April 16, 2005

Uwe Meixner

Some good, old-fashioned German philosophy. Though I haven't read the book, I pretty much agree with everything in this excerpt: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytho/dfwmeixner.html

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1 Comments:

Blogger Jime said...

Hi, congratulations for your excellent philosophical blog.

Meixner is an interesting philosopher. Specially, I like his views on philosophy of mind. A paper by Meixner against physicalism can be read here:

http://www.newdualism.org/review/vol1/DR1-1-U.Meixner.pdf

As you know, dualism is unfashionable in academic philosophy; but recently, dualism have been given more respect by some renowned philosophers. For example, materialist philosopher of mind William Lycan wrote a paper (in 2007) admitting: "I have been a materialist about the mind for forty years, since first I considered the mind-body issue. In all that time I have seen exactly one argument for mind-body dualism that I thought even prima facie convincing.<1>. And like many other materialists, I have often quickly cited standard objections to dualism that are widely taken to be fatal<2>—notoriously the dread Interaction Problem. My materialism has never wavered. Nor is it about to waver now; I cannot take dualism very seriously.

Being a philosopher, of course I would like to think that my stance is rational, held not just instinctively and scientistically and in the mainstream but because the arguments do indeed favor materialism over dualism. But I do not think that, though I used to. My position may be rational, broadly speaking, but not because the arguments favor it: Though the arguments for dualism do (indeed) fail, so do the arguments for materialism. And the standard objections to dualism are not very convincing; if one really manages to be a dualist in the first place, one should not be much impressed by them. My purpose in this paper is to hold my own feet to the fire and admit that I do not proportion my belief to the evidence
"

http://www.unc.edu/~ujanel/Du.htm

William Vallicella, another professional philosopher, have argued for dualism too:

http://maverickphilosopher.powerblogs.com/philosophy_of_mind/

It seems that philosophy of mind is a very interesting philosophical area to research and think.

Keep the excellent work!

10/29/2008 09:38:00 PM  

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