Tomas Hribek

The volume presents original contributions from the 2009 Knowledge, Value, Evolution conference, held in Prague in 2009. While the conference was held during the year of Darwin's double anniversary, its aims were not historical. Rather, we brought together researchers from many different countries who work on topics at the interface of philosophy, the humanities and evolutionary biology. Chapters included in this volume give a very comprehensive picture of the work on a Darwinian-inspired epistemology, philosophy of mind, ethics, social philosophy, as well as a more empirical study of cognition and religion.

[Materialism and Hylomorphism] The author disputes the view, expressed recently by Tomáš Machula a David Peroutka, that materialism, dominant in contemporary philosophy of mind, should be substituted by Thomist hylomorphism. The critique focuses on two aspects of Machula and Peroutka’s argument. Firstly, on their assumption that the contemporary preference for materialism is the result of chance (ignorance of the fact that in addition to materialism and dualism the position of hylomorphism is also available). This assumption fails to take into account the fact that dualism was already the subject of criticism in the 17th century, but materialism only became properly established in the mid-twentieth century. Secondly, the author argues that Thomist hylomorphism can be updated in a more fruitful way than that proposed by Machula and Peroutka. This updating requires us, however, to sacrifice certain metaphysically unsustainable ideas – in particular the idea that the soul is a non-material substance independent of the body.

[Davidson on Externalism] This is a critical analysis of Davidson's version of psychological externalism. The author argues that Davidson offers two different types of the theory, which do not coincide, however, with the usual distinction between physical and social externalism. On the one hand, Davidson argues that the mental states of an individual are determined by her causal history (what could be called "historical externalism"); on the other hand, he argues that each individual's mental states are determined by her interactions with other people (or what might be dubbed "interactionist externalism"). The author contends that these two externalisms are mutually not quite consistent, and that Davidson's arguments for them are inconclusive.

This paper starts from the familiar premise that psychological anti-individualism is incompatible with materialism. It attempts to state more clearly what this incompatibility consists in, and — rather than arguing in detail for any particular resolution — to inquire whether this incompatibility admits any resolution. However, the paper does offer a conditional argument concerning the possibility that the incompatibility is genuine and cannot be resolved. Provided that anti-individualism and materialism cannot be squared, and anti-individualism is correct, it follows that materialism has to be abandoned. If so, the situation is not as disastrous as it might at first seem. We need not, in consequence of our inability to construe a coherent metaphysics of mind, give up on intentional vocabulary any more than we must stop, in consequence of our inability to make sense of induction, anticipating the future