Joseph Levine

Joseph Levine (born January 17, 1952 ) is an American philosopher who teaches at the University of Massachusetts Amherst .

His field of work is the philosophy of mind and he became known with the so-called "Explanatory gap argument".

The idea is that an insurmountable explanation gap ( explanatory gap ) is, if we want to understand our consciousness by means of scientific inquiry. A scientific explanation of mental states would require the reductive return of all properties of these states. The property of being experienced in a special way ( qualia ), however, cannot be explained reductively by neuron fire or the like. There remains a gap between the outside perspective of the natural scientist and the experiential perspective of the first person.

In doing so, Levine does not want to return to a dualism (such as Karl Popper and John C. Eccles ), but remains - despite the problems described - a materialist.

literature

The ideas are developed in:

• Materialism and Qualia: The Explanatory Gap . In: Pacific Philosophical Quarterly . Volume 64, No. 4, October 1983, pp. 354-361.
• On Leaving Out What It's Like . In: G. Humphreys and M. Davies (Eds.): Consciousness. Psychological and Philosophical Essays . Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1993, pp. 121-136. Reprinted in: NJ Block , O. Flanagan, and G. Güzeledere (Eds.): The Nature of Consciousness. Philosophical Debates . MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts 1997.

In addition, a book has been published that deals with the topic in detail: Purple Haze. The Puzzle of Consciousness . Oxford University Press, 2001.

Web links

• Homepage of Joseph Levine , University of Massachusetts, Amherst, with bibliography