Die Debatten zu den Themen Physikalismus, Willensfreiheit und Künstliche Intelligenz stehen seit einigen Jahren im Mittelpunkt der Philosophie des Geistes. In den Debatten um den Physikalismus geht es dabei u.a. um folgende Fragen: Lässt sich alles, was es gibt, physikalisch erklären - auch der menschliche Geist? Lässt sich alles auf das Physische reduzieren? Ist der Bereich des Physischen kausal geschlossen? Realisiert das Physische das Mentale? Wie lässt sich mentale Verursachung erklären? In den Debatten um Willensfreiheit fragt man sich: (...) Sind wir physikalisch determiniert? Können wir freie Entscheidungen treffen? Sind wir für unsere Handlungen verantwortlich? Wie verhalten sich Freiheit und Determinismus zueinander? Welchen Beitrag kann die empirische Forschung leisten? In den Debatten um Künstliche Intelligenz werden diese Fragen verhandelt: Können Maschinen denken? Unterscheiden sich Menschen von Maschinen? Sind uns Computer geistig überlegen? Stellt maschinelle Intelligenz ein Modell für menschliche Kognition dar? Welchen wissenschaftlichen Nutzen kann Künstliche Intelligenz haben? Zu jedem der drei Themen Physikalismus, Willensfreiheit und Künstliche Intelligenz bietet das Buch drei Originalbeiträge von renommierten Wissenschaftlern verschiedener Disziplinen sowie jeweils einen kritischen Kommentar. Auf diese Weise soll deutlich werden, dass die drei Themen nicht nur eng miteinander zusammenhängen, sondern auch interdisziplinär von großem Interesse sind. (shrink)

Discusses and contrasts various accounts of physicalism, naturalism and materialism.

Does Physicalism lead to absurd results? Franz von Kutschera argued in his book „Grundfragender Erkenntnistheorie” that the weakest version of physicalism, i. e. the thesis that physical facts determine all the facts there are, leads to the absurd result that events in a remote future determine the present brain states of a person. It is shown that the argument is flawed in several respects and that the absurd result is not a consequence of physicalism but of an (...) auxiliary premiss of Kutschera's. (shrink)

In der Debatte zwischen Dualisten und Physikalisten spielen Zombies seit geraumer Zeit eine entscheidende Rolle – physikalische Duplikate phänomenal bewusster Lebewesen, die selbst nicht phänomenal bewusst sind. Die Vorstellbarkeit bzw. Möglichkeit von Zombies bringt, so die Standardauffassung, den Physikalismus in Schwierigkeiten: Wenn die physikalische Ausstattung der Welt die Welt in ihrer Gesamtheit determiniert, wie vom Physikalismus gefordert, dann kann es keine physikalischen Duplikate phänomenal bewusster Lebewesen geben, die nicht ebenfalls phänomenal bewusst sind. Die Arbeit argumentiert dafür, dass die (...) Standardauffassung falsch ist. Aus den üblicherweise angestellten Überlegungen ergibt sich kein zwingendes Argument gegen den Physikalismus, sondern bestenfalls die überraschende Konsequenz, dass Physikalisten wie Dualisten ihre jeweilige Position nicht als kontingent betrachten können, und schlimmstenfalls die nicht minder überraschende Konsequenz, dass der Dualismus falsch ist, wenn der Physikalismus mit der Möglichkeit von Zombies unverträglich ist.The debate between dualism and physicalism has recently been dominated by zombies—physical duplicates of phenomenally conscious beings that lack phenomenal consciousness. According to the standard view, the conceivability or possibility of zombies creates a serious problem for physicalism: If the physical make-up of the word determines the world in its entirety, as physicalism maintains, then there can be no physical duplicates of phenomenally conscious beings that are not phenomenally conscious. This paper argues that the standard view is wrong. The considerations usually appealed to do not yield a convincing argument against physicalism. At best, they result in the surprising claim that physicalists and dualists cannot understand their respective views as a contingent claim; at worst , they yield the no less surprising result that dualism is wrong if physicalism is incompatible with the possibility of zombies. (shrink)

The paper discusses definitions of and arguments for non-reductive physicalism (and argues that the term is a mis-nomer).

Article on physicalism and evolutionary explanations.

Qualia and Physicalism. It is assumed that the following three relations exhaust the possibilities for a physicalist account of qualia: 1. determination, 2. identity, 3. realization. The first relation is immediately rejected because it does not exclude property dualism. The second faces the problem that it is probably impossible to discriminate empirically between the identity thesis and the epiphenomenalist position. The third cannot handle qualia adequately, for qualia are not functional properties and the realization relation is only plausible as (...) a relation between physical realizers and functional properties. Finally, if one attempts to replace multiple realization by multiple identities it is shown that the notion of multiple property identities is unintelligible. The upshot is that if these three relations exhaust the possibilities of a physicalist construal of qualia then physicalism is wrong. (shrink)

In diesem Open-Access-Buch wird eine Verteidigung des nicht-reduktiven Physikalismus gegen den Vorwurf des Epiphänomenalismus entwickelt. Der nicht-reduktive Physikalismus besagt im Kern, dass mentale Eigenschaften zwar nicht mit physischen Eigenschaften identisch sind, sie aber dennoch so eng an physische Eigenschaften gebunden sind, dass man sinnvollerweise von einer auf grundlegender Ebene rein physischen Welt sprechen kann. Der Vorwurf des Epiphänomenalismus wendet gegen den nicht-reduktiven Physikalismus ein, dass aus seiner Grundidee folgt, dass es keine mentale Verursachung gibt: Wenn mentale Eigenschaften (...) tatsächlich nicht mit physischen Eigenschaften identisch sind, sondern lediglich eng an sie gebunden sind, dann können mentale Eigenschaften niemals kausal wirksam werden. Die in diesem Buch entwickelte Verteidigung beruht auf einer Unterscheidung zwischen zwei Begriffen der Kausalität: Kausaler Produktion und kausaler Abhängigkeit. Es wird dafür argumentiert, dass der nicht-reduktive Physikalismus zwar darauf festgelegt ist, dass es keine mentale Verursachung im Sinne von kausaler Produktion gibt. Diese Konsequenz kann jedoch akzeptiert werden. Denn aus dem nicht-reduktiven Physikalismus folgt keineswegs, dass es keine mentale Verursachung im Sinne von kausaler Abhängigkeit gibt. (shrink)

Zu den großen Rätseln der Philosophie des Geistes, ja der Philosophie überhaupt, gehört die folgende Frage: Wie lässt sich der qualitative oder phänomenale Charakter bewusster Erlebnisse beschreiben, erklären oder verstehen? Wie lässt sich beispielsweise erklären, wie es ist, eine Rose zu riechen? Einerseits erscheint angesichts der Erfolgsgeschichte der modernen Naturwissenschaften die Annahme plausibel, dass sich letztlich alles physikalisch erklären lässt, auch bewusste Erlebnisse. Bei dieser Annahme handelt es sich um die physikalistische Intuition, die in der analytischen Philosophie des Geistes die (...) Hauptmotivation der gegenwärtig dominierenden Position darstellt: der Position des Physikalismus. Andererseits stellt der nur subjektiv erfassbare qualitative Charakter bewusster Erlebnisse das Kernproblem für eine physikalische Erklärung des Bewusstseins dar: Wie sollte das Erlebnis von Rosenduft physikalisch erklärbar sein? Dabei handelt es sich um die antiphysikalistische Intuition, auf deren Grundlage in den letzten Jahren verschiedene Argumente gegen den Physikalismus vorgebracht worden sind. Indem in der vorliegenden Studie diesen beiden, zumindest auf den ersten Blick unvereinbar erscheinenden Intuitionen ausführlich und vorbehaltlos Rechnung getragen wird – sie stellen sowohl den Ausgangspunkt als auch den argumentativen Rahmen der Studie dar –, wird untersucht, wie sich der qualitative Charakter bewusster Erlebnisse im Rahmen einer Theorie des Bewusstseins fassen lässt. (shrink)

The present paper focuses on the work of Adolphe Quetelet (1796-1874), the Belgian author of the Social Physics who worked in the tradition of the French mathématique sociale, and of Otto Neurath (1882-1945), the Vienna Circle’s member who supported a “sociology within physicalism”. They shared some important philosophical and methodological positions: an empiricist approach to the social sciences, a unitary conception of the natural and the social sciences, and the appreciation of statistics as a tool for investigating and also (...) reforming society. My paper analyses these elements of continuity between the two authors, in order to highlight how an empirical-quantitative approach to society was (at least partially) inherited by Austrian sociology from an earlier French tradition. On the contrary, most German statisticians refused such an approach at the time in which social sciences were developing in Germany, and they strongly believed in an in-principle difference between natural and social sciences. From a systematic point of view, my paper devotes a special attention to the relationship between the application of statistics (praxis) and a unitary conception of the sciences (theory). Both in Quetelet’s and in Neurath’s work these two aspects support each other. Nevertheless Neurath can be said to have turned Quetelet’s reasoning upside-down: While Quetelet appealed to statistics to claim that the social sciences can reach the same objectivity and determinacy as the natural ones, Neurath referred to statistics to argue that the natural sciences – exactly like the social ones – are characterized by a certain degree of indeterminacy and underdetermination. (shrink)

Between Physics of Organism and Organismic Physics: Object and Method of Biology. In the history of biological theory one can observe an oscillation between two tendencies of thinking, namely the biologistic and the physicalistic point of view. Both aim at a general or unified theory of nature that is relevant for scientific research as well as for philosophical reflection. In terms of a pluralistic approach these two ways of theory-formation must be rejected. Biology e.g. as a specific natural science, characterized (...) by its mid-position between ‘nomothetic’ and ‘idiographic’ thinking (Windelband), is much more than a subordinate branch of physical knowledge. This very autonomy of biology does not only result from a special methodology or from a specific theoretical framework. On the contrary, the methodological and functional autonomy of biology is due to the very features of the phenomena investigated. These features include multitude, individuality and wholeness. (shrink)

Physicalism is the idea that everything either is physical or is nothing over and above the physical. For this formulation of physicalism to have determinate content, it should be identified what the “physical” refers to; i.e. the body problem. Some other closely related theses, especially the ones employed in the causal arguments for different versions of physicalism, and more especially the causal closure thesis, are also subject to the body problem. In this paper, I do two things. (...) First, I explore the structure of causal arguments for physicalism that represents a general argument. To do this, the premises and the conclusion of the general argument are given exact formulations. Second, drawing on those premises, especially the causal closure thesis, I propose a naturalistic formulation of the physical that satisfies the requirements any formulation of the physical is expected to fulfill. Following this proposal, we also have a recursive algorithm to recognize the set of all physical events. (shrink)

I argue that our knowledge of the world's causal structure does not generate a sound argument for physicalism. This undermines the popular view that physicalism is the only scientifically respectable worldview.

Physicalism, the thesis that everything is physical, is one of the most controversial problems in philosophy. Its adherents argue that there is no more important doctrine in philosophy, whilst its opponents claim that its role is greatly exaggerated. In this superb introduction to the problem Daniel Stoljar focuses on three fundamental questions: the interpretation, truth and philosophical significance of physicalism. In answering these questions he covers the following key topics: -/- (i)A brief history of physicalism and its (...) definitions, (ii)what a physical property is and how physicalism meets challenges from empirical sciences, (iii)'Hempel’s dilemma’ and the relationship between physicalism and physics, (iv)physicalism and key debates in metaphysics and philosophy of mind, such as supervenience, identity and conceivability, and (v)physicalism and causality. -/- Additional features include chapter summaries, annotated further reading and a glossary of technical terms, making Physicalism ideal for those coming to the problem for the first time. (shrink)

This paper describes a version of type identity physicalism, which we call Flat Physicalism, and shows how it meets several objections often raised against identity theories. This identity theory is informed by recent results in the conceptual foundations of physics, and in particular clar- ifies the notion of ‘physical kinds’ in light of a conceptual analysis of the paradigmatic case of reducing thermody- namics to statistical mechanics. We show how Flat Physi- calism is compatible with the appearance of (...) multiple realisation in the special sciences, and how and in what sense the special sciences laws are autonomous from the laws of physics, despite the full reductive picture of Flat Physicalism. We compare our view with a recent proposal by William Bechtel that accounts for the appearance of levels in mechanistic explanations. (shrink)

Closure is the central premise in one of the best arguments for physicalism—the argument from causal overdetermination. According to Closure, at every time at which a physical event has a sufficient cause, it has a sufficient physical cause. This principle is standardly defended by appealing to the fact that it enjoys empirical support from numerous confirming cases (and no disconfirming cases) in physics. However, in recent literature on mental causation, attempts have been made to provide a stronger argument for (...) it. This essay argues that, insofar as these attempts are successful, they actually establish a far stronger closure principle. Worryingly, the acceptance of this stronger principle presents a new problem for the most popular form of physicalism, that of nonreductive physicalism. The problem shall be referred to as the 'Problem of Strong Closure.'. (shrink)

In 1932, Rudolf Carnap published his article “Psychology in a Physical Language.” The article prompted a critical response by the Gestalt psychologist Karl Duncker. The exchange is marked by mutual lack of comprehension. In this paper I will provide a contextualized explication of the exchange. I will show that Carnap’s physicalism was deeply rooted in the psychophysical tradition that also informed Gestalt psychological research. By failing to acknowledge this, Carnap missed out on the possibility to enter into a serious (...) debate and to forge an alliance with a like-minded psychologist at the time. I conclude by suggesting that the kind of physicalism practiced by Gestalt psychologists deserves to be taken seriously by current philosophy of psychology. (shrink)

Edited book on the prospects of non-Platonist realism in the philosophy of mathematics. Physicalism holds that mathematics studies properties realised or realisable in the physical world. This collection of papers has its origin in a conference held at the University of Toronto in June of 1988. The theme of the conference was Physicalism in Mathematics: Recent Work in the Philosophy of Mathematics. At the conference, papers were read by Geoffrey Hellman (Minnesota), Yvon Gauthier (Montreal), Michael Hallett (McGill), Hartry (...) Field (USC), Bob Hale (Lancaster & St Andrew's), Alasdair Urquhart (Toronto) and Penelope Maddy (Irvine). This volume supplements updated versions of six of those papers with contributions by Jim Brown (Toronto), John Bigelow (La Trobe), John Burgess (Princeton), Chandler Davis (Toronto), David Papineau (Cambridge), Michael Resnik (North Carolina at Chapel Hill), Peter Simons (Salzburg) and Crispin Wright (St Andrews & Michigan). Together they provide a vivid, expansive snapshot of the exciting work which is currently being carried out in philosophy of mathematics. (shrink)

I focus on Fodor’s model of the relationship between special sciences and basic physics, and on a criticism of this model, that it implies that the causal stability of, e.g., the mental in its production of behaviour is nothing short of a miraculous coincidence. David Papineau and Graham Macdonaldendorse this criticism. But it is far less clear than they assume that Fodor’s picture indeed involves coincidences, which in any case their injection of a teleological supplement cannot explain. Papineau’s and Macdonald’s (...) problem is subtly different from a similar one presented by Adrian Cussins. This is no more effective against Fodor’s picture, but the kind of account of the relation between the physical and the psychological which could constitute a solution to Cussins’ problem is one which, for independent reasons, a physicalist of Fodor’s stripe ought to provide. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This essay has three goals. The first is to introduce the notion of fundamentality and to argue that physicalism can usefully be conceived of as a thesis about fundamentality. The second is to argue for the advantages of fundamentality physicalism over modal formulations and that fundamentality physicalism is what many who endorse modal formulations of physicalism had in mind all along. Third, I describe what I take to be the main obstacle for a fundamentality-oriented formulation (...) of physicalism: ‘the problem of abstracta’, which asks how physical can accommodate phenomena such as mathematics and universals, and which modal formulations do not face. I canvas three solutions: the inapt for ground solution, the concrete restriction, and the contingency restriction. (shrink)

Keine ausführliche Beschreibung für "Der Physikalismus als Modellfall positivistischer Denkweise" verfügbar.

A Physicalist Manifesto is a full treatment of the comprehensive physicalist view that, in some important sense, everything is physical. Andrew Melnyk argues that the view is best formulated by appeal to a carefully worked-out notion of realization, rather than supervenience; that, so formulated, physicalism must be importantly reductionist; that it need not repudiate causal and explanatory claims framed in non-physical language; and that it has the a posteriori epistemic status of a broad-scope scientific hypothesis. Two concluding chapters argue (...) in detail that contemporary science provides no significant empirical evidence against physicalism and some considerable evidence for it. Written in a brisk, candid and exceptionally clear style, this 2003 book should appeal to professionals and students in philosophy of mind, metaphysics and philosophy of science. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Formulating Physicalism Justifying Physicalism Objecting to Physicalism.

On the heels of the advance since the twentieth-century of wholly physicalist accounts of human persons, the influence of materialist ontology is increasingly evident in Christian theologizing. To date, the contemporary literature has tended to focus on anthropological issues (e.g., whether the traditional soul / body distinction is viable), with occasional articles treating physicalist accounts of such doctrines as the Incarnation and Resurrection of Jesus cropping up, as well. Interestingly, the literature to date, both for and against this influence, is (...) dominated by philosophers. The present volume is a collection of philosophers and theologians who advance several novel criticisms of this growing trend toward physicalism in Christian theology. The present collection definitively shows that Christian physicalism has some significant philosophical and theological problems. No doubt all philosophical anthropologies have their challenges, but the present volume shows that Christian physicalism is most likely not an adequate accounting for essential theological topics within Christian theism. Christians, then, should consider alternative anthropologies. (shrink)

This paper examines a nonreductive supervenience relation central to a philosophically popular version of nonreductive physicalism inspired by Donald Davidson. The paper argues that this global supervenience relation faces a serious epistemological problem that blocks its being superior to weaker, less general supervenience relations.

Though physicalism remains the most popular position in the metaphysics of mind today, there is still considerable debate over how to retain a plausible account of mental concepts consistently with a physicalistic world view. Philip Goff (Australasian Journal of Philosophy 89(2), 191–209, 2011) has recently argued that physicalism cannot give a plausible account of our phenomenal concepts, and that as such, physicalism should be rejected. In this paper I hope to do three things, firstly I shall use (...) some considerations from ontology to rebut Goff’s argument and consider some objections and replies. Secondly, I shall outline a version of a posteriori physicalism about phenomenal consciousness which draws on this particular ontology. Thirdly, I shall give support to this version of physicalism by arguing that it marries well with prominent theories in cognitive science, and has important advantages over other versions of a posteriori physicalism. (shrink)

Supervenience physicalism holds that all facts, of whatever type, globally supervene upon the physical facts, even though neither type-type nor token-token nonphysical-physical identities hold. I argue that, invoked like this, supervenience is metaphysically mysterious, needing explanation. I reject two explanations (Lewis and Forrest). I argue that the best explanation of the appearance of supervenience is an error-theoretic, projectivist one: there are no nonphysical properties, but we erroneously project such onto the physical world in a systematic way, yielding the appearance (...) of supervenience. (shrink)

Although the capacity to discriminate between different qualia is typically admitted to have a definition in terms of functional role, the qualia thereby related are thought to elude functional definition. In this paper I argue that these views are inconsistent. Given a functional model of discrimination, one can construct from it a definition of qualia. The problem is similar in many ways to Goodman's definition of qualia in terms of 'matching', and I argue that many of his findings survive reinterpretation (...) into a physicalistic basis which employs 'indiscriminability' as its primitive term. I show how one can identify the critical properties to which discrimination capacities are sensitive, and then identify their order. A problem arises concerning the different ways in which qualitatively distinct experiences can differ (hue, shape, and so on). Physicalist accounts have often been accused of relying in a circular fashion on some antecedent understanding of phenomenal properties in order to specify those differences. This account avoids such an accusation: ordering of critical properties is determined by the dimensionality of discriminations, and the latter is given by the structure of the discrimination pair lists. Once a topology of quality is constructed, qualia names can be defined by their relative location within the order. In the conclusion I argue that psychophysics employs physicalist techniques to define a topology of quality, and that it can provide what Thomas Nagel calls an "objective phenomenology.". (shrink)

This paper challenges the viability of argument from supervenience in defense of a physicalist position on the place of qualia, the subjective properties of consciousness, in a physical or material world. Physicalism, being an ontological thesis that asserts that the only things that really exist are either physical entities or properties, affirms that every mental attribute must be a physical attribute. However, the existence of a quale as an attribute of a mental state falsifies this affirmation. The physicalist argues (...) that qualia supervene on the physical properties in the human body, and that any problem about qualia is, just like any other scientific problem, resolvable scientifically, either in principle or in practice. This paper argues that supervenience is merely a report of the nature of reality, and not a justificatory ontological affirmation that qualia supervene on physical properties. The paper begins with a short description of physicalism and an account of qualia as distinctive character of consciousness. It further articulates and examines the physicalists’ use of the argument from supervenience to establish that qualia supervene on the physical elements in the world. The concluding part shows the errors in the argument from supervenience, and its implication for the truth of physicalism. (shrink)

How could physicalism be true of a world in which there are no fundamental physical phenomena? A familiar answer, due to Barbara Gail Montero and others, is that physicalism could be true of such a world if that world does not contain an infinite descent of mentality. Christopher Devlin Brown has produced a counterexample to that solution. We show how to modify the solution to accommodate Brown’s example: physicalism could be true of a world without fundamental physical (...) phenomena if that world does not contain an infinite descent of mentally constituted mentality. This solution is independently plausible and is available to physicalists of virtually all significant varieties. (shrink)

Many physicalists are vague about how defining‘physical property’fits in with characterizing physicalism. We determine the proper relation of these tasks. Employing panpsychism as a yardstick, we argue that defining‘physical property’and characterizing physicalism are subject to contradictory conditions of adequacy. We conclude that these tasks should be kept neatly apart. Exploiting this insight, we save physicalists from an apparently disastrous anti‐physicalist argument, we propose and defend a viable definition of‘physical property’, and we argue that the standard characterization of (...) class='Hi'>physicalism is flawed. We propose an improved account. (shrink)

Frank Jackson’s famous Knowledge Argument moves from the premise that complete physical knowledge is not complete knowledge about experiences to the falsity of physicalism. In recent years, a consensus has emerged that the credibility of this and other well-known anti-physicalist arguments can be undermined by allowing that we possess a special category of concepts of experiences, phenomenal concepts, which are conceptually independent from physical/functional concepts. It is held by a large number of philosophers that since the conceptual independence of (...) phenomenal concepts does not imply the metaphysical independence of phenomenal properties, physicalism is safe. This paper distinguishes between two versions of this novel physicalist strategy –Phenomenal Concept Strategy (PCS) – depending on how it cashes out “conceptual independence,” and argues that neither helps the physicalist cause. A dilemma for PCS arises: cashing out “conceptual independence” in a way compatible with physicalism requires abandoning some manifest phenomenological intuitions, and cashing it out in a way compatible with those intuitions requires dropping physicalism. The upshot is that contra Brian Loar and others, one cannot “have it both ways.”. (shrink)

Das Buch entwickelt einen neuartigen, physikalistischen Interpretationsansatz zu Wittgensteins Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Das traditionelle Urteil, Wittgenstein habe im Tractatus keine klare Vorstellung der Analyse gehabt, wird widerlegt. Auf der Basis der Rekonstruktion der um die Jahrhundertwende etablierten Sinnesdatenanalysen im allgemeinen und der Farbanalysen im besonderen wird nachgewiesen, daß Wittgensteins Tractatus eine physikalische Sinnesdatenanalyse voraussetzt. Auf diesem Hintergrund werden Wittgensteins allgemeine Auffassungen zur Analyse der Welt und Sprache gedeutet, begründet und exemplifiziert. Der Tractatus liefert die philosophische Klärung des mechanistischen Weltbildes von Boltzmann (...) und Hertz. Er stellt die Mittel bereit, um den Sinn der Sätze zu analysieren und die logische Zulässigkeit von Aussagen zu prüfen. Die Anwendung dieser Mittel ist Aufgabe der Philosophie. Daß sie anwendbar sind und wie sie anzuwenden sind, demonstriert dieses Buch. (shrink)

Carnap opposes physicalist language to phenomenal language. His elementary physicalist sentences convey descriptions which physicists still regard as phenomenal and subjective. A second order physicalism (principle of special relatively) is required in order to express physical laws. Carnap makes the phenomenal language a proper part of the physicalist language. This relation is compared to the relation that general relativity establishes between geometry and physiscs.

Flat Physicalism is a theory of through and through type reductive physicalism, understood in light of recent results in the conceptual foundations of physics. In Flat Physicalism, as in physics, so-called "high level" concepts and laws are nothing but partial descriptions of the complete states of affairs of the universe. "Flat physicalism" generalizes this idea, to form a reductive picture in which there is no room for levels, neither explanatory nor ontological. The paper explains how phenomena (...) that seem to be cases of multiple realization of special sciences kinds by physical kinds are fully explains in a reductive physicalist way. Finally, the paper exemplifies the fruitfulness of this reductive approach by showing how it can account even for a case of high-level anomaly in a deterministic universe (for example anomaly of the mental, should this turn our to be a fact about the world) - a result that may be called Anomalous Physicalism. (shrink)

Introspection presents our phenomenal states in a manner otherwise than physical. This observation is often thought to amount to an argument against physicalism: if introspection presents phenomenal states as they essentially are, then phenomenal states cannot be physical states, for we are not introspectively aware of phenomenal states as physical states. In this article, I examine whether this argument threatens a posteriori physicalism. I argue that as along as proponents of a posteriori physicalism maintain that phenomenal concepts (...) present the nature of their referents in a partial and incomplete manner, a posteriori physicalism is safe. (shrink)

It is often argued that higher-level special-science properties cannot be causally efficacious since the lower-level physical properties on which they supervene are doing all the causal work. This claim is usually derived from an exclusion principle stating that if a higher-level property F supervenes on a physical property F* that is causally sufficient for a property G, then F cannot cause G. We employ an account of causation as difference-making to show that the truth or falsity of this principle is (...) a contingent matter and derive necessary and sufficient conditions under which a version of it holds. We argue that one important instance of the principle, far from undermining non-reductive physicalism, actually supports the causal autonomy of certain higher-level properties. (shrink)

What has become known asthe blockers problemis an alleged difficulty facing attempts to formulate physicalism as a supervenience thesis. A blocker is an entity, itself contrary to physicalism, with the power to disrupt an otherwise necessary connection between physical and nonphysical conditions. I argue that there is no distinct blockers problem. Insofar as a problem can be identified, it turns out to be just a rather baroque version of a distinct and familiar objection to supervenience formulations and to (...) be of no independent interest. Work on the formulation of physicalism can thus proceed without worrying about blockers. (shrink)

I shall argue in this article that there are certain objectual and methodological boundaries imposed by the nature of physics that all formulations of physicalism based on physical theories should respect. Therefore, empirical physicalism – i.e., the sort of physicalism that is eager to accept all the entities included in some future, ideal and complete physical theory and all entities dependent on them (see Jeffrey Poland and Janice Dowell) – is already committed to the exclusion of certain (...) sorts of entities from its ontological inventory and it is far less tolerant than one might expect. After having presented my argument, I shall describe four plausible boundaries to what can be studied by physics. The boundaries will contribute to constructing a new version of physicalism, i.e., physics physicalism, whose acceptance is entailed by the acceptance of empirical physicalism. Finally, I shall briefly deal with three objections against my strategy and I shall evaluate the consequences of the acceptance of my conclusions for both physicalists and non-physicalists. (shrink)