For many years feminist theologians have found much in common with process theology. As a consequence a robust tradition has developed that links feminist theology with many aspects of process theology. An important element of this tradition is the attempt to draw similarities between postmodernism and feminist process theology. In this article I argue, first, that the connection between feminist process theology and postmodernism is philosophically problematic and, second, that another contemporary feminist approach, the new (...) class='Hi'>materialism, provides the basis for a more fruitful dialogue between feminist theology and process theology. My goal is to extend this dialogue. (shrink)

The first part of this book contains a selection of Leszek Nowak’s (1943-2009) works on non-Marxian historical materialism, which are published here in English for the first time. In these papers, Nowak constructs a dynamic model of religious community, reconstructs historiosophical assumptions of liberalism and considers the methodological status of prognosis of totalitarization of capitalist society. In the second part of the book, new contributions to non-Marxian historical materialism are presented. Their authors analyze mechanisms of the oligarchization of (...) liberal democracy, the democratization of real socialism, and the development of early modern Ottoman and post-war Chinese societies. The volume will be of interest to graduate and undergraduate students, as well as specialists who deal with the development of capitalist society, philosophy of history, the philosophy of social sciences and the political philosophy of liberalism. (shrink)

Developing MacIntyre’s metaphilosophy, Whitehead’s contention that philosophy ‘is the most effective of all the intellectual pursuits’ is elucidated and defended. It is argued that the narratives through which philosophical ideas are evaluated can refigure the stories constituting societies. In this way philosophical ideas become practically effective and come to be embodied in institutions. This is illustrated by the challenge by process philosophy to scientific materialism in the face of an impending global ecological crisis. It is argued that to (...) be successful, process philosophy must be articulated into a grand narrative to challenge the dominant grand narrative of modernity. (shrink)

Certain features of perception – the quale red, for example, and other qualia – must be regarded as additions to the materialist neurophysiological picture of perception. The perception of three-dimensional volumetric objects can also be seen as qualitative additions to the neurophysiological processes in the brain, possibly without additions to the information content.

1. Categories and the Scientific Turn of Metaphysics: The Notion of World-Fundamentality What are the fundamental inhabitants of the world? This question, as old as it is new, is about the fundamental structure of our world. Is our world a world of Aristotle's ordinary substances, Locke's physical substances, Husserl's wholes, Wittgenstein's facts, Sellars's processes, or Quine's sets? In order to distinguish the sort of metaphysical fundamentality at stake in this discussion from other possible types of fundamentality, I shall call it (...) from now on "world-fundamentality." In this article I want to make a proposal in the context of this metaphysical dispute. The proposal is the addition of a new criterion of world-fundamentality to the existing catalog of independence and simplicity, among some other prominent classical examples. I call this criterion "the materialist criterion of world-fundamentality" because it states that metaphysicians should not decide the question of whether our world is a world of facts rather than a world of sets or other categories without considering the explanatory power of such categories to account for the relation between "the manifest image" and "the scientific image," to use the words of Wilfrid Sellars. (shrink)

ABSTRACTMaterialism is the view that everything that is real is material or is the product of material processes. It tends to take either a ‘cosmological’ form, as a claim about the ultimate nature of the world, or a more specific ‘psychological’ form, detailing how mental processes are brain processes. I focus on the second, psychological or cerebral form of materialism. In the mid-to-late eighteenth century, the French materialist philosopher Denis Diderot was one of the first to notice that any (...) self-respecting materialist had to address the question of the status and functional role of the brain, and its relation to our mental life. After this the topic grew stale, with knee-jerk reiterations of ‘psychophysical identity’ in the nineteenth-century, and equally rigid assertions of anti-materialism. In 1960s philosophy of mind, brain–mind materialism reemerged as ‘identity theory’, focusing on the identity between mental processes and cerebral processes. In contrast, Diderot’s cerebral materialism allows... (shrink)

ABSTRACTMaterialism is the view that everything that is real is material or is the product of material processes. It tends to take either a ‘cosmological’ form, as a claim about the ultimate nature of the world, or a more specific ‘psychological’ form, detailing how mental processes are brain processes. I focus on the second, psychological or cerebral form of materialism. In the mid-to-late eighteenth century, the French materialist philosopher Denis Diderot was one of the first to notice that any (...) self-respecting materialist had to address the question of the status and functional role of the brain, and its relation to our mental life. After this the topic grew stale, with knee-jerk reiterations of ‘psychophysical identity’ in the nineteenth-century, and equally rigid assertions of anti-materialism. In 1960s philosophy of mind, brain–mind materialism reemerged as ‘identity theory’, focusing on the identity between mental processes and cerebral processes. In contrast, Diderot’s cerebral materialism allows for a more culturally sedimented sense of the brain, which he described in his late Elements of Physiology as a ‘book – except it is a book which reads itself’. Diderot thus provides a lesson for materialism as it reflects on the status of the brain, science and culture. (shrink)

This paper provides a brief critique of Jaegwon Kim’s evaluation of the achievements of materialist physicalism and then goes on to examine the case for panpsychism and the main objection that has been raised against it, i.e., the composition problem. The object of this examination is to lay bare the fundamental assumptions underlying both the main argument in support of the theory and the objection against it. Whitehead’s panexperientialism has a fair claim to be regarded as the most elaborate version (...) of the theory ever produced. Once the logical structure of the composition problem has been clarified, however, it becomes possible to see that—contrary to what has been argued by David Ray Griffin in his important book, Unsnarling the World-Knot—even Whitehead’sversion of the doctrine fails to provide a satisfactory solution. The paper is brought to an end with a general reflection on the shortcomings of current critiques of panpsychism. Whitehead’s panexperientialism cannot be accepted as it stands and panpsychism as a general philosophical position is not supported by a conclusive proof; nevertheless, the notion that experience is a pervasive feature of reality has the unquestionable merit of being a wholly adequate response to a real philosophical perplexity. (shrink)

This paper provides a brief critique of Jaegwon Kim’s evaluation of the achievements of materialist physicalism and then goes on to examine the case for panpsychism and the main objection that has been raised against it, i.e., the composition problem. The object of this examination is to lay bare the fundamental assumptions underlying both the main argument in support of the theory and the objection against it. Whitehead’s panexperientialism has a fair claim to be regarded as the most elaborate version (...) of the theory ever produced. Once the logical structure of the composition problem has been clarified, however, it becomes possible to see that—contrary to what has been argued by David Ray Griffin in his important book, Unsnarling the World-Knot—even Whitehead’s version of the doctrine fails to provide a satisfactory solution. The paper is brought to an end with a general reflection on the shortcomings of current critiques of panpsychism. Whitehead’s panexperientialism cannot be accepted as it stands and panpsychism as a general philosophical position is not supported by a conclusive proof; nevertheless, the notion that experience is a pervasive feature of reality has the unquestionable merit of being a wholly adequate response to a real philosophical perplexity. (shrink)

The present framing of the cultural debate in terms of materialism versus religion has allowed materialism to go unchallenged as the only rationally-viable metaphysics. This book seeks to change this. It uncovers the absurd implications of materialism and then, uniquely, presents a hard-nosed non-materialist metaphysics substantiated by skepticism, hard empirical evidence, and clear logical argumentation. It lays out a coherent framework upon which one can interpret and make sense of every natural phenomenon and physical law, as well (...) as the modalities of human consciousness, without materialist assumptions. According to this framework, the brain is merely the image of a self-localization process of mind, analogously to how a whirlpool is the image of a self-localization process of water. The brain doesn’t generate mind in the same way that a whirlpool doesn’t generate water. It is the brain that is in mind, not mind in the brain. Physical death is merely a de-clenching of awareness. The book closes with a series of educated speculations regarding the afterlife, psychic phenomena, and other related subjects. (shrink)

An expanded and updated edition of this classic collection.

The prediction of phenomena and processes in society poses a number of philosophical problems distinct from those involved in the prediction of natural processes. Societal prognosis encompasses primarily the conditions and connections arising, in the final analysis, in the practical activity of individuals, social groups, and class forces.

While most new materialists, including Thomas Nail, tend to distance themselves from Deleuze, this essay reads the encounter of Nail's ‘process materialism’ and Deleuzian philosophy as productive rather than contentious. After tracing the affinities of their notions of continuity and discontinuity by way of Deleuze's The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque and Nail's Lucretius I: An Ontology of Motion and Being and Motion, the essay considers Nail's unfolding of Lucretius’ luminous philosophy in relation to Deleuze's reading of Lucretius (...) from within Deleuze's own ‘philosophical luminism’. Within the multiple overlaps between Nail and Deleuze, particularly vis-à-vis quantum physics and quantum field theory, their divergent readings of the particle–wave duality bring about a productive conceptual tension. Nail's argument about the ontological precedence of waves over particles is illuminated by Deleuze's concept of their ontological complementarity, and vice versa. (shrink)

It has been argued that naturalizing the mind will result in the elimination of the ontology of folk psychology (e.g. beliefs and desires). This paper draws from a wide range of empirical literature, including from developmental and cross-cultural psychology, in building an argument for a position dubbed restrictive materialism . The position holds that while the ontology of folk psychology is overextended, there is a restricted domain in which the application of the folk ontology remains secure. From the evidence (...) of developmental uniformity and cross-cultural ubiquity of beliefs and desires, it is argued that the ontology (but not the principles) of folk psychology may be incorrigible. Thus, even if radically false as a description of first-order brain processes, beliefs and desires might be an unavoidable second-order brain process. Given that the domain of psychology is how humans think, if the above argument is correct, then beliefs and desires will continue to earn their rightful place in the ontology of any future psychology, in just the same way as any other scientific entity. (shrink)

My main topic will be, roughly speaking, the claim that mental events or conscious experiences or inner experiences are brain processes. I hasten to say, however, that I am not going to talk about “mental events” or “conscious experiences” or “inner experiences.” These expressions are almost exclusively philosophers terms, and I am not sure that I have got the hang of any of them. Philosophers are not in agreement in their use of these terms. One philosopher will say, for example, (...) that a pain in the foot is a mental event, whereas another will say that a pain in the foot certainly is not a mental event. (shrink)

Digital materiality (digimat) proposes a set of basic principles for how we understand the world through digital processes. This short book sets out a methodical materialist understanding of digital technologies, where they come from, how they work, and what they do.

My topic is the materialist appropriation of empiricism – as conveyed in the ‘minimal credo’ nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu (which interestingly is not just a phrase repeated from Hobbes and Locke to Diderot, but is also a medical phrase, used by Harvey, Mandeville and others). That is, canonical empiricists like Locke go out of their way to state that their project to investigate and articulate the ‘logic of ideas’ is not a scientific project: “I shall (...) not at present meddle with the Physical consideration of the Mind” (Essay, I.i.2, in Locke 1975; which Kant gets exactly wrong in his reading of Locke, in the Preface to the A edition of the first Critique). Indeed, I have suggested elsewhere, contrary to a prevalent reading of Locke, that the Essay is not the extension to the study of the mind of the methods of natural philosophy; that he is actually not the “underlabourer” of Newton and Boyle he claims politely to be in the Epistle to the Reader (Wolfe and Salter 2009, Wolfe 2010). Rather, Locke says quite directly if we pay heed to such passages, “Our Business here is not to know all things, but those which concern our Conduct” (Essay, I.i.6). There would be more to say here about what this implies for our understanding of empiricism (see Norton 1981 and Gaukroger 2005), but instead I shall focus on a different aspect of this episode: how a non-naturalistic claim which falls under what we now call epistemology (a claim about the senses as the source of knowledge) becomes an ontology – materialism. That is, how an empiricist claim could shift from being about the sources of knowledge to being about the nature of reality (and/or the mind, in which case it needs, as David Hartley saw and Denis Diderot proclaimed more overtly, an account of the relation between mental processes and the brain). (David Armstrong, for one, denied that there could be an identification between empiricism and materialism on this point: eighteenth-century history of science seems to prove him wrong: see Armstrong 1968 and 1978.) Put differently, I want to examine the shift from the logic of ideas in the seventeenth century (Locke) to an eighteenth-century focus on what kind of ‘world’ the senses give us (Condillac), to an assertion that there is only one substance in the universe (Diderot, giving a materialist cast to Spinozism), and that we need an account of the material substrate of mental life. This is neither a ‘scientific empiricism’ nor a linear developmental process from philosophical empiricism to natural science, but something else again: the unpredictable emergence of an ontology on empiricist grounds. (shrink)

In the first post World War II identity theories (e.g., Place 1956, Smart 1962), mind brain identities were held to be contingent. However, in work beginning in the late 1960's, Saul Kripke (1971, 1980) convinced the philosophical community that true identity statements involving names and natural kind terms are necessarily true and furthermore, that many such necessary identities can only be known a posteriori. Kripke also offered an explanation of the a posteriori nature of ordinary theoretical identities such as that (...) water = H2O. We identify the kinds and substances involved in theoretical identities by certain of their contingent properties. What we discover when we discover a theoretical identity is the underlying nature of the kind that we identify by those contingent properties. Now, of course, it was being a posteriori, not being contingent, that mattered to the identity theorists anyway, so the necessity of identity is not, in itself, damaging to mind brain identity theories. However, Kripke also argued persuasively that the alleged mind brain identities could not be treated in the same way as ordinary theoretical identities. We "identify" pain by feeling it, and surely how it feels is an essential property of pain, not a contingent property. Thus, a mind body identity theory must provide a different explanation of why its identities are a posteriori. A new wave of materialists has appeared on the scene with a new strategy for explaining [1] the a posteriori nature of its alleged identities. The strategy is to locate the explanation for the a posteriori nature of mind body identities, not on the side of the world, but on the side of the mind -in different ways of thinking about or imagining, or in different concepts. Thus, on this new view, there is only one property—this brain process type, which is identical with this pain.. (shrink)

A Materialist Theory of Justice offers an innovative reading of justice that draws from diverse theoretical currents, tracing in the process an age-old tradition of critical thought.

Dialogic Materialism: Bakhtin, Embodiment and Moving Image Art argues for the relevance of Mikhail Bakhtin's theories of dialogism as a means of examining the interdisciplinary nature of contemporary moving image art forms. The volume comprises six chapters divided into two sections. The first section, Part I, illustrates the key concepts in Bakhtin's multifaceted dialogism and develops these ideas in relation to moving image art. The main focus of this first part is the proposal of what the author terms dialogic (...) materialism, which builds upon the Marxism inherent in Bakhtin, examining the material processes of cultural exchange with a particular emphasis on multi-perspective subjective relations. Part II consists of case studies that apply dialogic materialism to the moving image artwork of three artists: Stan Douglas, Jamelie Hassan and Chris Marker. Applying Bakhtinian theory to the field of the visual arts provides a means of examining the fundamentally dialogic nature of moving image art making and viewing, a perspective that is not fully developed within the existing literature. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and (...) made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

The authors of this book reconstruct the philosophical, methodological and theoretical assumptions of non-Marxian historical materialism, a theory of historical process authored by Leszek Nowak (1943-2009), a co-founder of the Poznań School of Methodology. In the first part of the book, philosophical assumptions of this theory are compared with the concepts of Robert Nozick, Immanuel Wallerstein, André Gunder Frank and analytical Marxism. In the second part, non-Marxian historical materialism is compared with the concepts of Eva Etzioni-Halevy, Andrzej (...) Falkiewicz, Robert Michels, Vilfredo Pareto, Theda Skocpol and Karl August Wittfogel. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and (...) made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Life poses a threat to materialism. To understand the phenomena of animate nature, we make use of a teleological form of explanation that is peculiar to biology, of explanations in terms of what I call the ‘vital categories’ – and this holds even for accounts of underlying physico-chemical ‘mechanisms’. The materialist claims that this teleological form of explanation does not capture what is metaphysically fundamental, whereas her preferred physical form of explanation does. In this essay, I do three things. (...) (1) I argue that the ‘vital categories’, such as life form and life-process, do not reduce to the ‘physical categories’ and show that there are no grounds for the materialist's metaphysically limiting claim; (2) I sketch a positive view on how vital and physical explanations can both apply to a given phenomenon, and on how they interrelate; and (3) I show that this view meshes nicely with evolutionary theory, despite being committed to a form of ‘biological essentialism’. (shrink)

This paper explores a form of activism that operates with and within matter. For more than 150 years materialism has informed activist practice through materialist conceptions of history and modes of production. The paper discusses the ambivalences of these previous configurations of activism and materialism and explores possibilities for enacting activist interventions in conditions where politics is not only performed as a politics of history but as the fundamental capacity to remake and transform processes of matter and life. (...) What is activism when politics is increasingly performed as a politics of matter? What is activism when it comes to a materialist understanding of matter itself? (shrink)

The doctrine of eliminative materialism holds that belief-desire psychology is massively referentially disconnected. We claim, however, that it is not at all obvious what it means to be referentially (dis)connected. The two major accounts of reference both lead to serious difficulties for eliminativism: it seems that elimination is either impossible or omnipresent. We explore the idea that reference fixation is a much more local, partial, and context-dependent process than was supposed by the classical accounts. This pragmatic view suggests (...) that elimination is not the prime model for understanding the complex relations between the mind and brain sciences, and that we have little ground for concluding that in general psychological kinds do not exist. We suggest that reference changes are better seen as continuous rather than completely eliminative. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Materialism and Aesthetics: Paul de Man’s Aesthetic IdeologyJonathan Loesberg (bio)Declaring theories dead is an old and venerable method of declaring an end to our need to read them. As a result, theories die these days with dizzying frequency. It took most of the nineteenth century before Benedetto Croce declared what was dead in Hegel, and at least he intended to recuperate what he declared to be living. At (...) the 1996 MLA convention, in the space of only a couple of sessions, I heard both new historicism and cultural studies declared dead. Compared to Croce’s somewhat resigned attitude to Hegel’s mature demise, one must mourn the first theory, cut down suddenly in its vibrant adolescence, and the absolute infant mortality of the second. But surely the deadest of all dead theories is deconstruction. Indeed deconstruction must be dead, since its death has been declared with roughly the same frequency with which old vampire movies declare the death of the protagonist, who we know will nevertheless dependably arise for the next installment. Paul de Man, in particular, considering the regularity with which he is declared dead, threatens to become our most undead theorist. Certainly, he has published far more prolifically since his seeming demise in 1983 than he did prior to it. He made a prominent postmortem appearance when his World War II collaborationist writing emerged, and for a period, it became all but impossible to write about his later literary theoretical work without addressing these fifty-year-old newspaper articles. 1 By 1990, though, one could see de Man’s death reoccurring, though rather ambiguously. Thus in two articles written only a year apart in Diacritics, the same author first declared that de Man’s work was available “in near entirety” and that “substantial progress has been made in [its] interpretation” [Redfield, “Humanizing De Man” 35] and then later opened a second essay arguing that the theories had “not become any easier to assimilate” [Redfield, “De Man, Schiller, and the Politics of Reception” 50]. And now, with the doubly posthumous appearance of Aesthetic Ideology, the assured certification of deconstruction’s death occurs again. 2 For instance, a review in the New York Times, warning off those readers who might be attracted to the book because of the “lurid glow 8cast by the opportunistic anti-Semitism of the wartime years,” declares not merely de Manian deconstruction but the aesthetic theories of Kant and Hegel to be without current [End Page 87] interest. 3 And Lingua Franca, in a piece reporting the end of Minnesota’s Theory and History of Literature series (Aesthetic Ideology and Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory mark the last books of the series), sums up this last work in the series and possibly the last work of de Man this way: “the book also reminds us—in its pristinely linguistic approach to ‘great’ literary and philosophical texts—that the moment of unadulterated deconstruction has long since passed.” 4 Astonishingly, Minnesota Press sent this death certificate to me as part of the publicity packet it sends to reviewers.Of course theories die differently. Since their extinction, putative or actual, is not human, we may declare their death joyously and without guilt, or work toward their revivification without messy transactions in graveyards. They die so readily and return without melodramatics because they lack a real biological limit to which we attach their significance. When we see their significance, we declare them alive. Either not seeing their significance or wishing they had none, we as easily sentence them to death. Whether or not de Man’s theories of reading or language are living or dead, to this process of declaring theoretical death and life, Aesthetic Ideology relates directly. In the first instance, it does so in its status as a published object. In a certain sense, it is, as we have seen, dead on arrival. Its central essays on Kant and Hegel—“Phenomenality and Materialism in Kant,” “Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s Aesthetics,” and “Hegel on the Sublime”—have already been published and have received commentary as part of a larger coherent work on aesthetics that has long been announced. Even the previously unpublished essays—“Kant... (shrink)

The concept of self has preeminently been asserted (in its many versions) as a core component of anti-reductionist, antinaturalistic philosophical positions, from Descartes to Husserl and beyond, with the exception of some hybrid or intermediate positions which declare rather glibly that, since we are biological entities which fully belong to the natural world, and we are conscious of ourselves as 'selves', therefore the self belongs to the natural world (this is characteristic e.g. of embodied phenomenology and enactivism). Nevertheless, from Cudworth (...) and More’s attacks on materialism all the way through twentieth-century argument against naturalism, the gulf between selfhood and the world of Nature appears unbridgeable. In contrast, my goal in this paper is to show that early modern materialism could yield a theory of the self according to which (1) the self belongs to the world of external relations (Spinoza), such that no one fact, including supposedly private facts, is only accessible to a single person; (2) the self can be reconstructed as a sense of “organic unity” which could be a condition for biological individuality (a central text here is Diderot’s 1769 Rêve de D’Alembert); yet this should not lead us to espouse a Romantic concept of organism as foundational or even ineffable subjectivity (a dimension present in Leibniz and made explicit in German idealism); (3) what we call 'self' might simply be a dynamic process of interpretive activity undertaken by the brain. This materialist theory of the self should not neglect the nature of experience, but it should also not have to take at face value the recurring invocations of a better, deeper “first-person perspective” or “first-person science.”. (shrink)

Process philosophy has emerged as an approach to consciousness within contemporary science although re-consideration of Whitehead and James clearly contrasts with twentieth century materialism. In spite of controversy a number of researchers have described the concept of quantum coherence within living organisms that provides the basis of new process oriented theories. Among these researchers are Penrose and Hameroff who suggest that quantum gravity yields coherent processes fundamental to the idea of consciousness. Pribram emphasizes holographic processes in the (...) brain that give rise to quantum brain dynamics. Bohm also recognizes a central role of holographic processes in physics. The work of these researchers and the convergence with earlier work in metaphysics are described. (shrink)

Feminists today are re-imagining nature, biology, and matter in feminist thought and critically addressing new developments in biology, physics, neuroscience, epigenetics and other scientific disciplines. Mattering, edited by noted feminist scholar Victoria Pitts-Taylor, presents contemporary feminist perspectives on the materialist or ‘naturalizing’ turn in feminist theory, and also represents the newest wave of feminist engagement with science. The volume addresses the relationship between human corporeality and subjectivity, questions and redefines the boundaries of human/non-human and nature/culture, elaborates on the entanglements of (...) matter, knowledge, and practice, and addresses biological materialization as a complex and open process. This volume insists that feminist theory can take matter and biology seriously while also accounting for power, taking materialism as a point of departure to rethink key feminist issues. The contributors, an international group of feminist theorists, scientists and scholars, apply concepts in contemporary materialist feminism to examine an array of topics in science, biotechnology, biopolitics, and bioethics. These include neuralplasticity and the brain-machine interface; the use of biometrical identification technologies for transnational border control; epigenetics and the intergenerational transmission of the health effects of social stigma; ADHD and neuropharmacology; and randomized controlled trials of HIV drugs.A unique and interdisciplinary collection, Mattering presents in grounded, concrete terms the need for rethinking disciplinary boundaries and research methodologies in light of the shifts in feminist theorizing and transformations in the sciences. (shrink)

A number of popular arguments for dualism start from a premise about an epistemic gap between physical truths about truths about consciousness, and infer an ontological gap between physical processes and consciousness. Arguments of this sort include the conceivability argument, the knowledge argument, the explanatory-gap argument, and the property dualism argument. Such arguments are often resisted on the grounds that epistemic premises do not entail ontological conclusion. My view is that one can legitimately infer ontological conclusions from epistemic premises, if (...) one is very careful about how one reasons. To do so, the best way is to reason first from epistemic premises to modal conclusions , and from there to ontological conclusions. Here, the crucial issue is the link between the epistemic and modal domains. How can one reason from theses about what is knowable or conceivable to theses about what is necessary or possible? To bridge the epistemic and modal domains, the framework of two-dimensional semantics can play a central role. I have used this framework in earlier work to mount an argument against materialism. Here, I want to revisit the argument, laying it out in a more explicit and careful form, and responding to a number of objections. In what follows I will concentrate mostly on the conceivability argument. I think that very similar considerations apply to the other arguments mentioned above, however. In the final section of the paper, I show how this analysis might yield a unified treatment of a number of anti-materialist arguments. (shrink)

While some process philosophers have denigrated the emergent theory of mind, what they have denigrated has been ‘materialist’ theories of emergence. My contention is that one of the most important reasons for embracing process philosophy is that it is required to make intelligible the emergence of consciousness. There is evidence that this was a central concern of Whitehead. However, Whitehead acknowledged that his metaphysics was deficient in this regard. In this paper I will argue that to fully understand (...) the emergent theory of mind and its relation to process philosophy it is necessary to recast the whole history of modern philosophy in terms of efforts by philosophers grappling with the relationship between mind and body, or more broadly, consciousness and nature. This will involve granting a central place to Schelling’s philosophy, the ideas that influenced it and how Schelling’s insights were developed by subsequent philosophers. Process philosophy will then be seen as the tradition generated by efforts to transcend the opposition between idealism and materialism, and its promise in this regard, apart from anything else, is what makes it the most promising philosophy for the future. (shrink)

Con el objetivo de contribuir al debate actual sobre la necesidad del esclarecimiento de los fundamentos filosóficos de la investigación científica y su declaración en el discurso que expone sus principales resultados, se valoró la forma en que se asume la perspectiva dialéctico-materialista y se precisó en torno a algunos enfoques polémicos sobre la necesidad de su empleo consecuente como referente cosmovisivo en la construcción de la ciencia y la legitimación de sus resultados. Se enfatizó en la necesidad de su (...) consecuente empleo en el proceso de investigación. In order to contribute to the current debate on the necessity for clarification of the philosophical foundations of scientific research and its interpretation in discourse that exposes its main results, it was assessed how dialectical materialistic perspective is assumed and it was clarified around some controversial approaches about the necessity of its consistent use as a comprehensive reference in building science and the legitimacy of its results. It was emphasized on the need of its consistent use in the research process. (shrink)

My topic is the materialist appropriation of empiricism—as conveyed in the ‘minimal credo’ nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu. That is, canonical empiricists like Locke go out of their way to state that their project to investigate and articulate the ‘logic of ideas’ is not a scientific project: “I shall not at present meddle with the Physical consideration of the Mind”. Indeed, I have suggested elsewhere, contrary to a prevalent reading of Locke, that the Essay is not (...) the extension to the study of the mind of the methods of natural philosophy; that he is actually not the “underlabourer” of Newton and Boyle he claims politely to be in the Epistle to the Reader. Rather, Locke says quite directly if we pay heed to such passages, “Our Business here is not to know all things, but those which concern our Conduct”. There would be more to say here about what this implies for our understanding of empiricism, but instead I shall focus on a different aspect of this episode: how a non-naturalistic claim which falls under what we now call epistemology becomes an ontology—materialism. That is, how an empiricist claim could shift from being about the sources of knowledge to being about the nature of reality.. Put differently, I want to examine the shift from the logic of ideas in the seventeenth century to an eighteenth-century focus on what kind of ‘world’ the senses give us, to an assertion that there is only one substance in the universe, and that we need an account of the material substrate of mental life. This is neither a ‘scientific empiricism’ nor a linear developmental process from philosophical empiricism to natural science, but something else again: the unpredictable emergence of an ontology on empiricist grounds. (shrink)

Analysis of the social-cognitive substrate of scientific activity reveals that much of science functions in an inauthentic mode whereby a materialist world view constrains the authentic practice of science. But materialism cannot explain matter, as evidenced by empirical data concerning the nature of physical manifestation. Nor, then, should materialism be the basis for our interpretation of consciousness. It is time to move beyond scientific materialism and develop transcendent theories of consciousness. Such theories should minimally meet the following (...) criteria: they should be based on all of the usual empirical data concerning consciousness, including altered states of consciousness; they should take into account data about anomalous phenomena and transcendent states of consciousness; they should address the issue of existential meaning and provide soteriological guidance; and they should be consistent with the most accurate theories of physical manifestation, such as relativistic quantum field theories. Speculating within a quantum-theoretic context, consciousness could be inserted as a primitive element into reality by providing a role for intention in the selection process of observables, the collapse of the state vector, or the ordering of quantum fluctuations. But consciousness could be more fundamental, in the sense of a deep consciousness coinciding with a pre-physical substrate, from which intention shapes both mental experience and physical manifestation. If any significance can be attached to the mathematical formalism of relativistic quantum field theories, perhaps creation and annihilation operators, which determine the fluctuations of a quantum field, can metaphorically be regarded as the avenue through which intention acts. Morphic fields within the pre-physical substrate could hold in place patterns that shape the reality that we experience. Among such morphic fields could be ones that correspond to the world view of scientism. By becoming authentic, one could break from such constraints and consider alternative possibilities that can include various forms of radical transformation. (shrink)

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The question of the Hegelian heritage within the Marxian dialectic is a classic one that is still an open one, after more than a century of fruitful and various inquiry. In order to tackle the issue from a new perspective, we must first distinguish between, on the one hand, the subjective dialectic, or logic of Marxian thought, which is clearly inherited from Hegel, and, on the other hand, the objective dialectic, or logic of reality itself, which Marx arrived at by (...) way of a frontal opposition to his master, even as he took up the latter’s “rational kernel” in order to invert it, substituting for Hegel’s idealist philosophy of creation a materialist conception of production and replacing the logic of negativity by a logic of produ-activity. Thus conceptualized by Marx, the gnoseological dialectic and dialectical materialism interact rationally. This enables us to renew the foundations of a dialectical materialism. Unrelated to stalinist « diamat », such a conception is well equipped to demonstrate its effectiveness for the knowledge and understanding of realities, both in terms of their irreducible material singularity, apprehended according to their constitutive historicity, and as elements of a certain real totality which is in process. (shrink)

The soul is an immeasurable assortment of photons of the electromagnetic spectrum of radiations present in the cosmic universe that follow the laws of quantum metaphysics.Whether the soul came first or the body is unknown, but organized matter in the form of biochemical systems that exist, that formed as part of reorganization and evolution conjoins with the soul to bring these systems to life. In this paper I hypothesize that the soul follows a recurring process, just like the bio-chemical (...) cycles within the cell, conforming to Aristotle’s Anima or the Jaina concept of Jiva; the transforming soul that supports life and many lives. (shrink)

Process thought is the foundation for studies in many areas of contemporary philosophy, theology, political theory, educational theory, and the religion-science dialogue. It is derived from Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy, known as process theology, which lays a groundwork for integrating evolutionary biology, physics, philosophy of mind, theology, environmental ethics, religious pluralism, education, economics, and more. In _Process-Relational Philosophy_, C. Robert Mesle breaks down Whitehead's complex writings, providing a simple but accurate introduction to the vision that underlies much of (...) contemporary process philosophy and theology. In doing so, he points to a "way beyond both reductive materialism and the traps of Cartesian dualism by showing reality as a relational process in which minds arise from bodies, in which freedom and creativity are foundational to process, in which the relational power of persuasion is more basic than the unilateral power of coercion." Because process-relational philosophy addresses the deep intuitions of a relational world basic to environmental and global thinking, it is being incorporated into undergraduate and graduate courses in philosophy, educational theory and practice, environmental ethics, and science and values, among others. _Process-Relational Philosophy: A Basic Introduction_ makes Whitehead's creative vision accessible to all students and general readers. (shrink)

One of the principal tasks Dennett sets himself in Consciousness Explained is to demolish the Cartesian theater model of phenomenal consciousness, which in its contemporary garb takes the form of Cartesian materialism: the idea that conscious experience is a process of presentation realized in the physical materials of the brain. The now standard response to Dennett is that, in focusing on Cartesian materialism, he attacks an impossibly naive account of consciousness held by no one currently working in (...) cognitive science or the philosophy of mind. Our response is quite different. We believe that, once properly formulated, Cartesian materialism is no straw man. Rather, it is an attractive hypothesis about the relationship between the computational architecture of the brain and phenomenal consciousness, and hence one that is worthy of further exploration. Consequently, our primary aim in this paper is to defend Cartesian materialism from Dennett’s assault. We do this by showing that Dennett’s argument against this position is founded on an implicit assumption (about the relationship between phenomenal experience and information coding in the brain), which while valid in the context of classical cognitive science, is not forced on connectionism. (shrink)

Glenn Pearce, labels the identification of the firing of one's pain centres in the brain with feeling pain ‘a naive view,’ the refutation of which cannot much threaten any serious version of materialism. But in fact at least a dozen proponents of contemporary materialism have already hypothesized the identification of feeling pain with activation of a specific neural mechanism, although they picked the wrong mechanism, namely C-fibres. Just to take a recent example, James Cornman and Keith Lehrer, trying (...) to get around the objection to the identity theory that the language of neural processes and the language of feeling pains belong to different linguistic categories, suggest that the materialist could devise a new term to refer to the same entity across categories: ‘fibain.’They write,He would then claim that there are fibains, that is, entities with those properties usually associated with pains, and also with the properties usually associated with firing C-fibers. He can, then, avoid category mistakes by saying that what are thought to be pains and what are thought to be firing C-fibers are really fibains. (shrink)

Wittgenstein's philosophies, from both the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations, are explained and developed. Wittgenstein uses a primitive version of recursion theory to develop his attempt at a purely logical metaphysics in the Tractatus. However, due to his implicit materialist assumptions, he could not make the system completely logical, and built in a mystical division of possible worlds into the true and the false. This incoherence eventually lead him to reject logic as a method for doing metaphysics, and indeed to (...) reject metaphysics entirely. I argue that his move from the Tractatus to the Investigations was valid, but only given his materialist assumptions. If he had been willing to drop this unnecessary baggage, recursion would have played a very different role in his system, since he would then have had no need to separate static objects from processes, which he saw as purely mental. F.H. Bradley developed such a nonmaterialist metaphysics in the nineteenth century, but was crippled by a mentalism that Wittgenstein was free of. The anti-mentalism and anti-materialism that Wittgenstein considered as given were not so obvious to his predecessor, Russell, who revolted against Bradley's idealism in much the same way Wittgenstein ended up revolting against Russell's logical atomism. In my view, none of these positions was the right approach, which would require nonmentalism and nonmaterialism. But for some reason, these things (which seem to go together quite naturally to me) have been widely considered to be incompatible. Bradley was appropriately a non-materialist, but suffered from mentalism. Russell and the early Wittgenstein were appropriately nonmentalists, but suffered from materialism. The later Wittgenstein was, I would argue, still an ardent materialist and anti-mentalist, in spite of the fact that he had long since realized the contradictions to which materialism leads; he just had not recognized that it was his materialist assumptions that had lead him there, since these assumptions were so firmly engrained in his thinking as to be invisible.. (shrink)

This dissertation is a critical assessment of Wilfrid Sellars' Scientific Realism. ;The dissertation has ten chapters, whose topics are as follows: I classify Sellars' position as a variety of Non-Reductive Scientific Materialism. I discuss the Manifest/Scientific Image distinction. I reject the identification of the Manifest Image with a Common Sense Image on the ground that the Common Sense Image recognizes the existence of irreducible absolute processes, while the Manifest Image does not. I discuss the topic of ontological commitment. I (...) propose that we substitute for the Manifest Image a Common Sense Image which has a mixed ontology of events and substances. I focus on the intentionality-body problem. I believe that a large portion of the polemics over intentionality can be accounted for by a failure to demarcate non-conceptual from conceptual intentionality. I locate Sellars' position in current philosophical psychology. Sellars defends both functionalism and introspection. He tries to give a theoretical account of our introspective knowledge of thoughts and sensations on a behavioristic basis. My conclusions are that his argument does not go through, and that perhaps all non-overtly linguistic thoughts are non-conceptual. I offer a transcendental argument for a version of epistemological foundationalism. I clarify the concept of the Given in Sellars. I both defend and criticize his position on the Given. I defend Sellars' argument for the rejection of the Given from William Robinson's attack; but I defend C. I. Lewis' position on the Given from Sellars' attack. I deal with the epistemological and the ontological problems of perception. The conclusion I reach on the epistemological problem is that sensa are given through a phenomenological reduction. The conclusion I reach on the ontological problem is that Sellars is correct in his view that sensa exist as causal mediatory absolute processes in perception. I spell out the implications of my disagreement with Sellars on epistemology. The main implication is that in higher animals there is an evolutionarily endowed intractable representational system. I call this view Animal Realism. (shrink)

In this paper it is argued that we would not be logically obliged or rationally inclined to reject the ontology of contentful psychological states postulated by folk psychology even if the explanations advanced by folk psychology turned out to be generally inaccurate or inadequate. Moreover, it is argued that eliminativists such as Paul Churchland do not establish that folk psychological explanations are, or are likely to prove, generally inaccurate or inadequate. Most of Churchland's arguments—based upon developments within connectionist neuroscience—only cast (...) doubt upon the adequacy of 'sentential' theories of cognitive processing, not upon scientifically developed forms of folk psychological explanation of behavior, such as those offered by contemporary social psychology. Finally, it is noted that Churchland's brand of eliminativism rests upon a crude reductive criterion of theoretical adequacy that has little to recommend it, and suggested that the recognized theoretical limitations of contemporary social psychology may be precisely due to its historical commitment to this reductive criterion. (shrink)

The paper tries to rebut an objection to materialism. Anti-Materialists have argued that mental processes do not appear to be mere physical processes in the brain, And that secondary qualities such as sounds do not appear to be mere vibrations in the air. So materialists must admit that introspection and perception involve at least the illusion of the falsity of materialism. Using the headless woman illusion as a model, It is shown how the illusion is generated, And that (...) it is exactly what we ought to expect even if materialism is true. (shrink)

Radical democratic thinking is becoming intrigued by the material situatedness of its political agents and by the role of nonhuman participants in political interaction. At stake here is the displacement of narrow anthropocentrism that currently guides democratic theory and practice, and its repositioning into what we call ‘the nonhuman condition’. This Critical Exchange explores the nonhuman condition. It asks: What are the implications of decentering the human subject via a new materialist reading of radical democracy? Does this reading dilute political (...) agency? Or should this be seen, on the contrary, as an invitation for new voices and demands to enter into democratic assemblages? How might engagement with the more-than-human disrupt or extend theories of radical democracy? Hans Asenbaum and Amanda Machin discuss the human democratic subject both through radical democratic and new materialist lenses. They suggest that a new materialist decentred subject does not lose agency but further gains political responsibility in radical democracy. Jean-Paul Gagnon highlights the possibility of becoming through loss. In losing our anthropocentric arrogance—our understanding of being other and better than animal—we become more connected and discover our place in human-nonhuman assemblages. Melissa Orlie agrees that something can be gained through renouncing dominant human fantasies and presents a ‘radical democratic naturalism’. By renouncing land violence and acknowledging nature’s subjectivity, we can further nonexploitative radical democratic politics. This is where the notion of ‘tidalectic’ processes introduced by James L. Smith is helpful. Focusing on water and the Indigenous knowledges around rivers, he considers how democracy and community can be reimagined as plural, cyclical and attentive to the nonhuman with which the human is inevitably entangled. Diana Leong offers a different approach. Considering the nonhuman from the perspective of Black Studies demands an awareness to how blackness has long been constituted as non- or partially human. (shrink)