Physicalism

This seminar will examine the thesis of physicalism about the natural world: roughly, the idea that everything is fundamentally physical. We will start by looking at a very austere form of physicalism, "identification physicalism", that offers an attractively simple and uniform picture of nature. This kind of physicalism, or something like it, has been defended by David Lewis, Ted Sider, and Cian Dorr. We will consider some new arguments against identification physicalism that are off the beaten path: arguments from the special intentional character of consciousness, arguments from the epistemic and normative significance of consciousness, and arguments based on the ease with which we can determinately think and talk about our own conscious states.