CURRICULUM VITAE Ben White. EDUCATION Temple University, Philadelphia, PA Ph.D. in Philosophy 2016

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1 CURRICULUM VITAE Ben White Department of Philosophy 728 Anderson Hall 1114 W. Berks Street Philadelphia, PA benjamingwhite.wordpress.com EDUCATION, Philadelphia, PA Ph.D. in Philosophy 2016, Philadelphia, PA M.A. in Philosophy 2013 Guilford College, Greensboro, NC B.A. in Philosophy 2010 B.A. in English 2010 AREAS OF SPECIALIZATION Philosophy of Mind, Metaphysics AREAS OF COMPETENCE Epistemology, Ethics, Philosophy of Science, Early Modern Philosophy (esp. Kant) DISSERTATION Mind-Body Dualism and Mental Causation Committee: Gerald Vision (Chair), Kenneth Aizawa, Miriam Solomon, David Wolfsdorf How do our minds cause our bodies to move? The Exclusion Argument for physicalism maintains that in order for mental states like beliefs, desires, emotions, and sensations to cause physical effects such as those involved in bodily motion, the mind must itself be physical in nature. I contend that the premises of the Exclusion Argument are too weak to justify the rejection of the view that the mind is non-physical but capable of causing physical effects. PUBLICATIONS Conservation Laws and Interactionist Dualism The Philosophical Quarterly. 67:

2 Metaphysical Necessity Dualism Synthese The Realization of Qualia, Persons, and Artifacts Pacific Philosophical Quarterly (forthcoming) (forthcoming) PAPERS CURRENTLY IN PROGRESS Perceptual Phenomenology and the Determinacy of Mental Content It has been suggested by some writers that theories of phenomenal intentionality, which postulate a form of intentional content that is uniquely determined by phenomenology, can help resolve worries about the potential indeterminacy of mental content. Thus far, such proposals have been largely programmatic. This paper aims to improve on prior suggestions of this sort by developing a more precise account of how perceptual phenomenology contributes to the determinacy of mental content. The proposed account appeals to attention, perceptual cues, Gestalt principles, and assumptions that our perceptual systems rely on in processing sensory input as aspects of perceptual experience that help fix the contents of our mental states in ways that are indirectly influenced by our biological heritage. Opponent-Process Theory and the Reduction of Color Experience This paper draws on studies of the effects of simultaneous chromatic contrast on sensations of color and recordings of the response characteristics of color-opponent cells in the primate retina and lateral geniculate nucleus to provide some empirical evidence against Churchland s (2005, p.527) suggestion that there is a strict identity between our various color sensations and various coding vectors across the color-opponent neurons in our primary visual pathways. REFEREED PRESENTATIONS Mind-Body Dualism and Mental Causation American Philosophical Association Central Division Meeting Kansas City, MO March 2017 The Realization Relation Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology New Orleans, LA April 2015 The Realization Relation Arché Graduate Conference St. Andrews, Scotland November 2014 Why Dualists Should Reject the Metaphysical Possibility of Zombies Society for Exact Philosophy Pasadena, CA June

3 AWARDS Nordev Prize, for best preliminary paper by Temple philosophy student: Kant and the Subject of Aesthetic Experience 2011 Fellowship College of Liberal Arts Travel Award 2014 Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology Travel Award 2015 College of Liberal Arts Travel Award 2015 Pre-Doctoral Summer Research Opportunity Grant 2015 TEACHING EXPERIENCE Instructor, Philosophy of the Human Fall 2012 (2 sections), Spring 2013 (2 sections), Fall 2013 (2 sections), Spring 2014 (2 sections) Instructor, History of Philosophy: Modern Summer 2013, Summer 2014, Fall 2015 Instructor, Intellectual Heritage I: The Good Life Spring 2016, Spring 2017 (2 sections), Summer 2017 Taught classes and administered all grades. Instructor, Intellectual Heritage II: The Common Good Fall 2016, Fall 2017 (2 sections) Rowan University Instructor, Philosophy of Science Fall 2014 (2 sections), Spring 2015, Fall 2015 (2 sections) Instructor, Logic of Everyday Reasoning Spring 2015 Instructor, Philosophy of Science (online) Fall 2016, Fall 2017 (2 sections) Monitored discussion board and administered all grades. Instructor, Philosophy of Society (online) Spring 2017 Monitored discussion board and administered all grades. 3

4 University of Pennsylvania Teaching Assistant, Visual Studies 101: Eye, Mind, and Image Spring 2015, Spring 2016, Spring 2017 Primary Instructors: Gary Hatfield, André Dombrowski, and Michael Leja Graded assignments, assisted students, and led recitations. SERVICES TO THE PROFESSION Associate Member of the Interdisciplinary Study of Perceptual Learning Principal Investigators: Kevin Connolly and Adrienne Prettyman June 2016 May 2017 PROFESSIONAL MEMBERSHIPS American Philosophical Association GRADUATE COURSEWORK (* indicates audit) Theory of Knowledge, Gerald Vision Seminar in German Idealism, Kristin Gjesdal Seminar in Philosophy of Social Science, Joe Margolis Philosophy of History, Joe Margolis Kant s Critique of Judgment, Kristin Gjesdal Kant s Critique of Pure Reason, Espen Hammer Seminar in Ancient and Contemporary Conceptions of Pleasure, David Wolfsdorf Pragmatism and American Thought, Joe Margolis Seminar in Metaphysics: Existence, Reference, and Causation, Gerald Vision Philosophy of Mind, Gerald Vision British Empiricism, Han-Kyul Kim Seminar in Kant s Moral Philosophy, Owen Ware Seminar in Phenomenology*, Kristin Gjesdal Philosophy of Language*, Gerald Vision Seminar in Meta-ethics*, David Wolfsdorf University of Pennsylvania Seminar in Self-consciousness*, Rolf-Peter Horstmann Seminar in Perception*, Gary Hatfield Formal Logic*, Scott Weinstein LANGUAGES Reading knowledge of Ancient Greek Reading knowledge of Latin 4

5 REFERENCES Gerald Vision (Dissertation Chair) Professor of Philosophy Gary Hatfield Seybert Professor of Philosophy University of Pennsylvania David Wolfsdorf (Teaching Reference) Professor of Philosophy Kenneth Aizawa Professor of Philosophy Rutgers University Newark 5

6 Dissertation Abstract: Mind-Body Dualism and Mental Causation We typically assume that our minds have a causal impact on the world by affecting the motion of our bodies and thence the states of other physical objects in our environment. When a person gets up from the couch to rummage about in the fridge, it is, we say, their desire for food and belief that there is desirable food in the fridge (which are states of their mind) that cause them to stand up, walk to the kitchen, and open the fridge. Similarly, when someone stubs their toe, it is, we say, the resulting sensation of pain (another mental state) that causes them to wince and say Ow! One of the most long-standing objections to mind-body dualism (going back at least to Princess Elisabeth s correspondence with Descartes) is that the assumption that the mind is non-physical makes it very difficult to see how the mind could cause such effects. Doubts about the ability of dualists to provide a compelling account of the mind s causal efficacy remain perhaps the main source of the deep-seated skepticism with which dualism is now typically received. Such doubts are expressed in one of the primary contemporary arguments against dualism: Jaegwon Kim s Exclusion Argument. The Exclusion Argument maintains that since every physical effect has a sufficient physical cause, and instances of causal overdetermination (wherein a single effect has more than one sufficient cause) are rare, it follows that if mental events cause physical effects as frequently as they seem to, then mental events must themselves be physical in nature. My dissertation aims to show that the Exclusion Argument fails to justify the rejection of the view that the mind is non-physical but causes physical effects, and, more generally, that worries about mental causation are no good reason to do away with dualism. After outlining the structure of the Exclusion Argument and sketching some of the historical trends that led to its development, I begin by evaluating two attempts to respond to the Argument by appealing to the role that mental events play in psychological explanations of behavior. The first response holds that the success of such explanations is sufficient to show that mental events are causally efficacious, regardless of whether or not they are physical. On this view, the fact, e.g., that a person s anger serves to explain and in some cases predict their erratic behavior is enough by itself to demonstrate that such mental states have a causal impact on bodily motion, whether or not they are reducible to physical states of the brain. This proposal, I argue, fails to give due consideration to the reasons the Exclusion Argument gives for thinking that the validity of such explanations depends upon a physicalist reduction of mind. The second response holds that mental events may still be causally relevant to the occurrence of physical effects even if they are causally inert. This proposal, I argue, is undermined by Donald Davidson s observation that the legitimacy of psychological explanations of behavior requires there to be a real causal link between mental events and the behavior they explain. These two proposals having been found inadequate, I proceed to motivate the search for an alternative response to the Exclusion Argument by offering some reasons for thinking that the mind is non-physical. Using perceptions of color as a case study, I first provide some empirical support for the claim that mental properties are multiply realizable (i.e. that different types of physical states can give rise to the same type of mental state), and that mental properties consequently cannot be reduced to individual types of physical states. I then assess nonreductive forms of physicalism, which maintain that while mental properties are irreducible to 6

7 physical properties, each instance of a mental property is nonetheless token-identical with some physical event. After noting some potential inconsistencies in such a position, Donald Davidson s argument for the view is examined and rejected as relying on the flawed assumption that causes and effects must be subsumable under strict laws. A series of arguments are then offered noting various obstacles that the phenomenal and intentional features of mental events present to attempts to treat mental events as physical events that perform certain functions. Having provided some reasons for thinking that mental properties and their instances cannot be reduced to physical properties and their instances, the remainder of my dissertation explores two different responses to the Exclusion Argument, each of which focuses on one of the Argument s two crucial premises: viz. that every physical effect has a sufficient physical cause, and that causal overdetermination is rare. The first response points out that instances of causal overdetermination may in fact be quite common, for there are many cases wherein a whole produces an effect that certain of its parts could have caused on their own. Thus, when a window shatters upon being struck by a baseball, the window would often still have shattered even if it had been struck by the baseball s top half alone. Since such effects have multiple sufficient causes (one involving a certain whole, and another involving certain parts of that whole), they seem to qualify as overdetermined, and the relative frequency of their occurrence consequently suggests that causal overdetermination is actually not rare at all. One might try to avoid this conclusion by stipulating that overdetermining causes must be capable of existing or occurring independently of one another. But in this case a mental event and its physical base might both cause the same effect without overdetermining it, since it may be impossible for the physical base of a mental event to occur without the mental event it gives rise to. The second response to the Exclusion Argument maintains that the premise that every physical effect has a sufficient physical cause is far more disputable than it is typically taken to be. In support of this contention, I first note some difficulties involved in formulating this premise in such a way that it is strong enough to play its intended role in the Exclusion Argument without collapsing into the question begging assertion that only physical events cause physical effects. I then show that, contrary to popular belief, the premise that every physical effect has a sufficient physical cause does not follow or derive strong inductive support from conservation laws of physics, and that dualists can consequently deny this premise without thereby setting themselves at odds with current science. Having shown that the Exclusion Argument fails to justify the assumption that the mind must be physical in order to have a causal impact on the physical world, I go on to construct two positive accounts of mental causation that are consistent with mind-body dualism, one of which defines causation as consisting in the transference of energy or some other conserved quantity from one thing to another, and the other of which follows Peter Menzies in making the truth of causal claims dependent upon context. The availability of these two accounts serves to dispel one final objection that is often raised to the view that the mind is non-physical but causes physical effects, which is that even if non-physical mental events could cause physical effects without generating any problematic form of causal overdetermination, it is nevertheless simply incomprehensible how a non-physical entity could alter the motion of any physical thing. 7