The Waning of Materialism

Twenty-three philosophers examine the doctrine of materialism and find it wanting. The case against materialism comprises arguments from conscious experience, from the unity and identity of the person, from intentionality, mental causation, and knowledge. The contributors include leaders in the fields of philosophy of mind, metaphysics, ontology, and epistemology, who respond forcefully to the most recent versions and defences of materialism. The modal arguments of Kripke and others, multiple-realizability and deviant qualia arguments, the traditional certainty argument, the Nagel-Jackson knowledge argument, the explanatory gap problem, the causal exclusion problem, the self-consciousness argument, Burge's anti-individualism argument, and much more: all play a part in the building of a powerful cumulative case against the materialist research program. Several papers address the implications of contemporary brain and cognitive research (the psychophysics of color perception, multiple-personality syndrome, and the effects of cerebral commissurotomy), adding a posteriori arguments to the classical a priori critique of reductionism. All of the current versions of materialism reductive and non-reductive, functionalist, eliminativist, and new wave materialism come under sustained and trenchant attack. In addition, a wide variety of alternatives to the materialist conception of the person receive new and illuminating attention, including anti-materialist versions of naturalism, property dualism, Aristotelian hylomorphism, and non-Cartesian accounts of substance dualism.

George Bealeris Professor of Philosophy at Yale University.
Robert C. Koons is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin
Robert C. Koons is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin