Post-physicalism and Beyond

Abstract

It is becoming a commonplace in philosophical literature that physicalism need not be reductive. Non-reductive physicalism seems on the face of it to be a contradiction in terms. Some critics have called the idea of a physicalism without reduction “cheap materialism.” It is, of course, possible to quibble about who has the right to be called a physicalist and to play a game of “more physicalist than thou.” However, it would be more fruitful to develop a non-reductive version of physicalism and show that it retains something of the heart of the physicalist tradition while abandoning the reductionist program. John Post's Faces of Existence is just such a project. Post calls his position non-reductive physicalism. It might also be called Post-physicalist, post-dualist, post-relativist, post-everything. After Post, not much remains the same. While in many ways still just a sketch, Faces of Existence does attempt to do justice both to what he takes to be the basic intuitions of physicalism while jettisoning the reductionist program. There is no attempt to prove the truth of non-reductive physicalism in this book. The primary goal is to demonstrate the logical compatibility of a minimal physicalism and a non-reductive pluralism. Along the way we get an attempt to combine realist truth and the relativity of interpretation, to defend the objectivity of values, and to demonstrate the compatibility of some kind of theism with non-reductive physicalism.