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Summary Physicalism about the mind is the metaphysical view that all mental phenomena are ultimately physical phenomena, or necessitated by physical phenomena. There are various mental-physical relations proposed by physicalists to account for their claim. One relation is identity. Identity based physicalism about the mind takes two forms: token physicalism (which asserts that all token mental states are identical to a physical or neural state), and type physicalism (according to which all types of mental states are identical to types of physical or neural states). Another proposed relation is supervenience. Supervenience based physicalism about the mind is a form of type physicalism and it takes two main forms: a priori physicalism (the view that mental truths are a priori deducible from the totality of physical truths) and a posteriori physicalism (the view that mental truths are a posteriori or empirically necessitated by the totality of physical truths).
Key works Identity based physicalism was first proposed by Place 1956, Feigl 1958, and Smart 1959. Token identity based physicalism is taken to originate with Davidson 1963. Explicitly type identity based physicalist approaches are to be found in Lewis 1966 and in Armstrong 1968. An account of the distinction between a priori and a posteriori supervenience based physicalism is given in Chalmers 1996 and in Stoljar 2000. Particular a priori physicalist approaches are to be found in Dennett 1991Dretske 1995Lewis 1990Rey 1995. Particular a posteriroi physicalist approaches appear in Loar 1990Papineau 1993Tye 1995Hill 1997Balog 1999Block & Stalnaker 1999Balog 2011.
Introductions Stoljar 2015
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  1. Property dualists shouldn't be nominalists about properties.Daniel Giberman & David Mark Kovacs - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Substance dualism is the view that there are two fundamentally different kinds of substances: physical and mental. By contrast, according to property dualism there is only one kind of substance (physical) but two fundamentally different kinds of properties: physical and mental. Property nominalism is the view that there are neither repeatable nor non-repeatable fundamentally predicable entities (i.e. neither universals nor tropes) and that things being a certain way or being related in a certain way must ultimately be accounted for in (...)
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  2. The Many-Subjects Argument against Physicalism.Brian Cutter - forthcoming - In Geoffrey Lee & Adam Pautz (eds.), The Importance of Being Conscious. Oxford University Press.
    The gist of the many-subjects argument is that, given physicalism, it’s hard to avoid the absurd result that there are many conscious subjects in your vicinity with more-or-less the same experiences as you. The most promising ways of avoiding this result have a consequence almost as bad: that there are many things in your vicinity that are in a state only trivially different from being conscious, a state with similar normative significance. This paper clarifies and defends three versions of the (...)
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  3. Why the phenomenal concept strategy cannot save physicalism.Martina Fürst - 2008 - In Alexander Hieke & Hannes Leitgeb (eds.), Reduction and Elimination in Philosophy in the Sciences. Proceedings of the 31. International Wittgenstein Symposium. Druckwerker. pp. 106-109.
  4. Phänomenale Begriffe.Martina Fürst - 2019 - In Vera Hoffmann-Kolss & Nicole Rathgeb (eds.), Handbuch Philosophie des Geistes. J.B. Metzler. pp. 1-11..
    Viele unserer Bewusstseinszustände sind dadurch charakterisiert, dass es irgendwie für uns ist (Nagel 1974), in diesen Zuständen zu sein. In der Philosophie des Geistes werden derartige Zustände als ‚phänomenale Zustände‘ bezeichnet. ‚Phänomenale Begriffe‘ sind nun spezielle Begriffe, mittels derer wir uns auf phänomenale Zustände beziehen. Paradigmatische Beispiele für phänomenale Zustände, von denen wir einen phänomenalen Begriff besitzen können, sind das bewusste Erlebnis, die Farbe Blau zu sehen, den Klang einer Violine zu hören oder Schmerz zu fühlen. Zentral ist, dass sich (...)
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  5. On a body-switching argument in defence of the immateriality of human nature.Pirooz Fatoorchi - 2024 - Theoria 90 (1):17-29.
    In an earlier paper in Theoria, I discussed an argument based on the idea of “soul-switching” that attempted to undermine the immaterialist account of human beings. The present paper deals with a parity argument against that argument in which the idea of “body-switching” plays a pivotal role. I call these two arguments, that have been reported by Razi (d. 1210), respectively “the soul-switching argument” and “the body-switching argument”. After some introductory remarks, section 2 of the paper describes the structure of (...)
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  6. Grounding Physicalism and "Moorean" Connections.Alex Moran - 2023 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 1.
  7. Plotinus' Self-Reflexivity Argument against Materialism.Zain Raza - forthcoming - Ancient Philosophy Today.
    Plotinus argues that materialism cannot explain reflexive cognition. He argues that mere bodies cannot engage in the self-reflexive activity of both cognizing some content and being cognitively aware of cognizing this content. Short of outright denying the cognitive unity underlying this phenomenon of self-awareness, materialism is in trouble. However, Plotinus bases his argument on the condition that material bodies are capable of a spatial unity at most, and while this condition has purchase on ancient materialists, it would be rejected today. (...)
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  8. Review of Tye's Vagueness and the Evolution of Consciousness. [REVIEW]Angela Mendelovici & David Bourget - 2023 - Philosophical Review 132 (2):338-343.
  9. The Duchess of Disunity: Margaret Cavendish on the Materiality of the Mind.Colin Chamberlain - forthcoming - Philosophers' Imprint.
    Sometimes we love and hate the same thing at the same time. Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673)—the maverick early modern materialist—appeals to this type of passionate conflict to argue that the mind is a material thing. When our passions conflict, the mind or reason conflicts with itself. From this Cavendish infers that the mind has parts and, therefore, is material. Cavendish says this argument is among the best proofs of the mind’s materiality. And yet, the existing scholarship on Cavendish lacks the kind (...)
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  10. A Speculation About Consciousness.Edward A. Francisco - manuscript
    This is a sketch of the basis and role of consciousness and the minimally required elements and constraints of any setting that may produce consciousness. It proposes that consciousness (as we know it) is a biologically-mediated product of evolved recursive and hierarchically nested representational systems that obey information theoretic principles and Bayesian (probabilistic) feedback and feedforward predictive modeling processes.
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  11. Biological Naturalism and the Mind-Body Problem.Jane Anderson - 2022 - Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
    This book offers a new theoretical framework within which to understand “the mind-body problem”. The crux of this problem is phenomenal experience, which Thomas Nagel famously described as “what it is like” to be a certain living creature. David Chalmers refers to the problem of “what-it-is-like” as “the hard problem” of consciousness and claims that this problem is so “hard” that investigators have either just ignored the issue completely, investigated a similar (but distinct) problem, or claimed that there is literally (...)
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  12. The first-personal argument against physicalism.Christian List - manuscript
    The aim of this paper is to discuss a seemingly straightforward argument against physicalism which, despite being implicit in much of the philosophical debate about consciousness, has not received the attention it deserves (compared to other, better-known “epistemic”, “modal”, and “conceivability” arguments). This is the argument from the non-supervenience of the first-personal (and indexical) facts on the third-personal (and non-indexical) ones. This non-supervenience, together with the assumption that the physical facts (as conventionally understood) are third-personal, entails that some facts – (...)
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  13. Mental Causation, Exclusive Argument, and Non-reductive Physicalism.Xiaoyang Wang & Yuchen Wang - 2020 - Journal of Human Cognition 4 (2):53-67.
    Jeagwon Kim's exclusion argument is a well-known argument against non-reductive physicalism in the contemporary debate on mental causation. In this essay, we will first discuss two versions of the exclusion argument: the simple version and the sophisticated version. Secondly, we will take a conservative strategy to defend the kind of non-reductive physicalism initiated by Donald Davidson: the Token Identity Theory. Namely, we will explain where Kim failed to appropriately understand Davidson's work and argue that the simple version and the sophisticated (...)
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  14. Epiphenomenal Minds and Philosophers’ Zombies: Where do mental properties originate?George Aulisio - 2022 - National Taiwan University Philosophical Review 64 (Special Issue on Self and Other):267-312.
    Property dualism [PD], when adopted by physicalists, is the view that mental properties are irreducible and joined to the physical. Many property dualists who subscribe to physicalism hold epiphenomenalism—the view that the mind does not have a causal role in affecting physical events (e.g., bodily movements).1 In this paper, I examine two possible origins of mental properties and the entailments of those origins if one is committed to physicalism. First, mental properties have a generative origin (e.g., emergence, neurophysiological, etc.). Second, (...)
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  15. Reasons and Empty Persons: Mind, Metaphysics, and Morality: Essays in Honor of Mark Siderits.Christian Coseru (ed.) - 2023 - Springer.
    Best known for his groundbreaking and influential work in Buddhist philosophy, Mark Siderits is the pioneer of “fusion” or “confluence philosophy", a boldly systematic approach to doing philosophy premised on the idea that rational reconstruction of positions in one tradition in light of another can sometimes help address perennial problems and often lead to new and valuable insights. -/- Exemplifying the many virtues of the confluence approach, this collection of essays covers all core areas of Buddhist philosophy, as well as (...)
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  16. Modal Arguments against Physicalism in View of Scientific Findings Concerning Pain.Maja Malec - 2016 - Interdisciplinary Description of Complex Systems 14 (4):360-368.
    I analyse Kripke’s modal argument against the mind-brain identity theories. Specifically, he argues against the identity between pain and C-fibres simulation by pointing out the difference between this identity claim and the theoretical identifications, such as ‘Water is H2O’ and ‘Lightning is a motion of electric charges’. Kripke’s argument relies on the assumption that the experience of pains is a simple and homogenous phenomenon, but scientific research shows that it is in fact a quite complex one. We can distinguish at (...)
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  17. What's Wrong With Nonreductive Physicalism? The Exclusion Problem Reconsidered.Kevin Morris - 2023 - ProtoSociology 39:19-34.
    Jaegwon Kim argued that nonreductive physicalism faces the “exclusion problem” for higher-level causation, mental causation in particular. Roughly, the charge is that given the presumptive ubiquity of physical causation, there cannot be irreducible mental causes for physical effects. Since there are mental causes, Kim concluded that nonreductive physicalism should be rejected in favor of a more reductionist alternative according to which mental causes are just physical causes differently described. But why should mental causes be “excluded” in this way? Unfortunately, Kim (...)
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  18. What is it like to be boring and myopic?Kathleen Akins - 2014 - In Josh Weisberg (ed.), Consciousness (Key Concepts in Philosophy). Polity.
  19. Conceptual reductions, truthmaker reductive explanations, and ontological reductions.Savvas Ioannou - 2022 - Synthese 200 (4):1-26.
    According to conceptual reductive accounts, if properties of one domain can be conceptually reduced to properties of another domain, then the former properties are ontologically reduced to the latter properties. I will argue that conceptual reductive accounts face problems: either they do not recognise that many higher-level properties are correlated with multiple physical properties, or they do not clarify how we can discover new truthmakers of sentences about a higher-level property. Still, there is another way to motivate ontological reduction, the (...)
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  20. Physicalism, Infinite Decomposition, and Constitution.Torin Alter, Sam Coleman & Robert J. Howell - 2022 - Erkenntnis.
    How could physicalism be true of a world in which there are no fundamental physical phenomena? A familiar answer, due to Barbara Gail Montero and others, is that physicalism could be true of such a world if that world does not contain an infinite descent of mentality. Christopher Devlin Brown has produced a counterexample to that solution. We show how to modify the solution to accommodate Brown’s example: physicalism could be true of a world without fundamental physical phenomena if that (...)
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  21. The Problem "I" in Galen Strawson.Elaheh Khoshzaban & Zahra Khazaei - 2022 - Journal of Philosophical Investigations 16 (38):186-213.
    One of the topics in the philosophy of mind is the discussion of "I", which philosophers have referred to in various interpretations as "The self", "personal identity", "ego", "soul" and "spirit". Philosophers' different theories about the existence and even the nature of this seemingly simple and obvious have turned it into a philosophical problem. Galen Strawson is a physicalist who has addressed this issue by interpreting “The self”. On the one hand, he believes in the existence of the "empirical self", (...)
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  22. Philosophy of Mind: The Basics.Amy Kind - 2020 - New York, NY: Routledge.
    Philosophy of Mind: The Basics is a concise and engaging introduction to the fundamental philosophical questions and theories about the mind. The author Amy Kind, a leading expert in the field, examines central issues concerning the nature of consciousness, thought, and emotion. The book addresses key questions such as: • What is the nature of the mind? • What is the relationship between the mind and the brain? • Can machines have minds? • How will future technology impact the mind? (...)
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  23. The ins and outs of conscious belief.Sam Coleman - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (2):517-548.
    What should advocates of phenomenal intentionality say about unconscious intentional states? I approach this question by focusing on a recent debate between Tim Crane and David Pitt, about the nature of belief. Crane argues that beliefs are never conscious. Pitt, concerned that the phenomenal intentionality thesis coupled with a commitment to beliefs as essentially unconscious embroils Crane in positing unconscious phenomenology, counter-argues that beliefs are essentially conscious. I examine and rebut Crane’s arguments for the essential unconsciousness of beliefs, some of (...)
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  24. Three Versions of Physical Closure.Lei Zhong - 2020 - Grazer Philosophische Studien 97 (4):640-658.
    The Exclusion Argument has been regarded as the most powerful challenge to non-reductive physicalism. This argument presupposes a crucial thesis, Causal Closure of the Physical, which asserts that every physical effect has a sufficient physical cause. Although this thesis is widely accepted in contemporary philosophy of mind, philosophers say surprisingly little about what notion of physical entities should be adopted in the context. In this article, the author distinguishes between three versions of Closure that appeal to a narrow, a moderate, (...)
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  25. Focusing On The Brain, Ignoring The Body.Alessandro Colarossi - 2013 - Philosophy Now 97:17-19.
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Formulating Physicalism
  1. Physical Properties.Alexander D. Carruth - 2019 - In Mihretu P. Guta (ed.), Consciousness and the Ontology of Properties. New York: Routledge. pp. 24-38.
    Physicalism can be roughly characterised as the view that everything is physical, or that everything that is fundamental is physical, or that any non-physical entity—property, substance, fact, event, kind and what have you—is both dependent upon and fully determined by physical entities. Perhaps the greatest challenge facing physicalism is to explain how conscious experience can be accounted for within the physicalist framework. Given these rough characterisations of physicalism, before setting out to address the problem posed by consciousness, there is some (...)
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  2. Causalità del mentale: dall'argomento di Kim ai qualia in una prospettiva fisicalista.Leonardo Capitaneo - 2023 - Dissertation, Università Degli Studi di Torino
    Lo scopo dell’elaborato è presentare il problema della causalità del mentale e cercare di dare una soluzione fisicalista al problema che possa includere anche i qualia, da sempre considerati come l’ultima difesa a favore dell’irriducibilità della mente al fisico. Il primo capitolo ha il compito di trovare la teoria metafisica del mentale migliore che riesca sia a rendere conto della causalità del mentale e sia a resistere all’argomento di Kim. Dopo aver esposto in dettaglio l’argomento di Kim sono affrontati i (...)
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  3. Qualia share their correlates’ locations.Neil Sinhababu - 2023 - Synthese 202 (2):1-14.
    This paper argues that qualia share their physical correlates' locations. The first premise comes from the theory of relativity: If something shares a time with a physical event in all reference frames, it shares that physical event’s location. The second premise is that qualia share times with their correlates in all reference frames. Having qualia and correlates share locations makes relations between them easier to explain, improving both physicalist and dualist theories.
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  4. Physicalism, Foundationalism, and Infinite Descent.Jonas Werner - forthcoming - Erkenntnis:1-6.
    This paper contributes to answering the question how physicalism can be defined for a world without fundamental physical phenomena. In a recent paper in this journal, Torin Alter, Sam Coleman, and Robert J. Howell propose a necessary condition on physicalism. They argue that physicalism is true only if there is no infinitely descending chain of mentally constituted phenomena. I argue that this alleged necessary condition faces counterexamples. An infinitely descending chain of mentally constituted phenomena is compatible with physicalism. Afterwards I (...)
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  5. Studies in No-Self Physicalism.Feng Ye - 2023 - Springer Nature Singapore.
    This book demonstrates how a radical version of physicalism (‘No-Self Physicalism’) can offer an internally coherent and comprehensive philosophical worldview. It first argues that a coherent physicalist should explicitly treat a cognitive subject merely as a physical thing and should not vaguely assume an amorphous or even soul-like subject or self. This approach forces the physicalist to re-examine traditional core philosophical notions such as truth, analyticity, modality, apriority because our traditional understandings of them appear to be predicated on a cognitive (...)
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  6. Mindmelding, Chapter 2: An alternative framework.William Hirstein - 2012 - In Mindmelding: Consciousness, Neuroscience, and the Mind's Privacy. Oxford University Press.
    This chapter presents the following hypothesis: There is a perfectly sensible conception of the mind, consciousness, the self, what we mean by ‘I,’ how we perceive and know, and how we remember and decide, all of which cohere amongst one another as well as with what we know about the brain, according to which it is possible for one person to experience directly the conscious states of another person. Not only can one person be directly aware of the conscious states (...)
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  7. Flat Physicalism.Meir Hemmo & Orly Shenker - 2022 - Theoria 88 (4):743-764.
    This paper describes a version of type identity physicalism, which we call Flat Physicalism, and shows how it meets several objections often raised against identity theories. This identity theory is informed by recent results in the conceptual foundations of physics, and in particular clar- ifies the notion of ‘physical kinds’ in light of a conceptual analysis of the paradigmatic case of reducing thermody- namics to statistical mechanics. We show how Flat Physi- calism is compatible with the appearance of multiple realisation (...)
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  8. Naturalism or Ontological Significance? Physicalism and Fundamental Mentality: a historical approach.Hamed Bikaraan-Behesht - 2022 - Journal of Philosophical Investigations 16 (38):154-185.
    Most physicalists believe that physicalism is a thesis that denies the existence of fundamental mentality either as a substance or as a property. Therefore, since most physicalists also endorse a posteriori physicalism, according to them, if the future physical theory posits fundamental mentality as a fundamental physical concept, then physicalism will be falsified. In contrast, there are those who believe that the core idea of physicalism is an ontological deference to science (especially physics); the idea that is usually called scientism (...)
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  9. Fizikalizm, Bilgi Argümanı ve Felsefi Düşünce Deneyleri.Alper Bilgehan Yardımcı & Atilla Volkan Çam - 2021 - Nosyon: Uluslararası Toplum Ve Kültür Çalışmaları Dergisi 1 (8):1-11.
    Thought experiments, one of the most effective ways of acquiring knowledge, are an intellectual tool frequently used by scientists or thinkers in their fields of study. Thought experiments used to respond to scientific issues are considered scientific thought experiments, while thought experiments used for philosophical problems are called philosophical thought experiments. In this context, firstly, the differences between scientific and philosophical thought experiments are determined in the article. In particular, philosophical thought experiments are often needed in discussions within the field (...)
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  10. Physicalisme et monisme russellien.Victor Tremblay-Baillargeon - 2021 - Ithaque 28:119-137.
    Dans cet article, je propose de défendre le monisme russellien, une théorie posant l’existence de quiddités phénoménologiques au fondement de la réalité. Je propose en particulier de montrer que le monisme russellien échappe aux objections qui en font une version inadéquate du physicalisme. Pour ce faire, j’identifie les trois raisons qui motivent le physicalisme, c’est-à-dire la parcimonie, le naturalisme et l’argument de la clôture causale, et j’argumente qu’il faut considérer que le monisme russellien satisfait ces trois motivations. Ainsi, si j’ai (...)
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  11. Naturalism, Human Flourishing, and Asian Philosophy: Owen Flanagan and Beyond. [REVIEW]L. K. Gustin Law - 2021 - Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2021.
  12. Physicalism, Closure, and the Structure of Causal Arguments for Physicalism: A Naturalistic Formulation of the Physical.Hamed Bikaraan-Behesht - 2022 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 13 (4):1081-1096.
    Physicalism is the idea that everything either is physical or is nothing over and above the physical. For this formulation of physicalism to have determinate content, it should be identified what the “physical” refers to; i.e. the body problem. Some other closely related theses, especially the ones employed in the causal arguments for different versions of physicalism, and more especially the causal closure thesis, are also subject to the body problem. In this paper, I do two things. First, I explore (...)
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  13. A Threat for Physicalism: a new Gedankenexperiment.Claudio Calosi & Vincenzo Fano - 2012 - Epistemologia 1:130-140.
    We present a new thought experiment that raises a threat for Minimal Physicalism, i.e. the thesis according to which mental properties supervene on physical properties. Our proposal is an example of the so called hard problems in philosophy of mind, in particular the problem of maximal consciousness. We do not however presuppose anything about its very nature apart from the minimal, weak assumption that it is determined by first order mental properties. We argue that either Minimal Physicalism is unable to (...)
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  14. The Materialism of Roy Wood Sellars.Balázs Gimes - 2021 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 11 (1):166-182.
    Physicalism is often characterized as an empirical hypothesis. But according to an alternative conceptualization, it is instead a stance or an attitude. I analyze Roy Wood Sellars’s materialist philosophy in order to show that it is a counterexample to a specific physicalist empirical hypothesis: the minimal completeness of the physical. However, it is arguably not reducible to a stance: it is a meaningful metaphysical thesis with substantive cognitive content.
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  15. A Dilemma about the Mental.Guy Dove & Andreas Elpidorou - 2021 - Organon F: Medzinárodný Časopis Pre Analytickú Filozofiu 1.
    Physicalism demands an explication of what it means for something to be physical. But the most popular way of providing one—viz., characterizing the physical in terms of the postulates of a scientifically derived physical theory—is met with serious trouble. Proponents of physicalism can either appeal to current physical theory or to some future physical theory (preferably an ideal and complete one). Neither option is promising: currentism almost assuredly renders physicalism false and futurism appears to render it indeterminate or trivial. The (...)
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  16. Physicalism without supervenience.Lei Zhong - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 178 (5):1529-1544.
    It is widely accepted that supervenience is a minimal commitment of physicalism. In this article, however, I aim to argue that physicalism should be exempted from the supervenience requirement. My arguments rely on a parallel between ontological dependence and causal dependence. Since causal dependence does not require causal determination, ontological dependence should not require ontological determination either. Moreover, my approach has a significant theoretical advantage: if physicalism is not committed to supervenience, then the metaphysical possibility of zombies—which is still wide (...)
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  17. Review of Physicalism Deconstructed: Levels of Reality and the Mind-Body Problem, by Kevin Morris. [REVIEW]Jessica M. Wilson - 2020 - Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 1.
    Morris’s book is a valuable contribution. For the reasons below, I don’t think his case against NRP succeeds, and his version of EP faces a serious difficulty. Even so, this is an admirably clear, subtle, and well-informed brief, and philosophers interested in the structure of natural reality have much to gain from Morris’s insightful discussion and argumentation.
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  18. Metaphysical Emergence.Jessica M. Wilson - 2021 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    Both the special sciences and ordinary experience suggest that there are metaphysically emergent entities and features: macroscopic goings-on (including mountains, trees, humans, and sculptures, and their characteristic properties) which depend on, yet are distinct from and distinctively efficacious with respect to, lower-level physical configurations and features. These appearances give rise to two key questions. First, what is metaphysical emergence, more precisely? Second, is there any metaphysical emergence, in principle and moreover in fact? Metaphysical Emergence provides clear and systematic answers to (...)
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  19. The Fundamentality of Physics: Completeness or Maximality.Alyssa Ney - 2021 - Oxford Studies in Metaphysics 12.
    There is a standard way of interpreting physicalism. This is as a completeness thesis of some kind. Completeness physicalists believe there is or in principle could be some future physics that provides a complete explanatory or ontological basis for our universe. And this provides a sense in which physics is special among the sciences, the sense in which it is fundamental. This paper contrasts this standard completeness physicalism with what is a more plausible maximality physicalism. Maximality physicalists believe physics is (...)
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  20. Fundamental mentality in a physical world.Christopher Devlin Brown - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):2841-2860.
    Regardless of whatever else physicalism requires, nearly all philosophers agree that physicalism cannot be true in a world which contains fundamental mentality. I challenge this widely held attitude, and describe a world which is plausibly all-physical, yet which may contain fundamental mentality. This is a world in which priority monism is true—which is the view that the whole of the cosmos is fundamental, with dependence relations directed from the whole to the parts—and which contains only a single mental system, like (...)
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  21. Denialism: What Do the so-called Consciousness Deniers Deny?Orly Shenker - 2020 - Iyyun 68:307-337.
    Some philosophers consider that some of their colleagues deny that consciousness exists. We shall call the latter ‘deniers’, adopting a term that was initially meant pejoratively. What do the deniers deny? In order to answer this question, we shall examine arguments, both of some deniers and of their critics, and present denialism as a systematic highly non-trivial position that has had some interesting achievements. We will show that the denialist project concerns the epistemology of the mind and specifically of consciousness: (...)
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  22. Russellian Physicalism and its Dilemma.Lok-Chi Chan - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 178:2043-2062.
    Russellian monism – an influential doctrine proposed by Russell (1927/1992) – is roughly the view that the natural sciences can only ever tell us about the causal, dispositional, and structural properties of physical entities and not about their categorical properties, and, moreover, that our qualia are constituted by categorical properties. Recently, Stoljar (2001a, 2001b), Strawson (2008), Montero (2010, 2015), Alter and Nagasawa (2012), and Chalmers (2015) have attempted to develop this doctrine into a version of physicalism. Russellian monism faces the (...)
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  23. Consciousness, Conceivability, and Intrinsic Reduction.Jonathon VandenHombergh - 2018 - Erkenntnis 85 (5):1129-1151.
    Conceivability arguments constitute a serious threat against reductive physicalism. Recently, a number of authors have proven and characterized a devastating logical truth, centered on these arguments: namely, that their soundness entails the inconceivability of reductive physicalism. In this paper, I demonstrate that is only a logical truth when reductive physicalism is interpreted in its stronger, intrinsic sense, as opposed to its weaker—yet considerably more popular—extrinsic sense. The basic idea generalizes: perhaps surprisingly, stronger forms of reduction are uniquely resistant to the (...)
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  24. Physicalism.Daniel Stoljar - 2009 - In Tim Bayne, Axel Cleeremans & Patrick Wilken (eds.), The Oxford Companion to Consciousness. New York, NY, USA: pp. 529-532.
  25. The Mental-Physical Distinction.Daniel Stoljar - 2006 - In Donald Borchert (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2nd Edition. New York, NY, USA:
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