Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

Physicalists say sensible things about our ontology and anti-physicalist say sensible things about our phenomenal concepts. The latter claim that our phenomenal concepts correctly and substantively reveal the essence of our experiences. I argue that realist physicalists have to accommodate revelation within a physicalist framework but that neither Type-B nor Russellian Physicalism, the two prominent realist physicalist positions in the literature, can accomplish this task. I then introduce a new hybrid view, A-posteriori Russellian Physicalism, and show that it can succeed where its predecessors fail. The strategy relies on the metaphysical framework of Russellian Physicalism to give a “beefed-up” account of the phenomenal concept strategy. On this account, our phenomenal concepts reveal the non-fundamental categorical nature of physical properties. I will show that this explains, within a physicalist framework, how our phenomenal concepts correctly and substantively reveal the essence of our experience.