Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: The contemporary mind-body debate concerns the nature of mental (or phenomenal) properties. Physicalists maintain that mental properties are properly among the class of physical properties. Dualists, meanwhile, deny this, holding that mental properties are non-physical properties of a fundamentally different kind. This way of framing the debate, however, leaves out an historically important, though currently neglected form of dualism, which opposes physicalism not only with the claim that mental properties are non-physical, but also by recognising non-physical substances. Contemporary dualism is also known as property dualism, on which mental and physical properties are instantiated by the self-same physical object. The classical dualism of Plato, Augustine, and Descartes, however, was a form of substance dualism, on which mental properties are not only non-physical features, but also properties instantiated by non-physical substances. The consensus in the contemporary literature is that while property dualism is a serious option in the mind-body debate, substance dualism is not. It is with this contemporary dogma that Ralph Stefan Weir, in his excellent first book, is centrally concerned. In his view, there is little reason to grant that substance dualism is significantly less plausible than property dualism. In fact, Weir thinks that substance dualism is actually the more natural view. Moreover, he also thinks that this turns out to be good news for property dualists. For, the central thesis of Weir's book is in fact that property dualists must be substance dualists as well.
Source: The Philosophical Quarterly
DOI: 10.1093/pq/pqae011
Author: Alex Moran
Institution: University of Fribourg
Language: English
Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4391592185