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Physicalism

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2015)

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  1. Minds Within Minds: An Infinite Descent of Mentality in a Physical World.Christopher Devlin Brown - 2017 - Erkenntnis 82 (6):1339-1350.
    Physicalism is frequently understood as the thesis that everything depends upon a fundamental physical level. This standard formulation of physicalism has a rarely noted and arguably unacceptable consequence—it makes physicalism come out false in worlds which have no fundamental level, for instance worlds containing things which can infinitely decompose into smaller and smaller parts. If physicalism is false, it should not be for this reason. Thus far, there is only one proposed solution to this problem, and it comes from the (...)
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  • Physicalism, not scientism.Alyssa Ney - 2018 - In Jeroen de Ridder, Rik Peels & Rene van Woudenberg (eds.), Scientism: Prospects and Problems. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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  • (98 other versions)مواجهه با مسئله فعل الهی در طبیعت: برتری دیدگاه نوخاسته گرایانه بر دیدگاه های تومیستی و کوانتمی.سید حسن حسینی & مسعود طوسی سعیدی - 2020 - پژوهشنامه فلسفه دین 17 (2):27-56.
    نوخاسته‌گرایان مشهوری نظیر نانسی مورفی و پاول دیویس مدعی‌اند قبول برخی دیدگاه‌های نوخاسته‌گرایانه وقوع تحولی اساسی در پارادایم علمی حاکم را در پی دارد. در این مقاله، نخست با واکاوی مضامین اصلی مربوط به مواضعی نظیر طبیعت‌گرایی، تقلیل‌گرایی، علم‌گرایی و نظیر اینها، تحلیلی کلی از مؤلفه‌های پارادایم علمی ارائه می‌شود. در ضمن این تحلیل، مؤلفه‌های مختلف مربوط به پارادایم علمی تبیین شده، نسبت این مؤلفه‌ها با یکدیگر بررسی می‌شود. پس از آن، به بررسی دیدگاه‌های نوخاسته‌گرایانه از هر دو قسم نوخاسته‌گرایی (...)
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  • Regularities, laws, and an exceedingly modest premise for a cosmological argument.Travis Dumsday - 2018 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 83 (1):111-123.
    In reply to certain cosmological arguments for theism, critics regularly argue that the causal principle ex nihilo nihil fit may be false. Various theistic counter-replies to this challenge have emerged. One type of strategy is to double down on ex nihilo nihil fit. Another, very different strategy of counter-reply is to grant for the sake of argument that the principle is false, while maintaining that sound cosmological arguments can be formulated even with this concession in place. Notably, one can employ (...)
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  • (1 other version)A Posteriori Physicalism and Introspection.Andreas Elpidorou - 2017 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 98 (1):474-500.
    Introspection presents our phenomenal states in a manner otherwise than physical. This observation is often thought to amount to an argument against physicalism: if introspection presents phenomenal states as they essentially are, then phenomenal states cannot be physical states, for we are not introspectively aware of phenomenal states as physical states. In this article, I examine whether this argument threatens a posteriori physicalism. I argue that as along as proponents of a posteriori physicalism maintain that phenomenal concepts present the nature (...)
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  • In Defense of a Realization Formulation of Physicalism.Andrew Melnyk - 2018 - Topoi 37 (3):483-493.
    In earlier work, I proposed and defended a formulation of physicalism that was distinctive in appealing to a carefully-defined relation of physical realization. Various philosophers (Robert Francescotti, Daniel Stoljar, Carl Gillett, and Susan Schneider) have since presented challenges to this formulation. In the present paper, I aim to show that these challenges can be overcome.
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  • Redefining Physicalism.Guy Dove - 2018 - Topoi 37 (3):513-522.
    Philosophers have traditionally treated physicalism as an empirically informed metaphysical thesis. This approach faces a well-known problem often referred to as Hempel’s dilemma: formulations of physicalism tend to be either false or indeterminate. The generally preferred strategy to address this problem involves an appeal to a hypothetical complete and ideal physical theory. After demonstrating that this strategy is not viable, I argue that we should redefine physicalism as an interdisciplinary research program seeking to explain the mental in terms of the (...)
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  • Turning up the volume on the property view of sound.Pendaran Roberts - 2017 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 60 (4):337-357.
    In the present article, I show that sounds are properties that are not physical in a narrow sense. First, I argue that sounds are properties using Moorean style arguments and defend this property view from various arguments against it that make use of salient disanalogies between sounds and colors. The first disanalogy is that we talk of objects making sounds but not of objects making colors. The second is that we count and quantify over sounds but not colors. The third (...)
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  • Persistence and the First-Person Perspective.Dilip Ninan - 2009 - Philosophical Review 118 (4):425-464.
    When one considers one's own persistence over time from the first-person perspective, it seems as if facts about one's persistence are "further facts," over and above facts about physical and psychological continuity. But the idea that facts about one's persistence are further facts is objectionable on independent theoretical grounds: it conflicts with physicalism and requires us to posit hidden facts about our persistence. This essay shows how to resolve this conflict using the idea that imagining from the first-person point of (...)
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  • The myth of cognitive agency: subpersonal thinking as a cyclically recurring loss of mental autonomy.Thomas Metzinger - 2013 - Frontiers in Psychology 4:931.
    This metatheoretical paper investigates mind wandering from the perspective of philosophy of mind. It has two central claims. The first is that, on a conceptual level, mind wandering can be fruitfully described as a specific form of mental autonomy loss. The second is that, given empirical constraints, most of what we call “conscious thought” is better analyzed as a subpersonal process that more often than not lacks crucial properties traditionally taken to be the hallmark of personal-level cognition - such as (...)
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  • Nature's Providence: The Representational Role of Vision.Tim Klaassen - manuscript
    This paper presents a novel theory of what it is that makes vision a representational affair. Vision is a process of representation; a fact that does not depend on it being "contentfull" or "indirect". Even if it turns out that vision is direct and/or intrinsically "contentless", it is nevertheless defined by features that decisively make it count as a process or representation. The phenomenology of vision is key here: as we see, we are directly presented with aspects of the environment (...)
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  • Panpsychism and Causation: A New Argument and a Solution to the Combination Problem.Hedda Hassel Mørch - 2014 - Dissertation, Oslo
    Panpsychism is the view that every concrete and unified thing has some form of phenomenal consciousness or experience. It is an age-old doctrine, which, to the surprise of many, has recently taken on new life. In philosophy of mind, it has been put forth as a simple and radical solution to the mind–body problem (Chalmers 1996, 2003;Strawson 2006; Nagel 1979, 2012). In metaphysics and philosophy of science, it has been put forth as a solution to the problem of accounting for (...)
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  • Sensorama: A Phenomenalist Analysis of Spacetime and Its Contents.Michael Pelczar - 2015 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
    How does the modern scientific conception of time constrain the project of assigning the mind its proper place in nature? On the scientific conception, it makes no sense to speak of the duration of a pain, or the simultaneity of sensations occurring in different parts of the brain. Such considerations led Henri Poincaré, one of the founders of the modern conception, to conclude that consciousness does not exist in spacetime, but serves as the basic material out of which we must (...)
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  • A Physicalistic Account of Emergentism.Nicholas Schroeder - 2015 - Axiomathes 25 (4):479-494.
    Jaegwon Kim’s argument against non-reductive physicalism is well known. Many philosophers take Kim’s argument to also apply to emergentism. But this does not necessarily follow. In this paper, I will first briefly show why Kim’s argument against non-reductive physicalism need not apply to emergentism. Next, I will present a physicalistic account of emergentism offered by Jason Megill in his paper “A Defense of Emergence.” This will be followed by an examination of some of the limitations of Megill’s account, in particular, (...)
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  • If materialism is true, the United States is probably conscious.Eric Schwitzgebel - 2015 - Philosophical Studies 172 (7):1697-1721.
    If you’re a materialist, you probably think that rabbits are conscious. And you ought to think that. After all, rabbits are a lot like us, biologically and neurophysiologically. If you’re a materialist, you probably also think that conscious experience would be present in a wide range of naturally-evolved alien beings behaviorally very similar to us even if they are physiologically very different. And you ought to think that. After all, to deny it seems insupportable Earthly chauvinism. But a materialist who (...)
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  • Philosophy of mind and cognitive science since 1980.Elizabeth Schier & John Sutton - 2014 - In Graham Oppy & Nick Trakakis (eds.), History of Philosophy in Australia and New Zealand. Dordrecht: Springer.
    If Australasian philosophers constitute the kind of group to which a collective identity or broadly shared self-image can plausibly be ascribed, the celebrated history of Australian materialism rightly lies close to its heart. Jack Smart’s chapter in this volume, along with an outstanding series of briefer essays in A Companion to Philosophy in Australia and New Zealand (Forrest 2010; Gold 2010; Koksvik 2010; Lycan 2010; Matthews 2010; Nagasawa 2010; Opie 2010; Stoljar 2010a), effectively describe the naturalistic realism of Australian philosophy (...)
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  • Interventionism and the exclusion problem.Yasmin Bassi - 2013 - Dissertation, University of Warwick
    Jaegwon Kim (1998a, 2005) claims that his exclusion problem follows a priori for the non-reductive physicalist given her commitment to five apparently inconsistent theses: mental causation, non-identity, supervenience, causal closure and non-overdetermination. For Kim, the combination of these theses entails that mental properties are a priori excluded as causes, forcing the non-reductive physicalist to accept either epiphenomenalism, or some form of reduction. In this thesis, I argue that Kim’s exclusion problem depends on a particular conception of causation, namely sufficient production, (...)
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  • Methodological Individualism and Holism in Political Science: A Reconciliation.Christian List & Kai Spiekermann - 2013 - American Political Science Review 107 (4):629-643.
    Political science is divided between methodological individualists, who seek to explain political phenomena by reference to individuals and their interactions, and holists (or nonreductionists), who consider some higher-level social entities or properties such as states, institutions, or cultures ontologically or causally significant. We propose a reconciliation between these two perspectives, building on related work in philosophy. After laying out a taxonomy of different variants of each view, we observe that (i) although political phenomena result from underlying individual attitudes and behavior, (...)
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  • Thinking about Physicalism.Restrepo Ricardo - 2012 - Open Journal of Philosophy 2 (2):84.
    Physicalism, if it is to be a significant thesis, should differentiate itself from key metaphysical contenders which endorse the existence of platonic entities, emergent properties, Cartesian souls, angels, and God. Physicalism can never be true in worlds where things of these kinds exist. David Papineau, David Spurrett, and Barbara Montero have recently developed and defended two influential conceptions of physicalism. One is derived from a conception of the physical as the non-mentally-and-non-biologically identifiable. The other is derived from a conception of (...)
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  • Pain is Mechanism.Simon van Rysewyk - 2013 - Dissertation, University of Tasmania
    What is the relationship between pain and the body? I claim that pain is best explained as a type of personal experience and the bodily response during pain is best explained in terms of a type of mechanical neurophysiologic operation. I apply the radical philosophy of identity theory from philosophy of mind to the relationship between the personal experience of pain and specific neurophysiologic mechanism and argue that the relationship between them is best explained as one of type identity. Specifically, (...)
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  • The Way of Actuality.Sam Cowling - 2014 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 92 (2):231-247.
    In this paper, I defend an indexical analysis of the abstract-concrete distinction within the framework of modal realism. This analysis holds the abstract-concrete distinction to be conceptually inseparable from the distinction between the actual and the merely possible, which is assumed to be indexical in nature. The resulting view contributes to the case for modal realism by demonstrating how its distinctive resources provide a reductive analysis of the abstract-concrete distinction. This indexical analysis also provides a solution to a sceptical problem (...)
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  • Cognitive Science of Religion and the Study of Theological Concepts.Helen De Cruz - 2014 - Topoi 33 (2):487-497.
    The cultural transmission of theological concepts remains an underexplored topic in the cognitive science of religion (CSR). In this paper, I examine whether approaches from CSR, especially the study of content biases in the transmission of beliefs, can help explain the cultural success of some theological concepts. This approach reveals that there is more continuity between theological beliefs and ordinary religious beliefs than CSR authors have hitherto recognized: the cultural transmission of theological concepts is influenced by content biases that also (...)
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  • Argument-Forms which Turn Invalid over Infinite Domains: Physicalism as Supertask?Catherine Legg - 2008 - Contemporary Pragmatism 5 (1):1-11.
    Argument-forms exist which are valid over finite but not infinite domains. Despite understanding of this by formal logicians, philosophers can be observed treating as valid arguments which are in fact invalid over infinite domains. In support of this claim I will first present an argument against the classical pragmatist theory of truth by Mark Johnston. Then, more ambitiously, I will suggest the fallacy lurks in certain arguments for physicalism taken for granted by many philosophers today.
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  • Use theories of meaning.Marc Staudacher - 2010 - Dissertation, University of Amsterdam
    This dissertation is a contribution to the philosophy of language. Its central question is: In virtue of which facts do linguistic expressions mean what they do? E.g. why does “apple” mean apple in English? The question receives a systematic answer; in short: Linguistic expressions mean what they do because among their users, there are linguistic conventions and social norms to use and understand them in certain ways. The answer is clarified and defended as a central thesis. For in this form, (...)
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  • The Myth of Logical Behaviourism and the Origins of the Identity Theory.Sean Crawford - 2013 - In Michael Beaney (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of The History of Analytic Philosophy. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
    The identity theory’s rise to prominence in analytic philosophy of mind during the late 1950s and early 1960s is widely seen as a watershed in the development of physicalism, in the sense that whereas logical behaviourism proposed analytic and a priori ascertainable identities between the meanings of mental and physical-behavioural concepts, the identity theory proposed synthetic and a posteriori knowable identities between mental and physical properties. While this watershed does exist, the standard account of it is misleading, as it is (...)
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  • Deflationism about Truth and Meaning.Jakob Hohwy - 2002 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 40 (2):217-242.
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  • Aggregating Causal Judgments.Richard Bradley, Franz Dietrich & Christian List - 2014 - Philosophy of Science 81 (4):491-515.
    Decision-making typically requires judgments about causal relations: we need to know the causal effects of our actions and the causal relevance of various environmental factors. We investigate how several individuals' causal judgments can be aggregated into collective causal judgments. First, we consider the aggregation of causal judgments via the aggregation of probabilistic judgments, and identify the limitations of this approach. We then explore the possibility of aggregating causal judgments independently of probabilistic ones. Formally, we introduce the problem of causal-network aggregation. (...)
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  • A New Argument for Mind–Brain Identity.István Aranyosi - 2011 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 62 (3):489-517.
    In this article, I undertake the tasks: (i) of reconsidering Feigl’s notion of a ‘nomological dangler’ in light of recent discussion about the viability of accommodating phenomenal properties, or qualia, within a physicalist picture of reality; and (ii) of constructing an argument to the effect that nomological danglers, including the way qualia are understood to be related to brain states by contemporary dualists, are extremely unlikely. I offer a probabilistic argument to the effect that merely nomological danglers are extremely unlikely, (...)
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  • Neutral Monism Reconsidered.Erik C. Banks - 2010 - Philosophical Psychology 23 (2):173-187.
    Neutral monism is a position in metaphysics defended by Mach, James, and Russell in the early twentieth century. It holds that minds and physical objects are essentially two different orderings of the same underlying neutral elements of nature. This paper sets out some of the central concepts, theses and the historical background of ideas that inform this doctrine of elements. The discussion begins with the classic neutral monism of Mach, James, and Russell in the first part of the paper, then (...)
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  • Naturalism.Davidn D. Papineau - 2007 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    The term ‘naturalism’ has no very precise meaning in contemporary philosophy. Its current usage derives from debates in America in the first half of the last century. The self-proclaimed ‘naturalists’ from that period included John Dewey, Ernest Nagel, Sidney Hook and Roy Wood Sellars. These philosophers aimed to ally philosophy more closely with science. They urged that reality is exhausted by nature, containing nothing ‘supernatural’, and that the scientific method should be used to investigate all areas of reality, including the (...)
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  • Why ‘non-mental’ won’t work: on Hempel’s dilemma and the characterization of the ‘physical’.Neal Judisch - 2008 - Philosophical Studies 140 (3):299 - 318.
    Recent discussions of physicalism have focused on the question how the physical ought to be characterized. Many have argued that any characterization of the physical should include the stipulation that the physical is non-mental, and others have claimed that a systematic substitution of ‘non-mental’ for ‘physical’ is all that is needed for philosophical purposes. I argue here that both claims are incorrect: substituting ‘non-mental’ for ‘physical’ in the causal argument for physicalism does not deliver the physicalist conclusion, and the specification (...)
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  • On characterizing the physical.Jessica Wilson - 2006 - Philosophical Studies 131 (1):61-99.
    How should physical entities be characterized? Physicalists, who have most to do with the notion, usually characterize the physical by reference to two components: 1. The physical entities are the entities treated by fundamental physics with the proviso that 2. Physical entities are not fundamentally mental (that is, do not individually possess or bestow mentality) Here I explore the extent to which the appeals to fundamental physics and to the NFM (“no fundamental mentality”) constraint are appropriate for characterizing the physical, (...)
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  • (3 other versions)Max Black's objection to mind-body identity.Ned Block - 2006 - Oxford Studies in Metaphysics 2:3-78.
    considered an objection that he says he thought was first put to him by Max Black. He says.
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  • Two Physicalist Arguments for Microphysical Manyism.Simon Thunder - forthcoming - Erkenntnis:1-22.
    I here defend microphysical manyism. According to microphysical manyism, each composite or higher-level object is a mere plurality of microphysical particles. After clarifying the commitments of the view, I offer two physicalist-friendly arguments in its favour. The first argument appeals to the Canberra Plan. Here I argue that microphysical particles acting in unison play the theoretical roles associated with composite objects - that they do everything that we think of composite objects as doing - and thus that composite objects are (...)
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  • Kripke's knowledge argument against materialism.Adriana Renero - 2023 - Philosophical Perspectives 37 (1):370-387.
    In his unpublished 1979 Lectures on the Philosophy of Mind, Saul Kripke offers a knowledge argument against materialism focusing on deaf people who lack knowledge of auditory experience. Kripke's argument is a precursor of Frank Jackson's better‐known knowledge argument against materialism (1982). The paper sets out Kripke's argument, brings out its interest and philosophical importance, and explores some similarities and differences between Kripke's knowledge argument and Jackson's.
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  • Be Careful what you Wish for: Acceptance of Laplacean Determinism Commits One to Belief in Precognition.Stan Klein - 2024 - Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice 11 (1):19–29.
    Laplacean Determinism (his so-called demon argument) is the thesis that every event that transpires in a closed universe is a physical event caused (i.e., determined) in full by some earlier event in accord with laws that govern their behavior. On this view, it is possible, in principle, to make perfect predictions of the state of the universe at any time Tn on the basis of complete knowledge of the state of the universe at time T1. Thus, if identity theory, epiphenomenalism (...)
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  • Relativity in a Fundamentally Absolute World.Jack Spencer - 2022 - Philosophical Perspectives 36 (1):305-328.
    This paper develops a view on which: (a) all fundamental facts are absolute, (b) some facts do not supervene on the fundamental facts, and (c) only relative facts fail to supervene on the fundamental facts.
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  • The Nature of Appearance in Kant’s Transcendentalism: A Seman- tico-Cognitive Analysis.Sergey L. Katrechko - 2018 - Kantian Journal 37 (3):41-55.
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  • Psychological Causes in Plato’s Phaedo.Matthew L. Evans - 2022 - Ancient Philosophy Today 4 (2):196-216.
    Nearly all of us would accept that at least some of our thoughts – desires, beliefs, and intentions, for example – can be causally responsible for movements in our bodies. Starting in antiquity, and especially since Descartes, philosophers have deployed this claim as the pivotal premise in an increasingly popular line of argument against dualism. The purpose of this paper is to show that, in the Phaedo, Socrates uses this very same claim as the pivotal premise in a surprisingly powerful (...)
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  • Churchland, Nagel, and Their Severe Critique of Folk Psychology.Serdal Tümkaya - 2021 - Teorema: International Journal of Philosophy 3 (40):5-27.
    In this paper, I attempt to show that Thomas Nagel and Patricia Churchland, two seemingly very different philosophers of mind, in fact resemble each other quite closely in their severe critique of folk psychology. Due to folk psychology’s deep inadequacies, both Nagel and Churchland have suggested important revisions to it, which, strikingly, have led both of them to call their positions “revisionist”. This paper makes a significant contribution to the philosophy of mind literature, since almost all philosophers, including the Churchlands (...)
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  • Meaning and Metaphysical Necessity.Tristan Grotvedt Haze - 2022 - New York: Routledge.
    This book is about the idea that some true statements would have been true no matter how the world had turned out, while others could have been false. It develops and defends a version of the idea that we tell the difference between these two types of truths in part by reflecting on the meanings of words. It has often been thought that modal issues—issues about possibility and necessity—are related to issues about meaning. In this book, the author defends the (...)
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  • Relational Passage of Time.Matias Slavov - 2022 - New York: Routledge.
    This book defends a relational theory of the passage of time. The realist view of passage developed in this book differs from the robust, substantivalist position. According to relationism, passage is nothing over and above the succession of events, one thing coming after another. Causally related events are temporally arranged as they happen one after another along observers’ worldlines. There is no unique global passage but a multiplicity of local passages of time. After setting out this positive argument for relationism, (...)
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  • (1 other version)Introduction: Levels of Reality.Meir Hemmo & Orly Shenker - 2022 - In Meir Hemmo, Stavros Ioannidis, Orly Shenker & Gal Vishne (eds.), Levels of Reality in Science and Philosophy: Re-Examining the Multi-Level Structure of Reality. Springer.
    We give a general background describing how the notion of levels of reality comes about in contemporary nonreductive approaches to the special sciences, what the notion of levels means in these approaches, its role in our scientific outlook of the world, and why it is important.
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  • The multiple-computations theorem and the physics of singling out a computation.Orly Shenker & Meir Hemmo - 2022 - The Monist 105 (1):175-193.
    The problem of multiple-computations discovered by Hilary Putnam presents a deep difficulty for functionalism (of all sorts, computational and causal). We describe in out- line why Putnam’s result, and likewise the more restricted result we call the Multiple- Computations Theorem, are in fact theorems of statistical mechanics. We show why the mere interaction of a computing system with its environment cannot single out a computation as the preferred one amongst the many computations implemented by the system. We explain why nonreductive (...)
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  • Hempel’s Dilemma: Not Only for Physicalism.Erez Firt, Meir Hemmo & Orly Shenker - 2021 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 34 (2):101-129.
    According to the so-called Hempel’s Dilemma, the thesis of physicalism is either false or empty. Our intention in this paper is not to propose a solution to the Dilemma, but rather to argue as follows: to the extent that Hempel’s Dilemma applies to physicalism it equally applies to any theory that gives a deep-structure and changeable account of our experience or of high-level theories. In particular, we will show that it also applies to mind-body dualistic theories. The scope of Hempel’s (...)
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  • (1 other version)Physicalism and the Identity of Identity Theories.Samuel Z. Elgin - 2020 - Erkenntnis 87 (1):161-180.
    It is often said that there are two varieties of identity theory. Type-identity theorists interpret physicalism as the claim that every property is identical to a physical property, while token-identity theorists interpret it as the claim that every particular is identical to a physical particular. The aim of this paper is to undermine the distinction between the two. Drawing on recent work connecting generalized identity to truth-maker semantics, I demonstrate that these interpretations are logically equivalent. I then argue that each (...)
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  • Reconciling Ontic Structural Realism and Ontological Emergence.João L. Cordovil, Gil C. Santos & John Symons - 2023 - Foundations of Science 28 (1):1-20.
    While ontic structural realism (OSR) has been a central topic in contemporary philosophy of science, the relation between OSR and the concept of emergence has received little attention. We will argue that OSR is fully compatible with emergentism. The denial of ontological emergence requires additional assumptions that, strictly speaking, go beyond OSR. We call these _physicalist closure assumptions._ We will explain these assumptions and show that they are independent of the central commitments of OSR and inconsistent with its core goals. (...)
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  • Qualitative properties and relations.Jan Plate - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (4):1297-1322.
    This paper is concerned with two concepts of qualitativeness that apply to intensional entities. I propose an account of pure qualitativeness that largely follows the traditional understanding established by Carnap, and try to shed light on its ontological presuppositions. On this account, an intensional entity is purely qualitative iff it does not ‘involve’ any particular. An alternative notion of qualitativeness—which I propose to refer to as a concept of strict qualitativeness—has recently been introduced by Chad Carmichael. However, Carmichael’s definition presupposes (...)
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  • *Perception* (2021, preview).Adam Pautz - 1996 - In Enrique Villanueva (ed.), Perception. Ridgeview Pub. Co.
    A preview of my book *Perception*. Discusses the relationship between perception and the physical world and the issue of whether reality is as it appears. Useful examples are included throughout the book to illustrate the puzzles of perception, including hallucinations, illusions, the laws of appearance, blindsight, and neuroscientific explanations of our experience of pain, smell and color. The book covers both traditional philosophical arguments and more recent empirical arguments deriving from research in psychophysics and neuroscience. The addition of chapter summaries, (...)
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  • Towards a Unitary Case for Russellian Panpsychism.Luca Dondoni - 2021 - Philosophia 2021 (1):1-22.
    One of the most pressing challenges that occupy the Russellian panpsychist’s agenda is to come up with a way to reconcile the traditional argument from categorical properties (Seager, 2006; Alter & Nagasawa, 2015) with H. H. Mørch’s dispositionalism-friendly argument from the experience of causation (2014, 2018, 2020) — on the way to a unitary, all-encompassing case for the view. In this regard, Mørch claims that, via the commitment to the Identity theory of properties, one can consistently hold both panpsychist arguments (...)
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