Abstract
In this chapter, I defend dual-aspect monism, and I examine it in detail. I claim that an ‘aspect’ is not a property, nor a higher-order property, and I show what role it plays in the understanding of the relationship between the mental and the physical. Close to Russellian monism, the variant of this view that I defend here claims that all entities are “phental”.
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Notes
- 1.
A “one” answer is also provided by a strong form of idealism, which I do not discuss here.
- 2.
Le Bihan (forthcoming) discusses this, and favours the standard neutral monist terminology.
- 3.
Le Bihan (forthcoming) argues that a realist interpretation of aspects might lead to “an interesting new kind of dualism”. This is precisely what I want to avoid.
- 4.
Marcel Weber suggested in conversation that in principle we could have more than two kinds of epistemic accesses to phental entities and that dual-aspect monism would thus become an N-aspect monism where N would correspond to the number of kinds of accesses we would have; that is, the number of types of perspectives we could have on a phental entity. In principle, I agree with this suggestion, given that the way the world is given to us is contingently linked to how our perceptual and cognitive capacities are, and that other conscious beings could in principle have different capacities, perhaps richer than ours.
- 5.
Strawson's nice distinction between physicalism and physicSalism is relevant here: “[…] real physicalism can have nothing to do with physicsalism, the view—the faith—that the nature or essence of all concrete reality can in principle be fully captured in the terms of physics. Real physicalism cannot have anything to do with physicsalism unless it is supposed—obviously falsely—that the terms of physics can fully capture the nature or essence of experience” (Strawson 2006, p. 54).
References
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Strawson G (2006) Realistic monism—why physicalism entails panpsychism. J Conscious Stud 13(10–11):3–31
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Benovsky, J. (2018). Dual-Aspect Monism. In: Mind and Matter. SpringerBriefs in Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05633-9_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05633-9_3
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