In chapter 2 Swinburne rejects physicalism for two reason. The first is that it committed to entailments do not exist. It suggested this reason questionable both because there no persuasive deny are such entailments, and also think has entailments. second the mental involves privileged access by subject physical features allow access. proposed does in fact permit 3 defends Simple View of person...

A Thomistic metaphysics of participation in being offers an account rationality that is more complete and coherent than nonreductive physicalism. It a reasoned understanding how embodied intellectual subject shares life. This metaphysical framework supports as participated power, essential property human nature empowering persons to know reality make choices accordingly. Human fulfilment truth ...

1. In a recent article in this journal, Neil Campbell has argued that certain problems with the doctrine of psycho-physical supervenience can be overcome if supervenience is viewed as a relation between predicates rather than as a relation between properties. Campbell suggests that, when properly understood, this predicate version of supervenience "expresses a form of psycho-physical dependence...

The so-called Exclusion argument (Kim 2000; Papineau 2004) about mental causation applies one premise that is typically accepted without much discussion: the thesis of causal completeness of the physical domain (CCP). In part one I evaluate Papineau’s (2001) argument for the CCP. I argue that this argument is not satisfying and that it is incomplete. The rest of the thesis is dedicated to an al...

In addition to ignoring the severe practical problems posed by decoherence phenomena, quantum mind hypotheses are motivated by a misunderstanding of the nature of classical (i. e. nonquantum) dynamics. As presently understood, nonlinear dynamical systems – of which the brain is clearly one – exhibit the twin phenomena of chaos and emergence. The first of these impedes reductionist formulations ...

Filling in the schema requires specifying what it is for an entity to be physical, and what it is for an entity to be ‘‘nothing over and above’’ some other entities. Some have worried that no account of the physical is adequate for physicalist purposes; and I’ll soon say a bit about how physicalists have responded (in my view, successfully) to this worry. But my main focus here is on nothing ov...

Once, a mind-body theory based upon the idea of supervenience seemed to be a promising alternative to the various kinds of reductionistic physicalism. In recent years, however, Jaegwon Kim has subjected his own brainchild to a very thorough criticism. With most of Kim’s arguments I agree wholeheartedly not least because they converge with my own thoughts.2 In order to explain the few points of ...