Abstract
The chapter discusses the rejuvenation of an interest in Mach in the recent metaphysics and philosophy of mind. In the early twentieth century, Mach had been interpreted as a phenomenalist, but phenomenalism fell out of favor in the 1950s. In the later decades, he received praise for his naturalism, but his contributions to metaphysics or philosophy of mind were regarded as misbegotten or irrelevant. With the search for a monistic alternative to both materialism and dualism in the recent philosophy of consciousness, however, Mach attracts a fresh attention. For example, the contemporary philosopher Sam Coleman develops a version of a monistic metaphysic called “panqualityism,” which resembles Mach’s view to a large extent. Like most contemporary monists, however, Coleman works much more closely from Russell’s The Analysis of Matter, than Mach’s The Analysis of Sensations. The chapter details the circumstances that have led to the recent rise of monism; the varieties of Russellian monism; Coleman’s panqualityism; and the similarities and differerences between panqualityism and Machian monism.
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Notes
- 1.
See Rudolf Carnap, The Logical Structure of the World. Trans. by R. George. Berkeley, Cal.: University of California Press, 1967 (orig. 1928). A related somewhat later project is Nelson Goodman, The Structure of Appearance. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951.
- 2.
This happened due to a wide acceptance of the criticisms of phenomenalism offered by philosophers such as Chisholm and Austin, among others, during this period. See Roderick Chisholm, Perceiving: A Philosophical Study. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1957 (especially “Appendix,” in which Chisholm explicitly mentions Mach as a target of his criticism); and J. L. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962.
- 3.
This approach is exemplified in the texts of John T. Blackmore. It must be acknowledged that Blackmore greatly contributed to the Mach scholarship in the capacity of an editor of several volumes of historical materials as well as contemporary research. See in particular Ernst Mach: A Deeper Look. Documents and New Perspectives (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1992) and J. T. Blackmore/Ryoichi Itagaki/Setsuko Tanaka (eds.). Ernst Mach’s Vienna, 1895–1930: On Phenomenalism as Philosophy of Science (co-edited with Ryoichi Itagaki and Setsuko Tanaka, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001). However, as an interpreter of Mach’s philosophy, Blackmore only mechanically contrasted his own favored position, “indirect realism,” with Mach’s alleged “phenomenalism,” of which he claimed that it was refuted by the progress of science.
- 4.
For a representative of such a charitable approach to Mach in the 1970s and 1980s, see the work of Rudolf Haller, in particular the papers “Grundzüge der Machschen Philosophie” and “Poetische Phantasie und Sparsamkeit – Ernst Mach als Wissenschaftstheoretiker” (in Rudolf Haller/Friedrich Stadler (eds.), Ernst Mach – Werk und Wirkung. Vienna: Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1988, pp. 64–86 and 342–355).
- 5.
Ned Block, “On a Confusion about a Function of Consciousness” (1995), repr. in Block, Consciousness, Function, and Representation. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2007, p. 166.
- 6.
The “what it is like” idiom goes back, of course, to the famous article by Thomas Nagel, “What It Is Like to Be a Bat” (1974), repr. in Nagel, Mortal Questions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979, p. 166.
- 7.
Block, op. cit., p. 170.
- 8.
David Rosenthal, “Two Concepts of Consciousness” (1986), repr. in Rosenthal, Consciousness and Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 29.
- 9.
On the easy and hard problems, see David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, p. xii, xiii, and also Chalmers, “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness” (1995), in Chalmers, The Character of Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, pp. 3–34.
- 10.
David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind, op. cit., pp. 94–99.
- 11.
Ibid., p. 155.
- 12.
David Chalmers, The Character of Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, p. 133.
- 13.
In a late work, Russell summarized his notion of physics thusly: “All that physics gives us is certain equations giving abstract properties of their changes. But as to what it is that changes, and what it changes from and to—as to this, physics is silent.” See Bertrand Russell, My Philosophical Development. London: Routledge, 1995 (orig. 1959), p. 13.
- 14.
Russel says that percepts “are the only part of the physical world that we know otherwise than abstractly.” See Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Matter. London: Routledge, 1992 (orig. 1927), p. 402.
- 15.
David Chalmers, “Panpsychism and Panprotopsychism” (2013), in Torin Alter/Yujin Nagasawa (eds.), Consciousness in the Physical World: Perspectives on Russellian Monism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, p. 254.
- 16.
Galen Strawson, “Real Materialism,” in Alter/Nagasawa, op. cit., pp. 161–208.
- 17.
Barbara Gail Montero, “Russellian Physicalism,” in Alter/Nagasawa, op. cit., pp. 209–223.
- 18.
David Chalmers, “Panpsychism and Panprotopsychism,” in Alter/Nagasawa, op. cit., 246–247.
- 19.
David Chalmers, “Consciousness and Its Place in Nature,” in Chalmers, The Character of Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, pp. 136–137.
- 20.
About Russellian physicalism, see Montero, op. cit., 216–222.
- 21.
E.g., Strawson, op. cit.
- 22.
See the most complete exposition of Coleman’s view to date in Sam Coleman, “Neuro-Cosmology.” In Paul Coates/Sam Coleman (eds.), Phenomenal Qualities: Sense, Perception, and Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 66–102. See also Sam Coleman, “The Real Combination Problem: Panpsychism, Micro-Subjects, and Emergence.” Erkenntnis 79.1 (2014), pp. 19–44.
- 23.
For Coleman’s evocation of the Russellian view of physics, see “Neuro-Cosmology,” op. cit., p. 85.
- 24.
Ibid., p. 77.
- 25.
Coleman, “The Real Combination Problem,” op. cit., p. 21 (italics in the original).
- 26.
Coleman, “Neuro-Cosmology,” op. cit., p. 78.
- 27.
Chalmers, himself a critic of panqualityism, mentions in passing Mach as one of the pioneers of this theory in David Chalmers, “Panpsychism and Panprotopsychism,” op. cit., p. 271.
- 28.
Mach lists “colors, sounds, temperatures, pressures, spaces, times” as examples of “elements.” See Ernst Mach, The Analysis of Sensations. New York: Dover, 1959 (orig. 1886), p. 2.
- 29.
Ibid., p. 362.
- 30.
Ibid., p. 16 (italics in the original).
- 31.
Ernst Mach, Knowledge and Error. New York: Springer, pp. 31–32.
- 32.
Specifically, Haller claimed that for Mach, the mind-brain identity was a matter of “point of view” (Betrachtungsweise). See Rudolf Haller, “Grundzüge der Machschen Philosophie,” op. cit., p. 76.
- 33.
The Analysis of Sensations, op. cit., pp. 243–244.
- 34.
I am alluding to the current debate between the so-called presentists—who argue that the content of materialism should be based on the present state of physics—and the futurists—who think that materialism must be defined in terms of the complete physics of the future. See Daniel Stoljar, Physicalism. London: Routledge, 2010, chap. 5.
- 35.
Cf. James Ladyman/Don Ross et al., Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
- 36.
However, not everybody in contemporary philosophy believes that we all share some inescapable intuition about the intrinsic nature of phenomenality. Cf., e.g., the many works of Daniel Dennett.
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Hříbek, T. (2019). Mach and Panqualityism. In: Stadler, F. (eds) Ernst Mach – Life, Work, Influence. Vienna Circle Institute Yearbook, vol 22. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04378-0_12
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