Reference:
Gasparyan, D. E..
«Ignoramus et ignorabimus»? Does Contemporary Antiphysicalism Have a Positive Program?
// Philosophy and Culture. – 2014. – ¹ 9.
– P. 1257-1265.
Read the article
Abstract: The purpose of the present article is to find out whether the contemporary antiphysicalism has a positive program
and to analyze anti-physical solutions of the mind-body problem in the contemporary philosophy of mind. Using the approaches of such cotemporary analytical philosophers as Colin McGinn, Joseph Levine, Noam Chomsky, Thomas
Nagel and David Chalmers, the author evaluates the ratio of negative and positive component in modern anti-physical
approaches and determines the role of skepticism in their theories. Research methodology includes the historical descriptive
method and the method of comparative studies which, within the framework of the present research, involves the
comparison of physicalistic and antiphysicalistic approaches to the mind-body issues. The present research is based on
contemporary English and American antiphysicalistic programs in the philosophy of mind including substantial dualism
and different kinds of substantial dualism, property dualism or naturalistic dualism, epistemological skepticism, interactionism,
qualitatism and a few others. The conclusions are the following: although today antiphysicalism gives very
serious criticism of physicalism, the positions of the later are still strong. Whether this situation will change depends on
how convincing the positive program of antiphysicalists will turn out to be. The results of the research allow to better
understand a number of important writings on physicalistic and antiphysicalistic programs in contemporary analytical
philosophy of mind. The novelty and originality of the research is in viewing antiphysicalistic programs in terms of
contemporary English-American philosophy of mind, critical analysis of the main thought processes and key arguments
of contemporary English-American antiphysicalism and description of many works that have been written by modern
English and American philosophers recently but haven’t been translated into Russian yet.
Keywords: the mind-body problem, skepticism, anti-physicalism, physicalism, cognitive closure, explanatory gap, mysteries and problems, mysterianism, philosophy of the mind, qualitatism.
References:
Gasparyan D.E. Psikhofizicheskaya problema kak razdel sovremennoy filosofii soznaniya, Molodoy uchenyy. 2009. ¹ 12. S. 199-205.
Gasparyan D. E. Pozitsii dualizma v sovremennykh antifizikalistskikh strategiyakh analiticheskoy filosofii soznaniya // Vox. Filosofskiy zhurnal. 2013. ¹ 15. S. 3-23.
Chalmers, D. (1997). Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness//.Explaining Consciousness The "Hard Problem". Ed. by J. Shear. Cambridge (Mass.), 9-30.
Chalmers, D. (2003). Consciousness and its Place in Nature. The Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Mind, edited by Stephen Stich and Fritz Warfield, Blackwell, 44-57
Chalmers, D. (1996). The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Chomsky, N. (1975). Reflections on Language, NY Pantheon.
Chomsky, N. (2000). New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind. Cambridge, 2000.
Levine, J. (1983). ‘Materialism and qualia: The explanatory gap’, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 64, 354-361.
McGinn, S. (1989