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Summary Nonreductive materialism arose in the 1960s in response to the mind-brain identity theory before evolving into a more general anti-reductionist position of some diversity. Mind-brain identity theory, the earliest form of reductive materialism, asserts that mental states are identical to brain states. Nonreductive materialism denies this, whilst also asserting that materialism, the doctrine that everything is physical, was nevertheless true. The earliest defender of nonreductive materialism, Hilary Putnam, first developed the view via an analogy between computational properties and mental properties: that computational properties can be "realized" by different physical properties, such as mechanical or electronic properties, and that mental properties could be computational too, so also be realized by different physical properties. Thus the "multiple realization argument" was born. Nonreductive materialism then came to be understood as a "third way" between reductive materialist positions and abandoning materialism all together. And this promise led to a near nonreductive-consensus among materialists as the multiple realization argument swept virtually all before it. By the 1990s, however, the view became subject to increasing criticism, especially regarding the bona fides of its materialist credentials, its ability to accommodate mental causation, and the soundness of the multiple realization argument. This led both to the development of different versions of the view and a relative revival of reductionist approaches. The debate about these and related matters continues. 
Key works According to the standard story, the roots of nonreductive materialism terminate in the work of Putnam 1960, 1967, 1975. Other important contributors to the early form of the view include Davidson 1970; Fodor 1974; and Boyd 1980. The high watermark of the near nonreductive-consensus can be found in Block 1997 and Fodor 1997. Other important developments of nonreductive materialism include: Yablo 1992; Horgan 1997; Antony & Levine 1997; Clapp 2001; Antony 2003; Shoemaker 2007; Loewer 2007; Bennett 2008; Wilson 2009; List & Menzies 2009; and Pereboom 2011. Major objections to nonreductive materialism can be found in: Hill 1991; Kim 1992, 1998, 2005, 2007; Block & Stalnaker 1999; Bechtel 1999; Shapiro 2004; Polger 2004; Bickle 1998; 2010; Gozzano & Hill 2012; Gibb et al 2013; and Polger & Shapiro 2016.
Introductions A good place to start is Lynne Rudder Baker's 2009 recent introduction to nonreductive materialism. Daniel Stoljar's 2015 Stanford Encyclopedia entry on physicalism is helpful for situating the nonreductive variety within the larger materialist position. Jaegwon Kim's 2005 is a readable, influential work which discusses the view from a critical perspective. Cynthia MacDonald's 1989 is an accessible and more sympathetic introduction. 
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  1. The unsolvability of the mind-body problem liberates the will.Scheffel Jan - manuscript
    The mind-body problem is analyzed in a physicalist perspective. By combining the concepts of emergence and algorithmic information theory in a thought experiment employing a basic nonlinear process, it is argued that epistemically strongly emergent properties may develop in a physical system. A comparison with the significantly more complex neural network of the brain shows that also consciousness is epistemically emergent in a strong sense. Thus reductionist understanding of consciousness appears not possible; the mind-body problem does not have a reductionist (...)
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  2. Levels of Description and Levels of Reality: A General Framework.Christian List - manuscript
    This expository paper presents a general framework for representing levels and inter-level relations. The framework is intended to capture both epistemic and ontological notions of levels and to clarify the sense in which levels of explanation might or might not be related to a levelled ontology. The framework also allows us to study and compare different kinds of inter-level relations, especially supervenience and reduction but also grounding and mereological constitution. This, in turn, enables us to explore questions such as whether (...)
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  3. How is non-reductive physicalism possible.Paul Mainwood - manuscript
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  4. A nonreductive physicalist libertarian free will.Dwayne Moore - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Libertarian free will is, roughly, the view that the same agential states can cause different possible actions. Nonreductive physicalism is, roughly, the view that mental states cause actions to occur, while these actions also have sufficient physical causes. Though libertarian free will and nonreductive physicalism have overlapping subject matter, and while libertarian free will is currently trending at the same time as nonreductive physicalism is a dominant metaphysical posture, there are few sustained expositions of a nonreductive physicalist model of libertarian (...)
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  5. Mental Causation.David Robb - forthcoming - In Brian McLaughlin (ed.), Macmillan's Interdisciplinary Handbooks: Philosophy of Mind. Macmillan.
    This is an introduction to mental causation. It is written primarily for students new to the topic. The chapter is organized around the following argument: P1. Everything we do is caused by biochemical processes within our bodies and brains. P2. If everything we do is caused by biochemical processes within our bodies and brains, then nothing we do has a mental cause. C. Therefore, nothing we do has a mental cause.
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  6. Why Jaegwon Kim's Physicalism is Not Near Enough: An Implicit Argument for a New Vedic Interactionism.David Scharf - forthcoming - Journal of Consciousness Studies.
  7. The Subset View of Realization and the Part-Whole Problem.Takeshi Akiba - 2024 - Acta Analytica 39 (1):97-115.
    According to the subset view of realization, a property realizes another if the causal powers of the latter are a subset of those of the former. Against this view, some authors (in particular, Kevin Morris and Paul Audi) have argued that it has an untenable consequence that realizing properties are less fundamental than the properties they realize, because the subset view characterizes realized properties as parts (subsets) of their realizers whereas it is generally true that a part is prior to (...)
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  8. What's Wrong With Nonreductive Physicalism? The Exclusion Problem Reconsidered.Kevin Morris - 2023 - ProtoSociology 39:19-34.
    Jaegwon Kim argued that nonreductive physicalism faces the “exclusion problem” for higher-level causation, mental causation in particular. Roughly, the charge is that given the presumptive ubiquity of physical causation, there cannot be irreducible mental causes for physical effects. Since there are mental causes, Kim concluded that nonreductive physicalism should be rejected in favor of a more reductionist alternative according to which mental causes are just physical causes differently described. But why should mental causes be “excluded” in this way? Unfortunately, Kim (...)
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  9. Anti-reductionist Interventionism.Reuben Stern & Benjamin Eva - 2023 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 74 (1):241-267.
    Kim’s causal exclusion argument purports to demonstrate that the non-reductive physicalist must treat mental properties (and macro-level properties in general) as causally inert. A number of authors have attempted to resist Kim’s conclusion by utilizing the conceptual resources of Woodward’s interventionist conception of causation. The viability of these responses has been challenged by Gebharter, who argues that the causal exclusion argument is vindicated by the theory of causal Bayesian networks (CBNs). Since the interventionist conception of causation relies crucially on CBNs (...)
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  10. Why incompatibilism about mental causation is incompatible with non-reductive physicalism.Jonas Christensen & Umut Baysan - 2022 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 65 (5):546-568.
    ABSTRACT The exclusion problem is meant to show that non-reductive physicalism leads to epiphenomenalism: if mental properties are not identical with physical properties, then they are not causally efficacious. Defenders of a difference-making account of causation suggest that the exclusion problem can be solved because mental properties can be difference-making causes of physical effects. Here, we focus on what we dub an incompatibilist implementation of this general strategy and argue against it from a non-reductive physicalist perspective. Specifically, we argue that (...)
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  11. Conceptual reductions, truthmaker reductive explanations, and ontological reductions.Savvas Ioannou - 2022 - Synthese 200 (4):1-26.
    According to conceptual reductive accounts, if properties of one domain can be conceptually reduced to properties of another domain, then the former properties are ontologically reduced to the latter properties. I will argue that conceptual reductive accounts face problems: either they do not recognise that many higher-level properties are correlated with multiple physical properties, or they do not clarify how we can discover new truthmakers of sentences about a higher-level property. Still, there is another way to motivate ontological reduction, the (...)
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  12. Removing Realizers: Reply to Rellihan.Thomas Krödel - 2022 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 11 (3):150-156.
    The paper replies to Matthew Rellihan’s recent criticism of Thomas Kroedel’s simple argument for downward causation. Rellihan argues that the simple argument equivocates between two notions of realizers of mental properties, namely total realizers and core realizers. According to Rellihan, one premise of the argument is false on each disambiguation. In response, this paper argues that the version of the argument in terms of total realizers is sound after all if we evaluate counterfactual conditionals about the non-occurrence of total realizers (...)
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  13. Paralelismul psihofizic ca descriere și paralelismul psihofizic ca soluție.Mona Mamulea - 2022 - Studii de Istorie a Filosofiei Românești 18:79-90.
    The PhD dissertation defended by Ion Petrovici in 1905 triggered criticism related to its sources, method and aim. Although the author made use of the term ‘psychophysical parallelism’ in the title – the critics reproached –, the work had nothing to do with scientific psychology. The following paper discusses the distinction between psychophysical parallelism as description and psychophysical parallelism as solution to the mind–body problem. Only the former can be considered a proper scien­tific approach.
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  14. Mental Causation, Autonomy and Action Theory.Dwayne Moore - 2022 - Erkenntnis 87 (1):53-73.
    Nonreductive physicalism states that actions have sufficient physical causes and distinct mental causes. Nonreductive physicalism has recently faced the exclusion problem, according to which the single sufficient physical cause excludes the mental causes from causal efficacy. Autonomists respond by stating that while mental-to-physical causation fails, mental-to-mental causation persists. Several recent philosophers establish this autonomy result via similar models of causation :1031–1049, 2016; Zhong, J Philos 111:341–360, 2014). In this paper I argue that both of these autonomist models fail on account (...)
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  15. The Argument from Reason and the Dual Process Reply.Dwayne Moore - 2022 - Philosophia Christi 24 (2):217-239.
    The argument from reason states that if naturalism is true, then our beliefs are caused by physical processes rather than being causally based in their reasons, so our beliefs are not knowledge—including the belief in naturalism itself. Recent critics of the argument from reason provide dual process replies to the argument from reason—our beliefs can have both a naturalistic cause/ explanation and be caused/explained by its reasons, thereby showing that naturalism can accommodate knowledge. In this paper I consider three dual (...)
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  16. Trope Mental Causation: Still Not Qua Mental.Wenjun Zhang - 2022 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 8.
    A popular solution to the causal exclusion problem in the non-reductive physicalist camp is the trope identity solution. But this solution is haunted by the “quausation problem” which charges that the trope only confers causal powers qua physical, not qua mental. Although proponents of the trope solution have responded to the problem by denying the existence of properties of tropes, I do not find their reply satisfactory. Rather, I believe they have missed the core presupposition behind the quausation problem. I (...)
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  17. Exclusion, subset realization, and part‐whole relations.Wenjun Zhang - 2022 - Ratio 35 (1):5-15.
    The subset realization view proposes to solve the causal exclusion problem of non‐reductive mental instances by taking the mental instance as a part of its physical realizer. Many philosophers have argued that such a part‐whole relation will undermine physicalist realization because parts are ontologically prior to their wholes and the subset view is thus flawed. I argue that the relation that the subset view should propose is different from the ordinary part‐whole relation. What they should propose is another kind of (...)
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  18. A challenge to the second law of thermodynamics from cognitive science and vice versa.Meir Hemmo & Orly Shenker - 2021 - Synthese 199 (1-2):4897-4927.
    We show that the so-called Multiple-Computations Theorem in cognitive science and philosophy of mind challenges Landauer’s Principle in physics. Since the orthodox wisdom in statistical physics is that Landauer’s Principle is implied by, or is the mechanical equivalent of, the Second Law of thermodynamics, our argument shows that the Multiple-Computations Theorem challenges the universal validity of the Second Law of thermodynamics itself. We construct two examples of computations carried out by one and the same dynamical process with respect to which (...)
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  19. Causal Exclusion without Causal Sufficiency.Bram Vaassen - 2021 - Synthese 198:10341-10353.
    Some non-reductionists claim that so-called ‘exclusion arguments’ against their position rely on a notion of causal sufficiency that is particularly problematic. I argue that such concerns about the role of causal sufficiency in exclusion arguments are relatively superficial since exclusionists can address them by reformulating exclusion arguments in terms of physical sufficiency. The resulting exclusion arguments still face familiar problems, but these are not related to the choice between causal sufficiency and physical sufficiency. The upshot is that objections to the (...)
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  20. Mental causation as joint causation.Chiwook Won - 2021 - Synthese 198 (5):4917-4937.
    This paper explores and defends the idea that mental properties and their physical bases jointly cause their physical effects. The paper evaluates the view as an emergentist response to the exclusion problem, comparing it with a competing nonreductive physicalist solution, the compatibilist solution, and argues that the joint causation view is more defensible than commonly supposed. Specifically, the paper distinguishes two theses of closure, Strong Closure and Weak Closure, two causal exclusion problems, the overdetermination problem and the supervenience problem, and (...)
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  21. Difference-making and deterministic chance.Harjit Bhogal - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 178 (7):2215-2235.
    Why do we value higher-level scientific explanations if, ultimately, the world is physical? An attractive answer is that physical explanations often cite facts that don’t make a difference to the event in question. I claim that to properly develop this view we need to commit to a type of deterministic chance. And in doing so, we see the theoretical utility of deterministic chance, giving us reason to accept a package of views including deterministic chance.
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  22. Mentality and Object: Computational and Cognitive Diachronic Emergence.Ekin Erkan - 2020 - Cosmos and History : The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 20 (2):296-356.
    Espousing non-reductive physicalism, how do we pick out the specific relevant physical notion(s) from physical facts, specifically in relation to phenomenal experience? Beginning with a historical review of Gilbert Ryle’s behaviorism and moving through Hilary Putnam’s machine-state functionalism and Wilfrid Sellars’ inferential framework, up to more contemporaneous computationalist- and cognitivist-functionalism (Gualtiero Piccinini), we survey accounts of mentality that countenance the emergence of mental states vide input- and output-scheme. Ultimately arriving at the conclusion that functionalism cannot account for problems such as (...)
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  23. Practical Realism about the Self.Carolyn Dicey Jennings - 2020 - In Luis R. G. Oliveira & Kevin Corcoran (eds.), Common Sense Metaphysics: Themes From the Philosophy of Lynne Rudder Baker. Routledge.
    In Explaining Attitudes, Baker argues that we should treat our everyday practices as relevant to metaphysical debates, resulting in a stance of realism with respect to intentional explanations. In this chapter I will argue that if one is going to be a practical realist about anything, it should be the self, or subject of attention. I will use research on attention combined with the stance of practical realism to argue in favor of a substantive self. That is, I will present (...)
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  24. The Attending Mind.Carolyn Dicey Jennings - 2020 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
    Attention is essential to the life of the mind, a central topic in cognitive science, neuroscience, and psychology. Traditional debates in philosophy stand to benefit from greater understanding of the phenomenon, whether on the nature of the self, the foundation of knowledge, the natural basis of consciousness, or the origins of action and responsibility. This book is at the crossroads of philosophy of mind and cognitive science, offering a new theoretical stance on the concept of attention and how it intersects (...)
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  25. Mental Causation: A Counterfactual Theory.Thomas Kroedel - 2020 - Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    Our minds have physical effects. This happens, for instance, when we move our bodies when we act. How is this possible? Thomas Kroedel defends an account of mental causation in terms of difference-making: if our minds had been different, the physical world would have been different; therefore, the mind causes events in the physical world. His account not only explains how the mind has physical effects at all, but solves the exclusion problem - the problem of how those effects can (...)
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  26. Multiple realization and compositional variation.Kevin Morris - 2020 - Synthese 197 (6):2593-2611.
    It has often been thought that compositional variation across systems that are similar from the point of view of the special sciences provides a key point in favor of the multiple realization of special science kinds and in turn the broadly nonreductive consequences often thought to follow from multiple realization. Yet in a series of articles, and culminating in The Multiple Realization Book, Tom Polger and Larry Shapiro argue that an account of multiple realization demanding enough to yield such nonreductive (...)
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  27. A grounding physicalist solution to the causal exclusion problem.Robin Stenwall - 2020 - Synthese 198 (12):11775-11795.
    Remember how Kim Mental causation, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993b) used to argue against non-reductive physicalism to the effect that it cannot accommodate the causal efficacy of the mental? The argument was that if physicalists accept the causal closure of the physical, they are faced with an exclusion problem. In the original version of the argument, the dependence holding between the mental and the physical was cashed out in terms of supervenience. Due to the work or Fine and others, we have (...)
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  28. Review of Physicalism Deconstructed: Levels of Reality and the Mind-Body Problem, by Kevin Morris. [REVIEW]Jessica M. Wilson - 2020 - Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 1.
    Morris’s book is a valuable contribution. For the reasons below, I don’t think his case against NRP succeeds, and his version of EP faces a serious difficulty. Even so, this is an admirably clear, subtle, and well-informed brief, and philosophers interested in the structure of natural reality have much to gain from Morris’s insightful discussion and argumentation.
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  29. Taking Emergentism Seriously.Lei Zhong - 2020 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 98 (1):31-46.
    The Exclusion Argument has afflicted non-reductionists for decades. In this article, I attempt to show that emergentism—the view that mental entities can downwardly cause physical entities in a non-overdetermining way—is the most plausible approach to solving the exclusion problem. The emergentist approach is largely absent in contemporary philosophy of mind, because emergentism rejects the Causal Closure of Physics, a doctrine embraced by almost all physicalists. This article, however, challenges the consensus on causal closure and defends a physicalist version of emergentism. (...)
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  30. The Correlation Argument for Reductionism.Christopher Clarke - 2019 - Philosophy of Science 86 (1):76-97.
    Reductionists say things like: all mental properties are physical properties; all normative properties are natural properties. I argue that the only way to resist reductionism is to deny that causation is difference making (thus making the epistemology of causation a mystery) or to deny that properties are individuated by their causal powers (thus making properties a mystery). That is to say, unless one is happy to deny supervenience, or to trivialize the debate over reductionism. To show this, I argue that (...)
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  31. On the neurobiological redefinition of psychiatric symptoms: elimination, reduction, or what?Maël Lemoine - 2019 - Synthese 196 (6):2117-2133.
    Because biologization of psychiatric constructs does not involve derivation of laws, or reduce the number of entities involved, the traditional term of ‘reduction’ should be replaced. This paper describes biologization in terms of redefinition, which involves changing the definition of terms sharing the same extension. Redefinition obtains through triangulation and calibration, that is, respectively, detection of an object from two different spots, and tweaking parameters of detection in order to optimize the picture. The unity of the different views of the (...)
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  32. Levels: Descriptive, Explanatory, and Ontological.Christian List - 2019 - Noûs 53 (4):852-883.
    Scientists and philosophers frequently speak about levels of description, levels of explanation, and ontological levels. In this paper, I propose a unified framework for modelling levels. I give a general definition of a system of levels and show that it can accommodate descriptive, explanatory, and ontological notions of levels. I further illustrate the usefulness of this framework by applying it to some salient philosophical questions: (1) Is there a linear hierarchy of levels, with a fundamental level at the bottom? And (...)
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  33. Emergence and Non-reductive Physicalism.Cynthia Macdonald & Graham Frank Macdonald - 2019 - In Sophie Gibb, Robin Findlay Hendry & Tom Lancaster (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Emergence. New York, NY, USA; Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. pp. 195-205.
  34. Autonomous Mental Causation and Mental‐Qua‐Mental Causation.Dwayne Moore - 2019 - Philosophical Forum 50 (2):245-267.
    Nonreductive physicalists endorse autonomous mental causation, the view that mental causes, as distinct from physical causes, bring about mental and physical effects. The causal exclusion problem has recently pressured nonreductive physicalists to replace autonomous mental causation with reduced mental causation, the view that mental causes, as physical causes, bring about mental and physical effects. Reduced mental causation, in turn, faces the problem of mental quausation, according to which reduced mental causation only delivers mental‐as‐physical causation, not the requisite mental‐as‐mental causation. Proponents (...)
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  35. Causal Exclusion and Physical Causal Completeness.Dwayne Moore - 2019 - Dialectica 73 (4):479-505.
    Nonreductive physicalists endorse the principle of mental causation, according to which some events have mental causes: Sid climbs the hill because he wants to. Nonreductive physicalists also endorse the principle of physical causal completeness, according to which physical events have sufficient physical causes: Sid climbs the hill because a complex neural process in his brain triggered his climbing. Critics typically level the causal exclusion problem against this nonreductive physicalist model, according to which the physical cause is a sufficient cause of (...)
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  36. Causal Explanation in Psychiatry.Tuomas K. Pernu - 2019 - In Şerife Tekin & Robyn Bluhm (eds.), The Bloomsbury Companion to Philosophy of Psychiatry. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
  37. Elimination, not Reduction: Lessons from the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) and Multiple Realisation.Tuomas K. Pernu - 2019 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 42:e22.
    The thesis of multiple realisation that Borsboom et al. are relying on should not be taken for granted. In dissolving the apparent multiple realisation, the reductionist research strategies in psychopathology research (the Research Domain Criteria [RDoC] framework, in particular) are bound to lead to eliminativism rather than reductionism. Therefore, Borsboom et al. seem to be aiming at a wrong target.
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  38. Kompatybilistyczna odpowiedź na problem wykluczenia przyczynowego.Jan Rostek - 2019 - Filozofia Nauki 27 (1):73-93.
    The causal exclusion problem, as presented by Jaegwon Kim, is aimed to show that non-reductive physicalism is self-contradictory, as it is impossible for effects already having a sufficient physical cause to have a distinct mental cause. One possible reply to Kim’s argument is compatibilism — a view within non-reductive physicalism that states that psychophysical supervenience is able to sustain the coexistence of efficacious mental and physical causes. The aim of this paper is to describe the currently most popular compatibilist strategy, (...)
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  39. Humeanism, Best System Laws, and Emergence.Olivier Sartenaer - 2019 - Philosophy of Science 86 (4):719-738.
    In the current article and contrary to a widespread assumption, I argue that Humeanism and ontological emergence can peacefully coexist. Such a coexistence can be established by reviving elements of John Stuart Mill’s philosophy of science, in which an idiosyncratic account of diachronic emergence is associated with extensions of the Humean mosaic and the correlative coming into being of new best system laws, which have the peculiarity of being temporally indexed. Incidentally, this reconciliation of Humeanism and emergence allows for conceiving (...)
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  40. Introduction: The Character of Physicalism.Andreas Elpidorou - 2018 - Topoi 37 (3):435-455.
    The aim of this editorial introduction is twofold. First, Sects. 1–8 offer a critical introduction to the metaphysical character of physicalism. In those sections, I present and evaluate different ways in which proponents of physicalism have made explicit the metaphysical dependence that is said to hold between the non-physical and the physical. Some of these accounts are found to be problematic; others are shown to be somewhat more promising. In the end, some important lessons are drawn and different options for (...)
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  41. Retiring the Argument from Reason.David Kyle Johnson - 2018 - Philosophia Christi 20 (2):541-563.
    In C. S. Lewis’s Christian Apologetics: Pro and Con, I took the con in a debate with Victor Reppert about the soundness of Lewis’s famous “argument from reason.” Reppert then extended his argument in an article for Philosophia Christi; this article is my reply. I show that Reppert’s argument fails for three reasons. (1) It “loads the die” by falsely assuming that naturalism, by definition, can't include mental causation "on the basic level." (I provide multiple examples of naturalist theories of (...)
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  42. The Blackwell Companion to Substance Dualism.Jonathan J. Loose, Angus John Louis Menuge & J. P. Moreland (eds.) - 2018 - Oxford, U.K.: Wiley-Blackwell.
    A groundbreaking collection of contemporary essays from leading international scholars that provides a balanced and expert account of the resurgent debate about substance dualism and its physicalist alternatives. Substance dualism has for some time been dismissed as an archaic and defeated position in philosophy of mind, but in recent years, the topic has experienced a resurgence of scholarly interest and has been restored to contemporary prominence by a growing minority of philosophers prepared to interrogate the core principles upon which past (...)
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  43. In Defense of a Realization Formulation of Physicalism.Andrew Melnyk - 2018 - Topoi 37 (3):483-493.
    In earlier work, I proposed and defended a formulation of physicalism that was distinctive in appealing to a carefully-defined relation of physical realization. Various philosophers (Robert Francescotti, Daniel Stoljar, Carl Gillett, and Susan Schneider) have since presented challenges to this formulation. In the present paper, I aim to show that these challenges can be overcome.
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  44. Physicalism Deconstructed: Levels of Reality and the Mind–Body Problem.Kevin Morris - 2018 - New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press.
    How should thought and consciousness be understood within a view of the world as being through-and-through physical? Many philosophers have proposed non-reductive, levels-based positions, according to which the physical domain is fundamental, while thought and consciousness are higher-level processes, dependent on and determined by physical processes. In this book, Kevin Morris's careful philosophical and historical critique shows that it is very difficult to make good metaphysical sense of this idea - notions like supervenience, physical realization, and grounding all fail to (...)
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  45. Physicalism, Truthmaking, and Levels of Reality: Prospects and Problems.Kevin Morris - 2018 - Topoi 37 (3):473-482.
    This paper considers the extent to which the notion of truthmaking can play a substantive role in defining physicalism. While a truthmaking-based approach to physicalism is prima facie attractive, there is some reason to doubt that truthmaking can do much work when it comes to understanding physicalism, and perhaps austere metaphysical frameworks in general. First, despite promising to dispense with higher-level properties and states, truthmaking appears to make little progress on issues concerning higher-level items and how they are related to (...)
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  46. Truthmaking and the Mysteries of Emergence.Kevin Morris - 2018 - In Elly Vintiadis & Constantinos Mekios (eds.), Brute Facts. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    The concept of truthmaking, the idea that when a statement is true, there is typically something about the world in virtue of which it is true, has garnered much interest in recent metaphysics. Often, the motivation has been the thought that truthmaking can provide a new perspective on an important issue. This paper evaluates the claim that truthmaking can play a substantive role in defining an unproblematic notion of emergence. For despite playing an important role in philosophical discourse over the (...)
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  47. For Nonreductive Physicalism.Nancey Claire Murphy - 2018 - In Jonathan J. Loose, Angus J. L. Menuge & J. P. Moreland (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Substance Dualism. Hoboken, NJ, USA: Wiley. pp. 316–327.
    This chapter presents a partial argument for a Christian version of nonreductive physicalism. Its structure is based on the view that a Christian anthropology at a minimum must be: consonant with Scripture and at least a part of the Christian tradition; not in conflict with widely accepted science, and preferably supported by science; and internally coherent. The argument of the chapter, then, intentionally draws from biblical studies and theology, and from (a bit of) cognitive neuroscience. The impact of cognitive neuroscience (...)
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  48. Mental Causation via Neuroprosthetics? A Critical Analysis.Tuomas K. Pernu - 2018 - Synthese (12):5159-5174.
    Some recent arguments defending the genuine causal efficacy of the mental have been relying on empirical research on neuroprosthetics. This essay presents a critical analysis of these arguments. The problem of mental causation, and the basic idea and results of neuroprosthetics are reviewed. It is shown how appealing to the research on neuroprosthetics can be interpreted to give support to the idea of mental causation. However, it does so only in a rather deflationary sense: by holding the mental identical with (...)
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  49. Against Nonreductive Physicalism.Joshua Rasmussen - 2018 - In Jonathan J. Loose, Angus J. L. Menuge & J. P. Moreland (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Substance Dualism. Hoboken, NJ, USA: Wiley. pp. 328–339.
    This chapter aims to develop an argument in support of the basic mentality thesis. A “counting” argument is constructed in the chapter that poses a problem for the identity thesis. Then, the chapter extends the “counting” argument in a way that exposes a problem for the dependence (mind grounded in physical) thesis. The basic strategy of a counting argument is to show that there is a greater quantity of members of the one category than of some other. To illustrate, the (...)
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  50. Dismantling Bodily Resurrection Arguments Against Mind-Body Dualism.Brandon Rickabaugh - 2018 - In R. Keith Loftin & Joshua Farris (eds.), Christian Physicalism? Philosophical Theological Criticisms. Lanham: Lexington Books. pp. 295-317.
    According to the Christian doctrine of bodily resurrection, human persons will have an embodied existence in eternity. Many Christian materialists, especially Lynne Rudder Baker, Trenton Merricks, and Kevin Corcoran, argue that the doctrine of bodily resurrection creates serious problems for substance dualism (dualism). These critiques argued that bodily resurrection is made trivial by dualism, that dualism makes it difficult if not impossible to explain why we need to be embodied, or that dualism should be rejected as bodily resurrection is better (...)
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