Materialism in the philosophy of mind

By Robinson, Howard

Materialism – which, for almost all purposes, is the same as physicalism – is the theory that everything that exists is material. Natural science shows that most things ...

Knowledge argument

By Alter, Torin

The knowledge argument is an argument against physicalism, the view that the world is wholly physical. It was developed by Frank Jackson (1943–) and is based on the ...

Materialism

By Stack, George J.

Materialism is a set of related theories which hold that all entities and processes are composed of – or are reducible to – matter, material forces or physical ...

Colour, theories of

By Hilbert, David R.

The world as perceived by human beings is full of colour. The world as described by physical scientists is composed of colourless particles and fields. Philosophical theories of ...

Monism

By Craig, Edward

‘Monism’ is a very broad term, applicable to any doctrine which maintains either that there is ultimately only one thing, or only one kind of thing; it has ...

Disjunctivism

By Fish, William

The disjunctivist claims that the mental states involved in a case of successful – “veridical” – perception of an object differ from those involved in a hallucinatory experience ...

Herder, Johann Gottfried (1744–1803)

By Beiser, Frederick

Herder was a central figure in the German intellectual renaissance of the late eighteenth century. His achievement spanned virtually every domain of philosophy, and his influence, especially upon ...

Mental causation

By Loewer, Barry

Both folk and scientific psychology assume that mental events and properties participate in causal relations. However, considerations involving the causal completeness of physics and the apparent non-reducibility of ...

Mind, identity theory of

By Jackson, Frank

We know that the brain is intimately connected with mental activity. Indeed, doctors now define death in terms of the cessation of the relevant brain activity. The identity ...

Mind and body in early modern philosophy

By Duncan, Stewart

European philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries proposed a wide range of views about the nature of the mind and its relation to the body. ...

Artificial intelligence, recent work on

By Walmsley, Joel

The two main philosophical questions with which artificial intelligence (AI) has been traditionally concerned are (1) 'Could a machine think?’ and (2) 'Are we (humans) thinking machines?’ (see ...

Colour and qualia

By Levine, Joseph

There are two basic philosophical problems about colour. The first concerns the nature of colour itself. That is, what sort of property is it? When I say of ...

Sellars, Wilfrid Stalker (1912–89)

Wilfrid Sellars was an original, systematic philosopher in post-Second World War America. At a time when many thought of philosophy as piecemeal puzzle-solving, Sellars sought to develop a ...

Knowing how to

By Craig, Edward

It is sometimes said that when philosophers have thought about knowledge they have attended exclusively to knowing that p (or ‘propositional knowledge’, since p stands here for a ...

La Mettrie, Julien Offroy de (1709–51)

By Wellman, Kathleen

La Mettrie is best known as the author of the eighteenth-century materialist manifesto, L’Homme machine (1747). His interest in philosophical issues grew out of his preoccupation with medicine, ...

Paranormal phenomena

By Braude, Stephen E.

The term ‘paranormal phenomena’ refers to the class of anomalous events studied within the field of parapsychology. Parapsychology’s principal areas of investigation are extrasensory perception (ESP), psychokinesis (PK), ...

Resurrection

By van Inwagen, Peter

The Judaeo-Christian belief in a future general resurrection of the dead arose in late second-temple Judaism (see, for example, Daniel 12: 2 and John 11: 24). (Whether there ...

Subjectivity

By Francescotti, Robert

Consider those aspects of the world that are the way they are in virtue of how we think about them, or the way we feel about them, or ...

Mind, philosophy of

By Jackson, Frank; Rey, Georges

‘Philosophy of mind’, and ‘philosophy of psychology’ are two terms for the same general area of philosophical inquiry: the nature of mental phenomena and their connection with behaviour ...

Colour and qualia

There are two basic philosophical problems about colour. The first concerns the nature of colour itself. That is, what sort of property is it? When I say of ...

Gödel’s theorems

By Detlefsen, Michael

Utilizing the formalization of mathematics and logic found in Whitehead and Russell’s Principia Mathematica (1910), Hilbert and Ackermann (1928) gave precise formulations of a variety of foundational and ...

Metaphysics

By Craig, Edward

Metaphysics is a broad area of philosophy marked out by two types of inquiry. The first aims to be the most general investigation possible into the nature of ...

Reductionism in the philosophy of mind

By Sterelny, Kim

Reductionism in the philosophy of mind is one of the options available to those who think that humans and the human mind are part of the natural physical ...

Functionalism

By Papineau, David

The term ‘functionalism’ means different things in many different disciplines from architectural theory to zoology. In contemporary philosophy of mind, however, it is uniformly understood to stand for ...

Parapsychology

By Stairs, Allen

Tales of dreams that come true, ‘mind over matter’ and other such oddities are both familiar and old. Parapsychology investigates such things, attempting to use scientific and, especially, ...