From an Ontological Point of View is a highly original and accessible exploration of fundamental questions about what there is. John Heil discusses such issues as whether the world includes levels of reality; the nature of objects and properties; the demands of realism; what makes things true; qualities, powers, and the relation these bear to one another. He advances an account of the fundamental constituents of the world around us, and applies this account to problems that have plagued recent work (...) in the philosophy of mind and metaphysics (color, intentionality, and the nature of consciousness). (shrink)

What does reality encompass? Is it exclusively physical, or does it include mental and 'abstract' aspects? What are the elements of being, reality's raw materials? John Heil offers stimulating answers to these questions framed in terms of a comprehensive metaphysics of substances and properties inspired by Descartes, Locke, and their successors.

"The Analysis of Matter" is one of the earliest and best philosophical studies of the new physics of relativity and quantum mechanics.

I present an argument for panpsychism: the thesis that everything is conscious, or at least that fundamental physical entities are conscious. The argument takes a Hegelian dialectical form. Panpsychism emerges as a synthesis of the thesis of materalism and the antithesis of dualism. In particular, the key premises of the causal argument for materialism and the conceivability argument for dualism are all accommodated by a certain version of panpsychism. This synthesis has its own antithesis in turn: panprotopsychism, the thesis that (...) fundamental physical entities are protoconscious, also accommodates the key premises. Panpsychism and panprotopsychism are synthesized under Russellian monism, and then face an antithesis, the combination problem. The question of whether there is a new synthesis remains open. (shrink)

In this book, Derk Pereboom explores how physicalism might best be formulated and defended against the best anti-physicalist arguments. Two responses to the knowledge and conceivability arguments are set out and developed. The first exploits the open possibility that introspective representations fail to represent mental properties as they are in themselves; specifically, that introspection represents phenomenal properties as having certain characteristic qualitative natures, which these properties might actually lack. The second response draws on the proposal that currently unknown fundamental intrinsic (...) properties provide categorical bases for known physical properties and would also yield an account of consciousness. While there are non-physicalist versions of this position, some are amenable to physicalism. The book's third theme is a defense of a nonreductive account of physicalism. The type of nonreductivism endorsed departs from others in that it rejects all token identity claims for psychological and microphysical entities. The deepest relation between the mental and the microphysical is constitution, where this relation is not to be explicated by the notion of identity. (shrink)

The debate over physicalism in philosophy of mind can be seen as concerning an inconsistent tetrad of theses: (1) if physicalism is true, a priori physicalism is true; (2) a priori physicalism is false; (3) if physicalism is false, epiphenomenalism is true; (4) epiphenomenalism is false. This paper argues that one may resolve the debate by distinguishing two conceptions of the physical: on the theory‐based conception, it is plausible that (2) is true and (3) is false; on the object‐based conception, (...) it is plausible that (3) is true and (2) is false. the paper also defends and explores the version of physicalism that results from this strategy. (shrink)

Russellian monism offers a distinctive perspective on the relationship between the physical and the phenomenal. For example, on one version of the view, phenomenal properties are the categorical bases of fundamental physical properties, such as mass and charge, which are dispositional. Russellian monism has prominent supporters, such as Bertrand Russell, Grover Maxwell, Michael Lockwood, and David Chalmers. But its strengths and shortcomings are often misunderstood. In this paper we try to eliminate confusions about the view and defend it from criticisms. (...) We present its core and distinguish different versions of it. We then compare these versions with traditional theories, such as physicalism, dualism, and idealism. We also argue that the knowledge argument and the conceivability argument are consistent with Russellian monism and that existing arguments against the view, such as the argument from weirdness, are not decisive. We conclude that Russellian monism is an attractive view that deserves serious consideration. (shrink)

Consciousness in the Physical World collects historical selections, recent classics, and new pieces on Russellian monism, a unique alternative to the physicalist and dualist approaches to the problem of consciousness.

According to David Chalmers , 'we have good reason to suppose that consciousness has a fundamental place in nature' . This, he thinks is because the world as revealed to us by fundamental physics is entirely structural -- it is a world not of things, but of relations -- yet relations can only account for more relations, and consciousness is not merely a relation . Call this the 'structural argument against physicalism.' I shall argue that there is a view about (...) the relationship between mind and body, what I call, 'Russellian physicalism' that is consistent with the premises of the structural argument yet does not imply that consciousness is fundamental. (shrink)

Robert J. Howell offers a new account of the relationship between conscious experience and the physical world, based on a neo-Cartesian notion of the physical and careful consideration of three anti-materialist arguments. His theory of subjective physicalism reconciles the data of consciousness with the advantages of a monistic, physical ontology.

In recent decades, Russell’s “Neutral Monism” has reemerged as a topic of great scholarly interest among philosophers of mind, philosophers of science, and historians of early analytic philosophy. One of the most controversial points of scholarly dispute regarding Russell’s theory concerns how it best fits into standard classificatory schemes for understanding the relationship between mental phenomena and physical reality. The task of classifying Russell’s Neutral Monism is made all the more difficult by the fact that his conception of it evolves (...) in significant ways over the roughly four decades that he advocates it. In this paper, I contend that during this period, Russell holds (at least) three different, but related, ontological views, all of which he labels as “neutral monism”. This paper begins by considering key aspects of Russell’s early dualism which continue to play important roles in his Neutral Monism, especially his views about acquaintance, knowledge by description, structuralism about physics, and the construction of our physical knowledge. I argue that Russell revises, rather than abandons, his notion of knowledge by acquaintance in 1918 (when he gives up the act-object distinction) and contend that his resulting “neutral monism” remains a partial dualism until his 1921 The Analysis of Mind (hereafter AMi). Next, I explain how changes in physics leads Russell to re-conceptualize his Neutral Monism in The Analysis of Matter and An Outline of Philosophy, while challenging the relatively widespread view that his new position is a nonstandard version of physicalism. Finally, I argue that after 1940, Russell’s mature Neutral Monism—as presented in Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits, My Philosophical Development, and elsewhere—is very plausibly interpreted as a version of “Russellian Physicalism”. (shrink)

A prominent objection to supervenience physicalism is that a definition of physicalism in terms of supervenience allows for physicalism to be compatible with nonphysicalist outlooks, such as certain forms of emergentism. I take as my starting point a recent defense of supervenience physicalism from this objection. According to this line of thought, the subvenient base for emergent properties cannot be said to be purely physical; rather, it is “polluted” with emergent features in virtue of necessarily giving rise to them. Thus, (...) if emergentism is true, it is false that everything supervenes on physical properties. I argue that this gives way to a new challenge for supervenience physicalism. The challenge, roughly, is to distinguish the emergentist’s “polluted” base from a physical supervenience base; that is, to give conditions under which the subvenient base is not “polluted” by supervenient properties. The problem, I argue, is that it is hard to see how this can be done without collapsing supervenience physicalism into alternative approaches to physicalism. I thus argue that if the present defense of supervenience physicalism succeeds in defending the adequacy of a supervenience-based definition of physicalism, it does so by compromising its uniqueness. (shrink)

For some fifty years now, nearly all work in mainstream analytic philosophy has made no serious attempt to understand the _nature of_ _physical reality,_ even though most analytic philosophers take this to be all of reality, or nearly all. While we've worried much about the nature of our own experiences and thoughts and languages, we've worried little about the nature of the vast physical world that, as we ourselves believe, has them all as only a small part.