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Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy > Philosophy of mind
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Persons and Minds - The Prospects of Nonreductive Materialism (Paperback, 1978 ed.)
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Persons and Minds - The Prospects of Nonreductive Materialism (Paperback, 1978 ed.)
Series: Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, 57
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Persons and Minds is an inquiry into the possibilities of
materialism. Professor Margolis starts his investigation, however,
with a critique of the range of contemporary materialist theories,
and does not find them viable. None of them, he argues, "can
accommodate in a convincing way the most distinctive features of
the mental life of men and oflower creatures and the imaginative
possibilities of discovery and technology" (p. 8). In an
extraordinarily rich analysis, Margolis carefully considers and
criticizes mind-body identity theories, physicalism, eliminative
materialism, behaviorism, as inadequate precisely in that they are
reductive. He argues, then, for ramified concepts of emergence, and
embodiment which will sustain a philosophically coherent account
both of the distinctive non-natural character of persons and of
their being naturally embodied. But Margolis provokes us to ask,
what is an em bodied mind? The crucial context for him is not the
plain physical body as such, but culture. "Persons," he writes,
"are in a sense not natural entities: they exist only in cultural
contexts and are identifiable as such only by refer ence to their
mastery of language and of whatever further abilities presuppose
such mastery" (p. 245). The hallmark of persons, in Margolis's
account, is their capacity for freedom, as well as their physical
endowment. Thus he writes, " . . . their characteristic powers - in
effect, their freedom - must inform the order of purely physical
causes in a distinctive way" (p. 246)."
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