Against materialism

Faith and Philosophy

Volumn 23, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 3-32

  Plantinga, Alvin ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME   (United States)

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EID: 84858711313     PISSN: 07397046     EISSN: 21533393     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/faithphil20062316     Document Type: Article

References (26)

1. See, e.g., Richard Swinburne, The Evolution of the Soul (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 2, 145.
2. Aquinas' position on the relation between soul and body may be a special case of this view; see my "Materialism and Christian Belief," in Persons: Human and Divine, ed. Peter van Inwagen and Dean Zimmerman, forthcoming.
3. See, e.g., Bas van Fraassen, The Empirical Stance (New Haven: Yale, 2002), pp. 50ff.
4. Although I can't help concurring with David Armstrong, no friend of dualism: But disembodied existence seems to be a perfectly intelligible supposition⋯. Consider the case where I am lying in bed at night thinking. Surely it is logically possible that I might be having just the same experiences and yet not have a body at all. No doubt I am having certain somatic, that is to say, bodily sensations. But if I am lying still these will not be very detailed in nature, and I can see nothing self-contradictory in supposing that they do not correspond to anything in physical reality. Yet I need be in no doubt about my identity. (A Materialist Theory of Mind [London: Routledge, 1968], p. 19)
5. See my Warrant and Proper Function (New York; Oxford University Press, 1993), chap. 6.
6. See, e.g., Dean Zimmerman, "Material People" in The Oxford Handbook of Metaphysics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), pp. 504ff. Zimmerman himself seems attracted to the thought that "the mass of matter" of which one's body is composed is an object distinct from the latter, but colocated with it (although of course he is not attracted to the idea that a person is identical with such a mass of matter).
7. One such argument, for example, apparently has the following form: (a) Many people who advocate p, do so in the service of a hope that science will never be able to explain p; therefore (b) not-p. See Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), p. 27.
8. *) don't believe p?) See Daniel Dennett, Explaining Consciousness (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1991), p. 37.
9. "But on the kinds of figures that are coming out now, it seems like the whole brain must get recycled about every other month." John McCrone, "How Do You Persist When Your Molecules Don't?" Science and Consciousness Review, (web-journal, June 2004, No. 1).
10. See, e.g., David Hershenov, "The Metaphysical Problem of Intermittent Existence and the Possibility of Resurrection, Faith and Philosophy (Jan. 2003), p. 33.
11. And hence strictly speaking, the argument doesn't require a thought experiment; it requires instead seeing that a certain state of affairs or proposition is possible. See George Bealer, "Intuition and the Autonomy of Philosophy" in Rethinking Intuition, ed. Michael DePaul and William Ramsey (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), p. 207.
12. Monadology 17.
13. In Leibniz Selections, ed. Philip Werner (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1951), p. 536.
14. See Fred Dretske's Explaining Behavior (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), pp. 54ff.
15. See also Bill Ramsey's Using and Abusing Representation: Reassessing the cognitive Revolution (presently unpublished). Materialists who try to explain how a material structure like a neuronal event can be a belief ordinarily try to do so by promoting indicators to beliefs; for animadversions on such attempts, see the appendix in my "Materialism and Christian Belief."
16. "Evolutionary Epistemology" in The Philosophy of Karl Popper, ed. P. A. Schupp (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1974), p. 413.
17. "Evolutionary Epistemology" in Biology and Philosophy, vol. 1, No. 2 (1986), p. 193.
18. Metaphysics (Boulder, Colorado, 2002 (second edition)), p. 176.
19. "Dualism and Materialism: Athens and Jerusalem?", Faith and Philosophy 12:4, Oct. 1995, p. 478. That is (I take it), it seems to be necessary that material things don't have such properties. Van Inwagen's examples are such properties as being in pain and sensing redly; the same goes, I say, for properties like being the belief that p for a proposition p.
20. This may seem a bit abrupt; for substantiation, see my "Materialism and Christian Belief," (footnote 1).
21. Brown, Murphy and Malony Whatever Happened to the Soul? (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998), p. 1.
22. Matter and Consciousness (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984), p 20.
23. See also Thomas Nagel's "The Psychophysical Nexus," in Concealment and Exposure and Other Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002);
24. in the course of a long, detailed and subtle discussion, Thomas Nagel argues that there is a logically necessary connection between mental states and physical states of the following sort: for any mental state M there is a physical state P such that there is some underlying reality R, neither mental nor physical but capable of having both mental and physical states, which has essentially the property of being such that necessarily, it is in P just if it is in M. (And perhaps it would be sensible to go on from that claim to the conclusion that it is not possible that I exist when my body B does not.) Nagel concedes that it seems impossible that there be such a reality; his argument that nonetheless there really is or must be such a thing is, essentially, just an appeal to localization/dependency phenomena: "The evident massive and detailed dependence of what happens in the mind on what happens in the brain provides, in my view, strong evidence that the relation is not contingent but necessary (p 202), and "The causal facts are strong evidence that mental events have physical properties, if only we could make sense of the idea" (p. 204). The particular route of his argument here is via an argument to the best explanation: he suggests that the only really satisfactory explanation of those localization/dependency phenomena is the existence of such an underlying reality. (Of course if that is what it takes for a really satisfying explanation, it is less than obvious that there is a really satisfying explanation here.) This argument has also made its way into the popular press: See Steven Pinker's "How to Think About the Mind," Newsweek (Sept. 27, 2004), p. 78.
25. See Ned Block and Robert Stalnaker, "Conceptual Analysis, Dualism, and the Explanatory Gap" (hereafter 'B&S'), Philosophical Review, Jan. 1999, p. 1.
26. "Causal and Metaphysical Necessity," Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 79 (1998), p. 59.