Recent worries about possible epiphenomenalist consequences of nonreductive physicalism are misplaced, not, as many have argued, because nonreductive physicalism does not imply epiphenomenalism but because the epiphenomenalist implication is actually a virtue of the theory, rather than a vice. It is only by showing how certain kinds of mental properties are causally impotent that cognitive scie...

The conclusion of this argument (hereafter ZA) entails the falsity of physicalism because, technical details aside, physicalism is or entails the thesis that every psychological truth is entailed by some physical truth. If it is possible that I have a zombie duplicate however, then it is possible that the physical truths are as they are and some psychological truth is different. Hence 3 entails...

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...

In recent years, the debate on the problem of causal exclusion has seen an ‘interventionist turn’. Numerous non-reductive physicalists (e.g. Shapiro and Sober 2007) have argued that Woodward’s (2003) interventionist theory of causation provides a means to empirically establish the existence of nonreducible mental-to-physical causation. By contrast, Baumgartner (2010) has presented an interventi...

Since the time of Descartes, various versions a modal argument have been proffered for substance dualism. Until recently, premise most frequently attacked is one that moves from conceivability to metaphysical possibility. However, more new criticism has surfaced, viz., an contingent physicalism. The purpose this article show what I take be sophisticated physicalist fails as defeater argument. A...

the theory of dualism, i.e. duality of mind and body is, from most of the religious scholars and theologian's point of view, a theoretical basis for believes to hereafter. today the doctrine of physicalism is the most important challenge against dualism and whereby, mind and its moods, either are unrealistic and illusion (eliminative physicalism), or reductive physicalism; i.e. reduce them...

1.1 Conceivability and PossibilityDavid Chalmers’ challenge to physicalism has dominated the philosophy of mind for the last seventeen years. His 1995paper ‘Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness’ and his 1996 book The Conscious Mind reinvigorated the debate between physicalists and dualists. But Chalmers’ mature attack on physicalism appeared over a decade later in his extensive 2009 paper ...

Since something cannot be conscious without being a conscious subject, a complete physicalist explanation of consciousness must resolve an issue first raised by Thomas Nagel, namely to explain why a particular mass of atoms that comprises my body gives rise to me as conscious subject, rather than someone else. In this essay, I describe a thought-experiment that suggests that physicalism lacks t...