In a rich and provocative paper, Jaegwon Kim offers an ingenious argument for psychophysical reductionism. I take Kim to be posing a dilemma for anyone who would deny reductionism, viz. that one must either advocate the wholesale reduction of psychology to physical science or one must advocate the sundering of psychology into distinct fields, each one of which is reducible to physical science. ...

Ever since Darwin a great deal of the conceptual history of biology may be read as a struggle between two philosophical positions: reductionism and holism. On the one hand, we have the reductionist claim that evolution has to be understood in terms of changes at the fundamental causal level of the gene. As Richard Dawkins famously put it, organisms are just ‘lumbering robots’ in the service of ...

Pluralism is often put forth as a counter-position to reductionism. In this essay, I argue that reductionism and pluralism are in fact consistent. I propose that there are several potential goals for reductions and that the proper form of a reduction should be considered in tandem with the goal that it aims to achieve. This insight provides a basis for clarifying what version(s) of reductionism...