Being reduced : new essays on reduction, explanation, and causation / edited by Jakob Hohwy, Jesper Kallestrup.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Hohwy, Jakob.

Kallestrup, Jesper.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Philosophy of mind.

Brain.

Physical Description:

viii, 312 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2008.

Summary:

There are few more unsettling philosophical questions than this: 'what happens in attempts to reduce some properties to some other more fundamental properties?' Reflection on this question inevitably touches on very deep issues about ourselves, our own interactions with the world and each other, and our very understanding of what there is and what goes on around us. If we cannot command a clear view of these deep issues, then very many other debates in contemporary philosophy seem to lose traction-think of causation, laws of nature, explanation, consciousness, personal identity, intentionality, normativity, freedom, responsibility, justice, and so on. Reduction can easily seem to unravel our world.

Here, an eminent group of philosophers helps us answer this question. Their novel contributions comfortably span a number of current debates in philosophy and cognitive science: what is the nature of reduction, of reductive explanation, of mental causation? The contributions range from approaches in analytical metaphysics, over philosophy of the special sciences and physics, to interdisciplinary studies in psychiatry and neurobiology. The authors connect strands in contemporary philosophy that are often treated separately and in combination the chapters allow the reader to see how issues of reduction, explanation, and causation mutually constrain each other. The anthology therefore moves the debate further both at the level of contributions to specific debates and at the level of integrating insights from a number of debates.

Contents:

Reduction and embodied cognition : perspectives from medicine and psychiatry / Valerie Gray Hardcastle and Rosalyn W. Stewart

Real reduction in real neuroscience : metascience, not philosophy of science (and certainly not metaphysics!) / John Bickle

Reduction in real life / Peter Godfrey-Smith

Group agency and supervenience / Christian List and Philip Pettit

Reduction and reductive explanation : is one possible without the other? / Jaegwon Kim

CP laws, reduction, and explanatory pluralism / Peter Lipton

Must a physicalist be a microphysicalist? / David Papineau

Why there is anything except physics? / Barry Loewer

Multiple realization : keeping it real / Louise M. Antony

Causation and determinable properties : on the efficacy of colour, shape, and size / Tim Crane

The exclusion problem, the determination relation, and contrastive causation / Peter Menzies

Mental causation and neural mechanisms / James Woodward

Distinctions in distinction / Daniel Stoljar

Exclusion again / Karen Bennett.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780199211531

0199211531

OCLC:

226291796