Abstract: John Perry's book Knowledge, Possibility, and Consciousness is a lucid and engaging defense of a physicalist view of consciousness against various antiphysicalist arguments. In what follows, I will address Perry's responses to the three main anti-physicalist arguments he discusses: the zombie argument (focusing on imagination), the knowledge argument (focusing on indexicality), and the modal argument (focusing on intensions).

Abstract: List of figures Preface Introduction 1. The problem of other minds 1. The problem 2. Attempted solutions to the problem 3. The uniqueness of consciousness 4. Certainty and meaning Conclusion Questions for discussion Further reading 2. Strong dualism: body and soul 1. Developing an argument for dualism 2. Difficulties for strong dualism 3. Hume'n bundles 4. Against the bundle theory Conclusion Questions for discussion Further reading 3. Identity and the soul 1. The concept of identity 2. Soul identity over time 3. Soul identification at a time 4. The argument for dualism reconsidered Conclusion Questions for discussion Further reading 4. Rationalism, empiricism, and the soul 1. Rationalism versus Empiricism 2. Should we be Empiricists? 3. The empirical evidence for the soul 4. Alternative explanations Conclusion Questions for discussion Further reading 5. The case for physicalism 1. Arguments for mind-brain identity 2. Ramifications: types, tokens and other minds 3. Difficulties for mind-brain identity 4. The necessity of identity Conclusion Questions for discussion Further reading 6. After-life for physicalists 1. Resurrection 2. Reincarnation 3. Double difficulties or secondary survival? 4. Limits of individual survival Conclusion Questions for discussion Further reading 7. The case for theory-theory 1. From Cartesian conception to philosophical functionalism 2. Theory-theory and its opponents 3. Developing the theory: theorizing versus innateness 4. The problem of other minds revisited Conclusion Questions for discussion Further reading 8. Problems and prospects 1. Artificial minds 2. Free will 3. Intentionality 4. Consciousness Conclusion Questions for discussion Further reading Index

Abstract: Biology and the social sciences, ethology and linguistics, psychology and the health sciences, their internal specializations – from genetics to medical semeiotics (sympomatology), psychoanalysis, gerontology and immunology – all find in Sebeok’s global semiotics the place of encounter and reciprocal exchange, as well as of systematization and unification. However, it is important to note that ‘systematization’ and ‘unification’ are not understood neopositivistically, in the static terms of an ‘encyclopedia’, whether in the form of the juxtaposition of knowledge and linguistic practices or of the reduction of knowledge to a single scientific field and its relative languages (neopositivistic physicalism). Global semiotics may be presented as a metascience concerned with all academic disciplines that are signrelated. It cannot be reduced to the status of philosophy of science, though of course as a science it is dialogically engaged with philosophy. Such a global view is possible for human beings in so far as we are semiotic animals: consequently, the question is what is our responsibility towards life and towards the universe in its globality?

Abstract: This thesis has two philosophical positions as its targets. The first is 'scientific realism' of the form defended by Boyd, (the early) Putnam, and most recently Psillos. The second is empiricism in the vein of Mill, Mach, Ayer, Carnap, and Van Fraassen. My objections to both have a rather Popperian flavour. For I argue that 'confirmation' is a misnomer, that so-called 'ampliative inferences' are heuristics at best, and that naturalism and subjectivism are regressive doctrines. At the heart of genuine realism, I argue, is a stance on the issues of perception and conception. In particular, I hold that to be a realist is to reject the notion that there are representations which have some sort of epistemic priority. And along related lines, I maintain that the closely aligned doctrine of physicalism cannot simply be presupposed. What this amounts to is that the search for some sort of 'solid foundation' for knowledge' is a futile enterprise. Such a foundation would be unimportant, even if there were to be one, and we ought to be free to critically examine any claim we like. So rather than sapere aude, I would have 'dare to err', and place an intersubjective emphasis on inquiry. And this goes for metaphysics, logic, and mathematics, as well as for natural science. Yet I also advocate the view that we ought to be optimistic about our ability to find the truth, ceteris paribus. And to this end, I argue that we should accept that our faculty of conception is sufficient to allow us to connect with the possibilities of being, whereas our faculty of sense is sufficient to allow us to connect with that which is actual; this, given considerable critical struggle on our parts, both individually and collectively. I urge that it is methodologically advisable to behave as if this is so, if we are not to асһieve only the self-paralysis of the Pyrrhonist. In a nutshell, destructive realism says that natural science progresses by ruling out possibilities, in particular by ruling out possible worlds as candidates for the actual world, but that this is a two-stage process, involving both an a priori (metaphysical) and an a posteriori (observational) component. The aim of natural science is to eliminate false theories. Its aspiration is truth.

Abstract: It is widely accepted that physicalism faces its most serious challenge when it comes to making room for the phenomenal character of psychological experience, its so-called what-it-is-like aspect. The challenge has surfaced repeatedly over the past two decades in a variety of forms. 2 In a particularly striking one, Frank Jackson considers a situation in which Mary, a brilliant scientist who knows all the physical facts there are to know about psychological experience, has spent the whole of her life in a black and white room. He asks, What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a colour television monitor? Will she learn anything or not? It seems just obvious that she will learn something about the world and our visual experience of it. But then it is inescapable that her previous knowledge was incomplete. But she had all the physical information. (Jackson 1986: 130)

Abstract: Non-reductive physicalism denies the soul's existence, arguing that cognitive functions emerge from evolutionary processes. Focusing on Nancey Murphy, this paper argues that non-reductive physicalism has an inadequate conception of causality. Murphy defends downward causation, but like many modern and postmodern philosophers, she pays insufficient attention to the metaphysics of causality. Drawing on Thomistic philosophy, this article maintains that lower-level entities like neurotransmitters lack the causal power necessary to produce higher-level cognitive operations. In defending emergence, Murphy performs a metaphysical sleight-of-hand through which cognitive powers inexplicably appear. The paper ends by urging contemporary thinkers to develop richer metaphysical understandings of causality, and to use them to enhance the dialogue between religion and science.

Abstract: Abstract Through much of the twentieth century, especially during its second half, debates over the mind–body problem were shaped by physicalism, a philosophical world- view that has been inspired and fostered by an appreciation of the foundational position of physics among the sciences. The core of contemporary physicalism is the thesis that all things that exist in this world are bits of matter and structures aggregated out of bits of matter, all behaving in accordance with laws of physics. This metaphysical thesis has a companion epistemological thesis, the claim that all phenomena of the world can be physically explained if they can be explained at all. When physicalism is accepted as a basic framework, the foremost metaphysical problem about the mind is where in the physical world our minds fit—in fact, whether minds have a place in such an austerely physical world at all.

Abstract: “Genes Я us” – or not? About human determinism and voluntarism, with reference to homosexuality This article has as its departure point the conviction of some that human genome mapping predisposes human beings genetically and as a consequence, the homosexual person becomes a mere victim of circumstances. Biological determinism and social construc-tionism are not mutually exclusive and although a person is orientated within a web of boundary matters, the depiction of a human being as imago Dei still prevails. A person has the freedom to choose and the responsibility to do so. One’s understanding of reality provides a frame of reference from which a definition of morality is derived. The suggestion of Nancey Murphey to understand reality as a “nonreductive physicalism” is followed. Reductionism in any form is subsequently avoided. A holistic view of humankind in terms of which religious experience is seen as more than some brain functions and people are embedded in a “sacred canopy”, is therefore advocated.

Abstract: . Nonreductive physicalism, as opposed to reductionism, enjoys wide popularity by virtue of being regarded as comporting with the traditional image of human beings as free and ontologically unique without the difficulties of mind-body dualism. A consideration of reasons, both good and bad, for which reductionism is rejected suggests instead that the move to nonreductive physicalism does nothing to mitigate the implications of a physicalist account of human nature.

Abstract: This thesis presents an argument that would posit a substantial non-physical principle of cognition and consciousness, i.e . a mind or soul, ontologically distinct from the physical brain and its properties. The case consists of, first, a series of arguments that seek to establish the rational foundation for this Cartesian or substance dualism and, second, an attempt to reply to some of the major objections to it. The second component includes a survey of physicalism , the chief alternative to dualism as a solution to the classic mind-body problem. The theological significance of the debate, and particularly of the status one accords to dualism in the debate, is the concern of the final chapter. The latter concludes that the implications of accepting or rejecting substance dualism are far-reaching for theological and ethical affirmations about human immortality and the worth of human beings. Some areas needing further discussion and inquiry, such as the possible relevance of Chalcedonian Christology and the need for further reflection on the precise mechanism of brain-mind interaction, are highlighted in the course of the presentation of the issue.

Abstract: A common contemporary claim is the conjunction of metaphysical naturalism the idea, roughly, that there is no such person as God or anything at all like God with the view that our cognitive faculties have come to be by way of the processes to which contemporary evolutionary theory direct our attention. Call this view 4N&E\ I've argued elsewhere1 that this view is incoherent or self-defeating in that (1) anyone who accepts it has a def eater for R, the proposition that her cognitive faculties are reliable, which then gives her (2) a defeater for any proposition she believes, including, of course, N&E itself. The argument for (1), in turn, depends essentially on the proposition that (3) P(R/N&E) is low or inscrutable. To support (3), I divided N&E into mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive subcases, arguing that in each subcase Sh P(R/N&E&Si) is low or inscrutable. I won't repeat this argument here, but I do want to focus on a certain essential aspect of the argument for (3). But first we must note that one who accepts metaphysical naturalism will likely be a materialist or a physicalist with respect to human beings: materialism is almost universally thought to be de rigueur for naturalists. So let's at least temporarily assimilate materialism with respect to human beings to naturalism. Now suppose materialism is true: given that there are such things as beliefs, what sort of thing will a belief be?2 Since we are assuming materialism, it will presumably have to be a material process or event perhaps a long-standing neural event of some kind in the nervous

Abstract: A certain objection to belief in God is based on the intrinsic incoherence of the concept of Divine Being or God. In particular, it questions the major traditional characteristic, notably omniscience, and its relation to omnipotence, moral unassailability, and absence of embodiment on the part of the Divine Being. In this paper, an attempt is made to counter this objection by an appeal, not to natural theology, but rather to physicalism in its application to human beings, and by extension to the possible consistency of God’s omniscience with the other divine attributes, which philosophers such as Michael Martin have found to be mutually inconsistent and therefore wanting.

Abstract: When I look at a ripe tomato, in good lighting conditions and otherwise normal circumstances, I have a visual experience of redness. When I look at an unripe tomato under similar conditions, I have a visual experience of greenness. If conditions are the same in the two cases except for the ripeness of the fruit, the difference between the two experiences allows me to isolate two qualia, one of redness and another of greenness. Many opine that qualia are troublesome for any physicalist theory of mind because they are difficult (or impossible) to explain in physicalist terms. Daniel Dennett and Leopold Stubenberg are among those who suggest that qualia are impossible to explain in physicalist terms, though they characterize qualia in different ways (Dennett 1988; Stubenberg 1996). I will argue below that if qualia are emergent properties of chaotic brains, it is possible to explain them in physicalist terms. While I don’t provide logically sufficient conditions for the existence of qualia in physicalist terms, I believe the argument provided here gives good reason to think that it is possible to do so.

Abstract: In this paper I discuss a famous argument for physicalism – which some authors indeed regard as the only argument for it – the “overdetermination argument”. In fact it is an argument that does not establish that all the entities in the world are physical, but that all those events that enter into causal transactions with the physical world are physical. As mental events seem to cause changes in the physical world, the mind is one of those things that fall within the scope of the argument. Here I analyze one response to the overdetermination argument that has acquired some popularity lately, and which consists in saying that what mental events cause are not physical effects. I try to show that recent attempts to develop this response are not successful, but that there may be a coherent way of doing so. I also try to show that there seems to be a philosophical “niche” in which this way might fit.

Abstract: This essay examines current mind-body theories and argues that "emergentist monism" is preferable to "nonreductive physicalism" in the search for an adequate model of personhood. It demonstrates the compatibility of the emergentist account of evolving nature with Karl Rahner's notion of "active self-transcendence", and the need to appreciate the "integral" character of final salvation understood as participation, through the Spirit, in the divine identity of the risen Christ who is the new definitive "emergent whole" in person. The essay concludes with the proposition that integral salvation in Christ is fully actualised in the privileged event of death as the gift of "admirable exchange" of natures in the person of the risen One.

Abstract: In Knowledge, Possibility and Consciousness1 I argue that the Zombie Argument, the Knowledge Argument, and the Modal Argument do not provide people with broadly common-sensical views about consciousness and the mental, and an inclination towards physicalism, any reasons not to be physicalists. That is, they do not support the doctrine of neo-dualism, advocated by Chalmers2, Jackson3, and others: although the mind may be the brain, qualia, the what-its-like properties of experiences that makes them experiences, are not physical properties. I claim that as long as the physicalist maintains that these properties simply are physical properties, rather than holding some seemingly more sophisticated, but in fact more vulnerable, doctrine of supervenience, and adopts certain independently plausible views about knowledge and possibility, the force of the arguments can be evaded. Such a physicalist I call an "antecedent physicalist," by which I have in mind someone like myself, who is inclined toward physicalism, and thus inclined to suppose that experiences are physical states, until exposed to some good argument to show otherwise. Thus the book is directed at two groups: those that are sympathetic to physicalism but do not know what to make of these arguments, and those that deny physicalism because of one or more of these arguments. Readers outside these two groups are, however, most welcome. The point about knowledge and possibility is this. There are two ways we can think about possibility, and hence about the content of states of knowledge, thought of as the possibilities the knowledge permits. First there arc the possibilities for the subject matter, the extra-linguistic properties and things in the world the possibilities are possibilities for, or the knowledge is knowledge of. Thought of in this way, there is no possibility that Mark

Abstract: According to Putnam, although Oscar and Twin Oscar are in the same physical mental states (i.e., mental states interpreted in a physicalist way), Oscar points at and therefore means H2O, whereas Twin Oscar points at and therefore means XYZ. Nothing in their heads would "tell" us the difference, that is, allow us to distinguish between these two different meanings. Therefore meanings are not in the head. Instead, we rely and depend on the world to give and assign meanings. As Putnam puts it, the world "takes over". Searle by contrast argues that, although Oscar and his twin are in the same physical mental state, they grasp different abstract entities and their mental states have different Intentional contents. (Following Searle, "Intentionality" with capital " I " means directedness of the mind, encompassing perception, fear, desire, hope, and belief, together with what is usually meant by "intentionality"). When pointing at the water he sees in front of him, Oscar implicitly also points at himself (pointing at the water) and sets up conditions of satisfaction that refer to tokens and not mere types. It is part of his very act of perceiving the water that his mind sets up the condition of satisfaction that what he sees must be the stuff that causes him to have that very here is the reflexivity! perception. The "binding", if I may say so, between him and the water is part of the Intentional content that we create by pointing and calling that stuff "water". In this way, reality seems to be caught up into our minds. Now, is this "magic", as Michael Devitt (1990, p. 90) claims it is?

Abstract: Brian Loar believes he has refuted all those antiphysicalist arguments that take as their point of departure observations about what is or isn’t conceivable. I argue that there remains an important, popular and plausible-looking form of conceivability argument that Loar has entirely overlooked. Though he may not have realized it, Saul Kripke presents, or comes close to presenting, two fundamentally different forms of conceivability argument. I distinguish the two arguments and point out that while Loar has succeeded in refuting one of Kripke's arguments he has not refuted the other. Loar is mistaken: physicalism still faces an apparently insurmountable conceptual obstacle.

Abstract: Consider three answers to the question of what it actually is for you to be aware of the room you are in. (1) It is for the room in a way to exist. (2) It is for there to be only physical activity in your head, however additionally described. (3) It is for there to be non-spatial facts somehow in your head. The first theory, unlike the other two, satisfies criteria for an adequate account of consciousness itself. The criteria have to do with the seeming nature of this consciousness, and with subjectivity, reality and non-abstractness, mind-body causation, and the differences between perceptual, reflective and affective consciousness. The theory of consciousness as existence is not open to the objection of a deluded brain in a vat. The theory explains its own degree of failure in characterizing consciousness. It releases neuroscience and cognitive science from nervousness about consciousness, and leaves all of consciousness a subject for science. The theory is a reconstruction of our conception of consciousness. It may be that we should carry forward several theories of consciousness. But they will have to be compared in terms of truth to the criteria for an adequate theory.Article

Abstract: In a number of important works, Jerry Fodor has wrestled with the problem of how mental representation can be accounted for within a physicalist framework. His favored response has attempted to identify nonintentional conditions for intentionality, relying on a nexus of casual relations between symbols and what they represent. I examine Fodor's theory and argue that it fails to meet its own conditions for adequacy insofar as it presupposes the very phenomenon that it purports to account for. I conclude, however, that the ontological commitments of intentional psychology survive within a broader conception of naturalism than the one adopted by Fodor.

Abstract: The considerations that tell in favor of these two theses are, according to Levine, almost perfectly balanced but just almost since he thinks that the case in favor of physicalism is stronger than the case against it. This should give the physicalist cheer, though not much. For while Levine thinks that we have reason to accept physicalism, we remain, and he seems to think most likely always will remain, in utter bewilderment about how the physical brain gives rise to mental phenomena. Moreover, if this state of bewilderment was not enough to trouble lovers of knowledge, Levine tells us that the mind-body problem presents us with another conundrum, namely, that that if the mind is physical, then there should be an explanation of mentality in physical terms, precisely what he thinks we are incapable of achieving. Thus, Purple Haze is not a book with a happy ending. But while we do not find a solution to the puzzle of consciousness, a way to see through the purple haze, as it were, Levine offers us an extensive exploration of the puzzle, which delves into, among other things, the conceivability argument against physicalism and why he thinks it fails to show that the mental is not ontologically physical, the reasoning behind his view that we have no understanding of how the mind is physical, criticisms of various reductive accounts of the mental, an argument against eliminativism, and Levine's thoughts on the relationship between consciousness and cogni-

Abstract: Brian Loar believes he has refuted all those antiphysicalist arguments that take as their point of departure observations about what is or isn’t conceivable I argue that there remains an important, popular and plausible-looking form of conceivability argument that Loar has entirely overlooked Though he may not have realized it, Saul Kripke presents, or comes close to presenting, two fundamentally different forms of conceivability argument I distinguish the two arguments and point out that while Loar has succeeded in refuting one of Kripke's arguments he has not refuted the other Loar is mistaken: physicalism still faces an apparently insurmountable conceptual obstacleArticle

Abstract: In this paper I describe basic features of traditional (British) emergentism and Popper’s emergentist theory of consciousness and compare them to the contemporary versions of emergentism present in connectionist approach in cognitive sciences. I argue that despite their similarities, the traditional form, as well as Popper’s theory belong to strong causal emergentism and yield radically different ontological consequences compared to the weaker, contemporary version present in cognitive science. Strong causal emergentism denies the causal closure of the physical domain and introduces genuine new mental causal powers and genuine downward causation, while weak emergentism provides new insights in understanding the mechanisms and explanation that is compatible with physicalism.

Abstract: First, my thanks to Derek Jeffreys for his attention to my writings and for designating me a “leader in developing nonreductive physicalism in the last decade.” I shall address three issues. A cent...

Abstract: The aim of this paper is a contribution to discussions on the role of logic in the sciences of Nature from the side of the scientists. The remarks given below are justified by the consideration that the logicians are expected to provide procedures and rules, or at least critical analyses capable of helping scientists to make sound argumentations, especially to distinguish between mere conjectures and reliable explanations. Now, in the author's opinion, there are aspects of the nature of scientific truths which were ignored during the golden age of physicalism and now call for attention. Among these aspects there are the role of analogiesand the distinction between reasonable and true statements.