New Perspectives on Type Identity: The Mental and the Physical

Description

The type identity theory, according to which types of mental state are identical to types of physical state, fell out of favour for some years but is now being considered with renewed interest. Many philosophers are critically re-examining the arguments which were marshalled against it, finding in the type identity theory both resources to strengthen a comprehensive, physicalistic metaphysics and a useful tool in understanding the relationship between developments in psychology and new results in neuroscience. This volume brings together leading philosophers of mind, whose essays challenge in new ways the standard objections to type identity theory, such as the multiple realizability objection and the modal argument. Other essays show how cognitive science and neuroscience are lending new support to type identity theory and still others provide, extend and improve traditional arguments concerning the theory's explanatory power.

Simone Gozzano is Professor of Philosophy of Mind at the Universita dell'Aquila. He is the author of four books (in Italian) on topics such as intentionality, animal minds, mental causation and consciousness. He is the co-editor, with Francesco Orilia, of Tropes and the Philosophy of Mind (2008). Christopher S. Hill is a Professor of Philosophy at Brown University. He is the author of three books: Sensations: A Defense of Type Materialism (Cambridge, 1991), Thought and World: An Austere Account of Truth, Reference, and Semantic Correspondence (Cambridge, 2002), and Consciousness (Cambridge, 2009).

"...provides perspectives on the type-identity thesis that are both philosophically acute and informed by recent findings in the neurosciences. In addition, many of the contributions provide insightful historical accounts of the fortunes of the type-identity thesis -- and indeed, more generally, of physicalistic accounts of the mind. Thus the essays in this anthology are not merely individually interesting, and well worth reading on their own, but the volume as a whole hangs together in a way that is unusually instructive, and would be an excellent and provocative choice for a graduate seminar in the philosophy of mind." --Janet Levin, University of Southern California, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews