The role of perception in a priori knowledge: Some remarks

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/43392/1/11098_2004_Article_BF00646421.pd

Materialism and the criteria of the mental

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/43820/1/11229_2004_Article_BF00413431.pd

How Can My Mind Move My Limbs? Mental Causation from Descartes to Contemporary Physicalism

Mental events enter into causal relations with bodily events. The philosophical task is to explain how this is possible. Descartes’ dualism of mental and material substances ultimately founders on the impossibility of pairing mental events with physical events as causes and effects. This is what I have called “the pairing problem.” Many contemporary views also fail to explain mental causation. In the end, we are left with a dilemma. If mental phenomena are irreducible to physical phenomena, then mental phenomena lose their causal efficacy. However, if mental phenomena are reducible to physical phenomena, then casts doubt on the very existence of mental phenomena

Causes as explanations: A critique

This paper offers a critique of the view that causation can be analyzed in terms of explanation. In particular, the following points are argued: (1) a genuine explanatory analysis of causation must make use of a fully epistemological-psychological notion of explanation; (2) it is unlikely that the relatively clear-cut structure of the causal relation can be captured by the relatively unstructured relation of explanation; (3) the explanatory relation does not always parallel the direction of causation; (4) certain difficulties arise for any attempt to construct a nonrelativistic relation of causation from the essentially relativistic relation of explanation; and (5) to analyze causation as explanation is to embrace a form of “causal idealism”, the view that causal connections are not among the objective features of the world. The paper closes with a brief discussion of the contrast between the two fundamentally opposed viewpoints about causality, namely causal idealism and causal realism.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/43844/1/11238_2004_Article_BF00000001.pd

Psychophysical supervenience

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/43394/1/11098_2004_Article_BF00353523.pd

Reference : Some Recent Philosophical Issues

A semantical theory for a language is intended to represent what one must know to be able to interpret utterances of that language. What is the form such a theory must take, and what information must it provide about the language and its speakers? These are among the basic problems debated in the current Anglo-American philosophy of language. The aim of the present paper is to sketch the outlines of two influential approaches to the nature of semantical theory, namely the "building block" theory and the "holistic theory," and clarify the philosophical and methodological motivation for the holistic approach. The paper is basically an introductory survey of the current debate in this area, with a special focus on Donald Davidson's work

El fisicalismo no reduccionista y su problema con la causalidad mental

El texto que se traduce es “The Nonreductivist’s Troubles with Mental Causation”. Mental Causation. Eds. John Heil y Alfred Mele.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. 189-210. También se hizo uso de la versión publicada en Jaegwon Kim, Supervenience and mind. Selected philosophical essays. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. 336-357