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Subsequent work on essentialism and the mind-body problem

Nicholas Maxwell

pp. 33-79

Two components of all that I argued for in my three papers of 1966 and 1968 had an immense impact on subsequent philosophy, not via my publications, but via subsequent publications of others. As a result, my work was ignored and forgotten. The outcome was that the overall theme of my three papers has been ignored by subsequent philosophy, and still is ignored, to the detriment of work on the mind-body problem and the philosophy of physics up to 2017, as I reveal in this chapter. First, my refutation of Hume on causation was taken up by others, but in what I can only regard as a debased form, in that this work on causation and physical essentialism appeals to a dubious notion of "natural necessity" and not to logical or analytic necessity, which is what I employ in my 1968 paper. Despite inspiring some of this subsequent work, my 1968 paper has been ignored and forgotten. Second, my argument that physics cannot predict experiential facts such as "I see a red rose" had an enormous impact via its exposition by Thomas Nagel and Frank Jackson in papers published eight and twenty years after mine. The result was that my earlier work was ignored – and still is ignored. In this chapter I discuss recent contributions to The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on topics related to the mind-body problem, and show that aspects of my work of 1966 and 1968 are still ignored, to the detriment of work in this field. I conclude by giving a brief account of more recent work of mine on the mind-body problem and the more general human world/physical universe problem, also ignored by the main body of work in this field in philosophy.

Publication details

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-04143-4_2

Full citation:

Maxwell, N. (2018). Subsequent work on essentialism and the mind-body problem, in The metaphysics of science and aim-oriented empiricism, Dordrecht, Springer, pp. 33-79.

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