Themes in My Philosophical Work

This paper is an overview of my philosophical work. It follows closely the structure of the handout I used as the basis for a talk on this topic at the 2000 meeting of the Austro-Slovene Philosophical Association. The section-headings mention major themes, and various key concepts are indicated by boldface terms in the text. I invoked the notion of supervenience in my doctoral dissertation, Microreduction and the Mind-Body Problem, completed at the University of Michigan in 1974 under the direction of Jaegwon Kim. I had been struck by the appeal to supervenience in Hare (1952), a classic work in twentieth century metaethics that I studied at Michi-gan in a course on metaethics taught by William Frankena; and I also had been struck by the brief appeal to supervenience in Davidson (1970). Kim was already, in effect, construing the relation between physical and mental properties as a supervenience relation – although he was not yet using the word 'supervenience'. I assumed that a materialistic metaphysics was correct, and that integral to materialism is the idea that higher-level sciences (including psychology) are reducible to lower-level ones – ultimately to microphysics. One idea I pressed in the dissertation was that biconditional " bridge laws " would not suffice for genuine intertheoretic reduction if these inter-level laws were additional fundamental laws of nature alongside those of the reducing science; they would be what Herbert Feigl and J.J.C. Smart, in their writings on the psychophysical identity theory, called " nomological danglers. " I argued that the higher-level property in a bridge law should bear a relation of strict superve-nience to its correlated lower-level property, rather than merely being nomically correlated with it. The basic idea was that there are no two physically possible worlds w 1 and w 2 – where a physically possible world is, roughly, a world in which the laws of microphysics obtain and in which there are no nonphysical substances like ente-lechies or Cartesian souls – such that the actual-world bridge laws obtain in world w 1 but not in world w 2. (Thus, the bridge laws themselves are fixed relative to the fundamental physical facts and fundamental laws, rather than being fundamental laws themselves alongside those of microphysics.) Already when writing the dissertation, however, I was persistently bothered by the apparent conceivability of possible worlds that are physically just like ours but different with respect to the way phenomenal conscious …