Physicalism as an attitude

Philosophical Studies 138 (1):1 - 15 (2008)
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Abstract

It is widely noted that physicalism, taken as the doctrine that the world contains just what physics says it contains, faces a dilemma which, some like Tim Crane and D.H. Mellor have argued, shows that “physicalism is the wrong answer to an essentially trivial question”. I argue that both problematic horns of this dilemma drop out if one takes physicalism not to be a doctrine of the kind that might be true, false, or trivial, but instead an attitude or oath one takes to formulate one’s ontology solely according to the current posits of physics.

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Alyssa Ney
LMU Munich

Citations of this work

Physicalism.Daniel Stoljar - 2015 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
What Physicalism Could Be.Michael J. Raven - forthcoming - Analytic Philosophy.
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References found in this work

The View From Nowhere.Thomas Nagel - 1986 - New York: Oxford University Press.
New work for a theory of universals.David K. Lewis - 1983 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 61 (4):343-377.
An essay concerning human understanding.John Locke - 1689 - New York: Oxford University Press. Edited by Pauline Phemister.

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