Sharif Digital Repository

In this text to find the answer of the question “ what is it to be physical” in a definition form or a scheme of the term physical, firstly we sought for a possible consensus among recent physicists and philosophers. But from their answers not only we did not find any clear consensus but also most of them confess that the term is ambiguous and unclear. In a general aspect, we can categorize the answers to two theoretical and realistic perspective. The theoretical perspective, beside circularity and Hempel’s triviality, seems not to present any criteria for being physical. In realistic perspective, it seems that there is no ontologic constraint for being physical, that is from “being... 

Frank Jackson’s knowledge argument is presented to show the falsity of physicalism. The argument is based on a famous thought experiment according which, Mary, a genius scientist who has spent her whole life investigating the neurophysiology of vision in a black-and-white environment, in spite of acquiring complete physical knowledge in that field, knows nothing about the phenomenological properties of seeing red. The knowledge argument has three main steps: proofing the existence of an epistemic gap, inferring an ontological gap from the epistemic gap and inferring the falsity of physicalism from the ontological gap. Different criticisms are made of each step. One of the criticisms of the... 

To provide a stable foundation for human knowledge Descartes presumed that human being is composed of two distinct substances, the mind and the body. But, the solution through which he wanted to explain the correlation between these substances, was not accepted by other philosophers, and thereafter this problem was known as mind-body problem. This problem arises some other philosophical problems including solipsism and the problem of other minds. In this thesis, considering the grammar of such words like memory, understanding, and thinking I will show that having an exact description of these concepts we would be able to escape from these inclination to seek something behind these words, and... 

The problem of consciousness and its place in nature is the central issue in current theorizing about the mind and it also has close relationship with mind –body problem . As if we can prove consciousness and its unique properties then we can use it to reject physicalism but we were faced with other problems such as causal relations. There are different explanations about the nature of consciousness with the world but most of them place in dualism/ physicalim twofold. Russelian monism have recently argued, this view retains the strengths of traditional versions of dualism and materialism while avoiding their weakness. And In this thesis we have studied the theory and then discuss the...