David Bourget (Western Ontario)
David Chalmers (ANU, NYU)
Rafael De Clercq
Jack Alan Reynolds
Learn more about PhilPapers
I want to show that a common and plausible interpretation of what science tells us about the fundamental structure of the world – the ‘scientific picture of the world’ or SPW for short – leads to what I’ll call ‘generalized epiphenomenalism’, which is the view that the only features of the world that possess causal efficacy are fundamental physical features. I think that generalized epiphenomenalism follows pretty straightforwardly from the SPW as I’ll present it, but it might seem that, once granted, generalized epiphenomenalism is fairly innocuous, since its threat is too diffuse to provoke traditional worries about the epiphenomenal nature of mental states. If mental states are epiphenomenal only in the same sense that the putative powers of hurricanes, psyche- delic drugs or hydrogen bombs are epiphenomenal, then probably there is not much to worry about in the epiphenomenalism of the mental. I agree that the epiphenomenalism of hurricanes and the like is manageable, but it will turn out that ensuring manageability requires that mental states have an ontological status fundamentally different from that of hurricanes, drugs and bombs, a status that is in fact inconsistent with the SPW. So I’ll argue that generalized epiphenomenalism does have some seriously worrying consequences after all
|Keywords||No keywords specified (fix it)|
|Categories||categorize this paper)|
Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server
Configure custom proxy (use this if your affiliation does not provide a proxy)
|Through your library||
References found in this work BETA
No references found.
Citations of this work BETA
No citations found.
Similar books and articles
William Seager (2010). Concessionary Dualism and Physicalism. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 85 (67):217-237.
Frank Jackson (1982). Epiphenomenal Qualia. Philosophical Quarterly 32 (April):127-136.
Neil Campbell (2005). Explanatory Epiphenomenalism. Philosophical Quarterly 55 (220):437-451.
Brian P. Mclaughlin (2006). Is Role-Functionalism Committed to Epiphenomenalism? Journal of Consciousness Studies 13 (1-2):39-66.
Neil Campbell (2001). What Was Huxley's Epiphenomenalism? Biology and Philosophy 16 (3):357-375.
Amir Horowitz (1999). Is There a Problem in Physicalist Epiphenomenalism? Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 59 (2):421-34.
Danilo Suster (2001). Semifactuals and Epiphenomenalism. Acta Analytica 16 (26):23-43.
Volker Gadenne (2006). In Defence of Qualia-Epiphenomenalism. Journal of Consciousness Studies 13 (1-2):101-114.
Rex Welshon (1999). Anomalous Monism and Epiphenomenalism. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 80 (1):103-120.
William E. Seager (2006). Emergence, Epiphenomenalism and Consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies 13 (1-2):21-38.
Added to index2009-01-28
Total downloads42 ( #46,346 of 1,413,333 )
Recent downloads (6 months)4 ( #51,540 of 1,413,333 )
How can I increase my downloads?