Physicalism

Die Frage nach einem neuen Materialismus hat gegenwärtig quer durch die Disziplinen Konjunktur. Dabei wird Materie oder 'Matter' nicht länger als passiver Träger von Bedeutung, Diskursen oder menschlicher Manipulation verstanden, sondern die Eigensinnigkeit und Kontingenz der materiellen Welt betont. Dieser Band versammelt Beiträge, die die bislang massgeblich im englischsprachigen Raum und auf theoretischer Ebene stattfindende Debatte aufgreift und sie mit Blick auf ihr gesellschaftskritisches Potenzial diskutiert. Bei aller Diversität der disziplinären und thematischen Zugänge hebt der Band eine grundlegende Tendenz hervor. (...) Zum einen die Unzufriedenheit über die gegenwärtigen gesellschaftlichen Zustände, zum anderen die Unfähigkeit gegenwärtiger Analysen, die aktuellen Bewegungen und Umbrüche in der Gesellschaft anschaulich zu machen. Die unterschiedlichen im Band vorgestellten Ansätze, Materie neu zu denken, nehmen diese Herausforderung an: Sie versuchen, soziale und politische Zusammenhänge in ihrer Komplexität zu erfassen ohne den kritischen Impetus des 'alten' marxistischen Materialismus aufzugeben. Dabei wird versucht, neomaterialistische Ansätze für unterschiedliche Bereiche der Gesellschaftskritik fruchtbar zu machen, darunter Ökonomiekritik, Biopolitik, Feminismus, Raumtheorie, Ästhetik, Technologie und kritische Theorie"--Back cover. (shrink)

Nous sommes des êtres à la fois spirituels et corporels. Mon poids est un attribut corporel, tandis que ma capacité d'imaginer un paysage marin relève d'un attribut mental. Or, une fois admise cette dualité des attributs, comment concevoir l'interaction entre le corps et l'esprit? Face aux doctrines dualistes qui échouent à répondre à cette question, Max Kistler défend ici une variante du matérialisme réductionniste qui fait droit à la notion d'émergence : corps et esprit se logent au sein d'une hiérarchie (...) de niveaux de réalité. Les personnes - exclusivement composées, comme tout autre objet matériel, d'atomes - ont des propriétés émergentes que ne possède aucune de leurs composantes. L'auteur développe ainsi une nouvelle conception de l'émergence qui la rend compatible avec la réduction. Une personne peut penser tandis qu'aucune partie de son corps ne le peut : en ce sens, la capacité de penser émerge au niveau de la personne. Mais il est en principe possible d'expliquer cette capacité en termes des parties physiologiques de la personne. Une telle intégration dans la conception scientifique du monde ne prive notre esprit ni de réalité ni d'efficacité : lorsque je raconte ma rêverie à un ami, ma rêverie et le désir de la partager figurent parmi les causes de la vibration de mes cordes vocales..."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

The continental tradition in philosophy has gotten more "materialistic" over the last two hundred years. This has resulted from a combination of some very specific moves with regard to the epistemological parameters of understanding and the assertion that ideas may have material force in history. Therefore, the materialism within the continental tradition is not a materiality of being, but a materiality of understanding and action. Such an inquiry opens up space between the activities of sensation and the mental faculty of (...) cognition. 'I think, therefore I am,' is not an empirical statement, but a statement of cognition. It is assumed that this distinction is at the core of continental philosophy. Cognition is always interpretive. Experience is the start of cognition, but not its final product. Our cognitions cannot be separated from our experience of the physical, social, and cultural environment around us. The symbolic nature of language reinforces the interpretive nature of our thoughts and ideas. Our language is, therefore, always projecting an implicit image of the world. Language is, therefore, always political. The materiality of these cognitive world-views is manifested in two ways. First, in their formation. They are the products of sensual contact with the world. Second, in their effects. They move people. It is a picture of the world which serves to shape the content and character of human behavior. Whether we want to call these phantoms of the mind, world-view, ideas, thoughts, cognitions, or any other term, the dual character of their materiality is secure. This work examines the threads of materialist ideas running through the efforts of some major authors in the continental tradition in philosophy. A model of materialism is constructed in Chapter One and used to assess the materialist elements in works from Kant, Marx, Weber, Nietzsche, and contemporary poststructuralism. The work demonstrates the evolution of materialist thinking within the tradition and asserts an evolving and developing articulation of materialism in relation to the thoughts and activities of human beings." -- Publisher's description. (shrink)

Religion: material dynamics is a lively resource for thinking about religious materiality and the material study of religion. Deconstructing and reconstructing religion as material categories, social formations, and mobile circulations, the book explores the making, ordering, and circulating of religious things. Split into three sections, Part One revitalizes basic categories--animism and sacred, space and time--by situating them in their material production and testing their analytical viability. Part Two examines religious formations as configurations of power that operate in material cultures and (...) cultural economies and are most clearly shown in the power relations of colonialism and imperialism. Part Three explores the material dynamics of circulation through case studies of religious mobility, change, and diffusion as intimate as the body and as vast as the oceans. Each chapter offers insightful orientations and surprising possibilities for studying material religion. Exploring the material dynamics of religion from poetics to politics, David Chidester provides an entry into the study of material religion that will be welcomed by students and specialists in religious studies, anthropology, and history."--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

Le materialisme a toujours fait probleme, etant donne les enjeux ideologiques et donc politiques qu'il a impliques et qu'il implique toujours. Cet ouvrage tente d'examiner le materialisme sous ses differentes formes prises au cours des siecles et de justifier ses bases. Ce qui est en jeu, c'est l'existence de la matiere, la conception que l'on doit s'en faire, son extension et, bien entendu, notre capacite de la connaitre et d'en expliquer les diverses formes, des plus humbles aux plus hautes. Il (...) s'agit aussi de le confronter a differentes questions comme la foi religieuse, l'art, la dimension metaphysique des choses (si elle existe) et, question finale, celle du Sens (avec une majuscule). Il faudra aussi envisager lucidement la question des limites eventuelles de l'ontologie materialiste, quitte a surprendre et a la rendre plus modeste... mais aussi plus convaincante dans son ordre propre. (shrink)

It is often said that there is no appearance/reality distinction with respect to consciousness. Call this claim ‘NARD’. In contemporary discussions, NARD is closely connected to the thesis of revelation, the claim that the essences of phenomenal properties are revealed in experience, though the connection between the two requires clarification. This paper distinguishes different versions of NARD and homes in on a particular version that is closely connected to revelation. It shows how revelation and the related version of NARD pose (...) a threat to physicalism. Responses from physicalism and their limitations are also considered. (shrink)

God loves to provide well for His people. But He understands human nature. He knows how attractive material things can be. The more people have, the greater their temptation to use more and more for selfish reasons. So God gives His people outlets for the excess. "Take heed, and beware of covetousness: for a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth" (Luke 12:15). "Charge them that are rich-- that they be rich in good works, (...) ready to distribute,--laying up in store for themselves a good foundation" (1 Timothy 6:17-19). The real enjoyment of riches is the ability to give and share freely with others. That is one way we can lay up treasures in heaven.--Back cover. (shrink)

This collection of eleven philosophical essays addresses current trends in materialist philosophy dealing with subject-object relations, amounting to a polemical corrective that insists on the organizing role of the subject within materialist thought.

Reductionism is an old doctrine desperate for new direction. With nomologically constructed theories commanding less attention in the life sciences, concern for the twentieth-century tradition of a...

This paper describes a version of type identity physicalism, which we call Flat Physicalism, and shows how it meets several objections often raised against identity theories. This identity theory is informed by recent results in the conceptual foundations of physics, and in particular clar- ifies the notion of ‘physical kinds’ in light of a conceptual analysis of the paradigmatic case of reducing thermody- namics to statistical mechanics. We show how Flat Physi- calism is compatible with the appearance of multiple realisation (...) in the special sciences, and how and in what sense the special sciences laws are autonomous from the laws of physics, despite the full reductive picture of Flat Physicalism. We compare our view with a recent proposal by William Bechtel that accounts for the appearance of levels in mechanistic explanations. (shrink)

The main idea of this thesis is multi-descriptional physicalism. According to it, only physical entities are elements of our ontology, and there are different ways to describe them. Higher-level vocabularies (e.g., mental, neurological, biological) truly describe reality. Sentences about higher-level entities are made true by physical entities. Every chapter will develop multi-descriptional physicalism or defend it from objections. In chapter 1, I will propose a new conceptual reductive account that conceptually reduces higher-level entities to physical entities. This conceptual reductive account (...) combines resources from Heil’s truthmaker theory and either a priori physicalism or a posteriori physicalism. In chapter 2, I apply this conceptual reductive account to various debates. Physicalism, the multiple-realisability argument, the prototype theory of concepts, and truthmaker explanations will be discussed. In chapter 3, I will argue that a major aim of metaphysics should be to discover which entities are fundamental and explain why they suffice for the existence of derivative entities. In chapter 4, I will propose a new way to explain why sentences apparently about composite objects are true even though there are no composite objects. It combines resources from Cameron’s truthmaker theory and van Inwagen’s paraphrase strategy. In chapter 5, I will argue that the intuition that the mind and the body are very different does not show that the mind is distinct from the body. This intuition can be explained away by mentioning our dispositions to give non-physical explanations when we are ignorant of physical facts. In chapter 6, I will examine two arguments for the existence of a metaphysically independent level, and I will argue that only a modified version of one of them succeeds. I will argue that methodological principles support the view that there is a metaphysically independent level. (shrink)

Most physicalists believe that physicalism is a thesis that denies the existence of fundamental mentality either as a substance or as a property. Therefore, since most physicalists also endorse a posteriori physicalism, according to them, if the future physical theory posits fundamental mentality as a fundamental physical concept, then physicalism will be falsified. In contrast, there are those who believe that the core idea of physicalism is an ontological deference to science (especially physics); the idea that is usually called scientism (...) and is closely related to methodological naturalism. According to them, if physicists posit fundamental mentality as an integral part of the future fundamental physical theory, physicalism will not be falsified, and physicalists may (or should) accept fundamental mentality as a genuine physical concept. In this paper, I argue that there is some historical evidence in support of the latter understanding of physicalism. First, I give some historical evidence that seems to suggest that the historical origin of physicalism is the failure of those explanations – or pseudo-explanations – that have appealed to supernatural non-physical entities. Second, I show that in some of the initial reflections on materialism – the predecessor of physicalism – in the first half of the twentieth century, philosophers understood materialism in terms of the very historical origin. (shrink)

What marks emergence as a metaphysically interesting idea is that many macro-level entities and their properties are ontologically and causally autonomous in relation to the micro-level entities and properties they depend on---or so argues Jessica Wilson in Metaphysical Emergence (2021). To do so, she adopts a “metaphysically highly neutral” (p. 32) approach to questions about powers, causation, properties, and laws. That is, while explaining what emergence is and arguing that there is indeed emergence in the natural world, she doesn’t restrict (...) her analyses and arguments to any specific metaphysical accounts of these concepts, and she doesn’t commit to any controversial theses about them. In this article, I assess Wilson’s project against this methodological ideal of metaphysical neutrality. (shrink)

"The doctrine of materialism is one of the perennial and most controversial ideas in the arts and sciences. Throughout history it has aroused strong passions, and in the Sixteenth and Twentieth centuries was a doctrine over which people were persecuted and killed. Yet it has been equally aligned with empirical, enlightened and tolerant thinking. This book explores the fascinating and important philosophy of materialism in an engaging and thought-provoking way. Opening with an overview of the ideas of some of the (...) most important materialists, including Lucretius, Epicurus, Hobbes and Hume up to Darwin and Marx, Brown and Ladyman show how materialism's origins were twofold: it was an early form of scientific explanation but also an intellectual outlook, or belief-system, about the world in general. They then explain how materialism's beginnings as imaginative vision of the true nature of things faced a major challenge from modern physics, in the form of quantum theory and the general theory of relativity. This posed major questions for materialism: how could it be reconciled with unobservable entities and new discoveries about the nature of space and time? As the authors show, out of this challenge materialism did not die but re-emerged - as the new doctrine of physicalism. Drawing on colourful examples throughout - from modern physics, the nature of the mind, and atheism - the authors argue that whilst materialism may not have all the answers, its humanism and staunch belief in observation, evidence and experiment remains our best hope in a fragmented and hyper-specialised world"--. (shrink)