New Perspectives on Type Identity

Simone Gozzano is Professor of Philosophy of Mind at the Università dell'Aquila. He is the author of four books (in Italian) on topics such as intentionality, animal minds, mental causation and consciousness. He is the co-editor, with Francesco Orilia, of Tropes and the Philosophy of Mind (2008). Christopher S. Hill is a Professor of Philosophy at Brown University. He is the author of three books: Sensations: A Defense of Type Materialism (Cambridge, 1991), Thought and World: An Austere Account of Truth, Reference, and Semantic Correspondence (Cambridge, 2002), and Consciousness (Cambridge, 2009).

"...provides perspectives on the type-identity thesis that are both philosophically acute and informed by recent findings in the neurosciences. In addition, many of the contributions provide insightful historical accounts of the fortunes of the type-identity thesis -- and indeed, more generally, of physicalistic accounts of the mind. Thus the essays in this anthology are not merely individually interesting, and well worth reading on their own, but the volume as a whole hangs together in a way that is unusually instructive, and would be an excellent and provocative choice for a graduate seminar in the philosophy of mind." --Janet Levin, University of Southern California, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

• Introduction Simone Gozzano and Christopher S. Hill; 1. Acquaintance and the mind-body problem Katalin Balog; 2. Identity, reduction, and conserved mechanisms: perspectives from circadian rhythm research William Bechtel; 3. Property identity and reductive explanation Ansgar Beckermann; 4. A brief history of neuroscience's actual influences on mind-brain reductionism John Bickle; 5. Type-identity conditions for phenomenal properties Simone Gozzano; 6. Locating qualia: do they reside in the brain or in the body and the world? Christopher S. Hill; 7. In defense of the identity theory Mark I Frank Jackson; 8. The very idea of token physicalism Jaegwon Kim; 9. About face: philosophical naturalism, the heuristic identity theory, and recent findings about prosopagnosia Robert McCauley; 10. On justifying neurobiologicalism for consciousness Brian McLaughlin; 11. The causal contribution of mental events Alyssa Ney; 12. Return of the zombies? John Perry; 13. Identity, variability, and multiple realization in the special sciences Lawrence Shapiro and Thomas Polger; Bibliography; Index.