Papers by Julia Telles de Menezes
Analytica (Rio de Janeiro), Sep 12, 2015
This paper aims at exposing a strategy to organize the debate around physicalism. Our starting po... more This paper aims at exposing a strategy to organize the debate around physicalism. Our starting point (following Stoljar 2010) is the pre-philosophical notion of physicalism, which is typically formulated in the form of slogans. Indeed, philosophers debating metaphysics have paradigmatically introduced the subject with aid of slogans such as "there is nothing over and above the physical", "once every physical aspect of the world is settled, every other aspect will follow", "physicalism is the thesis that everything is physical". These ideas are very intuitive but they are, of course, far from being a satisfactory metaphysical conception of Physicalism. For that end, we will begin with the definition of physicalism as the thesis that everything is physical, following Stoljar, we should be able to respond to one central question: how to interpret the physicalist claim that everything in physical.
The place of physics in the edifice of science Modern planetarium software (e.g. on your tablet c... more The place of physics in the edifice of science Modern planetarium software (e.g. on your tablet computer) allows to virtually travel to a celestial body in outer space, circle a bit around it and then return back to Earth. As one travels around in space one meets big, very big chunks of matter subject to enormous physical forces. Back on Earth one may continue the travel by zooming in on incredibly small objects using eventually a scanning electron microscope. Whatever one sees on the way is matter subject to certain forces – all of that physical in character. One would not be able to see these things, safe by a miracle, unless they were physical; because seeing things is itself at bottom a physical process. It is, of course, an enormously complicated process. So complicated that it would be folly to try to describe it in basic physical terms. But we are confident that it can be done, that it must be doable in principle, if we had enough information storage and computing time and power – and enough interest in accomplishing the task. So, whatever objects we encounter in this world, they are objects in principle in the domain of physics. And whatever properties these objects may have, they are properties equivalent to a set of values for fundamentally physical variables. This special role of physics in modern natural science is, we take it, a deeply entrenched working hypothesis of all science. Of course, the special sciences, as well as the humanities, employ carefully attuned " macro-packages " so as to obtain explanations of the phenomena that charac
The claim that at least some of our mental states have qualitative, phenomenal features to which ... more The claim that at least some of our mental states have qualitative, phenomenal features to which we have privileged cognitive access is intuitively plausible. Nevertheless, the claim is considered by many philosophers to be incompatible with a physicalist ontology. Some radical physicalists prefer simply to deny the existence of the qualitative character of our mental states, whereas other physicalists try to reinterpret the knowledge of the phenomenal character of our experience as the acquisition of an ability, i.e., as a sort of know-how in opposition to the acquisition of an information (know-that). The paper presents and examines critically some recent attempts to compatibilize the sui generis nature of phenomenal knowledge with the materialist claim that the content of this sort of knowledge is constituted entirely by physical facts.
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Papers by Julia Telles de Menezes