Materialist Criticism: New Approaches

New materialist social inquiry: designs, methods and the research-assemblage

Aesthetic Confusion: The Legacy of New Criticism

A Materialist Believe in Qualia ?

Should a materialist believe in qualia? Yes and no. 'Qual ia ' is a name for the occupants of a certain functional role that is spelled out in our tacitly known folk psychology. If materialism is true, there are no perfect occupants of the role, and hence no perfect deservers of the name. But in all probability there are imperfect occupants of the role, imperfect deservers of the name. Good eno...

Subverting Campbell’s Materialist Conclusion

Keith Campbell and Jonathan Schaffer propose an ontology in which entities consist in collocated collections of tropes, and tropes are individuated by location. This would imply that immaterial entities are not possible. In this paper, I attempt to subvert this materialist conclusion by giving two arguments against the key individuation principle it requires. I show that the locational individu...

Criticism of Benacerraf’s Criticism of Modern Eleatics

I analyze here Benacerraf’s criticism of Thomson arguments on the impossibility of ω-supertasks. Although Benacerraf’s criticism is well founded, his analysis of Thomson’s lamp is incomplete. In fact, it is possible to consider a new line of argument, which Benacerraf only incidentally considered, based on the functioning laws of the lamp. This argument leads to a contradictory result that comp...