Cover Image by Karen Norberg

It’s a new year and a new editorial team for Dialectic, and we start with a dichotomy that goes back to when philosophy itself was new: that of Mind and Matter.

Every generation of philosophers since the pre-Socratics has been concerned with the nature of the material world and the part that we as mental agents play in it. Many views have been propounded from extreme idealism that denies a material world, to equally extreme materialism that squeezes out the mental entirely.

In the current climate of philosophy of mind increasingly becoming synonymous with that of cognitive science, it is essential to recognise that reducing the mind to the physical is a substantial philosophical claim and one that is far from self-evident. Indeed even given such a position, a wider conception of mind such as that suggested by Joe Peach’s article on group minds, can reveal that there are many avenues of great philosophical interest to explore distinct from the traditional mind-body problem.

Parallel to such limiting assumptions about the mind, is the claim that we can easily fully delineate the ‘physical’ world. But as we shall see in this issue (see Keith Allen’s article on non-physical properties), the boundaries of the world of matter are far from being immune to development.

So, as I hope this issue will show, although science has a lot to tell philosophy, philosophy certainly has a lot to tell science. As philosophers we are in a privileged position of not having to be constrained by any particular conceptual framework, and so are able to explore the full plethora of possible conceptual spaces. If we fail to do this then we run the risk of becoming stagnated and of obscuring the issue by our attempts to preserve dogmatism. There is still much important work left for the philosopher to do, so let us not be afraid to do it.

Christopher Williams
Editor

Mind & Matter

In this issue:

A Note on the Question of Materialism by David J. Allen

What makes a philosophy materialist? At the most basic level, it might seem that the term ‘materialism’ serves to delineate a certain ontological position – for example, the ‘materialist’ may be the philosopher for whom any non-material being supervenes on the material. While this ontological characterisation is certainly true to some extent, it fails to capture the real essence of materialism. Materialism is not so much a position as a problematic. The materialist is precisely the philosopher for whom subjectivity is a problem…

What It Is Like To Perceive Colour by Keith Allen

Is everything that exists physical? Discussions of this question typically focus on conscious experiences. But what about what these conscious experiences are conscious experiences of: red roses, sweet apples, fragrant lilies, in general ordinary material objects and their properties? Are these any less problematic for the physicalist view that everything that exists is physical? Not necessarily…

Losing Your Mind the Non-Paradoxical Way by Duncan Reynolds

ABSTRACT: In the Spring 2009 issue of Dialectic, Tom Stoneham describes a putative argument to the paradoxical effect that no-one has ever died. In this paper I attempt to resolve the paradox and, having done so, briefly discuss the continuing usefulness of the underlying argument as a test for theories of mind…

The Trouble With Qualia by J. H. Taylor

The trouble that functionalism has with qualia is well known. The basic idea is an extension of Nagel’s insight that a complete theory of mind must account in some way for the intrinsic quality of experience. (Nagel, 2004, esp.pp.537-8). Functionalism would have it that we can characterise such intrinsic qualities by way of their function. I believe functionalism faces problems with characterising qualia in this way…

The Material World by Edward Watson

What exactly is it that one wishes to speak of when one talks about the material world? As best I can understand it, it is a world that is comprised of matter, which for its existence depends not upon human perception but other influences as yet unknown…

Group Minds: Making Ants out of Ant Hills by Joseph W. Peach

Groups have minds. By ‘mind’ I mean here a nexus of agency; whatever has a mind acts in a structurally unified manner. By ‘group’ I mean a collection of persons in a cohesive formal structure, such as a corporation or family. I am not going to argue about whether or not group minds experience qualia, even if it seems to me no stranger that collections of persons can feel than that collections of neurons can. What I will argue is that groups act in a manner over and above the composites of their wills…

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