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36The Conceptual Link From Physical to MentalOxford University Press. 2013.How are truths about physical and mental states related? Robert Kirk articulates and defends 'redescriptive physicalism'--a fresh approach to the connection between the physical and the mental, which answers the problems that mental causation has traditionally raised for other non-reductive views
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508Zombies and ConsciousnessOxford University Press UK. 2005.By definition zombies would be physically and behaviourally just like us, but not conscious. This currently very influential idea is a threat to all forms of physicalism, and has led some philosophers to give up physicalism and become dualists. It has also beguiled many physicalists, who feel forced to defend increasingly convoluted explanations of why the conceivability of zombies is compatible with their impossibility. Robert Kirk argues that the zombie idea depends on an incoherent view of th…Read more
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70Physical realizationAnalysis 69 (1): 148-156. 2009.Sydney Shoemaker thinks the ‘most revealing characterization of physicalism’ is in terms of realization . He offers a meticulously worked out account of physical realization and goes on to apply it to a range of major topics: mental causation, personal identity, emergence, three-dimensional versus four-dimensional accounts of temporal persistence, qualia. 1 He also discusses constitution by micro-entities, functional properties, causation by ‘second-order’ properties, ‘phony’ and ‘genuine’ prope…Read more
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60Mind and BodyMcgill-Queen's University Press. 2003.In Mind and Body Robert Kirk offers an introduction to the complex tangle of questions and puzzles roughly labelled the mind-body problem.
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48Raw FeelingPhilosophical Review 105 (1): 94. 1996.Kirk’s aim in this book is to bridge what he calls “the intelligibility gap,” expressed in the question, “How could complex patterns of neural firing amount to this?”. He defends a position that he describes as “broadly functionalist,” which consists of several theses. I will briefly review them.
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97Zapping the zombiesThink 5 (13): 47-58. 2006.In the philosophy of mind, zombies often make an appearance. It seems we can conceive of zombies — beings physically exactly like ourselves but lacking conscious experience. There may not actually be any zombies, of course. But the suggestion that they could exist does at least seem to make sense. Or does it? Robert Kirk investigates
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45XIII*—The Trouble with Ultra-ExternalismProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 94 293-308. 19934.Robert Kirk; XIII*—The Trouble with Ultra-Externalism, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 94, Issue 1, 1 June 1994, Pages 293–308, https://doi.org/
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90Strict implication, supervenience, and physicalismAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 74 (2): 244-57. 1996.This Article does not have an abstract
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21Representation: Readings in the Philosophy of Mental Representation (Philosophical Studies Series 40)Philosophical Books 31 (4): 237-239. 1992.
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109How physicalists can avoid reductionismSynthese 108 (2): 157-70. 1996.Kim maintains that a physicalist has only two genuine options, eliminativism and reductionism. But physicalists can reject both by using the Strict Implication thesis (SI). Discussing his arguments will help to show what useful work SI can do.(1) His discussion of anomalous monism depends on an unexamined assumption to the effect that SI is false
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421The inconceivability of zombiesPhilosophical Studies 139 (1): 73-89. 2008.If zombies were conceivable in the sense relevant to the ‘conceivability argument’ against physicalism, a certain epiphenomenalistic conception of consciousness—the ‘e-qualia story’—would also be conceivable. But the e-qualia story is not conceivable because it involves a contradiction. The non-physical ‘e-qualia’ supposedly involved could not perform cognitive processing, which would therefore have to be performed by physical processes; and these could not put anyone into ‘epistemic contact’ wi…Read more
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52"The best set of tools"? Dennett's metaphors and the mind-body problemPhilosophical Quarterly 44 (172): 335-43. 1994.
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152Physicalism and strict implicationSynthese 151 (3): 523-536. 2006.Suppose P is the conjunction of all truths statable in the austere vocabulary of an ideal physics. Then phsicalists are likely to accept that any truths not included in P are different ways of talking about the reality specified by P. This ‘redescription thesis’ can be made clearer by means of the ‘strict implication thesis’, according to which inconsistency or incoherence are involved in denying the implication from P to interesting truths not included in it, such as truths about phenomenal con…Read more
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13Physicalism (review)Philosophical Review 105 (1): 92-94. 1996.How should we conceive of physicalism? Does it have to involve more than some kind of supervenience, or must it be reductionist or even eliminativist? Does it commit you to the psychophysical identity theory? Does it entail that all events are explicable in terms of physics? And what is to count as the physical—indeed, what is to count as physics? Jeffrey Poland offers well-argued answers to several of these questions, and a solidly constructed framework in terms of which we may reasonably aim t…Read more
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63Nonreductive physicalism and strict implicationAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 79 (4): 544-552. 2001.I have argued that a strong kind of physicalism based on the strict implication thesis can consistently reject both eliminativism and reductionism (in any nontrivial sense). This piece defends that position against objections from Andrew Melnyk, who claims that either my formulation doesn't entail physicalism, or it must be interpreted in such a way that the mental is after all reducible to the physical. His alternatives depend on two interesting assumptions. I argue that both are mistaken, ther…Read more
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University of UlsterRegular Faculty
Areas of Interest
Normative Ethics |