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Philosophers

Mortimer Adler
Rogers Albritton
Alexander of Aphrodisias
Samuel Alexander
William Alston
Anaximander
G.E.M.Anscombe
Anselm
Louise Antony
Thomas Aquinas
Aristotle
David Armstrong
Harald Atmanspacher
Robert Audi
Augustine
J.L.Austin
A.J.Ayer
Alexander Bain
Mark Balaguer
Jeffrey Barrett
William Barrett
William Belsham
Henri Bergson
George Berkeley
Isaiah Berlin
Richard J. Bernstein
Bernard Berofsky
Robert Bishop
Max Black
Susanne Bobzien
Emil du Bois-Reymond
Hilary Bok
Laurence BonJour
George Boole
Émile Boutroux
Daniel Boyd
F.H.Bradley
C.D.Broad
Michael Burke
Lawrence Cahoone
C.A.Campbell
Joseph Keim Campbell
Rudolf Carnap
Carneades
Nancy Cartwright
Gregg Caruso
Ernst Cassirer
David Chalmers
Roderick Chisholm
Chrysippus
Cicero
Randolph Clarke
Samuel Clarke
Anthony Collins
Antonella Corradini
Diodorus Cronus
Jonathan Dancy
Donald Davidson
Mario De Caro
Democritus
Daniel Dennett
Jacques Derrida
René Descartes
Richard Double
Fred Dretske
John Dupré
John Earman
Laura Waddell Ekstrom
Epictetus
Epicurus
Austin Farrer
Herbert Feigl
Arthur Fine
John Martin Fischer
Frederic Fitch
Owen Flanagan
Luciano Floridi
Philippa Foot
Alfred Fouilleé
Harry Frankfurt
Richard L. Franklin
Bas van Fraassen
Michael Frede
Gottlob Frege
Peter Geach
Edmund Gettier
Carl Ginet
Alvin Goldman
Gorgias
Nicholas St. John Green
H.Paul Grice
Ian Hacking
Ishtiyaque Haji
Stuart Hampshire
W.F.R.Hardie
Sam Harris
William Hasker
R.M.Hare
Georg W.F. Hegel
Martin Heidegger
Heraclitus
R.E.Hobart
Thomas Hobbes
David Hodgson
Shadsworth Hodgson
Baron d'Holbach
Ted Honderich
Pamela Huby
David Hume
Ferenc Huoranszki
Frank Jackson
William James
Lord Kames
Robert Kane
Immanuel Kant
Tomis Kapitan
Walter Kaufmann
Jaegwon Kim
William King
Hilary Kornblith
Christine Korsgaard
Saul Kripke
Thomas Kuhn
Andrea Lavazza
Christoph Lehner
Keith Lehrer
Gottfried Leibniz
Jules Lequyer
Leucippus
Michael Levin
Joseph Levine
George Henry Lewes
C.I.Lewis
David Lewis
Peter Lipton
C. Lloyd Morgan
John Locke
Michael Lockwood
Arthur O. Lovejoy
E. Jonathan Lowe
John R. Lucas
Lucretius
Alasdair MacIntyre
Ruth Barcan Marcus
Tim Maudlin
James Martineau
Nicholas Maxwell
Storrs McCall
Hugh McCann
Colin McGinn
Michael McKenna
Brian McLaughlin
John McTaggart
Paul E. Meehl
Uwe Meixner
Alfred Mele
Trenton Merricks
John Stuart Mill
Dickinson Miller
G.E.Moore
Thomas Nagel
Otto Neurath
Friedrich Nietzsche
John Norton
P.H.Nowell-Smith
Robert Nozick
William of Ockham
Timothy O'Connor
Parmenides
David F. Pears
Charles Sanders Peirce
Derk Pereboom
Steven Pinker
Plato
Karl Popper
Porphyry
Huw Price
H.A.Prichard
Protagoras
Hilary Putnam
Willard van Orman Quine
Frank Ramsey
Ayn Rand
Michael Rea
Thomas Reid
Charles Renouvier
Nicholas Rescher
C.W.Rietdijk
Richard Rorty
Josiah Royce
Bertrand Russell
Paul Russell
Gilbert Ryle
Jean-Paul Sartre
Kenneth Sayre
T.M.Scanlon
Moritz Schlick
Arthur Schopenhauer
John Searle
Wilfrid Sellars
Alan Sidelle
Ted Sider
Henry Sidgwick
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
J.J.C.Smart
Saul Smilansky
Michael Smith
Baruch Spinoza
L. Susan Stebbing
Isabelle Stengers
George F. Stout
Galen Strawson
Peter Strawson
Eleonore Stump
Francisco Suárez
Richard Taylor
Kevin Timpe
Mark Twain
Peter Unger
Peter van Inwagen
Manuel Vargas
John Venn
Kadri Vihvelin
Voltaire
G.H. von Wright
David Foster Wallace
R. Jay Wallace
W.G.Ward
Ted Warfield
Roy Weatherford
C.F. von Weizsäcker
William Whewell
Alfred North Whitehead
David Widerker
David Wiggins
Bernard Williams
Timothy Williamson
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Susan Wolf

Scientists

David Albert
Michael Arbib
Walter Baade
Bernard Baars
Jeffrey Bada
Leslie Ballentine
Marcello Barbieri
Gregory Bateson
Horace Barlow
John S. Bell
Mara Beller
Charles Bennett
Ludwig von Bertalanffy
Susan Blackmore
Margaret Boden
David Bohm
Niels Bohr
Ludwig Boltzmann
Emile Borel
Max Born
Satyendra Nath Bose
Walther Bothe
Jean Bricmont
Hans Briegel
Leon Brillouin
Stephen Brush
Henry Thomas Buckle
S. H. Burbury
Melvin Calvin
Donald Campbell
Sadi Carnot
Anthony Cashmore
Eric Chaisson
Gregory Chaitin
Jean-Pierre Changeux
Rudolf Clausius
Arthur Holly Compton
John Conway
Jerry Coyne
John Cramer
Francis Crick
E. P. Culverwell
Antonio Damasio
Olivier Darrigol
Charles Darwin
Richard Dawkins
Terrence Deacon
Lüder Deecke
Richard Dedekind
Louis de Broglie
Stanislas Dehaene
Max Delbrück
Abraham de Moivre
Bernard d'Espagnat
Paul Dirac
Hans Driesch
John Eccles
Arthur Stanley Eddington
Gerald Edelman
Paul Ehrenfest
Manfred Eigen
Albert Einstein
George F. R. Ellis
Hugh Everett, III
Franz Exner
Richard Feynman
R. A. Fisher
David Foster
Joseph Fourier
Philipp Frank
Steven Frautschi
Edward Fredkin
Benjamin Gal-Or
Howard Gardner
Lila Gatlin
Michael Gazzaniga
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen
GianCarlo Ghirardi
J. Willard Gibbs
James J. Gibson
Nicolas Gisin
Paul Glimcher
Thomas Gold
A. O. Gomes
Brian Goodwin
Joshua Greene
Dirk ter Haar
Jacques Hadamard
Mark Hadley
Patrick Haggard
J. B. S. Haldane
Stuart Hameroff
Augustin Hamon
Sam Harris
Ralph Hartley
Hyman Hartman
Jeff Hawkins
John-Dylan Haynes
Donald Hebb
Martin Heisenberg
Werner Heisenberg
John Herschel
Basil Hiley
Art Hobson
Jesper Hoffmeyer
Don Howard
John H. Jackson
William Stanley Jevons
Roman Jakobson
E. T. Jaynes
Pascual Jordan
Eric Kandel
Ruth E. Kastner
Stuart Kauffman
Martin J. Klein
William R. Klemm
Christof Koch
Simon Kochen
Hans Kornhuber
Stephen Kosslyn
Daniel Koshland
Ladislav Kovàč
Leopold Kronecker
Rolf Landauer
Alfred Landé
Pierre-Simon Laplace
Karl Lashley
David Layzer
Joseph LeDoux
Gerald Lettvin
Gilbert Lewis
Benjamin Libet
David Lindley
Seth Lloyd
Hendrik Lorentz
Werner Loewenstein
Josef Loschmidt
Ernst Mach
Donald MacKay
Henry Margenau
Owen Maroney
David Marr
Humberto Maturana
James Clerk Maxwell
Ernst Mayr
John McCarthy
Warren McCulloch
N. David Mermin
George Miller
Stanley Miller
Ulrich Mohrhoff
Jacques Monod
Vernon Mountcastle
Emmy Noether
Donald Norman
Alexander Oparin
Abraham Pais
Howard Pattee
Wolfgang Pauli
Massimo Pauri
Wilder Penfield
Roger Penrose
Steven Pinker
Colin Pittendrigh
Walter Pitts
Max Planck
Susan Pockett
Henri Poincaré
Daniel Pollen
Ilya Prigogine
Hans Primas
Zenon Pylyshyn
Henry Quastler
Adolphe Quételet
Pasco Rakic
Nicolas Rashevsky
Lord Rayleigh
Frederick Reif
Jürgen Renn
Giacomo Rizzolati
Emil Roduner
Juan Roederer
Jerome Rothstein
David Ruelle
David Rumelhart
Tilman Sauer
Ferdinand de Saussure
Jürgen Schmidhuber
Erwin Schrödinger
Aaron Schurger
Sebastian Seung
Thomas Sebeok
Franco Selleri
Claude Shannon
Charles Sherrington
David Shiang
Abner Shimony
Herbert Simon
Dean Keith Simonton
Edmund Sinnott
B. F. Skinner
Lee Smolin
Ray Solomonoff
Roger Sperry
John Stachel
Henry Stapp
Tom Stonier
Antoine Suarez
Leo Szilard
Max Tegmark
Teilhard de Chardin
Libb Thims
William Thomson (Kelvin)
Richard Tolman
Giulio Tononi
Peter Tse
Alan Turing
Francisco Varela
Vlatko Vedral
Mikhail Volkenstein
Heinz von Foerster
Richard von Mises
John von Neumann
Jakob von Uexküll
C. S. Unnikrishnan
C. H. Waddington
John B. Watson
Daniel Wegner
Steven Weinberg
Paul A. Weiss
Herman Weyl
John Wheeler
Wilhelm Wien
Norbert Wiener
Eugene Wigner
E. O. Wilson
Günther Witzany
Stephen Wolfram
H. Dieter Zeh
Semir Zeki
Ernst Zermelo
Wojciech Zurek
Konrad Zuse
Fritz Zwicky

Presentations

Biosemiotics
Free Will
Mental Causation
James Symposium
 
Louise Antony

Louise Antony is a philosopher of mind who defends a form of non-reductive physicalism. She argues for a middle ground between eliminative materialists who deny the existence of mind (like Daniel Dennett and the Churchlands) and the dualists, panpsychists, or neutral monists who look for something other than a purely physical explanation of the mind.

Antony divides her fellow defenders of a non-reductive physicalism into 1) those she calls "Neumanians," who are content to consider mind ineliminable by taking the descriptions, predictions, and explanations of "folk psychology" at face value, and 2) those, like herself, who want more robust reductive explanations of psychological phenomena. She wants to know how psychology can be embodied in material beings. She says:

The debate about non-reductive materialism is, I acknowledged, esoteric - it is an in-house dispute among committed materialists. But I must warn the reader that there is an even more outré dispute on the horizon. Non-reductive materialists do not all agree with each other about exactly what it means to call the mind material. Some (the philosophers I think of as "Neumanians") are willing to stop arguing once it has been shown that psychology is ineliminable, that the descriptions, predictions, and explanations of folk psychology must be taken at face value (Davidson. 1970; Baker, 1995; Burge, 1993). But others of us (and I am in this camp) think that a full defense of psychology requires more - an account of how psychology, with all its distinctive features, could be embodied in material beings. Such an account we contend, requires providing a reductive explanation of psychological phenomena. Thus, I intend to defend a version of non-reductive materialism that insists on ontological autonomy for the entities and properties of psychology, while demanding at the same time an account of psychological phenomena in terms of non-psychological phenomena.

Antony's account is to embrace the functionalist and computationalist views of Jerry Fodor and Hilary Putnam. Minds are advanced Turing machines which process "representations." Creatures that reason and deliberate, exhibit intentionality that conceives things and actions which do not yet exist, creatures that have a view of the world as they want it, as opposed to the world that exists, and that have powerful predictive powers, creatures with these characteristics need only possess a capacity to generate, store, and manipulate "representations," she says.

A good naturalist would make this picture the starting point of scientific investigation - why not? The data are manifest; the picture offers an explanation. The first question to ask would be how to understand the notion of "representation" - what kinds of physical states and mechanisms could implement the information processing posited in the naive picture? Turing, of course, provided an answer, by demonstrating how, in principle, a completely physical and fully automatic representation-processing machine could be built. This would be a machine with structured internal elements that could be construed as symbols and internal states defined partly in relation to those symbols, built in such a way that the principles governing the causal interactions among the states (in conjunction with "inputs" and "outputs") mirror rational relations among the representational contents encoded in the symbols. It is important to the adequacy of Turing's model as a model of mind that the "mirroring" be quite strong, and it is - the physical features of the representational elements to which the machine's causal laws are sensitive are precisely the features that serve to encode the elements of the representational contents that are semantically relevant. The generality of the mirroring - the ability of the mechanism to track all the semantic relations that exist among the contents of the symbols - is due to the compositionality of the symbol system as a whole.

The application of Turing's theory of automatic computation to psychology yields a satisfying precisification of the naive conception of mind: Thinking is fundamentally a matter of the manipulation of symbols - physical items with representational properties. The logically relevant aspects of the representational properties of the symbols are encoded in their syntactic forms, and the compositional structure of the symbol system mirrors the semantic and logical relations in which the representational contents of the symbols participate. Mental states are functional relations to mental symbols, and mental processes are computational processes defined over the mental symbols. The hypothesis that minds are like this is the hypothesis that minds have a "classical" architecture. In the 1970s this hypothesis was first articulated and defended, as the "language of thought" theory, by Jerry Fodor, perhaps the world's foremost champion of intentional realism,8 but it has received substantial development since then, notably by cognitive scientist Zenon Pylyshyn.

The LOTT explains the central phenomena. The hypothesis that mental representations are syntactically structured explains how psychological processes can respect rational relations during deliberation. The hypothesis that agents' behavior is mediated by representations explains both intentional inexistence and opacity phenomena. And the hypothesis that representations are realized in physical structures whose forms strongly mirror syntactic structure explains how representations can have causal powers that track rational relations. Finally, the entire picture explains the projectibility of mentalistic discourse: it explains how beliefs, desires, and other mental states implicated in perception and action can constitute natural kinds, capable of grounding prediction and explanation.

Not only does computationalism provide a satisfying account of folk psychological data, it has proved immensely fertile when extended beyond the realm of conscious and deliberate thought. Beginning with Chomsky's pioneering approach to language acquisition, and continuing with David Marr's theory of visual processing (Marr, 1982), the computationalist model has offered promising explanations of largely unconscious cognitive feats performed by human beings on a daily basis, such as face recognition. The idea that an innate "theory of mind" underlies our ability to quickly interpret the facial expressions of our con-specifics, and to give intentionalistic construals to characteristically human patterns of behavior, has gained wide acceptanor among psychologists: there is serious evidence that absence of such a "psychology module" might be the central deficit in autism. Computationalism has also been extended to the cognitive achievements of infrahuman animals, such as birds' acquisition of their species' songs and insects' spatial navigation, to account for animal cognition.

So here is the situation: we have available to us an intuitively appealing model of mind, one that explains the central phenomena of mentality and that has generates! new and fruitful programs of research within the fields of human psychology ami ethology. It is striking, then, that there is so much resistance to this model within philosophy. But what is more striking than the resistance itself is the fact that critics of this picture have no alternative to offer.

Antony discusses Jaegwon Kim's objections to a non-reductive physicalism.
In general, Kim and other reductionists need to show that there is a compelling difference between biology and psychology, such that we can rest content with a biologv that is autonomous from chemistry, but not a psychology that is autonomous from biology. I submit that no such difference will be - or can be - found. Biological theories earn their keep by providing fertile and explanatorily satisfying accounts of the phenomena we pick out under biological description. No one frets about how such theories will be "integrated" into the non-biological realm (although I understand that there have been such worries in the past), for it is presumed that the truth cannot be an enemy to the truth; that if biological phenomena are, as they certainly appear to be, part of the natural material world, that their existence is compatible with their being composed of chemical and ultimately physical stuff. Why cannot the same attitude be taken toward psychological phenomena? It is only if one assumes going into the game that "the mental" is somehow defined in contradistinction to the physical that there can even appear to be a problem about "locating" the mind in a physical world. Nonreductive materialists are thoroughgoing naturalists: we want only the same consideration for the psychological data as are according the data in any other domain.

Think about it.

For Teachers
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Notes

1.

Bibliography

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