54 found
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  1. A Physicalist Manifesto: Thoroughly Modern Materialism.Andrew Melnyk - 2003 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
    A Physicalist Manifesto is a full treatment of the comprehensive physicalist view that, in some important sense, everything is physical. Andrew Melnyk argues that the view is best formulated by appeal to a carefully worked-out notion of realization, rather than supervenience; that, so formulated, physicalism must be importantly reductionist; that it need not repudiate causal and explanatory claims framed in non-physical language; and that it has the a posteriori epistemic status of a broad-scope scientific hypothesis. Two concluding chapters argue in (...)
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  2. How to keep the 'physical' in physicalism.Andrew Melnyk - 1997 - Journal of Philosophy 94 (12):622-637.
    This paper introduces the term "Hempel's Dilemma" to refer to the following challenge to any formulation of physicalism that appeals to the content of physics: if physical properties are those mentioned as such in current physics, then physicalism is probably false; but if they are those mentioned as such in a completed physics, then, since we have no idea what completed physics will look like, the resulting formulation of physicalism will lack content that is determinable by us now. It shows (...)
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  3. Realization and the Formulation of Physicalism.Andrew Melnyk - 2006 - Philosophical Studies 131 (1):127-155.
    Twenty years ago, Richard Boyd suggested that physicalism could be formulated by appeal to a notion of realization, with no appeal to the identity of the non-physical with the physical. In (Melnyk 2003), I developed this suggestion at length, on the basis of one particular account of realization. I now ask what happens if you try to formulate physicalism on the basis of other accounts of realization, accounts due to LePore and Loewer and to Shoemaker. Having explored two new formulations (...)
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  4. Grounding and the Formulation of Physicalism.Andrew Melnyk - 2016 - In Ken Aizawa & Carl Gillett (eds.), Scientific Composition and Metaphysical Ground. London: Palgrave-Macmillan. pp. 249-269.
    Grounding is all the rage in analytical metaphysics. But here I give three reasons for not appealing to a primitive relation of grounding in formulating physicalism. (1) It probably can't do the key job it would need to do. (2) We don't need it, since we already have realization. (3) It is probably not even consistent with physicalism.
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  5. In Defense of a Realization Formulation of Physicalism.Andrew Melnyk - 2018 - Topoi 37 (3):483-493.
    In earlier work, I proposed and defended a formulation of physicalism that was distinctive in appealing to a carefully-defined relation of physical realization. Various philosophers (Robert Francescotti, Daniel Stoljar, Carl Gillett, and Susan Schneider) have since presented challenges to this formulation. In the present paper, I aim to show that these challenges can be overcome.
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  6. Can physicalism be non-reductive?Andrew Melnyk - 2008 - Philosophy Compass 3 (6):1281-1296.
    Can physicalism (or materialism) be non-reductive? I provide an opinionated survey of the debate on this question. I suggest that attempts to formulate non-reductive physicalism by appeal to claims of event identity, supervenience, or realization have produced doctrines that fail either to be physicalist or to be non-reductive. Then I treat in more detail a recent attempt to formulate non-reductive physicalism by Derk Pereboom, but argue that it fares no better.
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  7. Conceptual and linguistic analysis: A two-step program.Andrew Melnyk - 2008 - Noûs 42 (2):267–291.
    This paper argues against both conceptual and linguistic analysis as sources of a priori knowledge. Whether such knowledge is possible turns on the nature of concepts. The paper's chief contention is that none of the main views about what concepts are can underwrite the possibility of such knowledge.
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  8. Two cheers for reductionism, or, the dim prospects for nonreductive materialism.Andrew Melnyk - 1995 - Philosophy of Science 62 (3):370-88.
    I argue that a certain version of physicalism, which is viewed by both its admirers and its detractors as non-reductionist, in fact entails two claims which, though not reductionist in the currently most popular sense of 'reductionist', conform to the spirit of reductionism sufficiently closely to compromise its claim to be a comprehensively non-reductionist version of physicalism. Putatively non-reductionist versions of physicalism in general, I suggest, are likely to be non-reductionist only in some senses, but not in others, and hence (...)
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  9. Can Metaphysics Be Naturalized? And If So, How?Andrew Melnyk - 2013 - In Don Ross, James Ladyman & Harold Kincaid (eds.), Scientific metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 79-95.
    This is a critical, but sympathetic, examination of the manifesto for naturalized metaphysics that forms the first chapter of James Ladyman and Don Ross's 2006 book, Every Thing Must Go, but it has wider implications than this description suggests.
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  10. Inference to the best explanation and other minds.Andrew Melnyk - 1994 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 72 (4):482-91.
    Robert Pargetter has argued that we know other minds through an inference to the best explanation. My aim is to show, by criticising Pargetter's account, that this approach to the problem of other minds cannot, as it stands, deliver the goods; it might be part of the right response to the problem, but it cannot be the whole story. More precisely, I will claim that Pargetter does not successfully reconstruct how ordinary people in everyday life come reasonably to believe in (...)
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  11. Being a physicalist: How and (more importantly) why.Andrew Melnyk - 1994 - Philosophical Studies 74 (2):221-241.
    A standard objection to any version of physicalism, an objection which may be encountered both in conversation and in the literature, is that there is just no reason to be a physicalist; even if there are no good arguments against physicalism, there are none for it either. My main aim in this paper is to defeat this objection by supplying a trio of positive reasons for adopting a particular brand of physicalism, which I call realization physicalism. The arguments I shall (...)
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  12. Searle's abstract argument against strong AI.Andrew Melnyk - 1996 - Synthese 108 (3):391-419.
    Discussion of Searle's case against strong AI has usually focused upon his Chinese Room thought-experiment. In this paper, however, I expound and then try to refute what I call his abstract argument against strong AI, an argument which turns upon quite general considerations concerning programs, syntax, and semantics, and which seems not to depend on intuitions about the Chinese Room. I claim that this argument fails, since it assumes one particular account of what a program is. I suggest an alternative (...)
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  13. Formulating physicalism: Two suggestions.Andrew Melnyk - 1995 - Synthese 105 (3):381-407.
    Two ways are considered of formulating a version of retentive physicalism, the view that in some important sense everything is physical, even though there do exist properties, e.g. higher-level scientific ones, which cannot be type-identified with physical properties. The first way makes use of disjunction, but is rejected on the grounds that the results yield claims that are either false or insufficiently materialist. The second way, realisation physicalism, appeals to the correlative notions of a functional property and its realisation, and (...)
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  14.  63
    Physicalism: From Supervenience to Elimination.Andrew Melnyk - 1991 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 51 (3):573-587.
    Supervenience physicalism holds that all facts, of whatever type, globally supervene upon the physical facts, even though neither type-type nor token-token nonphysical-physical identities hold. I argue that, invoked like this, supervenience is metaphysically mysterious, needing explanation. I reject two explanations (Lewis and Forrest). I argue that the best explanation of the appearance of supervenience is an error-theoretic, projectivist one: there are no nonphysical properties, but we erroneously project such onto the physical world in a systematic way, yielding the appearance of (...)
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  15. Some Evidence for Physicalism.Andrew Melnyk - 2003 - In Sven Walter & Heinz-Dieter Heckmann (eds.), Physicalism and Mental Causation: The Metaphysics of Mind and Action. Imprint Academic. pp. 155-172.
    This paper presents an irreducibly inductive argument for physicalism based on the causal closure of the physical (for which it argues), and defends it against various detractors.
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  16. Papineau on the intuition of distinctness.Andrew Melnyk - 2002 - SWIF Philosophy of Mind 4 (1).
    Critical comments on David Papineau's idea that people find physicalism about phenomenal consciousness unbelievable because they commit what he calls the 'antipathetic fallacy'.
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  17. Physicalism.Andrew Melnyk - 2002 - In Stephen P. Stich & Ted A. Warfield (eds.), Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Mind. Blackwell. pp. 65-84.
    Written with a student audience in mind, this article surveys the issues raises by the attempt to formulate, argue for, and explore the implications of a comprehensively physicalist view of the world.
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  18. Physicalism unfalsified, chalmer's inconclusive conceivability argument.Andrew Melnyk - 2001 - In Carl Gillett & Barry Loewer (eds.), Physicalism and its Discontents. New York: Cambridge University Press.
  19. Pereboom’s Robust Non-reductive Physicalism.Andrew Melnyk - 2014 - Erkenntnis 79 (5):1191-1207.
    Derk Pereboom has recently elaborated a formulation of non-reductive physicalism in which supervenience does not play the central role and realization plays no role at all; he calls his formulation “robust non-reductive physicalism”. This paper argues that for several reasons robust non-reductive physicalism is inadequate as a formulation of physicalism: it can only rule out fundamental laws of physical-to-mental emergence by stipulating that there are no such laws; it fails to entail the supervenience of the mental on the physical; it (...)
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  20. Testament of a recovering eliminativist.Andrew Melnyk - 1996 - Philosophy of Science 63 (3):S185-S193.
    If physicalism is true (e.g., if every event is a fundamental-physical event), then it looks as if there is a fundamental-physical explanation of everything. If so, then what is to become of special scientific explanations? They seem to be excluded by the fundamental-physical ones, and indeed to be excellent candidates for elimination. I argue that, if physicalism is true, there probably is a fundamental-physical explanation of everything, but that nevertheless there can perfectly well be special scientific explanations as well, notwithstanding (...)
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  21. Materialism.Andrew Melnyk - 2012 - Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews 3 (3):281-292.
    Materialism is nearly universally assumed by cognitive scientists. Intuitively, materialism says that a person’s mental states are nothing over and above his or her material states, while dualism denies this. Philosophers have introduced concepts (e.g., realization, supervenience) to assist in formulating the theses of materialism and dualism with more precision, and distinguished among importantly different versions of each view (e.g., eliminative materialism, substance dualism, emergentism). They have also clarified the logic of arguments that use empirical findings to support materialism. Finally, (...)
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  22. Physicalism unfalsified: Chalmers' inconclusive argument for dualism.Andrew Melnyk - 2001 - In Carl Gillett & Barry Loewer (eds.), Physicalism and its Discontents. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 331-349.
    This paper aims to show that David Chalmers' conceivability argument against physicalism, as presented in his 1996 book, The Conscious Mind, is inconclusive. The key point is that, while the argument seems to assume that someone competent with a given concept thereby has access to the primary intension of the concept, there are physicalist-friendly views of conceptual competence which imply that this assumption is not true.
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  23. Ramsey 311,314 Rembrandt 388 Rosenberg, Alexander xxi Ross, WD. 274.Nathan Salmon, Andrew Melnyk, Trenton Merricks, John Stuart Mill, Matt Millen, Ruth G. Millikan, Piet Mondrian, Isaac Newton, David Owens & David Papineau - 2002 - In Jaegwon Kim (ed.), Supervenience. Ashgate. pp. 397.
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  24. The Scientific Evidence for Materialism About Pain.Andrew Melnyk - 2015 - In Steven M. Miller (ed.), The Constitution of Phenomenal Consciousness: Toward a Science and Theory. Philadelphia: John Benjamins. pp. 310-329.
    This paper argues in unprecedented empirical and philosophical detail that, given only what science has discovered about pain, we should prefer the materialist hypothesis that pains are purely material over the dualist hypothesis that they are immaterial. The empirical findings cited provide strong evidence for the thesis of empirical supervenience: that to every sort of introspectible change over time in pains, or variation among pains at a time, there corresponds in fact a certain sort of simultaneous neural change over time, (...)
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  25. Functionalism and Psychological Reductionism: Friends, Not Foes.Andrew Melnyk - 2007 - In Maurice Kenneth Davy Schouten & Huibert Looren de Jong (eds.), The matter of the mind: philosophical essays on psychology, neuroscience, and reduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell. pp. 31-50.
    The paper argues that a broadly functionalist picture of psychological phenomena is quite consistent with at least one interesting thesis of psychological reductionism.
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  26. Comments on Sydney Shoemaker’s Physical Realization.Andrew Melnyk - 2010 - Philosophical Studies 148 (1):113-123.
    This paper concerns Sydney Shoemaker's view, presented in his book, Physical Realization (Oxford University Press, 2007), of how mental properties are realized by physical properties. That view aims to avoid the "too many minds" problem to which he seems to be led by his further view that human persons are not token-identical with their bodies. The paper interprets and criticizes Shoemaker's view.
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  27. Naturalism as a Philosophical Paradigm.Andrew Melnyk - 2009 - Philo 12 (2):188-199.
    I develop the conjecture that “naturalism” in philosophy names not a thesis but a paradigm in something like Thomas Kuhn’s sense, i.e., a set of commitments, shared by a group of investigators, whose acceptance by the members of the group powerfully influences their day-to-day investigative practice. I take a stab at spelling out the shared commitments that make up naturalism, and the logical and evidential relations among them.
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  28.  55
    On the metaphysical utility of claims of global supervenience.Andrew Melnyk - 1997 - Philosophical Studies 87 (3):277-308.
    In this paper I pour a little cold water on claims of global supervenience, not by arguing that they are false, and not by arguing that they possess no philosophical utility whatsoever, but by building a case for the following conditional conclusion: if you expect claims of global supervenience to play a certain role in a certain metaphysical project, then you will be disappointed, since they cannot play such a role. The metaphysical project is to give an illuminating and suitably (...)
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  29.  55
    Physicalism, ordinary objects, and identity.Andrew Melnyk - 1995 - Journal of Philosophical Research 20:221-235.
    Any philosopher sympathetic to physicaIism (or materiaIism) will allow that there is some sense in which ordinary objects---tables and chairs, etc.---are physicaI. But what sense, exactly? John Post holds a view implying that every ordinary object is identical with some or other spatio-temporal sum of fundamental entities. I begin by deploying a modal argument intended to show that ordinary objects, for example elephants, are not identical with spatio-temporal sums of such entities. Then I claim that appeal to David Lewis’s counterpart (...)
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  30. Philosophy and the study of its history.Andrew Melnyk - 2008 - Metaphilosophy 39 (2):203–219.
    This paper is guided by, and begins to make plausible, the idea that there can be a naturalistic metaphilosophy, i.e., an inquiry that takes philosophy as an object of study in something like the way that contemporary (naturalistic) philosophy of science takes science as an object of study. The paper’s more specific goal is to ventilate certain provocative speculations concerning the character of philosophy’s cognitive achievement, especially over time. But this more specific goal will be approached indirectly, through addressing in (...)
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  31. Rea on Naturalism.Andrew Melnyk - 2004 - Philo 7 (2):131-137.
    My goal in this paper is to provide critical discussion of Michael Rea’s case for three of the controversial theses defended in his World Without Design (Oxford University Press, 2002): (1) that naturalism must be viewed as what he calls a “research program”; (2) that naturalism “cannot be adopted on the basis of evidence,” as he puts it; and (3) that naturalists cannot be justified in accepting realism about material objects.
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  32.  74
    A Case For Physicalism About The Human Mind.Andrew Melnyk - 2007 - God or Blind Nature? Philosophers Debate the Evidence.
    The first of three contributions to an e-book in which I debated Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro on the question whether the human mind is material. I said that it is, and they said that it isn't. The article is meant to be intelligible to an educated general audience. In this first contribution, I present a simplified version of the argument for physicalism based on the neural dependence of mental phenomena.
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  33.  82
    Is there a formal argument against positive rights?Andrew Melnyk - 1989 - Philosophical Studies 55 (2):205 - 209.
    Positive rights are, roughly, rights that one be provided with certain things; and so they entail obligations on others, not merely to refrain from interfering with the bearer of the rights, but to see to it that one gets whatever one has the rights to. An example of a positive right would be the right to a welfare minimum; the right, that is, to resources sufficient to satisfy basic physical needs. In this paper I criticise a couple of recent attempts (...)
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  34.  68
    Naturalism, Free Choices, And Conscious Experiences.Andrew Melnyk - 2007 - God or Blind Nature? Philosophers Debate the Evidence.
    The third of three contributions to an e-book in which I debated Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro on the question whether the human mind is material. I said that it is, and they said that it isn't. The article is meant to be intelligible to an educated general audience. In this third contribution, I reply to the claim of Goetz and Taliaferro that naturalism (i.e., anti-supernaturalism) cannot accommodate free choices and conscious experience.
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  35.  58
    One World and the Many Sciences: A Defence of Physicalism.A. Melnyk & Andrew Melnyk - 1991 - Dissertation, Oxford University
    The subject of this thesis is physicalism, understood not as some particular doctrine pertaining narrowly to the philosophy of mind, but rather as a quite general metaphysical claim to the effect that everything is, or is fundamentally, physical. Thus physicalism explicates the thought that in some sense physics is the basic science. The aim of the thesis is to defend a particular brand of physicalism, which I call eliminative type physicalism. It claims, roughly, that every property is a physical property, (...)
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  36.  59
    Physicalism and the First-Person Point of View: A Reply To Taliaferro and Goetz.Andrew Melnyk - 2007 - God or Blind Nature? Philosophers Debate the Evidence.
    The second of three contributions to an e-book in which I debated Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro on the question whether the human mind is material. I said that it is, and they said that it isn't. The article is meant to be intelligible to an educated general audience. In this second contribution, I criticize the appeals to introspection that Goetz and Taliaferro make to support their dualism.
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  37.  8
    Physicalism.Andrew Melnyk - 2003 - In Ted Warfield (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Mind. Blackwell. pp. 65–84.
    This chapter contains sections titled: Formulating Physicalism Justifying Physicalism Objecting to Physicalism.
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  38.  65
    The prospects for Dretske's account of the explanatory role of belief.Andrew Melnyk - 1996 - Mind and Language 11 (2):203-15.
    When a belief is cited as part of the explanation of an agent’s behaviour, it seems that the belief is explanatorily relevant in virtue of its content. In his Explaining Behavior, Dretske presents an account of belief, content, and explanation according to which this can be so. I supply some examples of beliefs whose explanatory relevance in virtue of content apparently cannot be accounted for in the Dretskean way. After considering some possible responses to this challenge, I end by discussing (...)
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  39.  81
    The prospects for Kirk's non-reductive physicalism.Andrew Melnyk - 1998 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 76 (2):323-32.
    Using the notion of strict implication, Robert Kirk claims to have formulated a version of physicalism which is nonreductive. I argue that, depending on how his notion of strict implication is interpreted, Kirk's formulation either fails to be physicalist or else commits him to reductionism. Either way we do not have nonreductive physicalism. I also suggest that the reductionism to which Kirk is committed, though unfashionable, is unobjectionable.
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  40. Critical Study of Thomas Nagel's "The Last Word". [REVIEW]Andrew Melnyk - 1999 - Philosophical Books 40 (1):14-17.
    This critical study takes Nagel's book to task for its obscurity, and for its under-argued rejection of naturalism.
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  41. Review of Joe Levine's "Purple Haze". [REVIEW]Andrew Melnyk - 2002 - Philosophical Psychology 15 (3):359-362.
    Though there is much else in Levine's book that is also worthy of discussion, this critical study focuses exclusively on his central positive thesis that phenomenal consciousness exhibits two features that “both resist explanatory reduction to the physical: subjectivity and qualitative character” (p. 175).
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  42. Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. A Critical Study of Elias E. Savellos and Umit D. Yalçin (eds.) Supervenience: New Essays. [REVIEW]Andrew Melnyk - 1999 - Noûs 33 (1):144–154.
    This critical study aims mainly to do two things: (i) throw some cold water on the claim that supervenience can be used to formulate a doctrine of non-reductive physicalism, and (ii) rebut an argument for physicalism offered (separately) by David Papineau and Barry Loewer. -/- The title alludes to the following lyric from "Mary Poppins", and was intended to hint that there is less to supervenience than meets the eye: -/- It's supercalifragilisticexpialidocious Even though the sound of it is something (...)
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  43. ‘The Conceptual Link from Physical to Mental’, by Kirk, Robert: Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. xii + 228, £35 (hardback). [REVIEW]Andrew Melnyk - 2014 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 92 (3):596-599.
    Review of Robert Kirk's The Conceptual Link From Physical To Mental (Oxford University Press, 2013).
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  44. What Do Philosophers Know? A Critical Study of Williamson's "The Philosophy of Philosophy". [REVIEW]Andrew Melnyk - 2010 - Grazer Philosophische Studien 80 (1):297-307.
    This is a critical notice of Timothy Williamson's, The Philosophy of Philosophy (Blackwell, 2007). It focuses on criticizing the book's two main positive proposals: that we should “replace true belief by knowledge in a principle of charity constitutive of content”, and that “the epistemology of metaphysically modal thinking is tantamount to a special case of the epistemology of counterfactual thinking”.
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  45.  24
    Review: Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. [REVIEW]Andrew Melnyk - 1999 - Noûs 33 (1):144 - 154.
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  46. (1 other version)Review of Michael Rea's, 'World without design: the ontological consequences of naturalism'. [REVIEW]Andrew Melnyk - 2004 - Mind 113 (451):575-581.
    Substantial review of Michael Rea's, World without design: the ontological consequences of naturalism. It is an improved version of my paper, "Rea On Naturalism" in Philo, 2004, revised in light of Rea's comments on the earlier paper. The discussion focuses on Rea’s case for three of his theses: that naturalism must be viewed as a ‘research programme’; that naturalism ‘cannot be adopted on the basis of evidence’, as he puts it; and that naturalists cannot be justified in accepting realism about (...)
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  47. Realization Realized. [REVIEW]Andrew Melnyk - 2009 - Philosophical Books 50 (3):185-195.
    This is a critical study of Sydney Shoemaker's, Physical Realization (Oxford University Press, 2007). It focuses on (i) the relationship between his subset theory of realization and the higher-order property theory of realization, and (ii) his attempt to solve the problem of mental causation.
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  48.  31
    Andreas Elpidorou and Guy Dove’s Consciousness and Physicalism: A Defense of a Research Program (Routledge, 2018). [REVIEW]Andrew Melnyk - 2018 - Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2018.
    This review mainly expresses skepticism about the book's central thesis that physicalism should be viewed as a research program, rather than as a comprehensive thesis about what the world is like.
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  49.  16
    Philosophical Applications of Cognitive Science. [REVIEW]Andrew Melnyk - 1994 - Review of Metaphysics 48 (2):404-405.
    In this exceptionally lucid book, Goldman deploys an enviable knowledge of the cognitive science literature in order to make a sustained but highly readable case for the conclusion that findings in cognitive science are relevant to resolving a wide range of philosophical problems. He does not hold that cognitive science can replace philosophy; nor, except perhaps briefly in his chapter on philosophy of mind, does he consider cognitive science as an object of philosophical analysis.
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  50.  10
    Representation, Meaning, and Thought. [REVIEW]Andrew Melnyk - 1994 - Review of Metaphysics 48 (1):137-138.
    Gillett's goal is to articulate and defend a view of the nature of thought that opposes the widely-accepted view that thoughts are internal states whose representational content is owed to causal connections with the environment, and whose interactions play a part in the causation of behavior. According to Gillett, discourse about human mental activity is not about goings-on in an inner realm of causal representational states". What is it about, then? Gillett's alternative view rests entirely upon an account of the (...)
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