2. The first of our trio, physicalism, is the thesis that, not necessarily but as a matter of fact, everything is physical. This thesis stands in need of clarification. For one thing, we need to be told what it is to be physical. This is a difficult and somewhat neglected question, but I want to set it aside. A rough and ready understanding will do for present purposes. Another aspect of the th...

Philosophical accounts of emergence have been explicated in terms of logical relationships between statements (derivation) or static properties (function and realization). Jaegwon Kim is a modern proponent. A property is emergent if it is not explainable by (or reducible to) the properties of lower level components. This approach, I will argue, is unable to make sense of the kinds of emergence ...

Physicalism (P) entails minimal physicalism (MP), MP entails minimal supervenience (MS), and MS is the thesis that there is covariance between the supervenient and the subvenient stuff. Therefore, if the (alleged) supervenient and subvenient stuff do not covary, then MS is false, and if MS is false then MP is false, and if MP is false then P is false. Put differently: if MS is false then P is f...

Abstract This paper contributes to answering the question how physicalism can be defined for a world without fundamental physical phenomena. In recent in this journal, Torin Alter, Sam Coleman, and Robert J. Howell propose necessary condition on physicalism. They argue that is true only if there no infinitely descending chain of mentally constituted I alleged faces counterexamples. An phenomena...

Physicalism is an ontological doctrine according to which everything in the world is physical in the last instance. This is usually interpreted as a claim that every non-physical, most notably every mental property can either be reduced to some physical property or shown to supervene on it. The main obstacle in an attempt to formulate physicalism properly is Hempel’s dilemma, and the most promi...

Perry, in this lucid, deep, and entertaining book (based on his 1999 Jean Nicod lectures), supposes that type-identity physicalism is antecedently plausible, and that rejecting this thesis requires good reason (this is " antecedent physicalism "). He aims to show that experience gap arguments, as given by Jackson (the knowledge argument), Kripke (the modal argument), and Chalmers (the zombie ar...

In this paper, I observe that Hobbesian physicalism on the one side, and Cartesian dualism on the other, have had a widespread cultural influence on the way we regard ourselves and on the way we behave toward one another. I argue that what we now need is a conceptual space within which we might forge a metaphysical alternative, an alternative that will give us some hope of overcoming the delete...