David Hodgson

Statelessness and displacement represent nothing short of a loss of place, the violation of rights and international norms, threat to safety and belonging, and severely limits access to law and citizenship. Social work must leverage and sustain an ethical standpoint as a critical counterpoint to the increasing moral and political urgency of statelessness. However, traditional and normative social work ethics operate at a level of abstraction that do not engage sufficiently with the realpolitik of statelessness. This paper critically engages with moral questions concerning displacement and statelessness by engaging the philosophy of James Tully and Christine Korsgaard. This engagement enables connections between agency and notions of democratic constitutionalism where people have the right to call into and contest relations of governance that oppress them, through various means such as advocacy and activism. We present a reconsideration of established ethical understandings by arguing for the place of public philosophy and the constitution of the self as key to social work theory and practice in response to statelessness and displacement. Korsgaard’s work on normativity and agency, and Tully’s notion of democratic constitutionalism provide a rich and original contribution to social work ethics that will be articulated for social work theory and practice.

In this book, Hodgson presents a clear and compelling case against today's orthodox mechanistic view of the brain-mind, and in favor of the view that "the mind matters." In the course of the argument he ranges over such topics as consciousness, informal reasoning, computers, evolution, and quantum indeterminancy and non-locality. Although written from a philosophical viewpoint, the book has important implications for the sciences concerned with the brain-mind problem. At the same time, it is largely non-technical, and thus accessible to the non-specialist reader

This book offers a much-needed critical overview of the concept of social justice and its application in professional social work practice. Social justice has a rich conceptual genealogy in critical theory and political philosophy. For students, teachers and social workers concerned with empowerment, social change and human rights, this book provides a guide to the key ideas and thinkers, crucial historical developments and contemporary debates about social justice. It synthesises interdisciplinary knowledge and offers a new framework for practice, including a clear and practical exposition of four domains of skills and knowledge important for social justice informed social work. The book also contributes to social work pedagogy by offering a comprehensive set of learning outcomes that can be used to design curriculum, teaching and learning, and further research into social justice praxis. This book provides a range of philosophical and critical perspectives to support and inform social work professional knowledge and skills. In its tight knitting together of theory and practice this book links philosophical and moral principles with an understanding of how to engage with social justice in a way that is relevant to social work.

David Chalmers distinguishes the hard problem of consciousness -- why should a physical system give rise to conscious experiences at all -- with what he calls the easy problems, the explanation of how cognitive systems, including human brains, perform various cognitive functions. He argues that the easy problems are easy because the performance of any function can be explained by specifying a mechanism that performs the function. This article argues that conscious experiences have a role in the performance by human beings of some cognitive functions, that can't be realised by mechanisms of the kind studied by the objective sciences; and that accordingly some of Chalmers’ easy problems will not be fully solved unless and until the hard problem is solved

This is a review article about John Searle's most recent book The Rediscovery of the Mind, which criticizes it for not going far enough in its departure from orthodox materialistic views of the brain and mind. It argues that Searle's two central propositions, consciousness is irreducible and consciousness cannot cause anything that cannot be explained by the causal behaviour of neurons, are incompatible; and suggests that it is reasonable and scientifically respectable to reject the latter rather than the former

DAVID HODGSON: This article supports the proposition that, if a judgment about the aesthetic merits of an artistic object can take into account and thereby be influenced by the particular quality of the object, through gestalt experiences evoked by the object, then we have free will. It argues that it is probable that such a judgment can indeed take into account and be influenced by the particular quality of the object through gestalt experiences evoked by it, so as to make it probable that we do have free will. The proposition is supported by reference to two basic tricks apparently involved in conscious processes, which I call the qualia trick and the chunking trick; and it is suggested that these tricks make possible and indeed probable the existence of a third trick, which I call the selection trick

I want to take issue with the assertion by Flanagan and Polger that there are no good theories as to `why did evolution result in creatures who were more than just informationally sensitive'; that is, why evolution has apparently not produced zombies. I've proposed a theory which I'd like to think is good: that consciousness is for kinds of plausible reasoning not available to mechanistic systems -- that there have been evolutionary advantages in an organism being able to act out choices between alternatives left open to it by the universal laws, choices which require consciousness of inconclusive and incommensurable reasons that the choices can resolve, and which are unique efficacious events rather than just the expression of the universal laws. This idea is developed and defended in Hodgson , 1994a, 1994b, 1995, 1996a, 1996b). No one has yet told me why it is no good

Responses to my article on Dawkins and God have fallen into two classes: those that challenge my criticism of Dawkins’ atheism, and those that challenge my criticism of the morality on display in some Bible stories. I will briefly respond to those in the first class, and then those in the second class. P. J. Moss suggests I am attracted to “the Cartesian notion of mind body dualism,” and do not have regard to “the work of those philosophers of mind who … see the task of the philosopher as posing the problem into a precise enough form so that it admits of scientific resolution;” and he commends the work of John Searle. I am indeed attracted to a kind of dualism. However, it is not the Cartesian dualism of “two distinct realms” rejected by Searle, but rather a dualism that accepts, as Searle does, that there are two categories of empirical reality, subjective and objective, which are mutually irreducible The Rediscovery of the Mind, pp19, 98), and that there are features of subjective reality that cannot be fully understood in terms of objective reality. In a major work published in 2001, Rationality in Action, Searle even leaves open as a reasonable possibility a view I support, namely that consciousness may be able to cause things that cannot be fully explained by the causal behaviour of neurons, and he also supports a non Humean notion of the self, as an entity that can, as a whole, consciously try to do things: see my review in Journal of Consciousness Studies 9, 92 94. In any event, my argument against Dawkins does not depend on acceptance of dualism, just on the undoubted fact that science does not yet have the first idea what objective features are necessary and sufficient to give rise to subjectivity. Robert McLaughlin makes out a reasoned case against my three suggested errors in Dawkins. It would take a book to deal fully with points of the kind he raises, but I have to be brief here.

'Plain' persons tend to accept that free will exists and is inconsistent with determinism, but this commonsense position is widely debunked by professional philosophers and cognitive scientists. In this special issue of the _Journal of Consciousness Studies_ David Hodgson defends a simple, robust account of the plain person's position on free will, and intends it to support equally robust views of personal responsibility for conduct. In a lively debate his ideas are discussed and challenged by ten philosophers and scientists of varying opinions, including Robert Kane, Henry Stapp, and veteran philosopher of mind J.J.C. Smart, with a response by the principal author.

In this paper, I argue that a satisfactory account of consciousness will involve both (1) local indeterminism, in that some relevant events are not wholly and unequivocally pre‐determined by immediately prior local events, and (2) nonlocality, in that, within the leeways left by local indeterminism, what happens can be immediately affected by spatially separated or extended events. I briefly consider if this can be avoided by treating consciousness as supervenient and epiphenomenal; and I suggest that current theories of consciousness break down through failure to incorporate local indeterminism and nonlocality. I conclude by outlining possible implications for freedom of the will, physicalism, and the relevance of quantum mechanics to consciousness.

This article looks at two approaches to the human brain and to the causation of behaviour: the objective approach of neuroscience, which treats the brain as a physical system operating in accordance with physical laws of general application; and the subjective approach of folk psychology, which treats people, and thus their brains and minds, as making choices or decisions on the basis of beliefs, desires, etc. It suggests three ways in which these two approaches might be related, two physicalist and one non-physicalist; and argues, with reference to ethical and legal issues,ues that there are strong commonsense grounds for preferring the non-physicalist alternative, and that science does not justify its rejection. It is suggested that a considerable onus of proof lies on proponents of physicalist approaches, having regard to the implications of such approaches for important issues of justice and human rights.In this paper, I outline two approaches to the human brain, involving two different views of the causation of human behaviour; and I consider how these two approaches might be linked or related. The first is the objective approach of neuroscience, which treats the human brain as a physical object, operating in accordance with the same physical laws as other physical objects. The second is the subjective approach of folk psychology, which we apply both in our ordinary interactions with other people and in our thinking about our own behaviour; and which treats people as choosing or deciding what to do on the basis of their beliefs, desires and so on

Fifty years ago the philosopher Wilfred Sellars identified two images of “man”, which he called respectively the “manifest image” and the “scientific image”; and he considered whether and how these two images could be reconciled. In this paper, I will very briefly look at the distinction drawn by Sellars and at his suggestions for reconciliation of these images. I will suggest that a broad distinction as suggested by Sellars can indeed usefully be drawn, but that the distinction can be more helpfully characterised than it was by Sellars. I will argue that there are more ways of reconciling the two images than those proposed by Sellars. And I will elaborate on what I think are the most promising lines along which the reconciliation could take place.

Max Bennett is a distinguished Australian neuroscientist, Peter Hacker an Oxford philosopher and leading authority on Wittgenstein. A book resulting from their collaboration, Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, has received high praise. According to the Blackwell website, G.H. von Wright asserts that it 'will certainly, for a long time to come, be the most important contribution to the mind-body problem that there is'; and Sir Anthony Kenny says it 'shows that the claims made on behalf of cognitive science are ill-founded'. M.R. Bennett & P.M.S. Hacker, Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience