Non-Reductive Physicalism

Chapters 2 and 3 were devoted to a discussion of Descartes’s substance dualism and its historical successors. Nowadays substance dualism has few proponents. Nevertheless dualism survives in the form of a widespread acceptance of a dualism of properties: property dualism. Functionalists, for instance, embrace a kind of property dualism in arguing that mental characteristics, although realized by or grounded in agents’ material makeup, are not reducible to material characteristics. More generally, philosophers calling themselves non-reductive physicalists hold that mental states and properties are dependent on, yet distinct from, material states and properties. A view of this sort has struck many philosophers as not merely attractive, but inevitable.