Breaking new ground in the debate about the relation of mind and body, David Armstrong's classic text - first published in 1968 - remains the most compelling and comprehensive statement of the view that the mind is material or physical. In the preface to this new edition, the author reflects on the book's impact and considers it in the light of subsequent developments. He also provides a bibliography of all the key writings to have appeared in the materialist debate.

A compelling position in the philosophy of mind is that the phenomenal character of experience is a non-intentional property of the experience that is immediately accessible to introspection, what philosophers commonly call a quale. And yet, when one introspects in order to discover what one's experience is like, introspection reveals only what one's experience is of. If there are qualia, they seem to be transparent to introspection. The very nature of qualia thus seems to conflict with the phenomenology of introspection. (...) ;In this dissertation, I present the problem of transparency and show that it lies at the core of the recent debate over the nature of phenomenal experience. This problem results from the fact that certain theses that are widely accepted in philosophy of mind are inconsistent. They are: Qualia exist; If qualia exist, then they are available to introspection; and Qualia are not available to introspection---they are transparent. I argue that solving this problem requires distinguishing between perceptual and non-perceptual theories of introspection. The transparency of qualia to introspection can be explained by rejecting perceptual theories of introspection. However, I show that the nature of qualia demands that, if qualia are introspectible, introspection must conform to a perceptual theory. Therefore, we have reason for thinking the phenomenal character of experience is not a non-intentional property of it---not a quale. ;In place of qualia, I advocate an intentionalist view of phenomenal character. According to this view, the phenomenal character of experience is a representation of a property, an awareness of a property. Introspective access to this property is possible if we adopt a non-perceptual theory of introspection, specifically a belief model, according to which we are introspectively aware that our experience has this property without being introspectively aware of it. The apparent transparency of the phenomenal character can be explained by pointing to a flawed tendency to treat introspection as a species of perception. Thus, my solution to the problem of transparency reconciles the nature of phenomenal experience with our introspective access to this experience while, at the same time, explaining the phenomenon of transparency. (shrink)

[…] One view I hold about the nature of phenomenal character, which is also a view about the relation between phenomenal character and the introspective belief about it, is that phenomenal character is “self intimating.” This means that it is of the essence of a state’s having a certain phenomenal character that this issues in the subject’s being introspectively aware of that character, or does so if the subject reflects. Part of my aim is to give an account which makes (...) it intelligible that this should be so. A more substantive view I hold about phenomenal character is that a perceptual state’s having a certain phenomenal character is a matter of its having a certain sort of representational content. This much I hold in common with a number of recent writers, including Gil Harman, Michael Tye, Bill Lycan, and Fred Dretske. But representationalism about phenomenal character often goes with the rejection of “qualia,” and with the rejection of the possibility of spectrum inversion and other sorts of “qualia invesion.” My version of representationalism embraces what other versions reject. It assigns an essential role to qualia, and accepts the possibility of qualia inversion. A central aim of the present paper is to present a version of this view which is free of the defects I now see in my earlier versions of it. (shrink)