Consciousness and the Prospects of Physicalism, by Derk Pereboom

Abstract

Derk Pereboom's Consciousness and the Prospects of Physicalism is a dense and subtle work. Its  pages are divided into discussions of three topics: an attempt to respond to the knowledge argument and conceivability argument on the grounds that introspection may misrepresent the properties of experience; a development of Russellian monism; and an account of mental properties on which they are "compositional" properties whose instantiations can be constituted by instantiations of physical properties. The three discussions are almost completely independent, so that the book is closer to a collection of three long articles than to a typical monograph. Despite its title, Consciousness and the Prospects of Physicalism does not purport to be anything like comprehensive catalog of theories of consciousness or of responses to arguments against physicalism; rather than evaluating alternative views, Pereboom seeks to create new prospects for physicalism (though these prospects are firmly situated within the familiar dialectic developed by Chalmers, Kim, and others). Throughout, Pereboom makes use of his unique philosophical skill set; perhaps no other contemporary philosopher can shift so fluently from Kant and Leibniz, to contemporary metaphysics, to philosophy of mind.A critic capable of emulating Pereboom's density and concision might have tried to discuss all three parts of Consciousness and the Prospects of Physicalism in the space allotted for this notice. But I will neglect Pereboom's development of Russellian monism, and focus on his possible-misrepresentation based response to the knowledge and conceivability arguments (in section ), and his constitution based account of the mind and mental causation (in section ).