Quote of the Week

The naturalistic/physicalistic crusade to reduce the mental to the physical is driven by the idea that we have better knowledge and understanding of the physical than we have of the "problematic" and uncomfortably "mysterious" mental. But if what I asserted above is true, the tenability of any sort of physicalism rests on an epistemology that is committed to a view diametrically opposed to this idea. We have a better, and more immediate grasp of the mental than we have of the theoretical posit that is the physical world and its properties. If anything, we should be much more concerned to reduce the physical to the comfortable, more familiar world of the mental than we should be interested in reductions that move in the opposite direction.

Richard Fumerton
Knowledge, Thought, and the Case for Dualism
(Cambridge Studies in Philosophy)