Howard Robinson

An extremely modest and, hence, uncontentious version of the transparency of experience entails that phenomenal qualities are amongst the fundamental building blocks of our, lived, manifest or common-sense world. As such, all attempts to conceive of them physicalistically seem to be self-destructive: I do not construct my manifest world out of neural firing frequencies. In particular, the _phenomenal concept strategy_ (PCS) can give no account of how a neural state can manifest itself as the sort of sensible quality out of which our apparent world is constructed. In fact, PCS does not even begin to touch the ‘hard problem’ that faces physicalism.

The fundamental philosophical problem with transubstantiation, is to give a plausible account of the concept of substance that it deploys. Aquinas admits that Aristotle’s concept of substance does not naturally fit the role (ST III 75 art. 4) and neither does a modern ‘chemical’ concept. I argue that emphasis on the teleological nature, from a Divine perspective, can solve these problems, without falling into the unorthodoxy for which ‘transignification’, as found in Rahner and Schillabeeckx, has been condemned. It also liberates the doctrine from a theory of natural objects, which credits physical nature with the possession and transmission of teleology, and replaces it with one that makes teleology in the physical world the product of God’s design, not part of a natural scientific hierarchy.

Ontological materialism, in its various forms, has become the orthodox view in contemporary philosophy of mind. This book provides a variety of defenses of mind-body dualism, and shows (explicitly or implicitly) that a thoroughgoing ontological materialism cannot be sustained. The contributions are intended to show that, at the very least, ontological dualism (as contrasted with a dualism that is merely linguistic or epistemic) constitutes a philosophically respectable alternative to the monistic views that currently dominate thought about the mind-body (or, perhaps more appropriately, person-body) relation.

Questions about perception remain some of the most difficult and insoluble in both epistemology and in the philosophy of mind. This controversial but highly accessible introduction to the area explores the philosophical importance of those questions by re-examining what had until recent times been the most popular theory of perception - the sense-datum theory. Howard Robinson surveys the history of the arguments for and against the theory from Descartes to Husserl. He then shows that the objections to the theory, particularly Wittgenstein's attack on privacy and those of the physicalists, have been unsuccessful. He argues that we should return to the theory sense-data in order to understand perception. In doing so he seeks to overturn a consensus that has dominated the philosophy of perception for nearly half a century.

On the heels of the advance since the twentieth-century of wholly physicalist accounts of human persons, the influence of materialist ontology is increasingly evident in Christian theologizing. To date, the contemporary literature has tended to focus on anthropological issues (e.g., whether the traditional soul / body distinction is viable), with occasional articles treating physicalist accounts of such doctrines as the Incarnation and Resurrection of Jesus cropping up, as well. Interestingly, the literature to date, both for and against this influence, is dominated by philosophers. The present volume is a collection of philosophers and theologians who advance several novel criticisms of this growing trend toward physicalism in Christian theology. The present collection definitively shows that Christian physicalism has some significant philosophical and theological problems. No doubt all philosophical anthropologies have their challenges, but the present volume shows that Christian physicalism is most likely not an adequate accounting for essential theological topics within Christian theism. Christians, then, should consider alternative anthropologies.

This volume contains papers by a group of leading experts on Aristotle and the later Aristotelian tradition of Neoplatonism. The discussion ranges from Aristotle's treatment of Parmenides, the most important pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, to Neoplatonic and medieval use of Aristotle, forwhich Aristotle himself set guidelines in his discussions of his predecessors. Traces of these guidelines can be seen in the work of Plotinus, and that of the later Greek commentators on Aristotle. The study of these commentators, and the recognition of the philosophical interest and importance ofthe ideas which they expressed in their commentaries, is an exciting new development in ancient philosophy to which this book makes a unique and distinguished contribution.