-
On the implications of scientific composition and completenessIn Antonella Corradini & Timothy O'Connor (eds.), Emergence in science and philosophy, Routledge. pp. 25--45. 2010.
-
67Brains, Neuroscience, and Animalism: On the Implications of Thinking BrainsSouthern Journal of Philosophy 52 (S1): 41-52. 2014.The neuroscience revolution has led many scientists to posit “expansive” or “thinking” brains that instantiate rich psychological properties. As a result, some scientists now even claim you are identical to such a brain. However, Eric Olson has offered new arguments that thinking brains cannot exist due to their intuitively “abominable” implications. After situating the commitment to thinking brains in the wider scientific discussions in which they are posited, I then critically assess Olson's a…Read more
-
289The varieties of emergence: Their purposes, obligations and importanceGrazer Philosophische Studien 65 (1): 95-121. 2002.I outline reasons for the recent popularity, and lingering suspicion, about 'emergence' by examining three distinct concepts of property emergence, their purposes and associated obligations. In Part 1, I argue 'Strong' emergence is the grail for many emergentists (and physicalists), since it frames what is needed to block the 'Argument from Realization' (AR) which moves from the truth of physicalism to the inefficacy of special science properties. I then distinguish 'Weak' and 'Ontological' emer…Read more
-
244Samuel Alexander’s Emergentism: Or, Higher Causation for PhysicalistsSynthese 153 (2): 261-296. 2006.Samuel Alexander was one of the foremost philosophical figures of his day and has been argued by John Passmore to be one of ‘fathers’ of Australian philosophy as well as a novel kind of physicalist. Yet Alexander is now relatively neglected, his role in the genesis of Australian philosophy if far from widely accepted and the standard interpretation takes him to be an anti-physicalist. In this paper, I carefully examine these issues and show that Alexander has been badly, although understandably,…Read more
-
120Understanding the 'making-up' relations, to put things neutrally, posited in mechanistic explanations the sciences is finally an explicit topic of debate amongst philosophers of science. In particular, there is now lively debate over the nature of the so-called 'realization' relations between properties posited in such explanations. Despite criticism (Gillett, Analysis 62: 316-323, 2002a), the most common approach continues to be that of applying machinery developed in the philosophy of mind to …Read more
-
71The hidden battles over emergenceIn Philip Clayton (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science, Oxford University Press. pp. 801--819. 2006.By Carl Gillett, Illinois Wesleyan University. Ontological reductionism has long dominated the sciences and intellectual life more broadly. It holds that a ‘final theory’ in physics would, in principle, suffice to explain all natural phenomena and that, ultimately, the entities of such a theory, like quarks with their properties of spin, charm and charge, are all that actually exists. Recently, however, a mounting challenge to this hegemonic reductionism has been focused around ‘emergent’ entit…Read more
-
238Physicalism and its Discontents (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2001.Physicalism, a topic that has been central to modern philosophy of mind and metaphysics, is the philosophical view that everything in the space-time world is ultimately physical. The physicalist will claim that all facts about the mind and the mental are physical facts and deny the existence of mental events and state insofar as these are thought of as independent of physical things, events and states. This collection of essays, first published in 2001, offers a series of perspectives on this im…Read more
-
153Constitution, and Multiple Constitution, in the Sciences: Using the Neuron to Construct a Starting Framework (review)Minds and Machines 23 (3): 309-337. 2013.Inter-level mechanistic explanations in the sciences have long been a focus of philosophical interest, but attention has recently turned to the compositional character of these explanations which work by explaining higher level entities, whether processes, individuals or properties, using the lower level entities they take to compose them. However, we still have no theoretical account of the constitution or parthood relations between individuals deployed in such explanations, nor any accounts of…Read more
-
72Strong emergence as a defense of non-reductive physicalism: A physicalist metaphysics for 'downward' determinationPrincipia 6 (1): 89-120. 2002.Iaegwon Kim, and others, have recently posed a powerful challen,ge to both emergentism cmd ncm-reductIve physicalism lyy providing arguments that these positums are cornmitted to an untenabie combmation of both `upwarcit and 'clouniwardi determmation. In secuon 1, I illuminate how the nature of the realiza:0n relatzon underlies such sicepucal arguments However, tn secuon 2, I suggest that such conclusicrns involve a confusion between the implications of physicahsm and those of a related thesis t…Read more
-
97Multiply realizing scientific properties and their instancesPhilosophical Psychology 24 (6): 727-738. 2011.Thomas Polger and Lawrence Shapiro (or P&S) have recently (2008) criticized ?causal-mechanist? views of realization that dominate research in the philosophy of mind and metaphysics of science. P&S offer the internal criticism that any account of realization focusing upon property instances, as views of causal-mechanist realization routinely do, must lead to incoherence about multiple realization. P&S's argument highlights important issues about property instances that have recently been neglecte…Read more
-
53A Mechanist Manifesto for the Philosophy of Mind: A Third Way for FunctionalistsJournal of Philosophical Research 32 21-42. 2007.One of the main early forms of “functionalism,” developed by writers like Jerry Fodor and William Lycan, focused on “mechanistic” explanation in the special sciences and argued that “functional properties” in psychology were continuous in nature with the special science properties posited in such mechanistic explanations. I dub the latter position“Continuity Functionalism” and use it to critically examine the “Standard Picture” of the metaphysics of functionalism which takes “functional” propert…Read more
-
3The metaphysics of mechanisms and the challenge of the new reductionismIn Maurice Kenneth Davy Schouten & Huibert Looren de Jong (eds.), The matter of the mind: philosophical essays on psychology, neuroscience, and reduction, Blackwell. 2007.Over the last century, as Figure 1 graphically illustrates, scientific investigations have given us a detailed account of many natural phenomena, from molecules to manic depression, through so-called
DeKalb, Illinois, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
General Philosophy of Science |
Philosophy of Psychology |
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Neuroscience |
Philosophy of Mind |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Religion |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |