Theo Todman's Book Collection (Book-Paper Abstracts)

BOOK ABSTRACT:

Back Cover Blurb

1. How is perception affected by our counting ourselves as inhabitants of the natural world? How do our actions fit into a world that is altered through our agency? And how do we accommodate our understanding of one another as fellow subjects of experience — as beings with thoughts and wants and hopes and fears? To answer these questions, Jennifer Hornsby offers a distinctive position in philosophy of mind: naive naturalism, which opposes the whole drift of the last thirty or forty years' philosophy of mind in the English-speaking world. Hornsby sets naive naturalism against dualism, but without advancing the claims of "materialism¹," "physicalism²," or "naturalism" as these have come to be known. She shows how we can, and why we should, abandon the view that thoughts and actions, to be seen as real, must be subject to scientific explanation.
2. "Hornsby disagrees with both Descartes and materialists³ . . . She denies that people are composed of a material and an immaterial substance . . . [but also] denies that mental properties reduce to physical properties...There is much an orthodox materialist⁴ can learn from the heretical Hornsby."
   —Michael Smith, Times Literary Supplement