A HYLOMORPHIC RESPONSE TO ELIMINATIVE MATERIALISM

Materialism-the view that all of reality is wholly determined by the very, very small-and Extreme Nominalism-the view that properties, kinds, and qualities do not really exist-have been the dominant view in analytic philosophy for the last hundred years or so. Both views, however, have failed to provide adequate accounts for the possibility of intentionality and of knowledge. 2 We must therefore look to alternatives. One well-tested alternative, the hylomorphism of Aristotle and the medieval scholastics, was rejected without being refuted and so deserves further examination. I will argue that Aristotelian hylomorphic provides a markedly superior account of knowledge, cognitive normativity, and intentionality.

In their recent book Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, Max Bennett and Peter Hacker attack neural materialism (NM), the view, roughly, that mental states (events, processes, etc.) are identical with neural states or material properties of neural states (events, processes, etc.). Specifically, in the penultimate chapter entitled " Reductionism, " they argue that NM is unintelligible, that " there is no sense to literally identifying neural states and configurations with psychological attributes. " This is a provocative claim indeed. If Bennett and Hacker are right, then a sizeable number of philosophers, cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, etc., subscribe to a view that is not merely false, but strictly meaningless. In this article I show that Bennett and Hacker's arguments against NM, whether construed as arguments for the meaninglessness of or the falsity of the thesis, cannot withstand scrutiny: when laid bare they are found to rest upon highly dubious assumptions that either seriously mischaracterize or underestimate the resources of the thesis.

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 1999

One of the principal tasks Dennett sets himself in Consciousness Explained is to demolish the Cartesian theatre model of phenomenal consciousness, which in its contemporary garb takes the form of Cartesian materialism: the idea that conscious experience is a process of presentation realized in the physical materials of the brain. The now standard response to Dennett is that, in focusing on Cartesian materialism, he attacks an impossibly naive account of consciousness held by no one currently working in cognitive science or the philosophy of mind. Our response is quite different. We believe that, once properly formulated, Cartesian materialism is no straw man. Rather, it is an attractive hypothesis about the relationship between the computational architecture of the brain and phenomenal consciousness, and hence one that is worthy of further exploration. Consequently, our primary aim in this paper is to defend Cartesian materialism from Dennett's assault. We do this by showing that Dennett's argument against this position is founded on an implicit assumption (about the relationship between phenomenal experience and information coding in the brain), which while valid in the context of classical cognitive science, is not forced on connectionism.

2000

One of the principal tasks Dennett sets himself in Consciousness Explained is to demolish the Cartesian theatre model of phenomenal consciousness, which in its contemporary garb takes the form of Cartesian materialism: the idea that conscious experience is a process of presentation realized in the physical materials of the brain. The now standard response to Dennett is that, in focusing on Cartesian materialism, he attacks an impossibly naive account of consciousness held by no one currently working in cognitive science or the philosophy of mind. Our response is quite different. We believe that, once properly formulated, Cartesian materialism is no straw man. Rather, it is an attractive hypothesis about the relationship between the computational architecture of the brain and phenomenal consciousness, and hence one that is worthy of further exploration. Consequently, our primary aim in this paper is to defend Cartesian materialism from Dennett’s assault. We do this by showing that De...

A critical outline is given of Rorty's early, 'eliminativist' attempt to formulate a materialist version of the mind-body identity theory that does not fall foul of the 'irreducible properties objection' (the thought that if mental states are brain states then the latter must exhibit the same properties as the former). An explanation is offered of why Rorty continued to describe himself as a materialist/physicalist despite having come to reject any version of mind-body identity.

Thomas Aquinas: Teacher of Humanity, 2015

Embodied cognition is a relatively new research program within the cognitive sciences that holds both challenges and opportunities for Thomistic hylomorphic dualism. The challenge is to show that Thomism can cohere with recent insights, and the opportunity is to use these insights to add to Thomistic thought. Embodied cognition poses a general challenge to dualistic mind/body conceptions because its focus on the importance of the body in cognitive processes lends itself to both reductive monism and emergence theory. It holds a specific challenge to Thomistic thought in its goal to replace theories of representational cognition with embodied cognition. This essay will make two arguments regarding the relation of embodied cognition and hylomorphic dualism. First, that the basic embodied paradigm found in embodied cognition is consistent with Thomistic accounts of hylomorphic body/soul unity. Second, the challenge to representational cognition does not overcome the representational paradigm, which in Thomism comes into play in cognition through the phantasms, and can contribute to the Thomistic understanding of habits. The sort of cognition through phantasms that Thomas expounds cannot be adequately explained solely through non-representational embodied cognitive processes. The extension of cognition to the body can be accommodated within Thomistic thought as part of habitual action, since habits lie primarily in the soul and secondarily in the body as the body assists with the operation of the soul. Thomistic hylomorphism can thus successfully cohere with insights from embodied cognition and learn from it for a deeper understanding of habits.

forthcoming in volume on 18th-century empiricism and the sciences, eds. AL Rey & S Bodenmann

My topic is the materialist appropriation of empiricism – as conveyed in the ‘minimal credo’ nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu (which is not just a phrase repeated from Hobbes and Locke to Diderot, but significantly, is also a medical phrase used by Harvey, Mandeville and others). That is, canonical empiricists like Locke go out of their way to state that their project to investigate and articulate the ‘logic of ideas’ is not a scientific project: “I shall not at present meddle with the Physical consideration of the Mind” (Locke 1975, I.i.2), which Kant gets exactly wrong in his reading of Locke, in the Preface to the A edition of the first Critique. Indeed, I have suggested elsewhere, contrary to a prevalent reading of Locke, that the Essay is not the extension to the study of the mind of natural-philosophical methods; that he is actually not the “underlabourer” of Newton and Boyle he claims politely to be in the Epistle to the Reader (Wolfe and Salter 2009, Wolfe 2010). Rather, Locke says quite directly, “Our Business here is not to know all things, but those which concern our Conduct” (Locke 1975, I.i.6). There is more to say here about what this implies for our understanding of empiricism (see Norton 1981 and Gaukroger 2005), but instead I shall focus on a different aspect of this episode: how a non-naturalistic claim which belongs to what we now call epistemology (a claim about the senses as the source of knowledge) becomes an ontology – materialism. That is, how an empiricist claim could shift from being about the sources of knowledge to being about the nature of reality (and/or the mind, in which case it needs, as Hartley saw and Diderot stated more overtly, an account of the relation between mental processes and the brain). (David Armstrong, for one, denied that there could be an identification between empiricism and materialism on this point [Armstrong 1968, 1978]: eighteenth-century history of science seems to prove him wrong.) Put differently, I want to examine the shift from Locke’s logic of ideas to an eighteenth-century focus on what kind of ‘world’ the senses give us (Condillac), to an assertion that there is only one substance in the universe (Diderot, giving a materialist cast to Spinozism), and that we need an account of the material substrate of mental life. This is neither a ‘scientific empiricism’ nor a linear developmental process from philosophical empiricism to natural science, but something else again: the unpredictable emergence of an ontology on empiricist grounds.

Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (Hardback), 2000

Naturalism about the mind is often taken to be equivalent to some form of physicalism: the existence of mental properties must be shown not to compromise the autonomy of the physical realm. It is argued that this leads to a choice between reductionism, eliminativism, epiphenomenalism or interactionism. The central aim of the paper is to outline an Aristotelian alternative to the physicalist conception of natural bodies. It is argued that the distinction between form and matter, and an ontology which treats individual natural bodies as real, unified things, rather than as complexes, enables us to achieve the non-reductionist, non-epiphenomenalist and non-interactionist position which eludes the post-Cartesian.