Bennett on Non-Reductive Physicalism

I just re-read Karen Bennett’s paper Exclusion, Again. In this paper she argues that causal exclusion arguments provide a nice overall argument for physicalism but do not cut against non-reductive physicalism as usually thought. Here is how she defines non-reductive physicalism. Let us begin with the ‘physicalism’ part. It is notoriously hard to define it [...]

cfp: SSPP

Pete Mandik is the program chair for the 104th annual meeting of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology, to be held March 22-24, 2012 in Savannah, GA. SSPP meetings feature concurrent programs in philosophy and psychology, as well as plenary sessions jointly sponsored by the philosophy and psychology program committees. The deadline for all [...]

Cohen & Dennett’s Perfect Experiment

I was re-reading Dennett and Cohen’s recent paper in Trends in Cognitive Science, “Consciousness Cannot be Separated from Function” and I am now puzzled by their view (before I go on, I would like to note that this issue of TICS also has Joe LeDoux’s paper where he mentions the Qualia Fest, and Lau & [...]

The Problem of Zombie Minds

So I am finally done teaching summer school and am ready to settle in to my two weeks of ‘vacation’ before the Fall semester begins. Just as I am about to switch on the PS3 I am struck by the following line of argument…let me know what you think of it… Those who know me [...]

Some Thoughts About Color

I just returned from an interdisciplinary workshop on color (More or Less: Varieties of Human Cortical Color Vision). Unfortunately I was not able to attend the conference that followed. Below are a few scattered (jet-lagged) thoughts in reflection of what happened. The workshop began with presentations by Michael Tye and Alex Bryne on the philosophy [...]