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God, Physicalism, and the Totality of Facts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2007

Andrea Christofidou
Andrea Christofidou
Affiliation:
Worcester College, Oxford
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Abstract

The paper offers a general critique of physicalism and of one variety of nonphysicalism, arguing that such theses are untenable. By distinguishing between the absolute conception of reality and the causal completeness of physics it shows that the ‘explanatory gap’ is not merely epistemic but metaphysical. It defends the essential subjectivity and unity of consciousness and its inseparability from a self-conscious autonomous rational and moral being. Casting a favourable light on dualism freed from misconceptions, it suggests that the only plausible way forward in the search for an understanding of both physical and mental reality is a recognition of the mind as a metaphysically distinct entity.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 82 , Issue 4 , October 2007 , pp. 515 - 542
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2007

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References

1 Philosophers such as Karl Popper rejected this idea of the spirit of the age precisely because of the possibility of the dangerous consequences that it might have, such as the dismissal of any thesis likely to go against that spirit. An instance of this can be seen in the general acceptance of “the dogmatic rule that dualism is to be avoided at all costs.” Dennett, Daniel, Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1991), 37Google Scholar; his italics.

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21 I have discussed these issues in greater detail in my doctoral thesis: The Metaphysics of the Self: Self-identification and Self-ascription (University of London, 1993).

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25 Williams (1978), 301.

26 I must make clear that the truth of any clear and distinct propositions remains absolute and does not fall short of any determinate facts. As Wiggins puts it: “Absoluteness is not a modality of truth. It is a feature of sense, one might say, not reference.” Wiggins, David, Needs, Values, Truth (2nd edn.; Basil Blackwell Ltd, 1987), 343, fn. 24Google Scholar.

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33 Crane (1995), 235.

34 See my ‘First Person: The Demand for Identification-free Self-reference’ Journal of Philosophy, XCII:4 (1995), 223–234.

35 My use of ‘external’ here is neutral with regard to the internalist/externalist debate regarding either semantics or the individuation of mental content in terms of truth-conditions. With regard to the latter debate, Descartes argues that clear and distinct propositions are true, they correspond to the nature of things and are neither dependent on, nor individuated or constituted by some internal sensa (CSMK, 3, Letter to Mersenne, 16 October 1639, AT II 597). That the mind is world-involving can be perfectly compatible with Descartes' dualist thesis.

36 Crane (1995), 221.

37 Descartes, CSM, 2: Fifth Meditation (AT VII 66–67).

38 Descartes, CSM, 2: Third Set of Objections and Replies (AT VII 176). The thesis defended here can be perfectly compatible with the idea that there is an interplay between our sortal concepts and the carving up of the world, since the applicability of such concepts is not arbitrary but guided by the nature of things; it is in no way up to us what to count as the essential nature of things, or persistence through time, and so on. See Wiggins, David, ‘On Singling Out an Object Determinately’ in Subject, Thought, and Context, Pettit, Philip & McDowell, John (Eds.) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 169–180Google Scholar; see especially 170.

39 Yablo, Stephen, ‘Mental Causation’, The Philosophical Review, vol. 101, 2 (1992), 245–280, 245CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 As I have discussed the various misunderstandings and confusions concerning Descartes' dualism (including the so-called argument from doubt which is in fact not Descartes's own argument), I shall not consider them here. See my ‘Descartes’ Dualism: Correcting Some Misconceptions', The Journal of the History of Philosophy, XXXIX (2001), 215–238.

41 Descartes, CSM, 2: Sixth Meditation, AT VII 78.

42 Yablo (1992), 245.

43 I discuss the relation between autonomy, truth, and goodness in ‘Freedom, Truth, and Goodness’, forthcoming.

44 Descartes, CSMK, 3: Letter to Regius, December 1641, AT III 460.

45 Descartes, CSMK, 3: Letters to Princess Elizabeth, 21 May 1643, AT III 664 ff., and 26 June 1643, AT III 691 ff.; Letter to Arnauld, 29 July 1648, AT V 222; Conversations with Burman, AT V 163 (Cottingham, John, [ed.] Descartes' Conversations with Burman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976)Google Scholar).

46 Crane and Mellor (1990), 186.

47 Crane and Mellor (1990), 206.

48 Crane (1991), 241.

49 Spinoza's ontologically monistic philosophy cannot be appealed to, because it is of a very different kind from contemporary conceptions of monism. The two infinite attributes of God or Nature which are accessible to the human mind, thought and extension, are incommensurable, irreducible, and metaphysically distinct (though, together with an infinity of attributes of the infinite substance, they presuppose a unity), and each “must be conceived through itself.” (Spinoza, 1985, I P10). There is no room in Spinoza's ontological monism for the view that the totality of facts, including the laws, can determine the mental facts. Moreover, one of the most problematic issues in Spinoza's metaphysics is: what it is for one and the same entity to have two metaphysically distinct attributes, each expressing a true and immutable essence. He was fully aware of these difficulties, and was led to draw a number of distinctions in his attempt to give a satisfactory account. One such distinction, relevant to our present concerns, comes out of his denial that the one infinite substance (God or Nature) is to be identified with corporeality or corporeal matter. See Spinoza: Complete Works, Samuel Shirley, (trans.) and Michael L. Morgan (Eds.) (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2002), Letter 73, 942; L332 = G iv 307/11–14.

50 Crane (1994), 224.

51 Crane (1991), 241.

52 Crane (1995), 220.

53 This is along the lines of the positions defended by Kripke, Saul, Naming and Necessity (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1980)Google Scholar, and Nagel, Thomas, ‘Conceiving the Impossible and the Mind-Body Problem’, Philosophy, 73 (1998), 337–352CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

54 Crane (1994), 227.

55 Descartes, CSM, 1: Principles, pt.II, §40, AT VIII (65).

56 We must be careful not to equate what the nature of causality is with any evidence that we may have for claiming that there are causes or causal interactions. That things causally interact according to causal laws is not a substantive account of what causality is, or indeed, of what it is for something to have causal powers.

57 The defence of such principles and of what follows here, should give no comfort to a Davidsonian thesis of the mental. Davidson's insight into the irreducibility and normativity of rationality is marred by his monism. He is wedded to physicalism and thus the most important and insightful part of his thesis turns out to be precarious, since, he states, there is no such thing as the mind, only linguistic mental terms and descriptions.

58 I discuss these issues in my book: Reason, Reality, and Freedom: A New Light on Descartes' Metaphysics, in progress.

59 The issues that surround the topic of the unity of consciousness require another paper and cannot be dealt with here, but it seems to me that Descartes's and Kant's insight are worthy of exploration.

60 Nagel (1998), 346.

61 All these are the necessary requirements, it seems to me, that Hume recognised and had the intellectual honesty openly to admit and lament in the ‘Appendix’ to the Treatise that his account of personal identity failed to provide. The seriousness of the problem recognised by Hume was that without the I or the self, the rest of his enquiry, especially his account of causality which provided a bedrock for his enquire, simply collapsed.

62 Williams (1978), 96–97.

63 Evans, Gareth, The Varieties of Reference (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 212Google Scholar.

64 Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Pure Reason (trans. by Smith, Norman Kemp; The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1980), B135Google Scholar; see also B140–2.

65 Given the climate at the time, and having been made aware by Mersenne of the literature that was circulating in Paris, and of the decree of the Fifth Lateran Council of 1513, Descartes found the need to say in the Synopsis, that although further arguments were required for the conclusion that the soul is immortal (since this could not be deduced from the argument for dualism), the arguments he had offered were “enough to give mortals the hope of an after-life” (AT VII 14). It may “have been the currency of the debate about the soul's immortality which caused Mersenne to add [those] words to the title of the first, Parisian, edition […which] shows how Descartes's work could be reduced against the wishes of the author to the terms of a current debate, and its novelty and precision misrepresented.” ‘Introduction’, René Descartes: A Discourse on the Method (A new translation by Ian Maclean; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), lvii–lviii.

66 Descartes, CSM, 2: Second Set of Replies (AT VII 153). And in the Sixth Set of Replies, he says: “I have certainly tried to prove by natural reason that the human soul is not corporeal, but I grant that only faith can enable us to know whether it will ascend above.” (AT VII 431).

67 See Letter to Mersenne, 29 August 1639 (CSMK, 3: AT II 570), in which he criticises those who mix the natural light of reason with any grace-inspired illumination.

68 Cottingham, John, ‘The Cartesian Legacy’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Suppl. vol. LXVI (1992), 1–21Google Scholar.

69 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Pears, David F. & McGuinness, Brian F. (transls.) (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), §1.1 and §1.2Google Scholar.

70 A defence of this rejection is outside the scope of this paper.

71 As Descartes explains: “mind and body are incomplete substances when they are referred to a human being which together they make up […] a unity in its own right” though they have nothing incomplete about them qua substances. (CSM, 2: Fourth Set of Replies AT VII 222).

I should like to thank Stephen Blamey and Peter J. King for their comments on previous drafts. Much earlier versions of this material were presented to a series of lectures on the Philosophy of Mind that I gave for the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Oxford in 1997, and to various seminars and classes that I have given since. I am grateful to those audiences for their comments.