| |
Materialism, in philosophy, is the doctrine that everything is exhaustively physical. Some materialists hold that there are mental phenomena and that they are exhaustively physical. Everything, including the mental, is physical: dualists are wrong to claim that the mental is non-physical. Further, mental properties are not radically different from, and irreducible to, physical properties: the dual aspect theory is wrong to claim that while everything is physical, mental aspects or properties are radically different from and irreducible to physical ones. Rather, the mental is exhausted by—is nothing—over and above the physical.
Other materialists hold that while everything is exhaustively physical, the mental could not be exhaustively physical. They infer that there are no mental things, claiming that we should eliminate the mental from our account of what reality contains. AJ
See also double aspect theory; dualism; eliminativism; identity theory; mental phenomena.Further reading P. Churchland, Matter and Consciousness; , J. Foster, The Immaterial Mind. |
|
