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
Being Reduced: New Essays on Reduction, Explanation, and Causation
โ Scribed by Jakob Hohwy, Jesper Kallestrup
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press, USA
- Year
- 2008
- Tongue
- English
- Leaves
- 323
- Edition
- First Edition
- Category
- Library
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
โฆ Synopsis
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 theoretical 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.
โฆ Table of Contents
Contents......Page 8
List of Contributors......Page 10
Introduction......Page 12
1. Reduction and Embodied Cognition: Perspectives from Medicine and Psychiatry......Page 31
2. Real Reduction in Real Neuroscience: Metascience, Not Philosophy of Science (and Certainly Not Metaphysics!)......Page 45
3. Reduction in Real Life......Page 63
4. Group Agency and Supervenience......Page 86
5. Reduction and Reductive Explanation: Is One Possible Without the Other?......Page 104
6. CP Laws, Reduction, and Explanatory Pluralism......Page 126
7. Must a Physicalist be a Microphysicalist?......Page 137
8. Why There Is Anything Except Physics......Page 160
9. Multiple Realization: Keeping It Real......Page 175
10. Causation and Determinable Properties: On the Efficacy of Colour, Shape, and Size......Page 187
11. The Exclusion Problem, the Determination Relation, and Contrastive Causation......Page 207
12. Mental Causation and Neural Mechanisms......Page 229
13. Distinctions in Distinction......Page 274
14. Exclusion Again......Page 291
C......Page 318
G......Page 319
M......Page 320
P......Page 321
S......Page 322
Z......Page 323
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