Abstract: considered an objection (Objection 3) that he says he thought was first put to him by Max Black. He says “…it is the most subtle of any of those I have considered, and the one which I am least confident of having satisfactorily met”. This argument, the “Property Dualism Argument,” as it is often called, turns on much the same issue as Frank Jackson’s (1982, 1986) “Knowledge Argument”, or so I will argue. This paper is aimed at elaborating and rebutting the Property Dualism Argument (or rather a family of Property Dualism Arguments) and drawing some connections to the Knowledge Argument.² I will also be examining John Perry’s (2001) book which discusses both Max Black’s argument and the Knowledge Argument, and some arguments drawn from Stephen White’s (1983) paper on the topic and some arguments inspired by unpublished papers by White

Abstract: The problems with Physicalism that have most exercised its defenders are ‘high-level problems’ – problems to do with intentionality, ‘qualia’, normativity, and so on. But I will argue that Physicalists have missed a serious Achilles heel at the level of basic metaphysics

Abstract: I am going to develop an argument against Physicalism concerning qualitative mental properties. Unlike most arguments against Physicalism, it is not based on the usual a priori considerations, such as what Mary learns when she comes out of her black and white room or the apparent conceivability of Zombies. Rather, it is based on two broadly a posteriori premises about the structure of experience and its physical basis

Abstract: 1. Introduction The story of Canberra, the capital of Australia, is roughly as follows. In 1901, when what is called ‘Federation’ occurred—that is, when the six colonies then occupying the territory of Australia decided to join forces and become one colony—it was naturally felt that there should be a capital city. But the rulers of the two most powerful cities, Sydney and Melbourne, could not agree which of them it was to be. (Nobody took seriously the claims of any other city.) So it was decided to build a completely new city more or less midway between them. In short, Canberra is constitutively connected to compromise. In philosophy, what is called ‘the Canberra Plan’ is constitutively connected to compromise too; at any rate, the sort of philosophical project for which people use this term often or always involves articulating a compromise or replacement conception of some of the central notions both of philosophy and of ordinary life. The reasons for the compromise usually start from a commitment to a general metaphysical thesis about what the world is like, viz., physicalism. According to physicalism, the world is (in some hard to define sense) fundamentally or basically physical. We are then asked to agree that physicalism is inconsistent with various intuitively plausible claims about the nature of apparently existing things, such as people, colours, values, freewill, experiences, ordinary physical objects, causation, and so on. How is this inconsistency to be resolved? The solution offered by proponents of the Canberra Plan is to compromise: to spell out replacement conceptions which on the one hand may reasonably be interpreted as successor conceptions to the intuitive or ordinary conceptions that cause the problem, but which on the other are compatible with

Abstract: This chapter argues that dualist vs. reductionist debates adopt an implicit description of consciousness that does not resemble ordinary experience. If one adopts an accurate description of conscious phenomenology along with an understanding of the fundamental differences between correlation, causation and ontological identity, reductionism cannot succeed. However the alternative is not a dualism that places consciousness beyond science. Rather, it is a nonreductionist science of consciousness.

Abstract: Perry, in this lucid, deep, and entertaining book (based on his 1999 Jean Nicod lectures), supposes that type-identity physicalism is antecedently plausible, and that rejecting this thesis requires good reason (this is “antecedent physicalism”). He aims to show that experience gap arguments, as given by Jackson (the knowledge argument), Kripke (the modal argument), and Chalmers (the zombie argument), fail to provide such reason; and moreover that each failure ultimately stems from an overly restrictive conception of the content of thought