Twenty-three philosophers examine the doctrine of materialism find it wanting. The case against materialism comprises arguments from conscious experience, from the unity and identity of the person, from intentionality, mental causation, and knowledge. The contributors include leaders in the fields of philosophy of mind, metaphysics, ontology, and epistemology, who respond ably to the most recent versions and defences of materialism. The modal arguments of Kripke and Chalmers, Jackson's knowledge argument, Kim's exclusion problem, and Burge's anti-individualism all play a part in the building of a powerful cumulative case against the materialist research program. Several papers address the implications of contemporary brain and cognitive research (the psychophysics of color perception, blindsight, and the effects of commissurotomies), adding a posteriori arguments to the classical a priori critique of reductionism. All of the current versions of materialism -- reductive and non-reductive, functionalist, eliminativist, and new wave materialism -- come under sustained and trenchant attack. In addition, a wide variety of alternatives to the materialist conception of the person receive new and illuminating attention, including anti-materialist versions of naturalism, property dualism, Aristotelian and Thomistic hylomorphism, and non-Cartesian accounts of substance dualism.
Edited by:
Robert C. Koons (University of Texas -- Austin),
George Bealer (Yale University)
Imprint: Oxford University Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 233mm,
Width: 155mm,
Spine: 30mm
Weight: 774g
ISBN: 9780199556199
ISBN 10: 0199556199
Pages: 524
Publication Date: 01 October 2009
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
I. Arguments from Consciousness 1: Laurence BonJour: Against Materialism 2: Adam Pautz: Consciousness: A Simple Approach 3: Charles Siewert: Saving Appearances: A Dilemma For Physicalists 4: Stephen L. White: The Property Dualism Argument 5: Eli Hirsch: Kripke's Argument against Materialism 6: George Bealer: The Self-Consciousness Argument: Functionalism and the Corruption of Intentional Content II. Arguments from Unity and Identity 7: David Barnett: On the Significance of Some Intuitions about the Mind 8: William Hasker: Persons and the Unity of Consciousness 9: Martine Nida-Rümelin: An Argument from Transtemporal Identity for Subject-Body Dualism III. Intentionality, Mental Causation and Knowledge 10: Bernard W. Kobes: Burge's Dualism 11: Tyler Burge: Modest Dualism 12: Neal Judisch: Descartes' Revenge Part II: The Supervenience Argument Strikes Back 13: Timothy O'Connor and John Ross Churchill: Nonreductive Materialism or Emergent Dualism? The Argument from Mental Causation 14: Robert C. Koons: Epistemological Objections to Materialism IV. Alternatives to Materialism 15: Terry Horgan: Materialism, Minimal Emergentism, and the Hard Problem of Consciousness 16: Michael Jubien: Dualizing Materialism 17: Joseph Almog: Dualistic Materialism 18: Mario De Caro: Varieties of Naturalism 19: Angus J. L. Menuge: Against Methodological Materialism 20: Brian Leftow: Soul, Mind and Brain 21: Uwe Meixner: Materialism Does Not Save the Phenomena -- and the Alternative Which Does 22: E. J. Lowe: Substance Dualism: A Non-Cartesian Approach Bibliography Index
Robert C. Koons is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas -- Austin. Koons studied at Michigan State, Oxford, and UCLA. He is the author of Paradoxes of Belief and Strategic Rationality (Cambridge, 1993), and Realism Regained (OUP, 2000). George Bealer is Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. He is the author of Quality and Concept (OUP, 1982)
