Daniel Giberman: Is the Refutation of Physicalism Child’s Play?

The Research Seminar Series in Philosophy invites you to a seminar with Daniel Giberman, Göteborg, "Is the Refutation of Physicalism Child’s Play?". 

Abstract:

It is well-known that philosophical zombies are putative counterexamples to standard physicalism. While “broad” physicalist theories—such as constitutive Russellian monism—are not similarly threatened by zombies, they allegedly are threatened by philosophical ghosts. This talk brings to the fore a third potential horror for both standard and broad physicalists: chuckies. A chucky is a physical twin of a typically inanimate object (such as a toy doll), which nonetheless enjoys human-like phenomenal consciousness. Chuckies are significant because their conceivability is clearer and more robust than that of ghosts, rendering them a deeper threat to extant physicalisms than are either zombies or ghosts. The talk will conclude by noting that the physicalist might respond to this threat by expanding to a sort of ‘superbroad’ physicalism, which subsumes under its explanatory domain not just the mental and the standardly physical, but also the very nature of property exemplification for material objects. 

About the seminar series

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