scholarly journals Dualismo de substâncias : Swinburne e as críticas materialistas de Paul Churchland

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Érika Helena Soares Perez
Keyword(s):  
Paul Churchland

Schellingianism & Postmodernity

1998 ◽  
pp. 32-38
Author(s):  
Iain Hamilton Grant
Keyword(s):  
Mental States ◽  
German Idealism ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
French Philosophy ◽  
Reflective Consciousness ◽  
European Philosophy ◽  
Paul Churchland

Andrew Bowie's recent Schelling and Modern European Philosophy claims that Schelling idealism is a critique of 'reflective reason' that can be brought to bear on the avatars of French postmodernism. Bower is careful not to intricate Schelling's Naturphilosophie and Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom, in which both nature and freedom are fused into a single, unconscious series of natural drives or 'vortex of forces.' To take Schelling at word would turn the Naturphilosophie and Inquiries into a materialist physics of mental states, the basis of which are inaccessible to reflective consciousness. Best represented by philosophers such as Paul Churchland, however, why does Bowie avoid playing up this materialist Schelling when dealing with French 'Irrationalism?' Inadvertently, Bowie rekindles the Kantian critique in order to separate two aspects of recent French philosophy: the materialist (with which Paul Churchland notes that his eliminative, connectionist neuromaterialism has much in common) and the reflective (as inherited from the German Idealism Schelling represents, and mediated via Bergson and Heidegger). While French philosophy's recent adoptions in the Anglo world have been of this latter complexion, Bowie's anxious prophylaxia exposes a materialist current in French thought that has remained more or less beyond the range of Anglophone hearing.

Speaking of Philosophy: A Reply to Paul Churchland

Dialogue ◽  
1977 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 502-506
Author(s):  
W. A. Shearson
Keyword(s):  
Paul Churchland

Studying Perception

Philosophy ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 83 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-211
Author(s):  
Olli Lagerspetz
Keyword(s):  
Mental Representation ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
General Picture ◽  
Peter Winch ◽  
Basic Understanding ◽  
Per Se ◽  
Paul Churchland

AbstractEmpirical studies of perception must use the logic of everyday non-technical conceptions of perception as their unquestioned background. This is because the phenomena to be studied are defined and individuated on the basis of such basic understanding. Thus the methods of neurobiology exclude reductionist accounts from the outset, implicitly if not explicitly. It is further argued that the concepts of neural and mental representation, while not confused per se, presuppose a general picture where perception as a whole is viewed in the light of teleology. References are made to discussions by Bennett and Hacker, Paul Churchland, and Peter Winch.

scholarly journals Viejo y nuevo pragmatismo

2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (47) ◽  
pp. 21
Author(s):  
Susan Haack
Keyword(s):  
Richard Rorty ◽  
Paul Churchland

<p class='p1'>C.S. Peirce, fundador del pragmatismo, propuso una filosofía científica reformada que se rige por la máxima pragmática, que asocia el significado de un concepto con sus consecuencias experienciales. Sin embargo, con el tiempo, el pragmatismo evolucionó: de la articulación lógica, idealista-realista de Peirce, pasó por el pragmatismo más psicológico y nominalista de James, hasta llegar en nuestros días a Richard Rorty, quien propone, en nombre del pragmatismo, que el territorio metafísico y epistemológico que forma el centro tradicional de la filosofía se abandone, y que la filosofía se convierta en un género de literatura; mientras que, en el otro extremo, filósofos científicos como Paul Churchland y Stephen Stich también se describen así mismos como pragmatistas. Revisando la historia del pragmatismo desde Pierce y James, pasando por Dewey, Mead y Schiller hasta nuestros días, este artículo detalla la transmutación del viejo pragmatismo en el nuevo.</p>

Sensation, Theory and Meaning

1985 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 135-155
Author(s):  
B. Thurston ◽  
S. Coval
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Realism ◽  
Causal Role ◽  
Causal Order ◽  
Intrinsic Nature ◽  
Paul Feyerabend ◽  
Central Argument ◽  
Causal Chains ◽  
Common Observation ◽  
The One ◽  
Paul Churchland

One way to judge whether sensations are merely part of the causal order and not part of the cognitive or epistemic order is to determine whether or not sensations control to any extent the meaning of our observation terms. Should our observation terms have their meanings even in part determined by sensations then this would seem to be evidence that sensations are of the cognitive order. In a recent and noteworthy book, Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind, Paul Churchland offers a development of the Sellarsian idea that sensations play a merely causal role in perception. Churchland also cites Paul Feyerabend, whose adaptation of the Sellarsian position he finds more to his purpose. The central argument of Churchland's book and the one which will be most particularly dealt with herein is an attempt to show that facts about sensations are totally irrelevant to the meaning of observation terms, even to the meaning of common observation terms such as 'hot,' 'cold,' 'white,' and 'black.' It is Churchland's contention, then, that facts about the intrinsic nature of sensations (as opposed to facts about their roles in causal chains) are semantically irrelevant.

Internal Recurrence

Dialogue ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 155-162
Author(s):  
Don Ross
Keyword(s):  
Neural Networks ◽  
Recurrent Neural Networks ◽  
Folk Psychology ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Paul Churchland

Paul Churchland does not open his latest book,The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul, modestly. He begins by announcing, “This book is about you. And me … More broadly still, it is about every creature that ever swam, or walked, or flew over the face of the Earth” (p. 3). A few sentences later, he says, “Fortunately, recent research into neural networks … has produced the beginnings of a real understanding of how the biological brain works—a real understanding, that is, of howyouwork, and everyone else like you” (p. 3). The implicit identification here of “me and you and everyone” with “the biological brain” might lead an uncharitable reader to view Churchland's book as “Eliminativism for the non-specialist,” that is, as an attempt to popularize the view of the mindbody problem with which, among his professional peers, Churchland has long been identified. However, I think that such a readingwouldbe uncharitable. He is, of course, frequently sceptical about the utility of folk psychology, but in this book he is much less concerned to disparage folk psychology as a failedtheory(by contrast with, for example, the arguments in Churchland 1979) than to urge the more modest view that the more we understand the brain, the better we shall be at helping those whose brains are damaged in ways that interfere seriously with the fulfilment of their lives. Hence, I am inclined to take him at his word when he says in the Preface that “The book is motivated first of all by sheer excitement over the new picture that is now emerging … [and] … also by the idea that this is information that the public needs to know” (p. xi). What excites Churchland so, at least overtly, is not the negative thesis he has defended elsewhere that folk-psychological terms fail to refer; his enthusiasm is mainly reserved for the positive thesis that minds are, essentially, interacting assemblies of recurrent neural networks. It is therefore this positive thesis, and Churchland's defence of it, that I will assess in the following discussion.

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