From the Knowledge Argument to Mental Substance

Howard Robinson is University Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Central European University, Budapest, Senior Fellow at the Rutgers Center for Philosophy of Religion, New Brunswick, and a Visiting Scholar at Fordham University, New York. He is the author of Matter and Sense: A Critique of Contemporary Materialism (Cambridge, 1982) and Perception (1994).

'From the Knowledge Argument to Mental Substance is an extremely ambitious and original book, crystallizing several decades of Howard Robinson's work in the philosophy of mind … In a field that is sometimes concerned with relatively small details of technical arguments, Robinson's highly ambitious and very novel approach is refreshingly different.' The Times Literary Supplement

• Part I. The Power of the Knowledge Argument: 1. Introducing the knowledge argument; 2. Dennett's denial of Mary's ignorance; 3. The abilities hypothesis and other functionalist strategies; 4. Why Frank should not have jilted Mary: the inadequacy of representationalism as a strategy against KA; 5. The phenomenal concept strategy: more enigma than argument; 6. Davidson, non-reductive physicalism and naturalism without physicalism; 7. Mysterianism, neutral monism and panpsychism; 8. Conclusion: the real power of the knowledge argument – qualia, qualities and our conception of the physical world; Part II. Why Physicalism Entails Epiphenomenalism: 9. Reductionism and the status of the special sciences; 10. Vagueness, realism, language and thought; 11. Composite objects, the special sciences, conceptualism and realism; 12. Why there are (probably) no physical individuals; 13. Dennett and the human perspective; Part III. Arguments for Mental Substance: 14. Some current arguments for substance dualism; 15. An argument for the existence of mental substance; 16. Plotinus, Locke and Hume on the unity of individual substances; Bibliography; Index.