Terence Horgan

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Terence Edward Horgan (born October 13, 1948 ) is an American philosopher and professor at the University of Arizona in Tucson . His areas of work include metaphysics , philosophy of mind and metaethics .

Horgan received his bachelor's degree in philosophy from Stanford University in 1970 . In 1974 he received his Ph.D. at the University of Michigan with the work Microreduction and the Mind-Body Problem with Jaegwon Kim . Kim's influence continues in Horgan's later work. After professorships in Illinois, Michigan and Memphis, Horgan has been a professor in Tucson, Arizona since 2002.

Physicalism and dualism

The center of Horgans thinking is the philosophy of the mind and here in particular the question of the possibility of a physicalistic interpretation of consciousness . For a long time, Horgan held materialism to be true and criticized Frank Cameron Jackson's dualistic Mary thought experiment . Horgan explained that Jackson's argument exploited an ambiguity in the talk of physical information, but was inconclusive, as "physical information" had different meanings in different premises .

In a more recent article from 2002, however, Horgan explains that materialism faces grave and unsolved problems. In this essay, Horgan argues against materialism with arguments of imaginability in the tradition of Saul Kripke and David Chalmers : According to Horgan, the following argument can be formulated against physicalism:

  1. It is conceivable for all physical properties that they appear without phenomenal properties ( qualia ).
  2. If something is imaginable, it is also possible
  3. If all physical properties are able to occur without phenomenal properties, physical and phenomenal properties cannot be identical.
So 4: Physical and phenomenal properties cannot be identical.

In another article from 2002, Horgan describes his ambivalent relationship to physicalism as follows:

I remain deeply attracted to materialism in philosophy of mind; I would like to believe that mental is super dupervenient on the physical. But the hole hard problem looks very hard indeed, and I see no prospects currently in sight for dealing with it satisfactorily. […] Much as I would like to be a materialist, at present I do not know what an adequate materialist theory of mind would be.
I still find materialism very attractive in the philosophy of mind; I would like to believe that the mental is super dupervenient over the physical. But the difficult problem of consciousness actually looks very difficult and I do not currently see any satisfactory prospects for a solution to the problem. […] As much as I would like to be a materialist, right now I don't see what an adequate materialist theory of mind would be.

Supervenience and super dupervenience

The concept of supervenience plays a central role in Horgan's philosophy of spirit . Horgan pointed out early on that a materialistic theory of consciousness is based on the fact that mental states supervise physical states. This means that a person's mental state can only change if a physical component changes at the same time.

At this point, Horgan's thought that supervenience alone is not sufficient for materialism has become influential . Rather, dualistic theories are also to be reconciled with supervenience, which is why materialists are committed to certain supervenience relationships, the superdupervenience relationships . According to Horgan, superdupervenience relationships are characterized by the fact that they can be explained by themselves, for example by the fact that the supervening properties can be reduced .

Fonts

  • with J. Tienson: Connectionism and the Philosophy of Psychology. Bradford Books, 1996.

literature

  • Essays on the Philosophy of Terence Horgan. In: Graz Philosophical Studies. 2002, ISSN  0165-9227 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Terence Horgan: Jackson on Physical Information and Qualia. In: Philosophical Quarterly. 34, 1984.
  2. ^ A b Terence Horgan and J. Tienson: Deconstructing New Wave Materialism. In: B. Loewer, (Ed.): Physicalism and Its Discontents. Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 307-318.
  3. ^ Terence Horgen: Themes in my philosophcal work. In: Grazer Philosophischen Studien - Essays on the Philosophy of Terence Horgan. 2002, ISSN  0165-9227 .
  4. ^ Terence Horgan: Supervenience and Microphysics. In: Pacific Philosophical Quarterly. 63, 1982, pp. 29-43.
  5. ^ Terence Horgan: From Supervenience to Superdupervenience: Meeting the Demands of a Material World. In: Min. 102, 1993, pp. 555-586.
personal data
SURNAME Horgan, Terence
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Horgan, Terence Edward (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH October 13, 1948