Online research in philosophy

In the 19th century, "Psychophysical Parallelism" was the most popular solution of the mind-body problem among physiologists, psychologists and philosophers. (This is not to be mixed up with Leibnizian and other cases of "Cartesian" parallelism.) The fate of this non-Cartesian view, as founded by Gustav Theodor Fechner, is reviewed. It is shown that Feigl's "identity theory" eventually goes back to Alois Riehl who promoted a hybrid version of psychophysical parallelism and Kantian mind-body theory which was taken up by Feigl's teacher Moritz Schlick.

In this paper it is argued that the multiple realizability argument and Kripke's argument are based on schemas of identifications rather than identification. In fact, "heat = molecular motion" includes a term "molecular motion" that does not capture a natural kind, nor has a unique referent. Is properly framed, this schema suits also for the type identity theory of mind. Some consequences of this point are evaluated.

In reply to Arif Ahmed, I argue that the apparatus of essentiality and qualified and unqualified possibilist identifications, developed in my paper 'Rigidity and Essentiality', can be used to provide a flawless reconstruction of several Kripkean ideas about the semantics of typical natural kind predicates, the essence of natural kinds, the contingency of usual descriptive identifications, and the arguments against psychophysical identity theories.