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Philosophers

Mortimer Adler
Rogers Albritton
Alexander of Aphrodisias
Samuel Alexander
William Alston
Anaximander
G.E.M.Anscombe
Anselm
Louise Antony
Thomas Aquinas
Aristotle
David Armstrong
Harald Atmanspacher
Robert Audi
Augustine
J.L.Austin
A.J.Ayer
Alexander Bain
Mark Balaguer
Jeffrey Barrett
William Barrett
William Belsham
Henri Bergson
George Berkeley
Isaiah Berlin
Richard J. Bernstein
Bernard Berofsky
Robert Bishop
Max Black
Susanne Bobzien
Emil du Bois-Reymond
Hilary Bok
Laurence BonJour
George Boole
Émile Boutroux
Daniel Boyd
F.H.Bradley
C.D.Broad
Michael Burke
Lawrence Cahoone
C.A.Campbell
Joseph Keim Campbell
Rudolf Carnap
Carneades
Nancy Cartwright
Gregg Caruso
Ernst Cassirer
David Chalmers
Roderick Chisholm
Chrysippus
Cicero
Randolph Clarke
Samuel Clarke
Anthony Collins
Antonella Corradini
Diodorus Cronus
Jonathan Dancy
Donald Davidson
Mario De Caro
Democritus
Daniel Dennett
Jacques Derrida
René Descartes
Richard Double
Fred Dretske
John Dupré
John Earman
Laura Waddell Ekstrom
Epictetus
Epicurus
Austin Farrer
Herbert Feigl
Arthur Fine
John Martin Fischer
Frederic Fitch
Owen Flanagan
Luciano Floridi
Philippa Foot
Alfred Fouilleé
Harry Frankfurt
Richard L. Franklin
Bas van Fraassen
Michael Frede
Gottlob Frege
Peter Geach
Edmund Gettier
Carl Ginet
Alvin Goldman
Gorgias
Nicholas St. John Green
H.Paul Grice
Ian Hacking
Ishtiyaque Haji
Stuart Hampshire
W.F.R.Hardie
Sam Harris
William Hasker
R.M.Hare
Georg W.F. Hegel
Martin Heidegger
Heraclitus
R.E.Hobart
Thomas Hobbes
David Hodgson
Shadsworth Hodgson
Baron d'Holbach
Ted Honderich
Pamela Huby
David Hume
Ferenc Huoranszki
Frank Jackson
William James
Lord Kames
Robert Kane
Immanuel Kant
Tomis Kapitan
Walter Kaufmann
Jaegwon Kim
William King
Hilary Kornblith
Christine Korsgaard
Saul Kripke
Thomas Kuhn
Andrea Lavazza
Christoph Lehner
Keith Lehrer
Gottfried Leibniz
Jules Lequyer
Leucippus
Michael Levin
Joseph Levine
George Henry Lewes
C.I.Lewis
David Lewis
Peter Lipton
C. Lloyd Morgan
John Locke
Michael Lockwood
Arthur O. Lovejoy
E. Jonathan Lowe
John R. Lucas
Lucretius
Alasdair MacIntyre
Ruth Barcan Marcus
Tim Maudlin
James Martineau
Nicholas Maxwell
Storrs McCall
Hugh McCann
Colin McGinn
Michael McKenna
Brian McLaughlin
John McTaggart
Paul E. Meehl
Uwe Meixner
Alfred Mele
Trenton Merricks
John Stuart Mill
Dickinson Miller
G.E.Moore
Thomas Nagel
Otto Neurath
Friedrich Nietzsche
John Norton
P.H.Nowell-Smith
Robert Nozick
William of Ockham
Timothy O'Connor
Parmenides
David F. Pears
Charles Sanders Peirce
Derk Pereboom
Steven Pinker
Plato
Karl Popper
Porphyry
Huw Price
H.A.Prichard
Protagoras
Hilary Putnam
Willard van Orman Quine
Frank Ramsey
Ayn Rand
Michael Rea
Thomas Reid
Charles Renouvier
Nicholas Rescher
C.W.Rietdijk
Richard Rorty
Josiah Royce
Bertrand Russell
Paul Russell
Gilbert Ryle
Jean-Paul Sartre
Kenneth Sayre
T.M.Scanlon
Moritz Schlick
Arthur Schopenhauer
John Searle
Wilfrid Sellars
Alan Sidelle
Ted Sider
Henry Sidgwick
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
J.J.C.Smart
Saul Smilansky
Michael Smith
Baruch Spinoza
L. Susan Stebbing
Isabelle Stengers
George F. Stout
Galen Strawson
Peter Strawson
Eleonore Stump
Francisco Suárez
Richard Taylor
Kevin Timpe
Mark Twain
Peter Unger
Peter van Inwagen
Manuel Vargas
John Venn
Kadri Vihvelin
Voltaire
G.H. von Wright
David Foster Wallace
R. Jay Wallace
W.G.Ward
Ted Warfield
Roy Weatherford
C.F. von Weizsäcker
William Whewell
Alfred North Whitehead
David Widerker
David Wiggins
Bernard Williams
Timothy Williamson
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Susan Wolf

Scientists

David Albert
Michael Arbib
Walter Baade
Bernard Baars
Jeffrey Bada
Leslie Ballentine
Marcello Barbieri
Gregory Bateson
Horace Barlow
John S. Bell
Mara Beller
Charles Bennett
Ludwig von Bertalanffy
Susan Blackmore
Margaret Boden
David Bohm
Niels Bohr
Ludwig Boltzmann
Emile Borel
Max Born
Satyendra Nath Bose
Walther Bothe
Jean Bricmont
Hans Briegel
Leon Brillouin
Stephen Brush
Henry Thomas Buckle
S. H. Burbury
Melvin Calvin
Donald Campbell
Sadi Carnot
Anthony Cashmore
Eric Chaisson
Gregory Chaitin
Jean-Pierre Changeux
Rudolf Clausius
Arthur Holly Compton
John Conway
Jerry Coyne
John Cramer
Francis Crick
E. P. Culverwell
Antonio Damasio
Olivier Darrigol
Charles Darwin
Richard Dawkins
Terrence Deacon
Lüder Deecke
Richard Dedekind
Louis de Broglie
Stanislas Dehaene
Max Delbrück
Abraham de Moivre
Bernard d'Espagnat
Paul Dirac
Hans Driesch
John Eccles
Arthur Stanley Eddington
Gerald Edelman
Paul Ehrenfest
Manfred Eigen
Albert Einstein
George F. R. Ellis
Hugh Everett, III
Franz Exner
Richard Feynman
R. A. Fisher
David Foster
Joseph Fourier
Philipp Frank
Steven Frautschi
Edward Fredkin
Benjamin Gal-Or
Howard Gardner
Lila Gatlin
Michael Gazzaniga
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen
GianCarlo Ghirardi
J. Willard Gibbs
James J. Gibson
Nicolas Gisin
Paul Glimcher
Thomas Gold
A. O. Gomes
Brian Goodwin
Joshua Greene
Dirk ter Haar
Jacques Hadamard
Mark Hadley
Patrick Haggard
J. B. S. Haldane
Stuart Hameroff
Augustin Hamon
Sam Harris
Ralph Hartley
Hyman Hartman
Jeff Hawkins
John-Dylan Haynes
Donald Hebb
Martin Heisenberg
Werner Heisenberg
John Herschel
Basil Hiley
Art Hobson
Jesper Hoffmeyer
Don Howard
John H. Jackson
William Stanley Jevons
Roman Jakobson
E. T. Jaynes
Pascual Jordan
Eric Kandel
Ruth E. Kastner
Stuart Kauffman
Martin J. Klein
William R. Klemm
Christof Koch
Simon Kochen
Hans Kornhuber
Stephen Kosslyn
Daniel Koshland
Ladislav Kovàč
Leopold Kronecker
Rolf Landauer
Alfred Landé
Pierre-Simon Laplace
Karl Lashley
David Layzer
Joseph LeDoux
Gerald Lettvin
Gilbert Lewis
Benjamin Libet
David Lindley
Seth Lloyd
Hendrik Lorentz
Werner Loewenstein
Josef Loschmidt
Ernst Mach
Donald MacKay
Henry Margenau
Owen Maroney
David Marr
Humberto Maturana
James Clerk Maxwell
Ernst Mayr
John McCarthy
Warren McCulloch
N. David Mermin
George Miller
Stanley Miller
Ulrich Mohrhoff
Jacques Monod
Vernon Mountcastle
Emmy Noether
Donald Norman
Alexander Oparin
Abraham Pais
Howard Pattee
Wolfgang Pauli
Massimo Pauri
Wilder Penfield
Roger Penrose
Steven Pinker
Colin Pittendrigh
Walter Pitts
Max Planck
Susan Pockett
Henri Poincaré
Daniel Pollen
Ilya Prigogine
Hans Primas
Zenon Pylyshyn
Henry Quastler
Adolphe Quételet
Pasco Rakic
Nicolas Rashevsky
Lord Rayleigh
Frederick Reif
Jürgen Renn
Giacomo Rizzolati
Emil Roduner
Juan Roederer
Jerome Rothstein
David Ruelle
David Rumelhart
Tilman Sauer
Ferdinand de Saussure
Jürgen Schmidhuber
Erwin Schrödinger
Aaron Schurger
Sebastian Seung
Thomas Sebeok
Franco Selleri
Claude Shannon
Charles Sherrington
David Shiang
Abner Shimony
Herbert Simon
Dean Keith Simonton
Edmund Sinnott
B. F. Skinner
Lee Smolin
Ray Solomonoff
Roger Sperry
John Stachel
Henry Stapp
Tom Stonier
Antoine Suarez
Leo Szilard
Max Tegmark
Teilhard de Chardin
Libb Thims
William Thomson (Kelvin)
Richard Tolman
Giulio Tononi
Peter Tse
Alan Turing
Francisco Varela
Vlatko Vedral
Mikhail Volkenstein
Heinz von Foerster
Richard von Mises
John von Neumann
Jakob von Uexküll
C. S. Unnikrishnan
C. H. Waddington
John B. Watson
Daniel Wegner
Steven Weinberg
Paul A. Weiss
Herman Weyl
John Wheeler
Wilhelm Wien
Norbert Wiener
Eugene Wigner
E. O. Wilson
Günther Witzany
Stephen Wolfram
H. Dieter Zeh
Semir Zeki
Ernst Zermelo
Wojciech Zurek
Konrad Zuse
Fritz Zwicky

Presentations

Biosemiotics
Free Will
Mental Causation
James Symposium
 
Antonella Corradini

Antonella Corradini is a philosopher at the Catholic University of Milan, where she has organized conferences on "Analytic Philosophy without Naturalism" (2003). "Emergence in Science and Philosophy" (2007), and "Quantum Physics and the Philosophy of Mind" (2013).

She is co-editor of books on analytic philosophy, psycho-physical dualism, and emergence.

Corradini describes solving the logical conflict between "bottom-up" causation (the basis for all "reduction" of higher level properties to the base physical level of atoms and molecules) and the assumed "downward causation" of the emergent properties as some kind of "magic."

Emergent phenomena are said to arise out of and be sustained by more basic phenomena, while at the same time exerting a 'top-down' control, constraint or some other sort of influence upon those very sustaining processes. To some critics, this has the air of magic, as it seems to suggest a kind of circular causality. (See Kim, 1999, for an argument to this conclusion.) Other critics deem the concept of emergence to be objectionably anti-naturalistic, requiring the onset at particular historical junctures of novel properties and behavior that are discontinuous with the world's fundamental dynamics.

Her systematic analysis of the British Emergentists’ philosophy (notably Samuel Alexander, C. Lloyd Morgan, and C. D. Broad) concludes that the British Emergentists were monists. She proposes a dualist reinterpreation of emergence and develops a specific version of Emergence as a Dualism.

She examines Jaegwon Kim's criticism of Emergentism and Non-reductive Physicalism and finds that Kim mistakenly assimilates these two.

Along with Kim, she asks whether downward causation is compatible with "bottom-up" determination and accepts Kim's argument that downward causation (and thus emergence) is incompatible with physicalism.

However, her agreement with Kim’s conclusions has the aim of differentiating between emergentism and non-reductive physicalism and of giving up physicalism. In emergentism there are ideas “that generate some tension within emergentism understood as a form of monism, but it can become wholly coherent by disavowing monism itself and by putting emergentism into a dualistic framework”.

Corradini says that:

In non-reductive physicalism downward causation is a derivative concept. In fact, Kim obtains it by showing that it is implied by same-level causation, which, in its turn, is implied by upward causation. But the implication from same-level causation to downward causation holds only under the condition that upward determination holds. Therefore, non-reductive physicalism is committed to downward causation insofar as it is a form of physicalism. Kim applies the same scheme to emergentism, but in this case his strategy is not justified, since for emergentists downward causation is not a derivative notion, but a primitive one, which lies at the very heart of their view. It is the utmost expression of the emergentistic thesis of the irreducibility of higher-level properties, thus it cannot be thought as disjointed from the non-explainability thesis. The fact that explainability of the mental by the physical does not hold for emergentism undermines any project - like Kim's - to give a physicalistic interpretation of downward causation.
The causal powers of the mind are not determined because of the two-stage model of free will.
Corradini proposes a dualistic version of emergence of mind from the body which does not exclude substance dualism. She does not deny that the mind remains functionally dependent on the body, but she gives the mind ontological independence, with causal powers that are not determined by the lower biophysical and physical layers from which it emerges.

Corradini claims that emergentism cannot coherently be supported without admitting that the underlying basis be only a necessary condition of the mental dimension, but not a sufficient one.

Information is immaterial. It is neither
matter nor energy.
See information as an emergent dualism
In order to allow the mental to emerge from its biological basis, a non-material dimension of reality is needed, which is endowed with ontological independence and exists from the very beginning of the emergent process. It follows from this that, if emergentists want to realize their non-reductionistic purposes, emergence must be understood as a dualistic relation.

Corradini sees the mind as non-material, ontologically independent of the brain from which it emerged. This emergence is dualistic beyond "property dualism." She calls it a distinctive kind of substance dualism.

What a developmental psychologist observes concerning the developmental history of a child is the appearance at a certain stage of her development of mental capabilities, whose complexity and sophistication gradually increase, together with the concomitant maturing of the physical structure. This empirical state of affairs — it seems to me — may be interpreted equally well both by an "emergent composite view" and by an emergent substance dualistic view of the human being. In other words, accordance with empirical evidence is not the benchmark on whose basis a confrontation among both positions has to take place. The merits of my variant of emergent dualism are to be found first of all at the conceptual level. My proposal explains the emergence of the mental substance without resorting to any creation ex nihilo, and also accounts for its ontological independence from the biological structure. In so doing, it guarantees that the mental substance has autonomous emergent powers that it can exert in a downward fashion on the body. Moreover, due to the mind's functional dependence on the body, my proposal, unlike Cartesian dualism, accounts for the existence of correlations of all mental states with brain states. As we know, neuroscientific research attests the detailed dependence of mental functions on brain functions and the existence of a systematic network of mind-brain correlations, so that at this stage of neuroscientific advancement no dualistic theory can afford to be ill at ease with such empirical data.

Other forms of emergent substance dualism meet the criterion of accounting for mind-body correlations. I submit that, together with these, my proposal deserves a closer look.

Corradini also analyzes some other contemporary forms of emergentism which can be potentially understood as dualistic versions (e.g., Timothy O’Connor, Paul Humphreys, and William Hasker).

E. Jonathan Lowe (Corradini's co-editor of Analytic Philosophy and Psycho-physical Dualism Today) has developed a related proposal for an interactionist non-Cartesian substance dualism. With his colleague Storrs McCall, Lowe developed a two-stage model of free will.

Works
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Notes

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Bibliography

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