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Introduction to 'Materialism: A Historico-Philosophical Introduction'

MATERIALISM: A HISTORICO-PHILOSOPHICAL INTRODUCTION

Materialism – the philosophical doctrine that ‘Everything that exists, is material’, including human beings, who cannot then have an immortal soul – has been a heretical or clandestine teaching since the beginnings of philosophy. Its main crime is “explaining the higher level in terms of the lower level,” as Auguste Comte put it; this in turn is supposed to lead straight to immoralism: even Darwin denied that he was a materialist! At the same time, materialism is said to be the position which somehow facilitated and prepared the advent of modern science, particularly physical and biological science. What then is materialism? Is there only one, or are there many variants? I will mainly examine the first sustained materialist school in modern philosophy, in eighteenth-century French thought, chiefly represented by La Mettrie and Diderot, but also other figures notably in England. In addition, I will draw some contrasts between ‘French materialism’ and contemporary philosophy of mind, in which the dominant question is the relation between mind and brain.

Related Papers

Charles Wolfe

From Hegel to Engels to Sartre and Raymond Ruyer (Ruyer, 1933), to name only a few, materialism is viewed as a necropolis, or the metaphysics befitting such an abode. Endless numbers of authors describe matter’s crudeness, bruteness, coldness or stupidity. ‘Dead matter’, ‘brutish’, ‘mechanical, lifeless matter’ is somehow cruelly used, so the vision goes, by second-rate scientists or their propagandists to strip the living world of its uniqueness, its singularity, and of course its freedom (Crocker, 1959, Hill, 1968). It is often and wrongly presented as ‘mechanistic materialism’ – with echoes of de-humanization and the hostility to the Scientific Revolution (which knew nothing of materialism!), e.g. of Merchant’s ‘Death of Nature’ sort, never very far off. This is a powerful Christian theme (in the Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth, in the Newtonian theologian Samuel Clarke and beyond: Overhoff, 2000). Here I aim to challenge this view, building on some aspects of Israel’s concept of the Radical Enlightenment (Israel, 2001), which has been controversial but which for my purposes is a useful claim about the dissemination of a kind of home-grown Spinozism which is sometimes turned into an ontology of the life sciences, an aspect Israel does not address (for further methodological discussion see Secrétan et al., eds., 2007 and Citton, 2006). First, I try and retrieve some ‘moments’ of radical Enlightenment materialism (including La Mettrie and Diderot, but also texts from the anonymous, clandestine tradition such as L’Âme Matérielle) and show how they are in fact defined by their recognition of the existence of organic beings, something also apparent in Diderot’s entry “Spinosiste” in the Encyclopédie. Second, I show how this ‘vital materialism’ in the Enlightenment is different from both earlier and later episodes, not least due to its ‘embodied’ character. Is this non-mechanistic materialism more accessible to ethics, or more of an ethics, than is usually thought? Here, the figure of the materialist as ‘laughing philosopher’ is relevant. Third, I reflect on what this implies for our image of the Enlightenment – as the implications are quite different from a Frankfurt School and/or Foucaldian vision of Enlightenment as ‘discipline’, regimentation and order (as still promoted for instance in Mayr, 1986). Notably, the presence at the heart of the Radical Enlightenment of a ‘vital materialism’ makes a difference – without this having to be taken, conversely, in the direction of a kind of holist vitalism “markedly at odds with the universalizing discourse of Encyclopedist materialism, with its insistence on the uniformity of nature and the universality of physical laws” (Williams, 2003, p. 177); vital materialism is still materialism. Its ethics tends towards the form of hedonism, but its most radical proponents (Diderot, La Mettrie and later Sade) disagree as to what this means.

In the shift from early modern matter theory to complex forms of Enlightenment materialism – from Bacon to Toland, and the clandestine manuscript tradition – we are faced with a reconfiguration of matter. From passive or mechanistic (defined strictly in terms of size, shape and motion), it becomes dynamic and plastic, as in this statement by John Toland in the fifth of his Letters to Serena: “Activity ought to enter into the Definition of Matter, it ought likewise to express the Essence thereof” (Toland 1704, 165). In addition, matter in this process of ‘endowment’ or incorporation of properties becomes vitalized, notably with the incorporation of properties such as irritability and sensibility (Wolfe 2014). Here, it is important not to oppose vitalism and materialism, for at least two reasons: first, because the concept of matter is becoming reconfigured so it possesses irreducibly vital properties (if Toland had granted it motion and activity, and rejected Newton’s distinction between gravity and matter, further texts of the period add on additional, biomedically or embryologically derived properties); but also, second, because several distinctive eighteenth-century medical vitalists insist on the irreducible materiality of the living systems they study. The ‘life’ they are interested in is not that of a vital principle, archaeus, semina rerum, vis vita or entelechy: it is that of a living body, or organism. This interrelation or even interpenetration of a materialist project to understand Life, and a vitalist project of articulating the specific, organized materiality of living bodies shows how the purported novelty of a ‘new materialism’ which claims to discover, in the late twentieth or early twenty-first century, the fact of our embodiment, including its cultural ramifications, may need to be taken with a considerable dose of salt. I seek to reconstruct this articulation of a vital materialism, so different from the old vision of a mechanistic materialism (Kaitaro 2008, Wolfe 2012), as classically presented by Engels (Engels 1888, in Marx & Engels 1982). In addition, I emphasize that this vital materialism is not a wholesale holism: it embraces a reductionist dimension, in its medicalized approach to body:soul relations. Matter is active, but not spiritualized.

Routledge Companion to 18th Century Philosophy, ed. A.V. Garrett

The concept of self has preeminently been asserted (in its many versions) as a core component of anti-reductionist, anti-naturalistic philosophical positions, from Descartes to Husserl and beyond, with the exception of some hybrid or intermediate positions which declare rather glibly that, since we are biological entities which fully belong to the natural world, and we are conscious of ourselves as 'selves', therefore the self belongs to the natural world (this is characteristic e.g. of embodied phenomenology and enactivism). Nevertheless, from Cudworth and More’s attacks on materialism all the way through twentieth-century argument against naturalism, the gulf between selfhood and the world of Nature appears unbridgeable. In contrast, my goal in this paper is to show that early modern materialism could yield a theory of the self according to which (1) the self belongs to the world of external relations (Spinoza), such that no one fact, including supposedly private facts, is only accessible to a single person; (2) the self can be reconstructed as a sense of “organic unity” which could be a condition for biological individuality (a central text here is Diderot’s 1769 Rêve de D’Alembert); yet this should not lead us to espouse a Romantic concept of organism as foundational or even ineffable subjectivity (a dimension present in Leibniz and made explicit in German idealism); (3) what we call 'self' might simply be a dynamic process of interpretive activity undertaken by the brain. This materialist theory of the self should not neglect the nature of experience, but it should also not have to take at face value the recurring invocations of a better, deeper “first-person perspective” or “first-person science.”

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.

an essay by Pietro Omodeo on my recent book Lire le matérialisme and my response, in JIHI 10:10 (2021)

Journal of early modern studies

Silvia Manzo

This paper will address the nineteenth-century reception of Bacon as an exponent of materialism in Joseph de Maistre and Karl Marx. I will argue that Bacon's philosophy is "quasimaterialist." The materialist components of his philosophy were noticed by de Maistre and Marx, who, in addition, pointed out a Baconian materialist heritage. Their construction of Bacon's figure as the leader of a materialist lineage ascribed to his philosophy a revolutionary import that was contrary to Bacon's actual leanings. This contrast shows how different the contexts were within which materialism was conceived and valued across the centuries, and how far philosophical and scientific discourses may be transformed by their receptions, to the point that in many cases they could hardly be embraced by the authors of these discourses.

We usually portray the early modern period as one characterised by the ‘birth of subjectivity’ with Luther and Descartes as two alternate representatives of this radical break with the past, each ushering in the new era in which ‘I’ am the locus of judgements about the world. A sub-narrative under the heading ‘the mind-body problem’ recounts how Cartesian dualism, responding to the new promise of a mechanistic science of nature, “split off” the world of the soul/mind/self from the world of extended, physical substance – a split which has preoccupied the philosophy of mind up until the present day. We would like to call attention to a different constellation of texts – neither a robust ‘tradition’ nor an isolated ‘episode’, somewhere in between – which have in common their indebtedness to, and promotion of an embodied, Epicurean approach to the soul. These texts follow the evocative hint given in Lucretius’ De rerum natura (III, 327-330) that ‘the soul is to the body as scent is to incense’ (in an anonymous early modern French version); in other words they neither assert the autonomy of the soul, nor the dualism of body and soul, nor again a sheer physicalism in which ‘psychic’ or ‘intentional’ properties are reduced to the basic properties of matter. Rather, to borrow the title of one of these treatises (L’âme matérielle), they seek to articulate the concept of a material soul. By reconstructing some elements of the tradition of a corporeal, mortal and ultimately material soul, at the intersection of medicine, natural philosophy and metaphysics, including sections devoted to Malebranche and Willis, but focusing primarily on texts including the 1675 Discours anatomiques by the Epicurean physician Guillaume Lamy; the anonymous manuscript from circa 1725 entitled L’âme matérielle, which is essentially a compendium of texts from the later seventeenth century such as Malebranche and Bayle, along with excerpts from Lucretius; and materialist writings such Julien Offray de La Mettrie’s L’Homme-Machine (1748), we seek to articulate this concept of a ‘material soul’ with its implications for notions of embodiment, the nature of mental states, and selfhood.

The materialist approach to the body is often, if not always understood in ‘mechanistic’ terms, as the view in which the properties unique to organic, living embodied agents are reduced to or described in terms of properties that characterize matter as a whole, which allow of mechanistic explanation. Indeed, from Hobbes and Descartes in the 17th century to the popularity of automata such as Vaucanson’s in the 18th century, this vision of things would seem to be correct. In this paper I aim to correct this inaccurate vision of materialism. On the contrary, the materialist project on closer consideration reveals itself to be, significantly if not exclusively, (a) a body of theories specifically focused on the contribution that ‘biology’ or rather ‘natural history’ and physiology make to metaphysical debates, (b) much more intimately connected to what we now call ‘vitalism’ (a case in point is the presence of Théophile de Bordeu, a prominent Montpellier physician and theorist of vitalism, as a fictional character and spokesman of materialism, in Diderot’s novel D’Alembert’s Dream), and ultimately (c) an anti-mechanistic doctrine which focuses on the unique properties of organic beings. To establish this revised vision of materialism I examine philosophical texts such as La Mettrie’s Man a Machine and Diderot’s D’Alembert’s Dream; medical entries in the Encyclopédie by physicians such as Ménuret and Fouquet; and clandestine combinations of all such sources (Fontenelle, Gaultier and others).

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What is materialism, michael philips on the shaky foundations of the most popular philosophical theory of modern times..

Most academic philosophers these days will tell you, without hesitation, that they are materialists. Materialism asserts that everything is or can be explained in relation to matter. This would be straightforward enough if we had a clear and stable idea of matter. But do we?

Unfortunately, we don’t. There have been big changes since Descartes introduced his version of the mind/body problem in the 17th century. Descartes argued that the essence of matter is extension, or to put it another way, that what makes something material is having a shape at some particular position in space. Mass and energy don’t enter his account at all. After a number of important intermediate stages, we have arrived at a picture that takes mass and energy to be central, that makes shape unnecessary, and makes position in space problematic. Since Einstein, many physicists have regarded matter as a ‘lumpy’ form of energy. And quantum physics, with its Uncertainty Principle and probability waves, severs any necessary connection between being material and having some particular shape at some definite location. A materialist influenced by Cartesian physics offers us a very different picture of the world than a materialist influenced by quantum mechanics. The point is that the laws of physics (or, rather, our versions of them) are open to change. This means that our current concepts of matter (mass and energy) may change as well.

If physics imposed logical constraints on these concepts — if it in some way limited their meaning or content — the problem might be solved. Materialism would then be the view that nothing exists which falls outside those constraints. But there are no such constraints. Or, rather, what seem to constrain physicists at one time are abandoned in another. After Einstein, no physicist thought that matter required a position in absolute space (as the Newtonians did). After quantum mechanics, few physicists thought that matter must be deterministic (as Einstein did). Now some physicists are seriously suggesting that matter can move backwards in time (as almost no one previously believed). The laws of physics get stranger every day and the only thing certain about the future of physics is that it will be decided by physicists. The physics of the future will not be bound by the physics of the present and certainly not by its metaphysics. As always, the physics of the future will let the philosophical chips fall where they may.

Perhaps we could say that matter is whatever physicists finally decide it is. But this reduces materialism to a blank check to be filled in when physics finally closes its book. To advocate materialism is now simply to pledge allegiance to physics’ final words (if any). Materialism is no longer a metaphysical doctrine. It is now the epistemological position that the methods of physics are such that they will finally map the structure of the universe.

Thus far we’ve been trying to understand what materialism asserts by looking for a clear and stable concept of matter. Maybe this is the wrong place to look. We might get further by thinking about all those spooky, ephemeral and esoteric things that materialism denies.

What are these things? Over the years, the targets have expanded. The main target of 17th century materialism was Descartes’ mental substance. Eighteenth and 19th century materialism was more ambitious, attacking both the supernatural in general (e.g., ghosts and magic), and religion in particular (e.g., immortal souls and divine intervention). The main targets of 20th century materialism expanded still further to include consciousness. These targets are very different but they have one important thing in common. In one way or another, they all challenge the idea that science is capable of producing a complete causal account of the universe. That is, they all claim that something outside the system of nature, as represented by science, either can have causal impact on the natural world, and/or can explain what we are and what will become of us. Let’s call the former ‘interventionism’ and the latter ‘exemptionism’.

The commitment to interventionism and exemptionism are obvious in the case of supernatural and religious phenomena. Gods, ghosts, witches and magicians intervene in the physical world by summoning forces and energy unknown to physics. Neither can immortal souls can be understood in terms described by science. The case of consciousness is less obvious but also strong. Despite nearly fifty years of concerted effort, states of consciousness have resisted all attempts at physical description. The difficulty isn’t hard to understand. The sensation of warmth, the taste of coffee, the sound of my voice in my head, have no quantifiable mass or energy and no actual location in physical space (we can’t open my head and find my headache). It is easy to think that they may be caused by the brain, but it is hard to think that they are the very same thing as what causes them. But if they are not identical, if experiences (as such) have causal power, they intervene in the material world just as gods and ghosts do. If a sensation of pain, considered just as such, just as an experience, can cause me to jump and shout, the laws of physics do not by themselves explain my jumping and shouting. That is why 20th century materialism takes consciousness to be a problem — especially the idea that conscious states can be causes of anything.

Where does this leave us? We tried to understand what materialism asserts by understanding what matter is. After all was said and done, we were left with the epistemological doctrine that matter is whatever physicists finally say it is. This appeared to rob materialism of all content as a metaphysical doctrine. So instead we tried to understand it in relation to what it denies. But our efforts have taken us nearly full circle. The only common features of the processes and entities that materialists have denied is that they are interventionist or exemptionist. That is, they challenge the view that physics can provide a complete picture of the world and our place in it. So our second attempt to understand what materialism asserts leads us to nearly the same place as our first. Materialism is just the epistemological view that the methods of physics can provide us with a complete account of how things are.

Michael Philips is a professor of philosophy at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon. In his spare time he is a photographer and performance artist.

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Department of Philosophy

The waning of materialism: new essays on the mind-body problem.

Twenty-three philosophers examine the doctrine of materialism find it wanting. The case against materialism comprises arguments from conscious experience, from the unity and identity of the person, from intentionality, mental causation, and knowledge. The contributors include leaders in the fields of philosophy of mind, metaphysics, ontology, and epistemology, who respond ably to the most recent versions and defenses of materialism. The modal arguments of Kripke and Chalmers, Jackson's knowledge argument, Kim's exclusion problem, and Burge's anti-individualism all play a part in the building of a powerful cumulative case against the materialist research program. Several papers address the implications of contemporary brain and cognitive research (the psychophysics of color perception, blindsight, and the effects of commissurotomies), adding a posteriori arguments to the classical a priori critique of reductionism. All of the current versions of materialism--reductive and non-reductive, functionalist, eliminativist, and new wave materialism--come under sustained and trenchant attack. In addition, a wide variety of alternatives to the materialist conception of the person receive new and illuminating attention, including anti-materialist versions of naturalism, property dualism, Aristotelian and Thomistic hylomorphism, and non-Cartesian accounts of substance dualism.

Contemporary Materialism: Its Ontology and Epistemology

© 2022
Gustavo E. Romero 0 ,
Javier Pérez-Jara 1 ,
Lino Camprubí 2

Instituto Argentino de Radioastronomía (IAR) (CONICET; CICPBA; UNLP), Villa Elisa, Argentina

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International Business School, Beijing Foreign Studies University, Beijing, China

Departamento de lógica y filosofía de la ciencia, universidad de sevilla, sevilla, spain.

The first book covering the status of materialism in philosophy today
Discusses varieties of materialism and their connections to the sciences as well as their limitations
Facilitates creative dialogue between different materialist approaches as well as idealists

Part of the book series: Synthese Library (SYLI, volume 447)

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Table of contents (13 chapters)

Front matter, what is materialism history and concepts.

Javier Pérez-Jara, Gustavo E. Romero, Lino Camprubí

Systemic Materialism

Gustavo E. Romero

Discontinuous Materialism

Javier Pérez-Jara

Quantum Matter

Spacetime is material.

Luciano Combi

Systemic Materialism in Biology

Rafael González del Solar

Mind and Matter

Íñigo Ongay de Felipe

Materialism and the History of Science

Lino Camprubí

Materialism, Logic, and Mathematics

Carlos M. Madrid Casado

The Material Nature of Software

Miguel A. Quintanilla Fisac

Mathematics Refer to Material Entities/Mathematics Do Not Refer to Material Entities

Gustavo E. Romero, Carlos M. Madrid Casado

Emergent Materialism Implies Continuism/Emergent Materialism Does Not Imply Continuism

Íñigo Ongay, Javier Pérez-Jara

Materialism Is False/Materialism Is Not False

Graham Harman, Javier Pérez-Jara

Back Matter

Epistemology
Materialism: systemic
Materialism: discontinuous
Materialism: inclusive
Materialism: history
Material emergence
Quantum matter
Ontology of spacetime
Biological matter
Philosophy of mathematics and logic
Ontology of software
Mind and matter

About this book

This book provides an up-to-date revision of materialism’s central tenets, its main varieties, and the place of materialistic philosophy vis a vis scientific knowledge.

Materialism has been the subject of extensive and rich controversies since Robert Boyle introduced the term for the ﬁrst time in the 17th century. But what is materialism and what can it oﬀer today? The term is usually deﬁned as the worldview according to which everything real is material. Nevertheless, there is no philosophical consensus about whether the meaning of matter can be enlarged beyond the physical. As a consequence, materialism is often deﬁned in stark exclusive and reductionist terms: whatever exists is either physical or ontologically reducible to it. This conception, if consistent, mutilates reality, excluding the ontological signiﬁcance of political, economic, sociocultural, anthropological and psychological realities. Starting from a new history of materialism, the present book focuses on the central ontological and epistemological debates aroused by today’s leading materialist approaches, including some little known to an anglophone readership. The key concepts of matter, system, emergence, space and time, life, mind, and software are checked over and updated. Controversial issues such as the nature of mathematics and the place of reductionism are also discussed from different materialist approaches. As a result, materialism emerges as a powerful, indispensable scientifically-supported worldview with a surprising wealth of nuances and possibilities.

Editors and Affiliations

About the editors.

Gustavo E. Romero is Full Professor of Relativistic Astrophysics at the National University of La Plata, and Superior Researcher of the National Research Council of Argentina. A former President of the Argentine Astronomical Society, he is currently Director of the Argentine Institute for Radio Astronomy (IAR). His work focuses on black hole physics, high-energy astrophysics, cosmology, and scientific philosophy. He has published more than 400 papers on astrophysics, gravitation, the foundations of physics, philosophy, and 12 books, including Introduction to Black Hole Astrophysics (2014, with G. Vila) and Scientific Philosophy (2018), both published by Springer. He is a recipient of the Helmholtz International Award and the Houssay Prize, among other honours.

Javier Pérez-Jara is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Sociology at Beijing Foreign Studies University and a Faculty Fellow at Yale University's Center for Cultural Sociology. He has held visiting teaching and research positions across the world, including the University of Cambridge, Stanford University, Yale University, Kyoto University, Kyoto Sangyo University, the University of Seville, the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, the Taiwanese Fu Jen Catholic University, and Minzu University of China. He is the author of many publications on philosophy and social theory, and his current teaching and research explore the theoretical and practical bridges between scientiﬁc interdisciplinarity and philosophy.

Lino Camprubí is Ramón y Cajal fellow at the Department of Philosophy in the Universidad de Sevilla, Spain. He obtained his PhD in History at UCLA and has been a research scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and at the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, as well as a visiting lecturer at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Engineers and the Making of the Francoist Regime (The MIT Press, 2014) and co-editor of Technology and Globalisation: Networks of Experts in World History (Palgrave, 2018) and of the special issue Experiencing the Global Environment (in Studies in the History and Philosphy of Science, Part A, 2018). His Los ingenieros de Franco (Crítica, 2017) won the ICOHTEC 2018 Book Prize.

Bibliographic Information

Book Title : Contemporary Materialism: Its Ontology and Epistemology

Editors : Gustavo E. Romero, Javier Pérez-Jara, Lino Camprubí

Series Title : Synthese Library

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89488-7

Publisher : Springer Cham

eBook Packages : Religion and Philosophy , Philosophy and Religion (R0)

Hardcover ISBN : 978-3-030-89487-0 Published: 03 June 2022

Softcover ISBN : 978-3-030-89490-0 Published: 04 June 2023

eBook ISBN : 978-3-030-89488-7 Published: 01 June 2022

Series ISSN : 0166-6991

Series E-ISSN : 2542-8292

Edition Number : 1

Number of Pages : XIX, 378

Number of Illustrations : 1 b/w illustrations

Topics : Philosophy of Science , History of Science

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Introduction

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Published: May 2008
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Philosophy is world‐wisdom; its problem is the world. Schopenhauer (1819: 2.187)

Almost all the controversies of philosophy arise only from misunderstandings between philosophers. Descartes (1646: 3.281)

Philosophy is one of the * great sciences of reality. It has the same goal as natural science. Both seek to give true accounts, or the best accounts possible, of how things are in reality. They standardly employ very different methods. Philosophy, unlike natural science, usually works at finding good ways of characterizing how things are without engaging in much empirical or a posteriori investigation of the world. It has a vast field of exercise. Many striking and unobvious facts about the nature of reality can be established a priori, facts about the structure of self‐consciousness, for example, or the possibility of free will, or the nature of intentional action, or the viability of the view that there is a fundamental metaphysical distinction between objects and their properties.

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The New Politics of Materialism: History, Philosophy, Science

Sarah Ellenzweig and John H. Zammito (eds.), The New Politics of Materialism: History, Philosophy, Science , Routledge, 2017, 328pp., $140 (hbk), ISBN 9781138240742.

Reviewed by John Protevi, Louisiana State University

Sarah Ellenzweig and John H. Zammito have edited a challenging set of essays that can serve as a critical companion to the “new materialist” (NM) movement, the main exemplars of which here are Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, Karen Barad, Jane Bennett, Elizabeth Grosz, Luciana Parisi, Jussi Parikka, and Rosi Braidotti. Many essays also mention Gilles Deleuze as an influence on NM, and a few concentrate on him as a NM thinker (Ansell-Pearson, Lowrie, Hayles).

The Introduction sets out three critical themes by means of which the essays interrogate NM: history, ontology, and politics. The extension of the term “materialism” is at stake in all these themes: is it purely a metaphysical stance, one opposed to dualism, or does it also cover any concept of matter as active or passive, etc., with no regard to metaphysics? On the former, restrictive sense, we can say that the physicalist Hobbes is a “materialist,” but not the dualist Descartes, no matter what we might say about his view of matter. Ontologically, we might ask if “materialism” points to any notion of matter as input to production process at any scale (e.g., recruits are the matter from which soldiers are produced) or is it only matter as endpoint of reduction (i.e., “small stuff treated by sub-atomic physics”) to which other regimes are reduced? Finally, intersecting these questions are the onto-political senses of “materialism” as the primacy of the economic, the rejection of a spiritualist notion of mind or soul, and a purely instrumental view of the effects of public religion.

The question about history: has NM staked its claim to novelty for its notions of active matter and widespread non-human agency by constructing a straw man out of the “old” materialism of Early Modern Europe, one supposedly dedicated to the thesis of inert, dead, or passive matter to be studied by mechanistic physics? About ontology: are NM thinkers too profligate in their ontology by attributing agency when mere causal efficacy would suffice? Do they properly account for “scale variance” or differences in power at different levels of emergence? And about politics: can the NM thinkers ground a politics in a new materialism of widespread agency, or do they lack the grappling with a naturalized normativity that would be needed for such political interventions?

Accompanying all these questions is another that appears from time to time (in the essays of Jess Keiser, Keith Ansell-Pearson, Angela Willey, and Christian J. Emden), and is the focus of Zammito’s contribution: wouldn’t it be better to analyze concepts of nature and naturalism than those of matter and materialism?

Ellenzweig starts off by claiming that Coole and Frost’s invocation of a “Cartesian-Newtonian” concept of matter as “inert” (in the popular sense of passivity, rather than the scientific sense of persistence in motion or rest without external influence) is not supportable when subjected to a fine-grained historical analysis. For Ellenzweig, such a notion derives more from one-sided readings by anxious theological critics rather than from the eponymous thinkers, whose works were more ambiguous when it came to the active / passive distinction. Descartes’s physics, with its plenum (refusal to separate space from matter), and the way in which matter maintained motion granted it originally by God was read by idealist contemporaries as granting too much activity to matter and hence threatening the spiritual impetus for motion that they believed necessary. For Ellenzweig it was thus critics of Descartes who insisted on the dichotomy between dead matter and activating spirit; Descartes’s own concept of matter was more ambiguous or even paradoxical in combining activity and passivity. Ellenzweig also claims that Newton’s notion in the first edition of the Principia of a vis insita or “innate force” that amounts to a vis inertiae or “force of inactivity,” amounts to a similar paradox or at least ambiguity between matter as active and passive; Newton will switch to a more passive notion of matter in the second edition of the Principia , after the enthusiastic John Toland had taken up the active matter interpretation and run with it. Anxious about a theological reaction similar to the one Descartes got, Newton then took pains to deaden his notion of matter. Ellenzweig then provides a nod to Spinoza’s conatus , which can now be seen as hearkening back to the active interpretation of matter in Descartes and Newton, before ending with a reading of Lucretius as advocating a limited notion of material dynamism, since too much attribution of activity or life to matter tempts one to animism and away from scientific naturalistic explanation.

Continuing the historical theme, Charles Wolfe explores the 18 th century tradition of vital materialism, focusing on La Mettrie and Diderot. He avoids a universal dynamic matter however, which he sees as the mere counterpart of Engels’s concept of “mechanistic materialism,” a concept he finds echoed in NM. For Wolfe, most 17 th century mechanists were substance dualists or agnostics rather than materialists. Wolfe will instead draw our attention to the 18 th century vital materialists’ concern with embodiment; what La Mettrie attempts is a soul-to-living-body reduction, not a mind-to-matter reduction. For Wolfe, this avoids a notion of body as dead matter animated by a vital principle, and a notion of living or vital matter below the organizational level of bodies. In other words, for his vital materialists, it’s organisms that are alive, and not simply “matter” as the “stuff of the universe.” Wolfe finds a fine statement of organic living emergence in one of his vital materialists: “For Venel, organic molecules and organized bodies are subject to laws that are different from that of matter in motion” (46). After his sketch of vital materialism, Wolfe turns to a criticism of the focus on subjectivity in the enactivist school exemplified by Evan Thompson, which strikes him as dualistic. He concludes with a look at Barad, whom he absolves of a subjectivity focus, but whose notion of materiality doesn’t connect with the biomedical analyses and reductionism of the vital materialists, hence preserving them as resources to be recommended to the current scene.

Wilson and Zammito, however, think Ellenzweig goes too far in purging Descartes of a concept of inert matter (Ellenzweig does admit it’s ambiguous). They emphasize that Hobbes at least was a straightforward mechanistic physicalist, as admitted by both Ellenzweig and Wolfe, so that for Wilson and Zammito “new materialism” is not forging its “old materialist” opponent out of whole cloth. Hence for Zammito, the 18 th Century vital materialists were reacting against 17 th century mechanists, which include Descartes and Newton. Also, he reminds us, let’s not forget late 18 th century Laplacean eliminativist, physicalist, determinism.

While allowing NM some historical accuracy with regard to its relation to “old” materialism (qua concept of matter, rather than metaphysical position), Wilson goes on to criticize the NM writers for a tendency to “declare, rather than to argue for, an intrinsic connection between the metaphysics of self-organization, indeterminate spontaneity, and progressive moral thinking on animal welfare, global inequality, gender, and climate change” (114). If we are to argue politics, Wilson says, we should recognize that Early Modern European materialists were seen as “the party of humanity,” and had the kind of theocratic enemies of which progressive thinkers should be proud. More mildly put, the is-ought distinction and its accompanying human exceptionalism has been the defensive position of contemporary critics of materialism; to illustrate this, Wilson examines the 1998 dialogue of Jean-Pierre Changeux and Paul Ricouer. Wilson admits that full-blown normativity, truth, and so on, are resistant to full naturalization, but she approves nonetheless of Changeux’s claim that the sciences can help us with new understandings of human nature. Consider, for example, Wilson asks us, psychological findings that “reveal an underlying disposition to sympathetic identification with others as a powerful human trait” (122). This enables us to question the Kantian move to a noumenal source of the moral will:

Rather than interpreting these conflicting results regarding altruism and selfishness in Kantian terms as the operations, now of a supernatural, now of a natural, element within us respectively, the scientific approach asks us to investigate the co-existence of these two sets of ‘natural’ motivation, as elicited by different cues in the context in which they are experienced (122).

Wilson then poses a very nice question: might it be that the counterpart to NM is not “old materialism” but science-resistant humanities (125)? But not just any science: at the end of the day, Wilson implies, it’s not in the vast sweep of materialist ontology that one should look for help in the battleground of politics, but in the materialist aspect of the biological and human sciences (which themselves are sites of contestation between, for instance, many Evolutionary Psychologists and many feminists).

In an essay with historical, ontological, and normative implications, Jess Keiser proposes a plastic conception of matter as escaping the binary of dead, passive matter and lively, active matter and allowing us to instead investigate the relation of " ‘first nature’ (understood as biophysical matter) and ‘second nature’ (understood as the ‘normative’ realm of discursive practices, social codes, and cultural rituals)" (68). Focusing on the neurophysiological, Keiser seeks to establish two early modern thinkers, Descartes and David Hartley, as possessing a plastic conception of brain matter, and thus resonating with William James and Donald Hebb’s theories. Shifting then to a contemporary, Keiser presents a brisk overview of the work of Adrian Johnston on first and second nature, that is, the way in which nature produces that which ruptures it, exceeds it, and conflicts with it. Johnston’s complex and challenging work resists short summary, but suffice it to say that for Keiser, Johnston enables us to grapple with the problem of how to “somehow reconcile a seeming dualism (between matter and mind, nature and culture) with the demands of monism” (70).

Keith Ansell-Pearson tackles the ontological and the normative aspects of NM in his Deleuze-centered essay. He begins by distinguishing naturalism (as denying human exceptionalism) and materialism (for him, physicalism). He insists that a strong strand of the early Deleuze is that of a “ethically minded naturalist” (92) echoing Lucretius, Spinoza, and Nietzsche in the fight against superstition and the search for human action as norm-generating. A turn to the work of Elizabeth Grosz allows Ansell-Pearson to distinguish a politics of subjective recognition and a politics grappling with the natural and social forces generating subjects with the power to affect and be affected. After a further treatment in detail of the Deleuze-Spinoza-Lucretius nexus, Ansell-Pearson concludes that Deleuze’s naturalism does not “deprive the human animal of its ethico-normative distinctiveness” (106). Hence for Ansell-Pearson, we should read Deleuze as a naturalist, and hence against human exceptionalism, but not as “anti-humanist” if that means denying the distinctiveness of the human; humans are part of nature, but an odd part, if you will.

Lenny Moss’s essay engages both the ontological and the normative. Against what he sees as a too loose notion of agency in new materialism, Moss distinguishes agency from activity by mobilizing a Hegelian insight: naturalized agency appears with taking a position in a normative field, one with values relative to and important for an agent. Moss brings together Aristotle’s flourishing and the Kantian/Hegelian notion of autonomy in his theory of natural “detachment”: “Detachment theory holds that ‘nature explores greater levels of detachment’ and that at increasingly higher levels of detachment this increasingly amounts to moving toward the capacity for normative self-determination” (237). Moss digs deeper than the usual attribution of value to single-celled organisms (“sense-making” in the enactive school) to discuss water, proteins, and enzymes; he finds there a “leap into a new space of self-organizing possibilities and thus a gateway into the possibility of normative causation” (239). Dipping below the biological like this is a bold move by Moss, especially in an essay that goes on to criticize Deleuze for “blurring life/non-life distinctions” (242) and Barad for a scale-free move of seeing quantum effects in the human register, but his insistence on a definite theory of normative agency arguably licenses his gesture.

Angela Willey is another of the contributors who foregrounds “nature” rather than simply “matter.” Feminist theories of the relation of nature and culture posed by Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, Sherry Ortner, Gayle Rubin, Catherine MacKinnon, and Judith Butler can help us escape a stale notion of NM as humanist appropriation of already-formed scientific findings about “vital matter.” Instead, we should be focusing on the way NM “insists upon the inseparability of ontology and epistemology, being and knowing, nature and culture” (149). By doing so we open ourselves to a “capacious call for creative and reflexive reimaging of the meaning of meaning making” so that we can “reconsider the stakes of knowledge politics to include the very materialization of bodies and worlds” (149). In this way, Willey sees one of the strongest potentials of NM to be its capacity to challenge disciplinary boundaries and allow us to marshal “proliferating narrative resources for knowing our worlds, and, in turn, making them anew” (150).

The questions of reduction and emergence come most clearly into focus in Derek Woods’ essay on “scale variance.” For Woods, this notion calls into question Barad’s position that quantum effects ramify in the macrophysical register. Referring to Mariam Thalos (2013), Woods calls into question the unity of science model of reductionism to physics. Alongside his critical remarks on Barad, Woods tackles DeLanda’s reading of Deleuze in Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (DeLanda 2002). I think there are some problems with his presentation of DeLanda, in which Woods assimilates the fully differentiated virtual to relatively undifferentiated pre-individual ontogenetic fields of individuation such as the egg. Nonetheless, once we leave ontogenesis, Woods poses important questions to DeLanda about the flat ontology of formed individuals and their part-whole relations at different scales.

N. Katherine Hayles picks up on the scale theme in her essay on the “cognitive nonconscious,” which she defines in terms of sub-personal neural processes of synthesizing, filtering, inferring, and anticipating which underlie conscious experience. The “cognitive nonconscious” differentiates levels of natural agency and thus “bridge[s] the gap between quantum effects and cultural dynamics,” a bridge whose mechanisms Barad and other NM thinkers assume must exist but do not explicitly discuss (185). Hayles attributes some of the level-skipping to a Deleuzean influence on NM. However, while it may be true that some NM thinkers (Hayles discusses Parisi, Parikka, Grosz, and Braidotti) emphasize the decentering and centrifugal terms of Deleuze (“deterritorialization” and “destratification”), Hayles neglects the way in which, in A Thousand Plateaus at least, Deleuze and Guattari insist upon the way in which centripetal forces of organismic organization (aka, “reterritorialization” or “stratification”) are both necessary and in many cases salutary. “Staying stratified . . . is not the worst thing that can happen” they say (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 161). Despite these quibbles, Hayles’s essay is a formidable challenge to her post-humanist NM interlocutors to fill in some of the mechanisms subtending the forms of cognition displayed in the natural continuum in which humans fit.

A third essay discussing scale is that of Christian J. Emden, who claims that NM is “self-defeating” (271) if it thinks it can forego an account of naturalizing normativity that, instead, can be found at the intersection of philosophical naturalism and political theory. For Emden, ethical and epistemic norms are not different in kind, but both inhere in the way in which humans cannot easily escape causal networks. Furthermore, Emden adds, we are owed an account of the emergence of normativity in material conditions, and because we “already live in a normative world,” that account should show how the political and ethical worlds engage with the material (273). Emden’s positive move is to naturalize humans by an account of the “emergence of normativity, linked to an uneven ontology of different scales of what we regard as reality” (273). After a treatment of Bennett, Braidotti, and Barad that accuses them of the naturalistic fallacy in one form or another, Emden shows that too oftrn philosophical naturalism and mainstream political theory avoid the naturalistic fallacy at the cost of an unacceptable divorce of the normative and the natural. Including nonhuman actants in the context of politics is acceptable to Emden, but only on the condition that we have an “uneven ontological field” with “complex forms of differentiation” (287). Emden thus closes with a sketch of three “scales of normativity” that impose constraints on different sets of agents: the biological and physical scale shared by all organisms; the affective scale relevant for “higher order animals, including humans”; and “moral and epistemic norms” and their social institutions, which govern “responsibilities, duties, and obligations” which are “qualitatively unique to human animals” (288-289).

Ian Lowrie will try to make consistent three tenets of his theory of social reality: Durkheim’s notion that social phenomena are objective; Deleuze and Guattari’s notion that the systematic nature of social phenomena are amenable to “a logic of tracing and coding”; and the notion that social phenomena are ordered by the historical and material conditions of their development (155). Objecting to the tendency in some NM thinkers to treat society as yet another assemblage aside others, Lowrie pivots to a discussion of Durkheim’s realist ontology of social systems impinging on the psychic systems of individual inhabitants. Lowrie’s take on Durkheim however insists on keeping contact with a historical materialist perspective linking the social to material practices. This brings him to Deleuze and Guattari, whose thought on the socius or organizing system of material and semiotic “flows” is summarized quite nicely as well as usefully put into relation with contemporary anthropological studies of non-state societies. Lowrie finishes with a challenging reading of contemporary financial capital against that of Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus , whom he thinks neglect the still operative coding operations of capital in favor of its schizophrenizing powers, such that desiring machines break free of the socius qua inert recording surface. While that’s plausible as a critique of Anti-Oedipus , I’m not convinced of Lowrie’s charge that A Thousand Plateaus falls prey to “nostalgia of the pure, for unorganized desire” (172). Despite my demurral here, Lowrie’s essay provides the framework of a re-reading of Deleuze and Guattari that will ultimately be fruitful in confirming or nuancing their work.

Mogens Lærke combines historical and political foci. Joining NM in not being satisfied with social constructivism, Lærke warns that materialism may not be the best way to avoid it, insofar as Hobbes, in his radical arbitrariness of signs and contractualist politics, is something of a social constructivist. Earlier in the volume, Wilson had shown that one can’t necessarily pin a regressive politics on “old” materialism, as it was seen at the time as the “party of humanity” against theocrats. Lærke, however, will claim that no politics can be grounded in materialism, though a Spinozist naturalization of politics, grounding it in the power relations of people and sovereign, can provide some hope, as long as we recognize the need to read Spinoza as “a genuine middle ground between materialism and idealism” (262).

We’ve treated some of Zammito’s historical interventions above; let me conclude by turning to his “Concluding (Irenic) Postscript,” where he asks for shift from the “new materialism” framework to that of “complex naturalism” allowing for the emergence of human subjectivity (308-309). Zammito’s call for attention to emergent order in nature brings to mind self-organizing systems (organismic, ecological, social) as the unit of study more than entities emerging from material configurations. The recommended shift from matter to nature works, I think, because we have such an atomic (in the literal and figurative senses) view of “matter” that reductionism and individualism go together. In this picture, the aggregation of individual capacities is always a threat to reduce emergence (that is, seeing emergence as merely epistemological and hence able to be reduced in a future with more exact measurement capacities). Of course, it’s in the question of measurement where quantum uncertainty comes in and why Barad is such an important figure in this collection. Beyond that, the move to a nature in which one can discern complex systems promises to be one that would allow the full fruit of Deleuze and Guattari’s work to be appreciated, as both a member of, and an inspiration to, the new materialist movement.

DeLanda, Manuel, 2002. Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy . Continuum.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, 1987. A Thousand Plateaus . Translated by Brian Massumi. University of Minnesota Press.

Thalos, Mariam, 2013. Without Hierarchy: The Scale Freedom of the Universe . Oxford University Press.

Philosophical Materialism

[This essay is from a lecture given to the Atheist Students Association at the University of Maryland, College Park, on November 14, 1996.]

Materialism is the oldest philosophical tradition in Western civilization. Originated by a series of pre-Socratic Greek philosophers in the 6th and 5th centuries before the Christian era, it reached its full classical form in the atomism of Democritus and Epicurus in the 4th century BCE. Epicurus argued that ultimate reality consisted of invisible and indivisible bits of free-falling matter called atoms randomly colliding in the void. It was on this atomic hypothesis that the Roman poet Lucretius wrote the first masterpiece of materialist literature around 50 BCE, the 7400-line philosophical poem De Rerum Natura , or, as it’s usually translated, The Nature of Things .

Already in Lucretius’ great poem we can see one of the hallmarks that distinguishes materialism from every other comprehensive philosophy produced by European civilization before the 20th century: its insistence on direct observation of nature and on explaining everything that happens in the world in terms of the laws of nature. In other words, from the beginning materialists have always based their theory on the best scientific evidence at hand, rather than on some putative “first philosophy” waiting to be discovered through abstract philosophical reasoning.

The tendency is clear in the second masterpiece of materialist literature, Baron Paul d’Holbach’s anonymously published La Systeme de la Nature ( The System of Nature ), which appeared in France in 1770 and was promptly condemned by Louis 16th’s government. This meant that the official state hangman was authorized to ferret out every copy of the book and have it literally cut to pieces on a beheading block. D’Holbach bases his mechanical determinism on Newtonian physics and Lockeian psychology, arguing that every event in nature, including all human thought and moral action, is the result of an inexorable chain of causation rooted in the flux of atomic motion. Like Lucretius, he insists there is no reality other than matter moving in space, as Newton theorized in his laws of motion and gravity. D’Holbach also attributes all thought to images impressed on the mind’s tabula rasa , or blank slate, in wholly mechanical fashion according to these same laws of motion, as Locke had argued.

So too with the third pre-20th-century masterpiece of materialist literature, Ludwig Buechner’s 1884 edition of Kraft und Stoff , translated Force and Matter , one of the most widely read and influential German books of the 19th century. Himself trained as a scientist, Buechner, like Lucretius and d’Holbach, saturated Force and Matter with the best science of his day, including cutting-edge theories and discoveries in physics, chemistry, geology, and biology, which of course incorporated Darwin’s recently published theory of evolution .

Yet neither Lucretius, d’Holbach, nor Buechner claimed that materialist philosophy was an empirical science. They all realized it rested on assumptions that were ultimately meta scientific, though never meta physical in the Aristotelian sense. That is, the assumptions of materialism reached beyond empirical science, though never beyond physical reality . These metascientific assumptions were, first of all, that material or natural reality formed an unbroken material continuum that was eternal and infinite[ 1 ]. Nature had no beginning or end. It was an eternal, self-generating and self-sustaining material fact without any sort of barrier or limit zoning it off from a nonmaterial, non-physical, or supernatural type of being. The only foundational being there was, was material being, and some kind of natural substance underlay all visible phenomena. Lucretius called this endless fact of material being the “All,” and with d’Holbach and Buechner concluded it lacked any plan or purpose and consisted of blindly opposing forces locked in an ultimately self-canceling, cosmic equipoise or gridlock.

Of course these assumptions implied, secondly, the lack of any governance or management of the universe by any sort of transcendental intelligence. From the start, materialism has been implicitly atheistic, though its atheistic implications were not fully spelled out before d’Holbach did so in his System . Materialism has always viewed atheism merely as a necessary consequence of its premises, not as a philosophically important end in itself. Supernatural gods, spiritual deities, or immaterial moralizers could obviously not be taken seriously, or for that matter even imagined to exist, in the materialist hypothesis.

Thirdly and last, materialism has always assumed that life is wholly the product of natural processes. All human thought and feeling emerges from the nonliving, inorganic matrix of physical nature and ends at death. Lucretius believed that thoughts and feelings were literally made up of a film of very fine atoms that peeled away from objects and recombined in the brain. D’Holbach believed that thoughts and feelings were the end product of chains of physical causation rooted in atomic motion. Buechner believed that thoughts and feelings were electrical impulses somehow shaped by the human nervous system into coherent patterns. Moreover, though it’s not widely known, Lucretius and d’Holbach both theorized that organic life evolved from inorganic matter, though it was not until Buechner’s championing of Darwinian theory that materialism could justify the theory scientifically.

So materialism has always inferred its theories from the best empirical evidence at hand and has as a result always had its metascientific hypotheses scientifically confirmed, because the basic assumption of valid science has also always been that nature is governed by coherent, discoverable physical laws. Indeed, the triumphs of science in the 20th century have been so stunning that today a majority of professional philosophers, at least in the English-speaking world, identify themselves as materialists of one kind or another[ 2 ]. Because these contemporary materialists disagree on some issues, I’d like to introduce you to modern materialism this evening by explaining some of its main concepts and controversies.

When someone today describes himself or herself as a materialist, they generally mean they stand somewhere in a spectrum defined at one end as reductive materialism[ 3 ] and at the other end as eliminative materialism[ 4 ]. Reductive and eliminative materialism[ 5 ] describe the poles of the process known as intertheoretic reduction. Intertheoretic reduction[ 6 ] refers to what happens when a new scientific theory either better explains or else completely invalidates an existing scientific theory. If the new theory better explains the old one, it is said to have reduced it to a fuller, more convincing explanation. A successful reduction of this kind was the incorporation and clarification of Newton’s laws of motion in Einstein’s theory of relativity, or of Maxwell’s laws of electromagnetism in quantum theory.

The other pole of intertheoretic reduction, eliminative materialism, consists of the invalidation or complete displacement of an earlier theory by a new one. Examples of this kind of elimination are: the theory of demonic possession being eliminated by the theory of mental disease, the theory of phlogiston being eliminated by the discovery of oxygen as the cause of combustion, or creationism being eliminated by evolution as an explanation of the earth’s history.

Obviously, modern reductive and eliminative materialists are allies in believing, as pre-20th century materialists did, that science has always confirmed and will most probably always continue to confirm the basic hypotheses of materialist philosophy: that is, first, that all reality is essentially a material reality and that therefore, second, no supernatural or immaterial reality can exist; and, third, that all organic life arises from and returns to inorganic matter. Their main disagreement is over the mind-brain problem, which has been the focus of 20th century materialist debate.

The so-called mind-brain problem refers to the question of whether or not human consciousness is reducible in all respects to scientific laws. In the 1960s and 1970s those materialists who said it is, known as identity theorists (i.e. the mind is identical to the brain in all respects), were challenged by other materialists known as property dualists[ 7 ], functionalists[ 8 ], or supervenience[ 9 ] theorists. What all of these challengers had in common was a belief that in some way human consciousness was irreducible to or inexplicable in terms of natural processes[ 10 ]. They held, for example, that so-called qualia — a person’s experience of pain or of after-images of color, for example — were unique to that person and incommunicable and unknowable to any one else. They argued further that such properties of consciousness as qualia could not be translated into the terms of physical science in any meaningful way and hence represented a reality not amenable to the laws of nature.

Moreover, these challengers doubted the reducibility of one person’s consciousness to the same series of physical events as that which underlay another person’s consciousness, even though both consciousnesses might depend on, or, in current philosophical jargon, be supervenient on, physical events happening in each brain. Two different brains did not have to work exactly the same way, much less intelligences that might be silicon-based rather than biologically-based but capable of sharing thoughts or feelings with biological brains. The fact that the same mental experience might be physically realized in different ways in two different biological or non-biological brains limited the identity of mind and brain to at most a token identity[ 11 ] between a specific brain and its unique mental experience. It invalidated broad, “type” identities between mental experiences and brain processes in general.

To these objections, current eliminative and reductive materialists make the following reply. First of all, they argue that qualia , or the private feels of one’s own experience, are no more incorrigible — no more infallibly known by the individual — than one’s experience of the external world[ 12 ]. One’s body and brain is just as likely to misrepresent internal as external experience. Pain can be anaesthetized and disappear, even though the same knife continues to cut your skin. One can hallucinate colors privately as well as publicly, and in fact the brain’s moment-to-moment reconstruction of the external world is arguably just as private an experience as that of one’s qualia , yet no one claims one’s knowledge of the external world is infallible or incorrigible.

Secondly, a token identity between mental events and brain events is all that is needed for a robust and defensible mind-brain reductionism. No reductive materialist needs to claim that every brain works precisely the same way when it sees a tree, multiplies 2 times 2, or hears a Beethoven symphony. All that is needed is a convincing theory of how brains in general succeed in producing what we call consciousness from their visceral pulps and fluids. Since how the brain actually works is today one of the least-understood and most hotly-debated subjects in science, I’d like to explain briefly the most promising of these theories and in the process finish my discussion of philosophical materialism.

Neuroscience has concluded that the firing, or spiking, of cells in the brain known as neurons is the foundation of all brain functioning. Every brain has billions of these neurons, joined together in billions of networks by tiny filaments called dendrites and axons. Incoming signals, in the form of tiny electrical impulses generated by other neurons, pass down the dendrites to circuit-breaker-like gaps around the neuron known as synapses, which chemically monitor all the incoming signals and, when all the signals have reached the appropriate level, suddenly depolarize the electric differential outside and inside the neuron and cause the neuron to fire, or spike. The neuron’s fired or spiked signal is then communicated to other neurons in the network down its axons. It takes roughly a hundredth of a second for a neuron to spike and repolarize for a new spike, which means that a neuron can fire at most a hundred times a second — far too slow to complete the incredibly complex tasks the brain can do almost instantly, like recognizing someone’s face, identifying a note or two or music as part of a song or symphony, or picking up a glass from a table.

This means that the brain is confined to what is known as the “hundred-step rule,” or the fact that the maximum number of sequential steps the brain can take in one second is about a hundred. Since high-powered digital computers (computers that do all their computations sequentially, like a herd of sheep passing one by one through a gate) can do millions of steps in a second yet are notoriously poor at doing the perceptual and discriminatory tasks brains do with ease, the brain, it is theorized, is not structured like a linear computer but like a vast number of multi-dimensional computers working in parallel with each other.

In what sense is the brain a “multi-dimensional” computer? At bottom, the brain evidently works on the same on-off, binary principle that governs all linear computers: like them, its basic language is either “on” or “off” — either spike/fire or not spike/fire. When a neuron spikes or fires, it does so in mechanical, all-or-nothing fashion like a spark plug, entirely as a result of having reached just the level of electrical excitation in its synapses it needs to make it suddenly depolarize. By themselves, neurons are nothing but stupid, mechanically controlled switches.

But when they are joined in networks whose signals parallel those of billions of other networks and interact at critical points, the result is human consciousness. From a countless plethora of dumb, electrical relay switches and settings emerges the amazing phenomenon we call human consciousness and intentionality — the ability to think about things, to feel a range of emotions, and to realize one’s self as a subjective entity distinct from the rest of the world.

How can this happen? How can something oblivious of the world become conscious of the world? Though theoretical neuroscience is still in its infancy, furiously boiling with new ideas, some likely answers are emerging from the steam. One promising theory is that networks of neurons in the brain consist of subsidiary groups of neurons or even individual neurons that serve as the axes of a multi-dimensional system of coordinates that can mathematically translate one kind of value to another kind of value. For example, someone sees an apple hanging from a tree. His brain locates the apple in an abstract visual space calculated in terms of how many degrees above a distant horizon the apple is, how close to him the focusing of his eyes tells him the apple is, and so on. But in order to pick the apple, his brain must translate its abstract visual calculation of the apple’s location into an abstract motor-muscular space which will tell the muscles of his arm at which angle they will have to set themselves in order to approach the apple. What happens here, it is theorized, is that an array of neuronal networks transforms the values of his visual space into those of his motor space by means of a mathematical tensor, or formula, that translates the multi-dimensional coordinates, or vectors, of visual space into the vectors of motor space — all the angles of sight are translated into angles of arm-bending. Although it does not seem so to the person reaching for the apple, his behavior is the result of a vast number of mathematical computations in his brain, which, because of its parallel computing capacity, it is able to carry out almost instantly.

Moreover, one of the brain’s most impressive powers is that it is incredibly plastic and capable of learning, especially in infancy and childhood. It may well learn by adjusting the synaptic openings, or weightings, as they are called, of neurons individually and in networks so that the signals reaching them must produce just the right polarity from just the right dendrites to fire. This could explain, for example, why we recognize faces and other hard-to-distinguish sense experiences so quickly. Our brain has so many neuronal networks available for use — one researcher has calculated them as totaling more than 10 to the 80th power — that every single thing we learn may have its own network set at just the right synaptic weightings to be activated only by that bit of learning. This means that impulses coming into the brain from the senses are blocked from activating all but the relevant network, which almost instantly verifies that it’s granny’s face at the door. And synaptic weightings are flexible enough to readjust to changing circumstances if necessary.

The bottom line of this theoretical approach, of course, is that the mind is reducible to natural processes that can be translated into the language of math and physics. Neuronal networks are computing mechanisms that effortlessly transform multi-dimensional vectors of one kind of mathematical value into other vectors of mathematical value. Visual space being changed into motor space has been mentioned, but a great deal of work has already also been done along these lines on how we see and hear. Images from the eyes’ retinas are translated into neuronal signals and processed through countless neural networks simultaneously so quickly that it seems to the viewer she is seeing the external world on a mirror in her mind, whereas in fact her brain is recreating and re-representing everything “out there” from, as it were, scratch. So too with sound. Varying air pressures entering the ear are translated into electrical impulses which are then massively and instantly parallel-processed into noises that seem to be coming to us, direct and unmediated, from the external world. But in fact they too, like our vision, are the result of incredibly complex processes of vector transformation among multi-dimensional coordinate systems performed by the countless neural networks of our brain.

Most reductive and eliminative materialists agree that the theory of mathematical transformations just sketched is one of the most promising explanations we have of how our brains work. But the eliminativists hold that the theory is so revolutionary and so much more convincing than current theories of the brain — for instance, that the brain is basically propositional and language-oriented — that it will eventually displace and replace the linguistic theory, just as the modern theory of mental disease displaced the medieval theory of demonic possession. Against them stand the reductive materialists, I among them, who share their enthusiasm for the new theory but believe that it will successfully reduce at least portions of the old theory the way Einstein’s relativity successfully reduced Newton’s laws of motion.

A couple of further comments on reductive materialism are in order. First, what is the status of mathematical concepts like numbers, mythical figures like river nymphs, comic-book characters like Donald Duck, and the like? Non-reductionists argue they are non-material, non-physical entities that are able to influence the physical world yet are inexplicable in terms of natural laws[ 13 ]. While granting a fictional, artificially man-made status to such phenomena, reductionists, on the other hand, argue that they do physically exist. Even when they are not physically embodied, say, in maps, epic poems, or comic books, they are actively or passively realized in the brains of intelligences capable of understanding and communicating them. In other words, all such ideas must be created, remembered, and transmitted in the form of appropriately processed neuronal firings by conscious intelligences to have whatever effect they do have outside those intelligences. They are in fact always physically embodied, either in brains or in the artifacts produced as a result of conscious effort. When and if no brain ever again lights up with the concept or memory of them, they have ceased to exist in that form, though most of the atomic elements which have produced them in brains in the past and could again produce them in the future will probably persist in some form as long as our present cosmos persists. To the reductionist, human thought and feeling are most definitely material entities capable of influencing other material entities like mountains, rivers, metal ores, and electric and nuclear energy in huge and spectacular ways.

The reductionist takes a similar approach to a second objection often raised by non-reductionists: Moral concepts, they say, are not reducible to natural process and physical law. In contrast, the reductionist, convinced that all life is the product of natural selection, sees morality as fundamentally the result of evolutionary survival. Social cooperation, love of one’s mate, offspring, relatives, or tribe, repugnance to the murder of one’s own species, and the like, are the reverse side of the coin of virtues like social competition, hatred of one’s enemies, successful prosecution of war and the killing of one’s own species, and the like. They are essentially the residue of human experience on the face of the planet, as are the invention of gods, of creation myths, of apocalyptic destructions of the world, and so on. Furthermore, the reductionist equates moral discrimination with sense discrimination. That is, the ability to sense a difference between heat and cold, light and dark, acid and alkaline is indistinguishable from the ability to decide whether this thing or place or experience is better or worse than that thing, place, or experience. Physical sensing and moral judgment have from the start been simultaneous and identical processes, and even the most refined and abstruse moral reasoning is rooted in the slime and grit of earth’s natural history. Human beings are moral to the core, not because a deity has commanded them to be or because they’ve chosen to be but because natural selection has forced them to be[ 14 ].

Finally, reductive materialism applauds and identifies itself with the stunning success of the reductive program of 20th century science as a whole. It regards such triumphs of human intelligence as the establishment of the periodic table of elements and of the standard model of elementary particles as surely among humanity’s greatest achievements. The periodic table and the standard model are outstanding examples of the relentless effort of scientists in this century to uncover deeper and deeper levels of physical explanation and to reduce their findings to more and more comprehensive and fundamental theories. Equally outstanding has been the effort to unify the four basic forces of nature at greater and greater levels of generalization. Already it has been proven that two of the four forces, electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force, were unified at energy levels that are theorized to have existed until a billionth of a second after the Big Bang had passed, after which they split. At a still earlier moment, it’s theorized that the electroweak force was unified with the strong nuclear force, and at a still more primordial moment before that — the so-called Planck era, when the universe was still less than 10 to the minus 43rd seconds old and seethed with a thousand million billion billion volts of energy — the electroweak and strong nuclear forces were still unified with the fourth force, gravity. Modern scientific reductionism has succeeded in showing that the manifold phenomena of physical nature — light, heat, rocks, flora, fauna, consciousness — are probably manifestations of a single, foundational, material reality, perhaps ultimately describable in the terms of some future human science. Materialism welcomes this success as further confirmation of its 2500-year-old hypotheses.

[Richard C. Vitzthum is the author of Materialism: An Affirmative History and Definition (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1995).]

Endnotes (by Keith Augustine )

[ 1] One may object to Vitzthum’s contention that the universe is infinite in extent and has existed eternally as being contrary to modern cosmology. The consensus view of modern cosmologists is that the universe–that is, all space and time–was created fifteen to twenty billion years ago with the Big Bang. Furthermore, physicists like Stephen Hawking have proposed that we live in a finite yet unbounded universe (see Hawking’s A Brief History of Time ). It is clear from his Materialism: An Affirmative History and Definition that Vitzthum does not dispute either that the Big Bang was the creation of the space-time manifold we inhabit or that Hawking’s finite yet unbounded universe, where there simply is no ‘before’ the Big Bang (since the Big Bang created time) any more than there is a place north of the North Pole, may be true. In such a view, the Big Bang doesn’t result from a fireball spontaneously appearing from absolute nothingness, but rather it doesn’t make any sense to speak of a time before the Big Bang. The Big Bang would simply be time zero from which the universe began. Other possibilities are that the universe is just one out of an infinite number of universes that preceded it through a Big Bang–Big Crunch–Big Bang cycle (such a view introduces a hypothetical meta time that is completely independent of time as we know it), that the Big Bang emerged from a quantum fluctuation in some quantum universe completely independent of and isolated from the universe we inhabit (quantum genesis), or that our universe formed when a black hole in another universe pinched off and became causally isolated from ours. Perhaps our universe is just one of an infinite number of other universes; or perhaps our universe is the only universe that ever was, is, or will be.

[ 2] Materialism has enjoyed widespread acceptance among well-educated twentieth-century thinkers. In the Preface to Contemporary Materialism: A Reader , Paul Moser and J. D. Trout write: “Materialism, put broadly, affirms that all phenomena are physical… Materialism is now the dominant systematic ontology among philosophers and scientists, and there are currently no established alternative ontological views competing with it” (p. ix). Jaegwon Kim, a philosopher at the forefront in the philosophy of mind, agrees: “There has been a virtual consensus, one that has held for years, that the world is essentially physical, at least in the following sense: if all matter were to be removed from the world, nothing would remain–no minds, no ‘entelechies’, and no ‘vital forces’… [M]ental states and processes are to be construed as states and processes occurring in certain complex physical systems, such as biological organisms, not as states of some ghostly immaterial beings [i.e. souls]” (p. 579 of “ Mind-body problem, the ” by Jaegwon Kim in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy edited by Ted Honderich).

[ 3] Reductionist materialism holds that mental states are identical to brain states, “that facts about mentality are reducible to physical facts, i.e. facts about matter and material processes” (p. 751 of ” Reductionism, Mental ” by Jaegwon Kim in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy edited by Ted Honderich). On a reductionist view, there is nothing about consciousness that is “over and above” physical brain processes.

[ 4] Eliminative materialists contend that minds don’t exist, that our ‘vague talk’ about things like feelings, thoughts, desires, etc, needs to be eliminated from our vocabulary and replaced with precise scientific terms referring only to brain states. In his Preface to the Paperback Edition (1992) of his A Materialist Theory of the Mind , David Armstrong confesses: “One Materialist theory I have never been drawn to is the Eliminativist account of the mental… If I were to become convinced that there is an incompatibility between a materialist or physicalist view of the world and the existence of the mental, then I would reluctantly turn Dualist. Materialism is a theory, even if, as I think, a good theory. The existence of mental things–pains, beliefs, and so on–seems to me to be part of bedrock, Moorean, commonsense. Its epistemic warrant is far better than that of Materialism” (p. xix).

[ 5] In the March 25, 1996 edition of Time Magazine , an article by Robert Wright titled “ Can Machines Think? ” raised the question of how eliminativism and reductionism differ, or in Wright’s words, “Some laypeople (like me, for example) have trouble seeing the difference between… saying consciousness doesn’t exist and saying it is nothing more than the brain.” The question can be restated as follows: Since both eliminativists and reductionists believe only in physical substances and properties, how do these two points of view differ? If the mind is physical, what does reductionism have that eliminativism lacks, since both only admit the existence of the physical? The article argues that advances in artificial intelligence only amplify what Wright calls the “extraness” of consciousness, the fact that one can explain human behavior in purely physical terms without ever invoking a the idea of mind, implying that consciousness must therefore be “over and above” the brain. In this article David Chalmers proposes that one could imagine a universe exactly physically identical to the universe we know yet without consciousness as an argument in favor of property dualism .

[ 6] The reductionist’s claim that mental states are identical to physical brain states is an example of intertheoretic reduction. Several examples of intertheoretic reduction exist in science: Lightning is identical to an electrical discharge; water is identical to H2O; light is identical to electromagnetic waves; sound is identical to compression waves traveling through a medium; genes are identical to the DNA molecule, etc. These examples all share one very important feature: They are all cases where our common-sense framework has been reduced to a new conceptual framework.

[ 7] Property dualism holds that nonphysical substances or things do not exist (e.g. immaterial souls which make organisms conscious, vitalist ‘life forces’ which make organisms alive as opposed to inanimate, and deities and other ‘spiritual’ beings), but that there are nonphysical properties of physical matter. Among this class of nonphysical properties are what we call mental states, and they are produced by physical brains. For the property dualist, only physical substances exist, but these physical ‘things’ can have physical or nonphysical properties. Consciousness, it is argued, is a nonphysical property of the brain because it doesn’t have properties commonly associated with physical phenomena (e.g. mass, shape, size, density, electric charge, temperature, position in space, etc).

[ 8] Functionalists claim that mental states are functional states ( rather than brain states) which connect input (environmental stimuli), other mental states (interconnected functions), and output (behavioral responses) in a cognitive system by means of causal relations . Jaegwon Kim explains this definition as follows: “Pain, for example, is to be understood in terms of its function as a causal intermediary between sensory input (e.g. tissue damage), behaviour output (e.g. wincing), and other mental states (e.g. desire to be rid of it). Most functionalists are physicalists [materialists] in that they hold that only appropriate physical states could serve as such causal intermediaries. But they… [hold that] mental properties cannot be identified with physical-biological properties. And functionalism construes psychology as a scientific study of these functional properties [while neuroscience is distinguishably the study of neural properties] and kinds, specified in terms of their causal roles… This view of psychology… is, arguably, the received view of the nature of cognitive science” (p. 580 of “ Mind-body problem, the ” by Jaegwon Kim in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy edited by Ted Honderich).

[ 9] Jaegwon Kim defines supervenience as the idea that “once all the physical facts about your body are fixed, that fixes all the facts about your mental life… [W]hat mental properties you instantiate is wholly dependent on the features and characteristics of your bodily processes. This ‘supervenience physicalism’ may be regarded as… the weakest commitment any physicalist must make” (p. 580 of “ Mind-body problem, the ” by Jaegwon Kim in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy edited by Ted Honderich). Kim also points out that “[o]thers maintain that the mind-body relation is adequately characterized as one of ‘supervenience’–that is, in the claim that there could not be two entities, or worlds, that are exactly alike in all physical respects but differ in some mental respect… [T]he reductionist, the functionalist, and even the epiphenomenalist are all committed to mind-body supervenience” (p. 576 of “ Mind, problems of the philosophy of ” by Jaegwon Kim in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy edited by Ted Honderich). Epiphenomenalism is a type of property dualism which contends that mental states are mere nonphysical by-products or effects of neural firings that themselves have no effects on the physical world–including the brain–whatsoever.

[ 10] Naturalists (from philosophical naturalism) might object that human consciousness is totally natural –i.e. not supernatural–yet still nonphysical (lacking physical properties). In such a view, natural would be seen as being more inclusive a term than physical: e.g. a naturalist might believe that the term natural encompasses everything physical, nonphysical mental states, and perhaps nonphysical abstract objects like numbers. To a reductionist materialist, ‘natural’ is synonymous with ‘physical’.

[ 11] A materialist theory of the mind which invokes a token identity maintains that each instance of a mental type is identical to each instance of a physical type. That is to say, mental states aren’t exclusively identified with brain states, as they are in a type identity . A token identity allows the possibility that the same mental state–pain, for example–could be instantiated not only in the human brain but also in different physical systems, such as computers or radically different alien brains. The type-token identity distinction can be illustrated in other phenomena in nature: lightning is a type identity because it is a category (or type) of natural phenomena that is identical to a category of electrical discharge. A single lightning flash is a token identity: An individual flash of lightning is token identical to an individual electrical discharge. Thus, the broader type identities refer to classes of objects or events, whereas token identities refer to specific cases. A token identity is an essential characteristic of functionalism .

[ 12] Although the view that one can know his own mental states incorrigibly has been defended by nonreductionists like John Searle, this position is not a necessary assumption of all forms of nonreductive materialism. A nonreductionist might argue, for example, that he does not know his own qualia or subjective experience infallibly, but that he does know that what he has access to in introspection is nonphysical subjective experience.

[ 13] One should understand here that nonreductionists also grant a fictional status to concepts such as river nymphs and comic-book characters. A nonreductionist argument is that numbers, sets, universals, and other abstract objects exist independently of the physical world. David Armstrong has commented on this: “Suppose… that there is a transcendent realm of numbers. How scientifically-implausible to think that this realm, or members of this realm, can act on brains!” (p. 38 of “Naturalism, Materialism, and First Philosophy” by David Armstrong in Contemporary Materialism edited by Paul K. Moser and J. D. Trout).

[ 14] An evolutionary account of the origin of moral judgment in human beings does not tell us what (if anything) makes a specific action moral . On a materialist view, all codes of conduct must ultimately be man-made or socially constructed; there are no objective moral laws existing independently of sentient beings in the way that laws of nature do. Thus there are no objective criteria for determining if human actions are right or wrong. The objectivity of laws of nature is clear–our approximations to them (laws of physics) are publicly falsifiable and can be corroborated by empirical evidence. Moreover, unlike natural laws, moral laws can be violated. But if what we call moral laws are really man-made inventions, our ethical rules are arbitrary and thus individuals are not obligated to follow them. Nothing makes an action objectively moral or immoral; individual and social codes vary because ethics, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. But then there are no compelling grounds for arguing that Aztec human sacrifice, Nazi or Serbian genocide, or infanticide is really wrong. Core ethical rules are no doubt determined by intersubjective consensus across cultures–for example, incest and murder are universally prohibited. But such consensus does not demonstrate the objectivity of ethics; it merely demonstrates that human beings or societies are largely ‘built’ the same way and react similarly to certain types of behavior. Suppose we have inherited an aversion to committing murder. That such a genetic disposition would be widespread makes evolutionary sense. A known murderer’s neighbors will fear that the murderer might kill them. Out of mutual self-interest they would be wise to band together and eliminate the murderer before he could eliminate them. Since murderers would tend to be eliminated before they could reproduce, individuals with a genetic inclination to commit murder would tend to dwindle. But this is merely an accident of natural selection, and trying to base morality on the fact that adhering to certain ethical norms will make you more “fit” to stay alive and reproduce is insufficient. The origin of behavior is irrelevant to whether a behavior is right or wrong; what makes an individual evolutionarily ‘fit’ (e.g. infidelity) is not necessarily moral. There will no doubt still be some individuals who are genetically inclined to commit murder; but we do not conclude that the are exempt from moral prohibitions on murder because of this. Furthermore, the fitness of certain evolutionary traits changes when the environment changes. Would murder suddenly become morally acceptable–even obligatory–if it provided us a selective advantage? On a materialist account, the only foundations for behavioral codes are preserving self-interest and satisfying one’s conscience–there are no additional ‘moral facts’ which motivate behavior.

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Physicalism

Physicalism is, in slogan form, the thesis that everything is physical. The thesis is usually intended as a metaphysical thesis, parallel to the thesis attributed to the ancient Greek philosopher Thales, that everything is water, or the idealism of the 18th Century philosopher Berkeley, that everything is mental. The general idea is that the nature of the actual world (i.e. the universe and everything in it) conforms to a certain condition, the condition of being physical. Of course, physicalists don’t deny that the world might contain many items that at first glance don’t seem physical — items of a biological, or psychological, or moral, or social, or mathematical nature. But they insist nevertheless that at the end of the day such items are physical, or at least bear an important relation to the physical.

1.1 Terminology

1.2 historical issues, 1.3 a framework for discussion, 2.1 supervenience and necessity physicalism.

2.2.1 Token Physicalism
2.2.1 Type Physicalism

2.3.1 Second-order Physicalism

2.3.2 Subset Physicalism

2.4 Grounding Physicalism

2.5 fundamentality physicalism.

3.1 Reductive and Non-Reductive Physicalism

3.2 A Priori and A Posteriori Physicalism

4.1 the theory and object conceptions of the physical, 4.2 circularity, 4.3 hempel’s dilemma.

4.4 The Panpsychism Problem
4.5 The Via Negativa

4.6 Structuralist Approaches

4.7 physicalism as an attitude, 5.1 qualia and consciousness, 5.2 meaning and intentionality, 5.3 numbers and abstracta, 5.4 methodological issues, 6. the case for physicalism, other internet resources, related entries, 1. preliminaries.

Physicalism is sometimes known as ‘materialism’. Indeed, on one strand to contemporary usage, the terms ‘physicalism’ and ‘materialism’ are interchangeable. But the two terms have very different histories. The word ‘materialism’ appears in English towards the end of the 17th century, but the word ‘physicalism’ was introduced into philosophy only in the 1930s by Otto Neurath (1931) and Rudolf Carnap (1959/1932), both of whom were key members of the Vienna Circle, a group of philosophers, scientists and mathematicians active in Vienna prior to World War II. While it is not clear that Neurath and Carnap understood physicalism in the same way, one thesis often attributed to them (e.g. in Hempel 1949) is the linguistic thesis that every statement is synonymous with (i.e. is equivalent in meaning with) some physical statement. But materialism as traditionally construed is not a linguistic thesis at all; rather it is a metaphysical thesis in the sense that it tells us about the nature of the world. At least for the positivists, therefore, there was a clear reason for distinguishing physicalism (a linguistic thesis) from materialism (a metaphysical thesis). Moreover, this reason was compounded by the fact that, according to official positivist doctrine, metaphysics is nonsense. Since the 1930s, however, the positivist philosophy that under-girded this distinction has for the most part been rejected—for example, physicalism is not a linguistic thesis for contemporary philosophers—and this is one reason why the words ‘materialism’ and ‘physicalism’ are now often interpreted as interchangeable.

Some philosophers suggest that ‘physicalism’ is distinct from ‘materialism’ for a reason quite unrelated to the one emphasized by Neurath and Carnap. As the name suggests, materialists historically held that everything was matter — where matter was conceived as “an inert, senseless substance, in which extension, figure, and motion do actually subsist” (Berkeley, Principles of Human Knowledge, par. 9). But physics itself has shown that not everything is matter in this sense; for example, forces such as gravity are physical but it is not clear that they are material in the traditional sense (Lange 1865, Dijksterhuis 1961, Yolton 1983). So it is tempting to use ‘physicalism’ to distance oneself from what seems a historically important but no longer scientifically relevant thesis of materialism, and related to this, to emphasize a connection to physics and the physical sciences. However, while physicalism is certainly unusual among metaphysical doctrines in being associated with a commitment both to the sciences and to a particular branch of science, namely physics, it is not clear that this is a good reason for calling it ‘physicalism’ rather than ‘materialism.’ For one thing, many contemporary physicalists do in fact use the word ‘materialism’ to describe their doctrine (e.g. Smart 1963). Moreover, while ‘physicalism’ is no doubt related to ‘physics’ it is also related to ‘physical object’ and this in turn is very closely connected with ‘material object’, and via that, with ‘matter.’

In this entry, I will adopt the policy of using both terms interchangeably, though I will typically refer to the thesis we will discuss as ‘physicalism’. It is important to note, though, that physicalism (aka materialism) is often associated with a number of further doctrines distinct from the one we will focus on; for a discussion of some of these, see the supplement on:

Physicalism and Associated Doctrines

Setting aside what it is properly called, the thesis of physicalism is often described as an extremely old, even ancient, thesis. The first sentence of Friedrich Lange ’s The History of Materialism , which was the standard work on the subject in the 19th century is: “Materialism is as old as philosophy, but not older” (1925, 3). What Lange has in mind is the pre-Socratic philosopher Democritus , who is usually thought of defending a kind of physicalism or materialism when he said or allegedly said, “all is atoms and the void.” This view casts a long shadow over subsequent formulations of physicalism. A position like that of Democritus was revived in the early modern period just prior to Newton, by philosophers and scientists such as Hobbes or Gassendi . In the eighteenth century, French philosophers like D’Holbach and La Mettrie thought of themselves as materialists (and would be now classified as physicalists) somewhat in the same way since they held that each human being is a complicated sort of machine. In the nineteenth century, while Karl Marx ’s ‘dialectical materialism’ is something different from the metaphysical thesis we will focus on, he nevertheless developed his social philosophy against the background of what we would call physicalism; in fact, Marx’s doctoral dissertation was a comparison of Democritus and Epicurus . And in the twentieth century, analytic philosophers such as Smart and Lewis self-consciously defended their views in a way that acknowledges, as Lewis put it, “our intellectual ancestors” (1994, 293).

However, while there is certainly something in common here, the underlying historical issues are extremely complicated, since they involve subtle questions of scientific and philosophical change. We won’t discuss them in detail in this entry. It is worth emphasis, though, that we should be careful in lumping different people in different epochs together. The precise views they held are often different from one another. As we noted above, and as Lange himself emphasises, Newton did not think that, even in the physical world, all is atoms and the void, since for him there are also forces such as gravity. It follows that any post-Newtonian philosophers who think of themselves as physicalists must have a different thesis in mind from Democritus.

In approaching the topic of physicalism, one may distinguish what I will call the interpretation question from the truth question . The interpretation question asks:

What does it mean to say that everything is physical?

The truth question asks:

Is it true to say that everything is physical?

There is obviously a sense in which the second question presupposes an answer to the first — you need to know what a statement means before you can ask whether it’s true — and so we will begin with the interpretation question.

The interpretation question itself divides into two sub-questions, which I will call the condition question and the completeness question . The condition question asks:

What does it mean to for something to be physical ?

The condition question holds fixed the issue of what it means for everything to satisfy some condition, or to bear a relation to something that satisfies that condition, and asks instead what is the condition, being physical , that everything satisfies or bears a relation to. Notice that a parallel question could be asked of Thales: what is the condition, being water , that according to Thales, everything satisfies?

The completeness question asks:

What relation or relations must obtain between everything and the physical if physicalism is to be true?

In other words, the completeness question holds fixed the issue of what it means for something to be physical, and asks instead what relation or relations obtain between everything and the physical if physicalism is true; in what sense, in other words, is physicalism a complete thesis, a thesis that applies to everything whatsoever. Notice again that a parallel question could be asked of Thales: assuming we know what condition you have to satisfy to be water, what does it mean to say that everything satisfies that condition?

Once again there is a sense in which the second question here presupposes an answer to the first — you need to know what it is for something to be physical in order to assess different proposals about the relation everything bears to the physical. Nevertheless, it is easier from a presentational point of view to discuss the completeness question first, leaving our answer to the condition question for the moment impressionistic, and that will be our procedure.

2. The Completeness Question

How should we approach the completeness question? In the history of attempts to answer this question, people have tended to adopt one of two strategies. One appeals to (what philosophers call) modal notions, where a modal notion here means a notion connected to possibility and necessity, to what might or must be the case. Another appeals to non-modal notions, that is, notions distinct from ideas about possibility and necessity. There is a wide variety of such notions, though perhaps the most obvious one is identity in the logical sense, according to which if x is identical to y, then every property of x is a property of y. This notion has consequences for possibility and necessity, but it is not itself modal. Other non-modal notions include realization , or grounding , which we will consider below.

In practice, most formulations of physicalism include both modal and non-modal elements at some level. Proponents of modal formulations often end up appealing to something non-modal in the course of elaborating and defending their view. Non-modal versions are usually interpreted so that they have the same modal consequences as modal versions. Nevertheless, the issue of whether to answer the completeness question by appealing to modal or non-modal ideas has proved as controversial as any in the literature on what physicalism is (for overviews, see Rabin 2020, Elpidorou 2018a, Tiehen 2018). In what follows, we will first look at an influential modal answer to the completeness question, which appeals to supervenience , and then turn to several non-modal alternatives.

The idea of supervenience has its origins in meta-ethics but was imported into philosophy of mind mainly by Davidson 1970; for a survey, see supervenience . For our purposes, the general idea might be introduced via an example due to David Lewis of a dot-matrix picture:

A dot-matrix picture has global properties — it is symmetrical, it is cluttered, and whatnot — and yet all there is to the picture is dots and non-dots at each point of the matrix. The global properties are nothing but patterns in the dots. They supervene: no two pictures could differ in their global properties without differing, somewhere, in whether there is or there isn’t a dot (1986, p. 14).

This gives us one way to think about the basic idea of physicalism. The basic idea is that the physical features of the world are like the dots in the picture, and the psychological or biological or social features of the world are like the global properties of the picture. Just as the global features of the picture supervene on the dots, so too everything supervenes on the physical, if physicalism is true.

It is desirable to have a more explicit statement of physicalism, and here too Lewis’s example gives us direction. He says that, in the case of the picture, supervenience means that “no two pictures can be identical in the arrangement of dots but different in their global properties”. Similarly, one might say that, in the case of physicalism, no two possible worlds can be identical in their physical properties but differ, somewhere, in their mental, social or biological properties. To weaken this slightly, we might say that if physicalism is the case at our world – that is, is true of our universe and everything in it – then no other world can be physically identical to our world without being identical to it in all respects. This suggests the following general account of what physicalism is (in the following formulation and in subsequent ones, we use “iff” to abbreviate “if and only if”):

If physicalism is construed along the lines suggested in (1), we have an answer to the completeness question. The completeness question asks: what relation does everything bear to the physical if physicalism is true? According to (1), the answer is that everything must supervene on the physical; or, to put it more technically, there is no possible world which is identical to our world in every physical respect but which is not identical to it in a biological or social or psychological respect. It will be useful to have a name for physicalism so defined, so let us call it supervenience physicalism .

Supervenience offers one modal formulation of physicalism, but it is worth taking note of a second modal formulation too. Suppose we say that a property G is necessitated by a property F just in case, in all possible worlds, if something is F then it is G ; in this sense, for example, being red necessitates being colored, and being square necessitates having some extension in space. This suggests a formulation of physicalism along the following lines:

What is the relation between physicalism so defined, which we might call necessity physicalism , and supervenience physicalism ? At least if necessitation is understood as a sort of entailment, then these are not equivalent; for discussion of this point, see supervenience . However, (1) and (2) are clearly similar, in particular they are modal formulations of physicalism. In what follows we will concentrate on supervenience physicalism, but what we will say will apply also to necessity physicalism.

Supervenience physicalism was for many years the dominant version of physicalism; perhaps because of this, many different problems have been raised for it; some of these problems are discussed in the supplement on:

Supervenience Physicalism: Further Issues

But the most influential objection to supervenience physicalism (and to modal formulations generally) is what might be called the sufficiency problem . This alleges that, while (1) articulates a necessary condition for physicalism it does not provide a sufficient condition. The underlying rationale is that, intuitively one thing can supervene on another and yet be of a completely different nature. To use Fine’s famous (1994) example, consider the difference between Socrates and his singleton set, the set that contains only Socrates as a member. The facts about the set supervene on the facts about Socrates; any world that is like ours in respect of the existence of Socrates is like ours in respect of the existence of his singleton set. And yet the set is quite different from Socrates. This in turn raises the possibility that something might be of a completely different nature from the physical and nevertheless supervene on it.

One may bring out this objection further by considering positions in philosophy which entail supervenience and yet deny physicalism. A good example is necessitation dualism , which is an approach that weaves together elements of both physicalism and its traditional rival, dualism. On the one hand, the necessitation dualist wants to say that mental facts and physical facts are metaphysically distinct—just as a standard dualist does. On the other hand, the necessitation dualist wants to agree with the physicalist that mental facts are necessitated by, and supervene on, the physical facts. If this sort of position is coherent, (1) does not articulate a sufficient condition for physicalism. For if necessitation dualism is true, any physical duplicate of the actual world is a duplicate simpliciter . And yet, if dualism of any sort is true, including necessitation dualism, physicalism is false.

How to respond to the sufficiency problem? Some respond by denying the coherence of the position that causes the problem. Necessitation dualism as we have just described it violates (what is known as) Hume’s dictum that there are no necessary connections between distinct existences. According to necessitation dualism, mental and physical properties are metaphysically distinct, and yet are necessarily connected. However, Hume’s dictum is itself a matter of controversy (see Jackson 1993, Stalnaker 1996, Stoljar 2010, and Wilson 2005, 2010). Another approach appeals to a priori physicalism which will examine below (see Jackson 2006). But by far the most common response has been to concede that the sufficiency problem shows that supervenience formulation of physicalism is too weak (e.g. Kim 1998), and to look for an alternative.

2.2 Identity Physicalism

Suppose then that (1) provides a necessary condition for physicalism but not a sufficient condition; how might we strengthen it to make it more plausible? The most obvious thing to do is to appeal to identity. Indeed, in the history of attempts to answer the completeness question, the appeal to identity predates the appeal to supervenience. Nevertheless, this version of physicalism— identity physicalism as we may call it—runs into serious problems.

In fact there are two different versions of identity physicalism, type physicalism and token physicalism . Token physicalism is the view that every particular thing in the world is a physical particular. So the token physicalist says that physicalism should be formulated in the following way:

But (3) offers neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for physicalism. To see that it is not sufficient, consider the variety of dualism usually called property dualism . Property dualism says that (a) every particular is a physical particular but (b) some particulars (e.g. human beings) have psychological properties wholly distinct from any physical properties. The contrast here is with substance dualism . The substance dualist agrees with the property dualist that some particulars have psychological properties wholly distinct from any physical properties, but they will add that such particulars are themselves non-physical.

Token physicalism – physicalism according to (3) – is certainly inconsistent with substance dualism. Substance dualism entails that some particulars are non-physical, token physicalism denies it. But token physicalism is compatible with property dualism; indeed property dualism entails that token physicalism is true. On the other hand, property dualism is usually understood as being inconsistent with physicalism in any form. Hence token physicalism is not sufficient for physicalism.

The problem that property dualism presents for token physicalism is noteworthy in several respects. For one thing, it is similar to the problem necessitarian dualism presents for supervenience physicalism, though necessitarian dualism can itself be developed either as a sort of property dualism or as a sort of substance dualism. For another thing, it brings out the important role properties rather than particulars play in the contemporary discussion of physicalism. If one ignores properties, the dispute between physicalism and dualism may easily be understood as the dispute between token physicalism and substance dualism; but once properties are factored in, things look very different.

Not only does (3) not provide a sufficient condition for physicalism, it does not provide a necessary condition either. Consider a social or legal object such as the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. According to (3), if physicalism is true, there must be some physical object or particular for the court to be identical with. But intuitively, there is no such physical object. Nevertheless, physicalism might still be true. If so, token physicalism is not necessary for physicalism. (Notice here that there is no parallel problem for supervenience physicalism. It entails that the facts about court supervene on physical facts but not that there is any physical object that the court is identical with. For the classic presentation of this point, see Haugeland 1983).

Turning now to type physicalism, this holds that every property (or at least every property instantiated in the actual world) is identical with some physical property. So the type physicalist supposes that physicalism should be formulated in the following way:

Unlike both token physicalism and supervenience physicalism, type physicalism is sufficient for physicalism: if every property instantiated in the actual world is identical with some physical property, then dualism will be false in any of the versions we have considered

However, while (4) provides a sufficient condition for physicalism, it does not provide a necessary condition. Consider again the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. If type physicalism is true, then every property that the court has (for example, having a legal power over lower courts) must be identical with some physical property. But on the face of it, that is unlikely. Nevertheless, physicalism might still be true. If so, type physicalism is not necessary for physicalism. (Notice again that there is no parallel problem for supervenience physicalism. It entails that the property having a legal power over lower courts supervenes on physical properties, not that it is identical with a physical property.)

Another way to bring out the sense in which type physicalism is too strong for physicalism is to focus on the possibility of multiple realizability , as philosophers call it. This is roughly the idea that physically very different creatures can nevertheless share psychological properties; see multiple realizability . A major benefit of supervenience physicalism is that, as usually understood, it is consistent with this possibility. But type physicalism is often thought of as not consistent with it, at least if we focus on instantiated psychological properties. If so, type physicalism may be false while supervenience physicalism may be true.

We have been assuming that supervenience physicalism is distinct from type physicalism. But it is worth noting that, there are ways to understand supervenience according to which this difference is less obvious. The reason for this has to do with questions concerning the logical (or Boolean) closure of the set of physical properties — if P , Q and R are physical properties, which of the various logical permutations of P , Q and R are likewise physical properties? On some assumptions concerning closure and supervenience, supervenience physicalism (construed as a necessary truth) entails type physicalism; on other assumptions, it doesn’t. But the problem is that the assumptions themselves are difficult to interpret and evaluate, and so the issue remains a difficult one. It is not necessary for our purposes to settle the question concerning closure here. (For further discussion of these issues see Kim 1993, Bacon 1990, Van Cleve 1990, Stalnaker 1996.)

2.3 Realization Physicalism

Our discussion of the completeness question has so far yielded negative results: supervenience physicalism is too weak, type physicalism is too strong, and token physicalism is both too weak and too strong. What seems to be required is an approach that, like the modal formulations we started with, entails the supervenience of everything on the physical, but unlike them avoids the sufficiency problem. One prominent idea along these lines appeals to a relation between properties distinct from both identity and supervenience, usually called realization . As in the case of identity physicalism, there are two different versions of realization physicalism as we may call it; we will consider them in turn.

The first realization definition has been explored and defended in most detail by Andrew Melnyk (see Melnyk 2003 and the references therein). For Melnyk, a property F realizes a property G if and only if (a) G is identical to a second-order property, the property of having some property that has a certain causal or theoretical role; and (b) F is the property that plays the causal or theoretical role in question. We may call this notion ‘second-order realization’ to distinguish it from a different notion of realization to be considered in a moment. This suggests:

Suppose we call physicalism so defined second-order realization physicalism or second-order physicalism for short; what is the relation between it and supervenience physicalism? Supervenience physicalism does not entail second-order physicalism since the fact that a property F supervenes on a property G does not entail that F is a second-order property.

Does second-order physicalism entail supervenience physicalism? The usual assumption is that it does, but, as Melnyk himself notes at one point (2003, p. 23), there is an issue here having to do with the definition of a second-order property, the property of having some property that has a certain causal or theoretical role. What are the properties involved in spelling out these causal or theoretical roles? If physicalism is true at all, it must be true of these properties as much as any other properties. But then by second-order physicalism, these properties themselves will be either physical or realized by physical properties. If the first option is taken, the second-order physicalist will stand revealed as holding a version of identity physicalism (one level up, as it were), and thus will face the multiple realization objection. If the second option is taken, the second-order physicalist looks committed to an infinite regress, since now we have further properties realized by physical properties and, correlatively, further causal or theoretical roles. To avoid the regress, the second-order physicalist might say that these properties supervene on or are identical to physical properties. But now it hard to see the difference between the realization physicalist and these other doctrines. (For some further discussion of this issue, see Elpidorou 2018a.)

The second realization definition of physicalism has been developed by Wilson 1999, 2011 and Shoemaker 2007. On this view, a property F realizes a property G if and only if (a) G has some set of causal powers or features S ; (b) F has some set of causal powers or features S* ; and (c) S is a subset of S* . (We may call this notion ‘subset realization’ to distinguish it from the different notion of realization just considered.) This suggests:

Suppose we call physicalism so defined subset realization physicalism or subset physicalism for short; what is the relation between it and supervenience physicalism? Supervenience physicalism does not entail subset physicalism since the fact that a property G supervenes on a property F does not entail anything about their causal powers. For example, if causation is a macro-phenomenon as some philosophers have held it to be, it may be that F has no causal powers at all, while G does.

Does subset realization physicalism entail supervenience physicalism? Well, there is a problem here too having to do with (what is sometimes called) a causal theory of properties, that is, a theory according to which the causal powers or features that a property bestows on the things that have it are exhaustive of the nature of that property. Suppose that a causal theory is false. Then, in principle, one property might subset realize another and yet be quite different from it in nature. And this in turn suggests that subset physicalism does not by itself entail supervenience physicalism. Of course, one might respond by asserting that the causal theory is true. But to do that is controversial; indeed, even those philosophers who hold both a subset model and a causal theory want to separate out these two commitments (e.g. Shoemaker 2007; see also Wilson 2011). Alternatively, one might respond by denying that physicalism entails supervenience in the first place, by saying that “lack of … supervenience is compatible with physicalism” (Wilson 2014, 255, see also Wilson 2011). But this too is controversial; as we saw above, most philosophers assume that supervenience is necessary for physicalism. Hence the status of the subset approach remains controversial.

An influential recent approach to the completeness question that is different from any we have considered so far focuses on the idea of grounding, something that has been extensively discussed recently in the metaphysics literature (see, e.g., Fine 2001, Schaffer 2009, Rosen 2010, Wilson 2014, Bennett 2017 and the essays in Correia and Schneider 2012). Intuitively, a property F is grounded in a property G just in case F holds in virtue of G , or the instantiation of G explains the instantiation of F . This suggests:

Suppose we call physicalism so defined grounding physicalism ; what is the relation between it and supervenience physicalism? Supervenience physicalism does not entail grounding physicalism, since the fact that a property F supervenes on a property G does not entail that F is grounded by G .

Does grounding physicalism entail supervenience physicalism? Some philosophers suppose it does (e.g. Rosen 2010) and so for them grounding physicalism would entail supervenience physicalism. But others suppose it does not (e.g. Schaffer 2009) which raises the question of whether a thesis such as (7) by itself provides an account of physicalism, or whether some compromise between it and (1) would have to be reached.

Even if grounding physicalism entails supervenience physicalism, there are further issues about it that have been raised. One problem concerns abstract objects, i.e., entities apparently not located in space and time, such as numbers, properties and relations, or propositions. However, since this problem seems a general problem for all kinds of physicalism, we will discuss it below.

A second problem for grounding physicalism is that the notion of grounding is itself controversial in some quarters. Wilson (2014), for example, points out that grounding per se is similar to supervenience in that it leaves open many of the questions philosophers of mind are interested in, viz., whether the mental exists, whether it is reduced to the physical, and whether it is causally efficacious. She concludes that grounding “cannot do the work” that its proponents want it to do (2014, 542). One might respond that this depends on what work grounding physicalism is supposed to do; indeed, it may be a feature rather than a bug that grounding leaves these things open. But whatever is the truth about this, there is no doubt that the precise contours of the grounding relation are yet to be made out. Hence, the proper assessment of grounding physicalism is at this point a bit unclear (for some further discussion, see, e.g., Berker 2018 and Schaffer 2016).

The final answer to the completeness question we will consider focuses on the idea of a fundamental property, which is a notion discussed extensively in David Lewis’s metaphysics, and the literature that follows on from it. On Lewis’s view, a fundamental or perfectly natural property is a special kind of property, one that is, as he says, “not at all disjunctive, or determinable, or negative. They render their instances perfectly similar in some respect. They are intrinsic; and all other intrinsic properties supervene on them” (2009, 204). This suggests the following formulation of physicalism:

Suppose we call physicalism so defined fundamentality physicalism ; what is the relation between it and supervenience physicalism? Supervenience physicalism does not entail fundamentality physicalism, since the fact that a property F supervenes on a property G does not entail that either property is fundamental. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to think that fundamentality physicalism entails supervenience physicalism, especially in the light of Lewis’s comment about supervenience just quoted.

How plausible is (8) as an account of physicalism? One objection concerns the notion of a fundamental property quite generally. For at least some philosophers, Lewis’s ideas about fundamentality are, as he himself puts it, a throwback to medieval metaphysics (Lewis 1983). Another objection is that physicalism on this view seems empirically speculative, since it seems to entail that there is a fundamental level in the world; if so, definitions in terms of grounding may do better (Schaffer 2003). Whatever is the truth about these objections, it is an interesting historical fact that Lewis defines physicalism twice-over. He defines it as supervenience physicalism (as we saw above) and also as fundamentality physicalism. There is no suggestion in his work that these are in any sense in tension (for further discussion, see Stoljar 2015). This underscores the point made earlier, namely, that in practice all versions of physicalism, and hence any answer to the completeness question, will include modal and non-modal elements.

3. Varieties of Physicalism

We have been considering various answers to the completeness question, namely, what it means to say that everything is physical. At this point, it is worth considering two issues associated with completeness that have not so far been brought to the surface, and which suggest different varieties of physicalism. The first is whether physicalism involves a kind of reductionism; the second is whether physicalism involves what philosophers call a priori entailment or deducibility.

3.1 Reductive and Non-reductive Physicalism

The main problem in assessing whether a physicalist must be a reductionist is that there are various non-equivalent versions of reductionism.

One idea is tied to the notion of conceptual or reductive analysis. When philosophers attempt to provide an analysis of some concept or notion, they often try to provide a reductive analysis of the notion in question, i.e. to analyze it in other terms. Applied to the philosophy of mind, this notion might be thought of entailing the idea that every mental concept or predicate is analyzed in terms of a physical concept or predicate. A formulation of this idea is (9):

While one occasionally finds in the literature the suggestion that physicalists are committed to (9) in fact, no physicalist since before Smart (1959) has (unqualifiedly) held anything like it. Adapting Ryle (1949), Smart supposed that in addition to physical expressions there is a class of expressions which are topic-neutral, i.e. expressions which were neither mental nor physical but when conjoined with any theory would greatly increase the expressive power of the theory. Smart suggested that one might analyze mental expressions in topic-neutral (but not physical) terms, which in effect means that a physicalist could reject (9).

A different notion of reduction derives from the attempts of philosophers of science to explain intertheoretic reduction. The classic formulation of this notion was given by Ernest Nagel (1961). Nagel said that one theory was reduced to another if you could logically derive the first from the second together with what he called bridge laws, i.e., laws connecting the predicates of the reduced theory (the theory to be reduced) with the predicates of the reducing theory (the theory to which one is reducing). Here is a formulation of this idea, where the theories in question are psychology and neuroscience:

Once again, however, there is no reason at all why physicalists need to accept that reductionism is true in the sense of (10). We noted earlier that the possibility of multiple realization renders type physicalism implausible; something similar is true in this case. Many different neurobiological processes (whether in our own species or a different one) could underlie the same psychological process — indeed, given science fiction, even non-neurobiological processes might underlie the same psychological process. If so, (10) seems to be false. (For a classic presentation of multiple realization and reductionism, see Fodor 1974, but for an alternative view, see Kim 1993).

A third notion of reductionism is more metaphysical in focus than either the conceptual or theoretical ideas reviewed so far. According to this notion, reductionism means that the properties expressed by the predicates of (say) a psychological theory are identical to the properties expressed by the predicates of (say) a neurobiological theory — in other words, this version of reductionism is in essence a version of type physicalism or the identity theory. As we have already seen, however, since a physicalism need not be a type physicalism, it need not be reductionism in this metaphysical sense either

A final notion of reductionism that needs to be distinguished from the previous three concerns whether mental statements follow a priori from non-mental statements. Here is a statement of this sort of idea,

What (11) says is that if reductionism is true, a priori knowledge alone, plus knowledge of the physical or non-mental truths will allow one to know the mental truths. This question is usually debated in the context of another, viz., the question of a posteriori and a priori physicalism. So we now turn to that question.

We have been assuming that supervenience is necessary for physicalism, even if it is not sufficient. But what follows from supervenience? One thing that is usually thought to follow is that the physical truths of the world entail all the truths; hence physicalism is true at all (12) is true

Now suppose that S is a statement which specifies the physical nature of the actual world and S* is a statement which specifies the total nature of the world. (It might be that neither S nor S* are expressible in languages we can understand, but let us set this aside.) Then physicalism tells us in addition that that:

Another way to say this is to say that if supervenience physicalism is true, the following conditional is necessarily true:

Indeed, this is a general feature of supervenience physicalism: if it is true then there will always be a necessary truth of the form of (14).

Now, if (14) is necessary the question arises whether it is a priori , i.e. knowable independent of empirical experience, or whether it is a posteriori , i.e. knowable but not independently of empirical experience. Traditionally, every statement that was necessary was assumed to be a priori . However, since Kripke’s Naming and Necessity (1980), philosophers have become used to the idea that there are truths which are both necessary and a posteriori . Accordingly many recent philosophers have defended a posteriori physicalism : the claim that statements such as (14) are necessary and a posteriori (cf. Loar 1997). Moreover, they have used this point to try to disarm many objections to physicalism, including those concerning qualia and intentionality that we will consider below. Moreover, as we have just noted, some philosophers have suggested that the necessary a posteriori provides the proper interpretation of non-reductive physicalism.

The appeal to the necessary a posteriori is on the surface an attractive one, but it is also controversial. One problem arises from the fact that Kripke’s idea that there are necessary and a posteriori truths can be interpreted in two rather different ways. On the first interpretation — I will call it the derivation view — while there are necessary a posteriori truths, these truths can be derived a priori from truths which are a posteriori and contingent. On the second interpretation — I will call it the non-derivation view — there are non- derived necessary a posteriori truths, i.e. necessary truths which are not derived from any contingent truths (or any a priori truths for that matter). The problem is that when one combines the derivation view with the claim that (14) is necessary and a posteriori , one encounters a contradiction. If the derivation view is correct, then there is some contingent and a posteriori statement S# that logically entails (14). However, if S# logically entails (14) then (since ‘If C , then if A then B ’ is equivalent to ‘If C & A , then B ’) we can infer that the following is both necessary and a priori :

One the other hand, if physicalism is true, and S summarizes the total nature of the world then S# is already implicitly included in S . In other words, (15) is simply an expansion of (14). But if (15) is just an expansion of (14), then if (15) is a priori , (14) must also be a priori . But that means our initial assumption is false: (14) is not a necessary a posteriori truth after all (see Jackson 1998).

How might an a posteriori physicalist respond to this objection? The obvious response is to reject the derivation view of the necessary a posteriori in favor of the non-derivation view. But this is just to say that if one wants to defend a posteriori physicalism, one will have to defend the non-derivation view of the necessary a posteriori . However, the non-derivation view is controversial, so it is not something that we can hope to solve here. (For discussion, see Byrne 1999, Chalmers 1996, 1999, Jackson 1998, Loar 1997, Lewis 1994, Yablo 1999, and the papers in Gendler and Hawthorne 2004)

4. The Condition Question

Earlier we distinguished two interpretative questions with respect to physicalism, the completeness question and the condition question. So far we have been concerned with the completeness question. I turn now to the condition question, the question of what it is for something (an object, an event, a process, a property) to be physical.

This issue has received less attention in the literature than the questions we have been studying so far. But it is just as important. Without any understanding of what the physical is, we can have no serious understanding of what physicalism is. After all, what does it mean to say that everything is physical, as opposed to chemical or financial. (The point here is quite general: if Thales says that everything is water, we don’t understand what he says unless he says something about what water is. The physicalist is in the same boat.)

So what is the answer to the condition question? If we concentrate for simplicity on the notion of a physical property, we can discern two kinds of answers to this question (see Stoljar 2001, Stoljar 2010, Tiehen 2018). The first ties the notion of a physical property to a notion of a physical theory, for this reason we can call it the theory-based conception of a physical property:

The theory-based conception : A property is physical iff it is the sort of property that physical theory tells us about.

According to the theory-based conception, for example, if physical theory tells us about the property of having mass, then having mass is a physical property. (The theory-based conception bears some relation to the notion of physical1 discussed in Feigl 1967; more explicit defense is found in Smart 1978, Lewis 1994, Braddon-Mitchell and Jackson 1996, and Chalmers 1996.)

The second kind of answer ties the notion of a physical property to the notion of a physical object, for this reason we can call it the object-based conception of a physical property:

The object-based conception : A property is physical iff it is the sort of property had by paradigmatic physical objects and their constituents.

According to the object-based conception, for example if paradigmatic physical objects such as rocks or planets are solid or are located in space or have mass, then the property of being solid or located in space or having mass is a physical property. (The best examples of philosophers who operate with the object-conception of the physical are Meehl and Sellars 1956 and Feigl 1967; more recent defense is to be found in Jackson 1998.)

Do these conceptions characterize the same class of properties? There are a number of different possibilities here, but one that has received some attention in the literature is that physical theory only tells us about the dispositional properties of physical objects, and so does not tell us about the categorical properties, if any, that they have — a thesis of this sort has been defended by a number of philosophers, among them Russell (1927), Armstrong (1968), Blackburn (1992) and Chalmers (1996). Hence, if physical objects do have categorical properties, those properties will not count as physical by the standards of the theory conception. On the other hand, there seems no reason not to count them as physical in some sense or other. If that is right, however, then the possibility emerges that the theory- and the object-conceptions characterize distinct classes of properties.

A further distinction that can be made here, and which cross-cuts the theory/object distinction, is between a more narrow and a more broad conception of a physical property (see Chalmers 2015). A narrow conception counts as a physical property only those within a restricted range. On the theory conception, for example, these might the properties expressed by fundamental physics. A broader conception counts as physical property any property which is either a property in the narrow sense (a narrow physical property, as we might call it) or else bears the right kind of relation to narrow physical properties, for example, is definable in terms of them, or is grounded in them. There are lots of complications here, partly because there are different ways of restricting the narrow class, and different ways of extending such a class. Here we will understand the theory and object conceptions in a narrower rather than a broad way.

Along with the concepts of space, time, causality, value, meaning, truth and existence, the concept of the physical is one of the central concepts of human thought. So it should not be surprising that any attempt to come to grips with what a physical property is will be controversial. The theory and object conceptions are no different: each has provoked a number of different questions and criticisms. In the remainder of our discussion of the condition question, I will review some main ones.

To begin with, one might object that both conceptions are inadequate because they are circular, i.e., both appeal to the notion of something physical (a theory or an object) to characterize a physical property. But how can you legitimately explain the notion of one sort of physical thing by appealing to another?

However, the response to this is that circularity is only a problem if the conceptions are interpreted as providing a reductive analysis of the notion of the physical. But there is no reason why they should be interpreted in that way. After all, we have many concepts that we understand without knowing how to analyze (cf. Lewis 1970). So there seems no reason to suppose that either the theory or object conception is providing anything else but a way of understanding the notion of the physical.

The point here is an important one in the context of the condition question. Earlier we said that the condition question was perfectly legitimate because it is legitimate to ask what the condition of being physical is that, according to physicalism, everything has. But this legitimate question should not be interpreted as the demand for a reductive analysis of the notion of the physical. Consider Thales again: it is right to ask Thales what he means by ‘water’ — and in so doing demand an understanding of the notion of water — but it is wrong to demand of him a conceptual analysis of water.

One might object that any formulation of physicalism which utilizes the theory-based conception will be either trivial or false. Carl Hempel (cf. Hempel 1969, see also Crane and Mellor 1990) provided a classic formulation of this problem: if physicalism is defined via reference to contemporary physics, then it is false — after all, who thinks that contemporary physics is complete? — but if physicalism is defined via reference to a future or ideal physics, then it is trivial — after all, who can predict what a future physics contains? Perhaps, for example, it contains even mental items. The conclusion of the dilemma is that one has no clear concept of a physical property, or at least no concept that is clear enough to do the job that philosophers of mind want the physical to play.

One response to this objection is to take its first horn, and insist that, at least in certain respects contemporary physics really is complete or else that it is rational to believe that it is (cf. Smart 1978, Lewis 1994 and Melnyk 1997, 2003). There is an element of truth in this. It may be rational to believe that contemporary science is true, even if not that it is complete. Nevertheless, it also seems mistaken to define physicalism with respect to the physics that happens to be true in this world. The reason is that whether a physical theory is true or not is a function of the contingent facts; but whether a property is physical or not is not a function of the contingent facts. For example, consider medieval impetus physics. Medieval impetus physics is false (though of course it might not have been) and thus it is irrational to suppose it true. Nevertheless, the property of having impetus — the central property that objects have according to impetus physics — is a physical property, and a counterfactual world completely described by impetus physics would be a world in which physicalism is true. But it is hard to see how any of this could be right if physicalism were defined by reference to the physics that we have now or by the physics that happens to be true in our world. (For development of this point, and for a dilemma that is similar to Hempel’s but which casts the issue in modal rather than temporal terms, see Stoljar 2010; for discussion, see Baltimore 2013, Fiorese 2016)

A different response to Hempel’s dilemma is that what it shows, if it shows anything, is that a particular proposal about how to define a physical property — namely, via reference to physics at a particular stage of its development — is mistaken. But from this one can hardly conclude that we have no clear understanding of the concept at all. As we have seen, we have many concepts that we don’t know how to analyze. So the mere fact — if indeed it is a fact — that a certain style of analysis of the notion of the physical fails does not mean that there is no notion of the physical at all, still less that we don’t understand the notion.

One might object that, while these remarks are perfectly true, they nevertheless don’t speak to something that is right about Hempel’s dilemma, namely, that for the theory-conception to be complete one needs to know what type of theory a physical theory is. Perhaps one might appeal here to the fact that we have a number of paradigms of what a physical theory is: common sense physical theory, medieval impetus physics, Cartesian contact mechanics, Newtonian physics, and modern quantum physics. While it seems unlikely that there is any one factor that unifies this class of theories, perhaps there is a cluster of factors — a common or overlapping set of theoretical constructs, for example, or a shared methodology. If so, one might maintain that the notion of a physical theory is a Wittgensteinian family resemblance concept. However, whether this is enough to answer the question of what kind of theory a physical theory is remains to be seen. (For further discussion of Hempel’s dilemma, see the papers in Elpidorou 2018a.)

4.4 The panpsychism problem

Hempel’s dilemma against the theory-conception is similar to an objection that one often hears propounded against the object-conception (cf. Jackson 1998). Consider a version of panpsychism according to which all the physical objects of our acquaintance are conscious beings just as we are. (For further discussion and different versions of this view, see Panpsychism .) Would physicalism be true in that situation? It seems intuitively not; however, if physicalism is defined via reference to the object-conception of a physical property then it is hard to see why not. After all, according to that conception, something is a physical property just in case it is required by a complete account of paradigmatic physical objects. But this makes no reference to the nature of paradigmatic physical objects, and so allows the possibility that physicalism is true in the imagined situation.

One thing to say in response to this objection is that the mere possibility of panpsychism cannot really be what is at issue here. For panpsychism per se is not inconsistent with physicalism (cf. Lewis 1983). After all, the fact that there are some conscious beings is not contrary to physicalism — why then should the possibility that everything is a conscious being be contrary to physicalism? If so, what is at issue in the objection is not panpsychism so much as the possibility that the paradigms or exemplars in terms of which one characterizes the notion of the physical might turn out to be radically different from what we normally assume in a quite specific sense — they might turn out to be in some essential or ultimate respect mental.

Once the problem is put like that, however, the panpsychism problem looks similar to a problem that arises in general whenever one one tries to understand or define a concept in terms of paradigmatic objects which fall under it, viz., that these definitions have certain sort of empirical presuppositions that might turn out to be false. Suppose one tried to define the concept red in terms of similarity to paradigmatic red things, such as blood. Pursuing this strategy commits one to the idea that the belief that blood is red is a piece of common knowledge shared among all those who are competent with the term. But that seems wrong — someone who thought that blood was green would be mistaken about blood but not about red. Now this problem is a difficult problem, however — and this is the crucial point for our purposes — the problem is also a quite general problem; it arises because of the paradigm style of definition. So to that extent, the concept of the physical does not seem to be any worse off than the concept of red, the panpsychism problem notwithstanding. (For discussion of the general strategy see Lewis 1997)

Of course, one would reject this entire line of thought if one rejected its starting point, viz., that panpsychism is consistent with physicalism. Wilson (2006, 78–9), for example, suggests that while physicalism is consistent with the view that some conscious beings exist, it is not consistent with the view that some fundamental conscious beings exist, and it is this last claim that is definitive of panpsychism. But in fact even that is consistent with physicalism, though admittedly of an unusual sort. To illustrate, imagine a world in which the fundamental properties are both mental and physical. That is certainly a far-fetched scenario but it doesn’t seem to be impossible. Would physicalism be true in such a world? It is hard to see why not; at least it may be true at that world that any physical duplicate of it is a duplicate simpliciter . Would panpsychism likewise be true at such a world? Again, it is hard to see why not, since the fundamental properties instantiated at such a world are mental, though of course they are also physical.

4.5 The via negativa

One idea that often emerges in the context of Hempel’s dilemma and the panpsychism problem, but deserves separate treatment, is the so-called Via Negativa (see e.g. Montero and Papineau 2005, Wilson 2006, Fiorese 2016).

The simplest way to introduce the Via Negativa is to interpret it as a definition of the notion a physical property something like this: F is a physical property if and only if F is a non-mental property. But there are many reasons to resist such a definition. Take vitalism. Vitalism isn’t true, but it might have been true; there is no contradiction in it for example. So imagine a world in which plants and animals instantiate the key property associated with vitalism, viz., élan vital. It seems reasonable to say that in that case plants and animals instantiate a property that is non-physical, i.e. élan vital is not physical. And yet one should not say on this account that plants and animals instantiate a mental property, i.e., élan vital is not mental. In short, élan vital is neither mental nor physical. But the Via Negativa as stated cannot accommodate that fact.

One might try to meet this objection by revising the Via Negativa so that what is intended is only a partial definition along these lines: F is a physical property only if F is non-mental. Even so problems remain. As we have seen élan vital causes a problem because it is neither mental nor physical. But there might be properties that are both mental and physical. Consider a version of the identity theory according to which being in pain just is c-fibers firing. If we suppose that such a theory is true, is the property of being in pain then mental or physical? Both presumably; but this could not be true on the Via Negativa construed as a definition of what a physical property is, even a partial definition. For if a property is mental and physical, then, given the Via Negativa, it will be both mental and non-mental which (of course) it can’t be! Now obviously, there are good questions about whether an identity theory along these lines is or could be true, but regardless of whether it is true, it should not be ruled out simply because of a proposal about how to define the words in which it is stated.

Alternatively, one might try to meet the objection by adopting what Wilson 2006 calls the ‘no fundamental mentality’ constraint. On this interpretation, what proponents of the Via Negativa have in mind is that F is a physical property only if F is not fundamentally mental, where in turn to be ‘not fundamentally mental’ is most naturally understood as entailing that if F is a fundamental property then it is non-mental. This version of the view avoids the problem about having c-fibers since presumably that property is not fundamental. But once again problems remain. Take the world we considered above at which the fundamental properties are both mental and physical; in effect, what applies to c-fibers firing (if the identity theory is true) applies to the fundamental properties instantiated at this world. As I said, this scenario is far-fetched, but it doesn’t seem to be impossible, and it is certainly not impossible simply as a matter of the definition of the words. And yet it would be impossible for that reason if the ‘no fundamental mentality’ version of the Via Negativa were true.

Of course, to raise these problems for the Via Negativa is not to deny that there is something right about it. For example, when we think of properties that would falsify physicalism we do often think of *certain* mental properties, e.g., the distinctive properties of ectoplasm or ESP. However, this fact—that certain mental properties would, if instantiated, falsify physicalism—can be captured without defining the physical in general as the non-mental. A better way would be to require, of any spelling out of the notion of the physical, whether it be the object-based account or the theory-based account, that it respect that fact that some (uninstantiated) mental properties are non-physical.

Another idea about how to define the physical that has become prominent in recent times is a structuralist approach to the physical.

One way to introduce the structuralist approach is to see it as a development of the theory conception formulated above. On the theory view, a property is physical just in case it is tied in the right way to a physical theory. One problem that arises for such a view, as we have seen, is what ‘physical theory’ is supposed to mean here. For the structuralist (at least in the context; ‘structuralism’ can mean many different things), a physical theory is one that employs a restricted vocabulary. One particularly frank version of this sort of view is suggested by Russell 1927; on this view, the vocabulary in question is restricted to logical or mathematical vocabulary. Contemporary philosophers adopt a less restricted view according to which the vocabulary is either logical or mathematical or causal or nomological (i.e. pertaining to laws) or some combination of these (see Alter 2016, Chalmers 2020, Goff 2017; for criticism see Stoljar 2020). In effect, proposals like this provide a topic-neutral conception of the physical, and hence a topic-neutral conception of physicalism.

An attractive feature of this approach is that it provides an answer to Hempel’s dilemma and similar problems. Physics may indeed change over time, but according to the structuralist, any physical theory must be restricted to this sort of vocabulary. Hence we can appeal to the notion of a physical theory to formulate a version of physicalism on which everything supervenes on or is realised by or is grounded in physical properties that can be expressed in that limited vocabulary. (Here structuralism about the physical draws support from structural realism in philosophy of science, a position to which it is in some ways quite similar; see, e.g. Structural Realism )

However, a problem for structuralism (developed in Stoljar 2020) is that, while placing restrictions of this sort on the notion of a physical theory helps with Hempel’s dilemma, it also seems overly stringent. Physical theories on the face of it tell you lots of things about the physical world which are not topic-neutral, for example, about mass, energy, electrons, protons and a myriad other things. The idea that we can capture all of this using a language that employs only logical/mathematical or causal/nomic vocabulary may seem an overly ambitious one.

While there are problems with structuralist approaches to the physical, as with the Via Negativa, there is also something right about it. We have noted one idea in philosophy of science that is similar to the structuralist approach to the physical, namely, structural realism. A different idea that philosophers of science have emphasised a lot in recent literature is that physicists and other scientists often construct mathematical models of the systems they are interested in; moreover, they often focus on the mathematical properties of these models themselves (see, e.g. Weisberg 2013). Perhaps a structuralist approach to such mathematical models is plausible. Nevertheless, structuralism about the physical is a thesis, not about these mathematical models, but about the target systems that these models correspond to, and it precisely this that causes the problem.

In view of the difficulties posed by Hempel’s dilemma and related problems, some philosophers have explored the interesting idea that to be a physicalist is not to hold some thesis or belief – that is, to hold something that may be true or false – but is rather to adopt a kind of attitude or stance. As Alyssa Ney (2008, p. 9, see also Van Fraassen 2002) develops this “attitudinal” view, for example, “physicalism is an attitude one takes to form one’s ontology completely and solely according to what physics says exists”.

Now, as with other ideas we have looked at, there is certainly something right about the attitudinal view. As we will see below, contemporary physicalists are often methodological naturalists, and methodological naturalists may well hold the attitude Ney describes. Nevertheless, there is a major problem for the view, viz., that on the face of it holding this sort of attitude is neither necessary nor sufficient for being a physicalist.

To see it is not necessary, consider such ancient philosophers as Democritus or Lucretius. These philosophers are physicalists, or at least are usually classified that way, i.e., since they held the doctrine traditionally called ‘materialism’. But they did not hold the attitude Ney describes, either implicitly or explicitly, for physics (at least identified sociologically) did not exist in their day at all.

In response, one might adjust the attitudinal view so that the ‘physics’ towards which one holds the relevant attitude is not identified sociologically, but is instead understood as a certain sort of theory considered in the abstract. But then further problems arise. First, it is now difficult to see the difference between holding the relevant attitude and simply believing a thesis. If one resolves to be guided in one’s ontology by the truth of a particular theory, how is that different from just believing the theory? Second, if one holds an attitude toward a particular theory, Hempel’s dilemma seems to arise again though in a slightly different form. For which physical theory is meant? If one means current physics, as in fact Ney suggests, then one might argue that this is not an attitude that physicalists should reasonably hold, since current physics is incomplete; and if one means ideal physics, it is hard to see what the content or nature of the attitude is.

To see that the attitude is not sufficient, imagine a situation in which physics postulates properties or objects which are like those postulated by traditional dualists; as Ney puts it imagine “it is the year 3000 AD and physicists have been forced to introduce irreducible mental entities into their theory.” (2008, p. 12). In such a situation, a person might hold the attitude Ney describes, and yet intuitively not be a physicalist.

In response, Ney agrees that this is a possibility but points out, first, it would still be reasonable to criticize the people who hold the attitude – for example, on the grounds that those who hold a different attitude might have arrived at correct ontology more quickly – and, second, that it doesn’t follow that the attitude definitive of physicalism is identical to the attitude definitive of dualism. (The ideas underlying this second point are (a) if one adopts the attitudinal view about physicalism then one should in fairness adopt it about dualism as well; and (b) that from the fact that two attitudes coincide in a possible situation it does not follow that they are identical.) However, while both these suggestions might be true, it is hard to see them as responding to the basic point that person who holds the attitude Ney describes in the imagined situation is not correctly described as a physicalist. In principle, after all, such a person may be criticized in many ways; moreover, the fact that holding a particular attitude is not sufficient for being a physicalist does not entail that doing so is necessary for being a dualist.

5. The Case Against Physicalism

Having provided an answer to the interpretation question, I now turn to the truth question: is physicalism (as we have interpreted it so far) true? I will first discuss three reasons for supposing that physicalism is not true. Then I will consider the case for physicalism.

The main argument against physicalism is usually thought to concern the notion of qualia, the felt qualities of experience. The notion of qualia raises puzzles of its own, puzzles having to do with its connection to other notions such as consciousness, introspection, epistemic access, acquaintance, the first-person perspective and so on. However the idea that we will discuss here is the apparent contradiction between the existence of qualia and physicalism.

Perhaps the clearest version of this argument is Jackson’s knowledge argument; see qualia: the knowledge argument . This argument asks us to imagine Mary, a famous neuroscientist confined to a black and white room. Mary is forced to learn about the world via black and white television and computers. However, despite these hardships Mary learns (and therefore knows) all that physical theory can teach her. Now, if physicalism were true, it is plausible to suppose that Mary knows everything about the world. And yet — and here is Jackson’s point — it seems she does not know everything. For, upon being released into the world of color, it will become obvious that, inside her room, she did not know what it is like for both herself and others to see colors — that is, she did not know about the qualia instantiated by particular experiences of seeing colors. Following Jackson (1986), we may summarize the argument as follows:

P1. Mary (before her release) knows everything physical there is to know about other people.

P2. Mary (before her release) does not know everything there is to know about other people (because she learns something about them on being released).

Conclusion. There are truths about other people (and herself) that escape the physicalist story.

Clearly this conclusion entails that physicalism is false: for if there are truths which escape the physicalist story how can everything supervene on the physical? So a physicalist must either reject a premise or show that the premises don’t entail the conclusion.

There are many possible responses to this argument, but here I will briefly mention only three. The first is the ability hypothesis due to Lawrence Nemerow (1988) and developed and defended by David Lewis (1994). The ability hypothesis follows Ryle (1949) in drawing a sharp distinction between propositional knowledge or knowledge-that (such as ‘Mary knows that snow is white’) and knowledge-how (such as ‘Mary knows how to ride a bike’), and then suggests that all Mary gains is the latter. On the other hand, P2 would only be true if Mary gained propositional knowledge.

A second response appeals to the distinction between a priori and a posteriori physicalism. As we saw above, the crucial claim of a posteriori physicalism is that (13) — i.e. the claim that S entails S* — is a posteriori . Since (13) is a posteriori , you would need certain experience to know it. But, it is argued, Mary has not had (and cannot have) the relevant experience. Hence she does not know (13). On the other hand, the mere fact that Mary has not had (and cannot have) the experience to know (13) does not remove the possibility that (13) is true. Hence a posteriori physicalism can avoid the knowledge argument. (It is an interesting question which premise of the knowledge argument is being attacked by this response. The answer depends on whether (13) is physical or not: if (13) is physical, then the response attacks P1. But if (13) is not physical, the response is that the argument is invalid.).

A third response is to distinguish between various conceptions of the physical. We saw above that potentially the class of properties defined by the theory-conception of the physical was distinct from the class of properties defined by the object-conception. But that suggests that the first premise of the argument is open to interpretation in either of two ways. On the other hand, Jackson’s thought experiment only seems to support the premise if it is interpreted in the one way, since Mary learns by learning all that physical theory can teach her. But leaves open the possibility that one might appeal to the object-conception of the physical to define a version of physicalism which evades the knowledge argument.

One of the most lively areas of philosophy of mind concerns the issue of which if any of these responses to the knowledge argument will be successful. (See the papers in Ludlow, Nagasawa, and Stoljar 2004. See also Qualia: The Knowledge Argument ) The ability response raises questions about whether know-how is genuinely non-propositional (cf. Lycan 1996, Loar 1997 and Stanley and Williamson 2001), and about whether it gets the facts right to begin with (Braddon Mitchell and Jackson 1996). As against a posteriori physicalism, it has been argued both that it rests on a mistaken approach to the necessary a posteriori (Chalmers 1996, 1999, Jackson 1998), and that the promise of the idea is chimerical anyway (cf. Stoljar 2000). The third response raises questions about the distinction between the object and the theory conception of the physical and associated issues about dispositional and categorical properties, and also about the relation between physicalism on the one hand, and a related view, sometimes called Russellian monism. See Russellian monism , as well as Chalmers 1996, Lockwood 1992, Stoljar 2000, 2001, Montero 2010, 2015)

Philosophers of mind often divide the problems of physicalism into two: first, there are the problems of qualia, typified by the knowledge argument; second, there are problems of intentionality. The intentionality of mental states is their aboutness, their capacity to represent the world as being a certain way. One does not simply think, one thinks of (or about ) Vienna; similarly, one does not simply believe, one believes that snow is white. Just as in the case of qualia, some of the puzzles of intentionality derive from facts internal to the notion, and from the relation of this notion to the others such as rationality, inference and language; see Intentionality . But others derive from the fact that it seems difficult to square the fact that mental states have intentionality with physicalism. There are a number of ways of developing this criticism but much recent work has concentrated on a certain line of argument that Saul Kripke has found in the work of Wittgenstein (1982; see also Private Language ).

Kripke’s argument is best approached by first considering what is often called a dispositional theory of linguistic meaning. According to the dispositional theory, a word means what it does — for example, the word ‘red’ means red — because speakers of the word are disposed to apply to word to red things. Now, for a number of reasons, this sort of theory has been very popular among physicalists. First, the concept of a disposition at issue here is clearly a concept that is compatible with physicalism. After all, the mere fact that vases are fragile and sugar cubes are soluble (both are classic examples of dispositional properties) does not cause a problem for physicalism, so why should the idea that human beings have similar dispositional properties? Second, it seems possible to develop the dispositional theory of linguistic meaning so that it might apply also to intentionality. According to a dispositional theory of intentionality, a mental concept would mean what it does because thinkers are disposed to employ the concept in thought in a certain way. So a dispositional theory seems to hold out the best promise of a theory of intentionality that is compatible with physicalism.

Kripke’s argument is designed to destroy that promise. (In fact, Kripke’s argument is designed to destroy considerably more than this: the conclusion of his argument is a paradoxical one to the effect that there can be no such a thing as a word’s having a meaning. However, we will concentrate on the aspects of the argument that bear on physicalism.) In essence his argument is this. Imagine a situation in which (a) the dispositional theory is true; (b) the word ‘red’ means red for a speaker S; and yet (c) the speaker misapplies the word — for example, S is looking at a white thing through rose-tinted spectacles and calls it red. Now, in that situation, it would seem that S is disposed to apply ‘red’ to things which are (not merely red but) either-red-or-white-but-seen-through-rose-tinted-spectacles. But then, by the theory, the word ‘red’ means (not red but) either-red-or-white-as-seen-through-rose-tinted-spectacles. But that contradicts our initial claim (b), that ‘red’ means red. In other words, the dispositional theory, when combined with a true claim about the meaning of word, plus a truism about meaning — that people can misapply meaningful words — leads to a contradiction and is therefore false.

How might a physicalist respond to Kripke’s argument? As with the knowledge argument, there are many responses but here I will mention only two. The first response is to insist that Kripke’s argument neglects the distinction between a priori and a posteriori physicalism. Kripke often does say that according to the dispositionalist, one should be able to ‘read off’ truths about meaning from truths a physicalist can accept. (For a proposal like this, see Horwich 2000.) One problem with this proposal is, as we have seen, that its background account of the necessary a posteriori is controversial. As we saw, a posteriori physicalists are committed to what we called the non-derivation view about necessary a posteriori truths. But the non-derivation view has come under attack in recent times.

The second response is to defend the dispositional theory against Kripke’s argument. One way to do this is to argue that the argument only works against a very simple dispositionalism, and that a more complicated version of such a theory would avoid these problems. (For a proposal along these lines, see Fodor 1992 and the discussion in Braddon-Mitchell and Jackson 1996). A different proposal is to argue that Kripke’s argument underestimates the complexity in the notion of a disposition. The mere fact that in certain circumstances someone would apply ‘red’ to white things does not mean that they are disposed to apply red to white things — after all, the mere fact that in certain circumstances something would burn does not mean that it is flammable in the ordinary sense. (For a proposal along these lines see Hohwy 1998, and Heil and Martin 1998)

As with the knowledge argument, the issues surrounding Kripke’s argument are very much wide open. But it is important to note that most philosophers don’t consider the issues of intentionality as seriously as the issue of qualia when it comes to physicalism. In different vocabularies, for example, both Block (1995) and Chalmers (1996) distinguish between the intentional aspects of the mind or consciousness, and the phenomenal aspects or qualia, and suggest that it is really the latter that is the central issue. As Chalmers notes (1996; p. 24), echoing Chomsky’s famous distinction, the intentionality issue is a problem , but the qualia issue is a mystery .

A third problem, which we mentioned briefly above, is the problem of abstracta (Rabin 2020). This concerns the status within physicalism of abstract objects, i.e., entities apparently not located in space and time, such as numbers, properties and relations, or propositions.

To see the problem, suppose that abstract objects, if they exist, exist necessarily, i.e., in all possible worlds. If physicalism is true, then the facts about such objects must either be physical facts, or else bear a particular relation (grounding, realisation) to the physical. But on the face of it, that is not so. Can one really say that 5+7=12, for example, is realised in, or holds in virtue of, some arrangement of atoms and void? Or can one say that it itself is a physical fact or a fundamental physical fact? If not, physicalism is false: the property of being such that 5+7=12 obtains the actual world but is neither identical to, nor grounded in or realized by, any physical property. (Sometimes the problem of abstracta is formulated as concerning, not abstract objects such as numbers or properties, but the grounding or realization facts themselves; see, e.g, Dasgupta 2015. We will set this aside here.)

There are a number of responses to this problem in the literature; for an overview, see Rabin 2020, see also Dasgupta 2015 and Bennett 2017; for more general discussion of physicalism and abstracta, see Montero 2017, Schneider 2017, and Witmer 2017.

One response points out that, while the problem of abstracta confronts many different versions of physicalism, it does not arise for supervenience physicalism. After all, since numbers exist in all possible worlds, facts about them trivially supervene on the physical; any world identical to the actual world in physical respects will be identical to it in respect of whether 5+7=12, because any world at all is identical to the actual world in that respect! But the difficulty here is that supervenience physicalism seems, as we saw above, too weak anyway. Indeed, one might think that the example of abstracta is simply a different way to bring out that it is too weak.

Another option is to adopt a version of nominalism, and deny the existence of abstracta entirely. The problem with this option is that defending nominalism about mathematics is no easy matter, and in any case nominalism and physicalism are normally thought of as distinct commitments.

A third view, which seems more attractive than either of the two mentioned so far, is to expand the notion of a physical property that is in play in formulations of physicalism. For example, one might treat the properties of abstract objects as topic-neutral in something like the sense discussed in connection with Smart and reductionism above (see section 3.1). Topic-neutral properties have the interesting feature that, while they themselves are not physical, but are capable of being instantiated in what is intuitively a completely physical world, or indeed what is intuitively a completely spiritual world or a world entirely made of water. If so, it becomes possible to understand physicalism so that the reference to ‘physical properties’ within it is understood more correctly as ‘physical or topic-neutral properties’.

A final response to the problem does not expand the notion of the physical as much as it restricts the scope of physicalism to properties of a certain sort. One suggestion along these lines has been made by a number of writers (e.g. Rabin 2020, following Dasgupta 2015) in the context of grounding physicalism, though perhaps the underlying idea can be extended to other varieties as well. They suggest that grounding physicalism, which we formulated above as (7), should be revised to take the following form:

Here, a property is groundable just in case it is apt for being grounded, i.e. it is the sort of property that can be either grounded or not. Ordinary psychological properties are presumably in this class. If grounding physicalism is true, they are grounded in physical properties, whereas if it is false, they are not grounded in physical properties; either way, they are groundable properties. But mathematical properties and the properties of abstracta more generally might in at least some instances not be groundable, they may fail to be properties that are apt for being grounded. If so, we have an alternative solution to the problem of abstracta: (7*) permits that some properties of abstracta are not grounded in the physical, so long as they are ungroundable.

The final argument I will consider against physicalism is of a more methodological nature. It is sometimes suggested, not that physicalism is false, but that the entire ‘project of physicalism’ — the project in philosophy of mind of debating whether physicalism is true, and trying to establish or disprove its truth by philosophical argument — is misguided. This sort of argument has been mounted by a number of writers, but perhaps its most vocal advocate has been Noam Chomsky (2000; see also Searle 1992, 1999).

It is easiest to state Chomsky’s criticism by beginning with two points about methodological naturalism. In general it seems rational to agree with the methodological naturalists that the best hope for a theoretical understanding of the world is by pursuing the methods which are typical of the sciences. It would then seem rational as a special case that our best hope for a theoretical understanding of consciousness or experience is by pursuing the methods of the sciences — by pursuing, as we might put it, the naturalistic project with respect to consciousness. So Chomsky’s first point is that it is rational to pursue the naturalistic project with respect to consciousness.

Chomsky’s second point is that the physicalist project in philosophy of mind is on the face of it rather different from the naturalistic project. In the first place, the physicalist project is, as we have noted, usually thought of a piece of metaphysics. But there is nothing obviously metaphysical about the naturalistic project, it simply raises questions about what we can hope to explain. In the second place, the physicalist project is normally thought of as being amenable to philosophical argument, whereas it is unclear where philosophical argument (if this is different from scientific argument) would enter the naturalistic project. In short, there doesn’t seem anything particularly ‘philosophical’ about the naturalistic project — it simply applies the methods of science to consciousness. But the physicalist project is central to analytic philosophy.

It is precisely at the place where the physicalist project departs from the naturalistic project that Chomsky’s criticism begins to take shape. For insofar as it is different from the naturalistic project, there are a number of ways in which the physicalist project is questionable. First, it is hard to see what the project might be — it is true that throughout the history of philosophy and science one encounters suggestions that one might find out about the world in ways that are distinct from the ones used in the sciences, but these suggestions have always been rather obscure. Second, it is hard to see how this sort of project could recommend itself to physicalists themselves — such a project seems to be a departure from methodological naturalism but most physicalists endorse methodological naturalism as a matter of fact. On the other hand, if the physicalist project does not depart from the naturalistic project, then the usual ways of talking and thinking about that project are highly misleading. For example, it is misleading to speak of it as a piece of metaphysics as opposed to a piece of ordinary science.

In sum, Chomsky’s criticism is best understood as a kind of dilemma. The physicalist project is either identical to the naturalistic project or it is not. If it is identical, then the language and concepts that shape the project are potentially extremely misleading; but if it is not identical, then there are a number of ways in which it is illegitimate.

How is one to respond to this criticism? In my view, the strongest answer to Chomsky accepts the first horn of his dilemma and suggests that what philosophers of mind are really concerned with is the naturalistic project. Now, of course, what concerns them is not so much the details of the project — that would not distinguish them from working scientists. Rather they are concerned with what the nature of the project and what its potential limits might be.

This theme might be developed in several ways, but one well-known development of it has been suggested by Thomas Nagel (1983) and Bernard Williams (1985). According to them, any form of scientific inquiry will at least be objective, or will result in an objective picture of the world. On the other hand, we have a number of arguments — the most prominent being the knowledge argument — which plausibly show that there is no place for experience or qualia in a world that is described in purely objective terms. If Nagel and Williams are right that any form of scientific inquiry will yield a description of the world in objective terms, the knowledge argument is nothing less than a negative argument to the effect that the naturalistic project with respect to consciousness will not succeed.

If what is at issue is the limits of the naturalist project, why is the debate so often construed as a metaphysical debate rather than a debate about the limits of inquiry? In answer to this question, we need to sharply divorce the background metaphysical framework within which the problems of philosophy of mind find their expression, and the problems themselves. Physicalism is the background metaphysical assumption against which the problems of philosophy of mind are posed and discussed. Given that assumption, the question of the limits of the naturalistic project just is the question of whether there can be experience in a world that is totally physical. Nevertheless, when properly understood, the problems that philosophers of mind are interested in are not with the framework themselves, and to that extent are not metaphysical. Thus, the common phrase ‘metaphysics of mind’ is misleading.

Having considered one side of the truth question, I will turn finally to the other: what reason is there for believing that physicalism is true?

The first thing to say when considering the truth of physicalism is that we live in an overwhelmingly physicalist or materialist intellectual culture. The result is that, as things currently stand, the standards of argumentation required to persuade someone of the truth of physicalism are much lower than the standards required to persuade someone of its negation. (The point here is a perfectly general one: if you already believe or want something to be true, you are likely to accept fairly low standards of argumentation for its truth.)

However, while it might be difficult to assess dispassionately the arguments for or against physicalism, this is still something we should endeavor to do. Here I will review two arguments that are commonly thought to establish the truth of physicalism. What unites the arguments is that each takes something from the physicalist world-picture which we considered previously and tries to establish the metaphysical this of physicalism.

The first argument is (what I will call) The Argument from Causal Closure . The first premise of this argument is the thesis of the Causal Closure of the Physical — that is, the thesis that every event which has a cause has a physical cause. The second premise is that mental events cause physical events — for example we normally think that events such as wanting to raise your arm (a mental event) cause events such as the raising of your arm (a physical event). The third premise of the argument is a principle of causation that is often called the exclusion principle (Kim 1993, Yablo 1992, Bennett 2003). The correct formulation of the exclusion principle is a matter of some controversy but a formulation that is both simple and plausible is the following:

Exclusion Principle If an event e causes event e* , then there is no event e# such that e# is non-supervenient on e and e# causes e* .

The conclusion of the argument is the mental events are supervenient on physical events, or more briefly that physicalism is true. For of course, if the thesis of Causal Closure is true then behavioral events have physical causes, and if mental events also cause behavioral events, then they must supervene on the physical if the exclusion principle is true.

The Argument from Causal Closure is perhaps the dominant argument for physicalism in the literature today. But it is somewhat unclear whether it is successful. (For some discussion see, Mental Causation ). One response for the anti-physicalist is to reject the second premise and to adopt a version of what is called epiphenomenalism, the view that mental events are caused by, and yet do not cause, physical events. The argument against this position is usually epistemological: if pains don’t cause pain behavior how can it be that your telling me that you are in pain gives me any reason for supposing you are? It might seem that epiphenomenalists are in trouble here, but as a number of recent philosophers have argued, the issues here are very far from being settled (Chalmers 1996, Hyslop 1999). The crucial point is that the causal theory of evidence is open to serious counterexamples so it is unclear that it can be used against epiphenomenalism effectively.

A different sort of response is to reject the causal principles on which the argument is based. As against the exclusion principle, for example, it is often pointed out that certain events are overdetermined. The classic example is the firing squad: both the firing by soldier A and by soldier B caused the prisoner’s death but since these are distinct firings, the exclusion principle is false. However, while this line of response is suggestive, it is in fact rather limited. It is true that the case of the firing squad represents an exception to the exclusion principle — an exception that the principle must be emended to accommodate. But is difficult to believe that it represents an exception that can be widespread. A more searching response is to reject the very idea of causal closure on the grounds, perhaps, that (as Bertrand Russell (1917) famously argued) causation plays no role in a mature portrayal of the world. Once again, however, the promise of this response is more imagined than real. While it is true that many sciences do not explicitly use the notion of causation, it is extremely unlikely that they do not imply that various causal claims are true.

The second argument for physicalism is (what I will call) The Argument from Methodological Naturalism . The first premise of this argument is that it is rational to be guided in one’s metaphysical commitments by the methods of natural science. Lying behind this premise are the arguments of Quine and others that metaphysics should not be approached in a way that is distinct from the sciences but should rather be thought of as continuous with it. The second premise of the argument is that, as a matter of fact, the metaphysical picture of the world that one is led to by the methods of natural science is physicalism. The conclusion is that it is rational to believe physicalism, or, more briefly that physicalism is true.

The Argument from Methodological Naturalism has received somewhat less attention in the literature than the Argument from Causal Closure. But it seems just as persuasive — in fact, rather more so. For how might one respond? One possibility is to reject its first premise. But this is not something that most people are attracted to (or at least are attracted to explicitly.)

The other possibility is to reject its second premise. However, if physicalism can be clearly stated — admittedly, this is a big ‘if’ — it is not terribly clear what this would amount to or what the motivation for it would be. In the first place, our earlier discussion shows that physicalism is not inconsistent with explanatory autonomy of the various sciences, so that one should not reject physicalism merely because one can’t see how to reduce those sciences to others. In the second place, while it is perfectly true that there are examples of non-physicalist approaches to the world — vitalism in biology is perhaps the best example — this is beside the point. The second premise of the Argument from Methodological Naturalism does not deny that other views are possible, it simply says that physicalism is the most likely view at the moment. Finally, one might be inclined to appeal to arguments such as the knowledge argument to show that physicalism is false, and hence that methodological naturalism could not show that physicalism is false. However, this suggestion represents a sort of confusion about the knowledge argument. As we saw above, if successful the knowledge argument suggests, not simply that physicalism is false but that any approach to the world that is compatible with methodological naturalism is false. But if that is so, it is mistaken to suppose that the knowledge argument gives one any reason to endorse anti-physicalism if that is supposed to be a position compatible with methodological naturalism.

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Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Hossein Ameri, Tim Bayne, Rich Cameron, Brian Garrett, Robert Pasnau, Stewart Saunders, Jessica Wilson, and particularly David Chalmers for their help in constructing this entry. In addition, the author and editors would like to thank two readers, Joshua R. Stern and Greg Stokley, for discovering numerous typographical errors on an earlier version. Their volunteer efforts were entirely unsolicited and very much appreciated.

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Materialism refers to a collection of personality traits. The contemporary world is full of people who possess materialistic trait. They have a belief that owning and acquisition of the right properties is the vital ingredients of happiness. These people think that success is judged by the things individual possesses. Philosophers and theologians have been complaining for long that materialism is contrary to moral life. More often the goal of gaining material wealth is regarded as empty and in result it prevents a person from being involved in a normal life. The consequences of pursuing materialistic lifestyle are the inability to reach the state of happiness in one’s life. The empirical studies, carried out to find the correlation between happiness and materialism , have confirmed negative correlation between the two.

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Materialism
materialism, in philosophy, the view that all facts (including facts about the human mind and will and the course of human history) are causally dependent upon physical processes, or even reducible to them.. The word materialism has been used in modern times to refer to a family of metaphysical theories (i.e., theories of the nature of reality) that can best be defined by saying that a theory ...
Materialism
Materialism is a form of philosophical monism which holds that matter is the fundamental substance in nature, and that all things, including mental states and consciousness, are results of material interactions of material things. According to philosophical materialism, mind and consciousness are caused by physical processes, such as the neurochemistry of the human brain and nervous system ...
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Moreover, the very history of materialism is movable. This is because philosophical history of philosophy is already mobilizing conceptions of matter, being, knowledge, and truth. Rather than from the God's eye view, our reconstruction of the development of matter is grounded on our own inclusive materialist conception.
(PDF) Introduction to 'Materialism: A Historico-Philosophical
Conclusion Chapter 1 (Introduction): materialism, opprobrium and the history of philosophy Abstract Materialism - the philosophical doctrine that 'Everything that exists, is material', including human beings, who cannot then have an immortal soul - has been a heretical or clandestine teaching since the beginnings of philosophy.
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Abstract. The basic causal argument for materialism is that since physics is causally complete, conscious states must either be physical, or they must be epiphenomenal "danglers" with no causal influence on the physical world. Papineau explores this argument in detail, paying particular attention to the concept of causation, the meaning of ...
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