Abstract
Several philosophers have argued that property dualism and substance materialism are incompatible positions. Recently, Susan Schneider has provided a novel version of such an argument, claiming that the incompatibility will be evident once we examine some underlying metaphysical issues. She purports to show that on any account of substance and property-possession, substance materialism and property dualism turn out incompatible. In this paper, I argue that Schneider’s case for incompatibility between these two positions fails. After briefly laying out her case for incompatibility, I present an account of substance—one that relies on a relational ontology—that makes the combination of substance materialism and property dualism unproblematic. Then I show that even under the theories of substance that Schneider considers—those that rely on a constituent ontology—there still is no incompatibility problem.
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Notes
I use ‘physical’ and ‘material’ (and their cognates) synonymously throughout.
For disagreement, see Lycan (2013), who argues that substance dualism is no worse off than property dualism.
She makes a similar argument concerning non-reductive physicalism in Schneider (2013), claiming that such a view also requires denying substance materialism. Along with bundle theory and substratum theory, she also considers in that paper a neo-Aristotelian view (which is closer to E.J. Lowe’s version of non-Cartesian substance dualism than to other so-called neo-Aristotelian views), an event-ontology, and an independence conception of substance; and she argues that none of these positions helps in making the case for the compatibility of non-reductive physicalism and substance physicalism.
Bare substrata/particulars are also generally regarded as playing the role of individuators.
Armstrong would regard such an account as a “blob” theory (1989: 76–77), though “blob” theories also include nominalist theories.
The scare quotes on ‘relation’ is to indicate the loose sense of that term, especially since some realists do not want to construe exemplification as a genuine relation in order to avoid Bradley’s regress.
An anonymous reviewer raises the worry that such a relational (Platonic) view might still be incompatible with substance materialism since such properties will exist outside of spacetime. However, this worry is misguided since substance materialism only requires that we have no parts that are immaterial. But under the relational ontology, these non-spatial properties are not parts of the substance in any sense of ‘part’.
For the locus classicus of the zombie thought experiment, see Chalmers (1997).
This argument attempts to show that it is impossible for my body or any of its parts to be the subject of all and only my mental states, and hence I (as the subject of all and only my mental states) am not identical to my body or any of its parts.
Though animalism has Aristotelian roots, I take it that it is a distinct position from what Schneider calls the “neo-Aristotelian view” in (2013: 147).
For Olson’s (2003) Thinking Animals Argument to work, it seems that at minimum mental states must be nomologically supervenient on physical states—which I take to be compatible with property dualism.
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Acknowledgments
I thank Steve Davis and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments on an earlier draft.
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Yang, E. The compatibility of property dualism and substance materialism. Philos Stud 172, 3211–3219 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0465-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0465-6