“And the wine is bottled poetry”: Dupré on Reductionism and the Mental”
With Prof Adrian Haddock (Universität Leipzig, Germany)
This talk has two main agenda. The first is to celebrate John’s criticism of reductionism in the philosophy of mind. The second is to consider John’s resistance to the idea that the ultimate ground for rejecting such reductionism is the subjectivity of the mental. John rightly recoils from those versions of this idea which rest on repetition of the stock phrase “there is something it is like to be X”. But he does not consider its best version, which understands subjectivity as self-consciousness: a form of cognition which is at once first personal and non-empirical. I suggest that John should endorse the idea in this version. But I also suggest that he cannot do so because, if he were to do so, then he would no longer be an empiricist, and empiricism is integral to John’s philosophical identity.
16 сен 2024
