The Waning of Materialism
March 25, 2010
Terry Horgan
The chapter presents and defends minimal emergentism, a non-materialist metaphysical position that posits brute inter-level necessitation relations (either nomically or metaphysically necessary) between physical and mental phenomena. It contrasts this view with stronger forms of emergentism and outlines powerful challenges to materialism arising from features of human consciousness. The argument concludes that minimal emergentism offers a viable and theoretically appealing alternative to materialism for understanding the mind.
The Waning of Materialism
March 25, 2010
Adam Pautz
Sensory consciousness cannot be fully explained in physical or functional terms. This argument for primitivism does not rely on common a priori reasoning such as the knowledge argument or the explanatory gap. Instead, it draws on a philosophical claim about the structure of consciousness combined with an empirical claim about its physical basis.
The Waning of Materialism
March 25, 2010
George Bealer
Functionalism, the most cogent form of contemporary materialism, fails to account for thoughts with embedded psychological attitudes. Reductive functionalism, which tries to define mental states in physical terms, faces a dilemma: it must either accept definitional circularity incompatible with materialism or use Ramsified definitions that misdescribe self-conscious thoughts. Language-of-thought functionalism leads to epiphenomenalism, and attempts to avoid circularity via a Tarskian hierarchy founder on the type-free nature of introspection. The only viable functionalism is non-reductive, accepting mental properties as ontologically primary, on a par with physical properties.
The Waning of Materialism
March 25, 2010
Laurence BonJour
There are no compelling arguments for materialism in the philosophy of mind, and powerful, seemingly unanswerable objections against it. Arguments for materialism that appeal to causal closure or naturalism rest on undefended assumptions. The central objection is that materialist views fail to explain the experienced character of conscious states, illustrated by Frank Jackson's example of Mary, the color-experience-deprived neurophysiologist, and by the problem of conscious intentional content. None of the available responses to the Mary example succeed, and a parallel argument applies to conscious intentional content. Materialist views are false, but no positive account of conscious content is presently available.
The Waning of Materialism
March 25, 2010
William Hasker
The human person is typically understood as having a unified, coherent self that is a rational agent capable of responding to others. However, phenomena like split-brain patients and multiple personality disorder challenge this unity. This chapter presents the unity of consciousness argument, rooted in Leibniz and Kant, as a counter to those challenges. While the empirical evidence seems to show disunity, the argument and evidence are not inconsistent. Together, they pose a problem for materialist accounts of mind and also reveal a serious difficulty for standard Cartesian dualism. The author concludes by outlining emergent dualism as their preferred metaphysical view of persons.