Part I of the book clears space for later work and supplies a key theoretical platform. To get us started, I briefly sketch the outlines of the scientific views to highlight how they differ from philosophical accounts of reduction /emergence; and to broach a diagnosis of how the dislocation between …
Many thanks to John Schwenkler for allowing me to blog here about my new book Reduction and Emergence in Science and Philosophy. The book is long, so I will seek to unpack the main themes of the book’s four sections in subsequent posts. At the end of this post, I …
It’s my pleasure to introduce this symposium on Bernard Molyneux’s paper “The Logic of Mind-Body Identification” (in the current issue of Ergo), with commentaries by Liz Irvine (Cardiff), István Aranyosi (Bilkent), and Jonathan Simon (NYU). Molyneux’s paper introduces a new strategy for explaining why proposed identities between the mental and …
The following analysis was submitted by Brains reader Bruce Mayo, a retired computational linguist with some background in philosophy, in response to Kristina’s much-discussed post. Enjoy! Now that some of the dust has settled around Thomas Nagel’s recent book, Mind and Cosmos, it might be time to sort out the …
This is my first ‘real’ blog post, and before I begin, I’d like to thank John for inviting me to contribute to this blog (and apologize for the fact that it’s taken me while to get around to doing so). Many thanks for giving me this opportunity! I have recently …
LMU Munich, 14-16 November 2013 The conference invites proposals for talks that address the inter- or intratheoretic relations of specific theories or provide precise notions of such relations for the application in the sciences. Submission Process Please submit both a short abstract (max. 100 words) and an extended abstract (500-1000 …
The mind-body problem asks: How are mental states related to physical states of the brain, the body, and behavioral states more generally? Functionalists claim that mental states are identical with functional roles, defined as relations between environmental impingements, external behaviors, and other mental states.Analytic functionalists contend that these identities are imposed …
