Yujin Nagasawa, God and Phenomenal Consciousness: A Novel Approach to Knowledge Arguments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), xiii + 162 Pps., $85.00.
Yujin Nagasawa is Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham and Honorary Research Fellow at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the Australian National University. He is the author of numerous journal articles and co-editor of There’s Something About Mary: Essays on Phenomenal Consciousness (year???) and Frank Jackson’s Knowledge Argument and New Waves in Philosophy of Religion (year???). In this title, he bridges debates in two areas of philosophy: the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of religion.
Within the introduction, Nagasawa notes how he was fascinated by two metaphysical issues when he first became interested in philosophy: the existence of God in the philosophy of religion, and the mystery of phenomenal consciousness in the philosophy of mind. He attempts to develop a heretofore unnoticed connection between these two debates. How could the mind have developed out of a mere aggregate of billions of neurons, he queried. How could one prove the existence of a deity worthy of worship and adoration? He addresses these topics in this title, which is divided into four distinct parts. Part I considers the conceptual background of general knowledge arguments. Herein, he contends that Thomas Nagel’s ‘bat arguments’, Frank Jackson’s well-known ‘Mary argument’, and Patrick Grim’s ‘knowledge de se’ argument are all rightly regarded as knowledge arguments. Although he argues against the physicalist approach to phenomenal consciousness, in part II, Nagasawa focuses on these knowledge arguments within the philosophy of religion, attempting to undermine existing objections to the arguments, which enables him to then propose his own objections to these arguments (note: he finds none of them convincing). He purports that both the bat argument and Mary argument fail to prove physicalism false.
Part III argues that his analyses of these three knowledge arguments are equally applicable to the philosophy of mind. He demonstrates that the bat arguments of Nagel is structurally parallel to the knowledge de se argument of Grim, and shows that the Mary argument of Jackson is parallel to the argument from concept possession. He contends that the knowledge de se argument and the from concept possession both fail to prove theism false. He proposes novel objections, herein, to the bat argument and the Mary argument by contrasting them to their counterparts in the philosophy of religion. From the failure of these arguments, Nagasawa derives a unique metaphysical thesis in part IV, ‘nontheoretical physicalism’, according to which although the world is entirely physical, there are physical facts that cannot be captured even by the most complete theories of the present-day physical sciences. By ‘nontheoretical’, Nagasawa does not mean to portray that it is not theoretical per se, but that it does not attempt to define physicalism in terms of theoretically communicable propositions instead. In contrast to the theory-based account, he proposes an entity-based account of the physical. The position advocated by Nagasawa holds that the physical omniscience thesis is true – that if one knows everything physical there is to know about the world, then one is omniscient simpliciter. However, the position of Nagasawa rejects that everything is subsumed by complete theories of the physical sciences. Hence, although the world is physically uniform, the world is not – at the same time – entirely theoretically uniform.
This book bridges debates in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of religion through its defence of ‘non-theoretical physicalism’. It proposes novel objections to Thomas Nagel’s and Frank Jackson’s arguments against physicalism about consciousness by appealing to the author’s own objections to certain arguments against the existence of God. This work, therefore, is a critical and comparative analysis of knowledge arguments as well as a defense of nontheoretical physicalism. There is one point of criticism that I would like to make, however: Nagasawa asserts that if God exists, He (sic) must be both omniscient and omnipotent (143). I would like to counter that both Molinism and contemporary Process thought offer avenues and resources to maintain – at least qualified interpretations – of both of these positions. Nagasawa does not acknowledge such in this text, but makes a broad generalization that conceptions of the godhead today insist on both omniscience and omnipotence as historically defined instead. Nevertheless, although the various terms introduced in this text make reading it somewhat laborious, the reader who endures will profit much from Nagasawa’s analyses and propositions regarding both God and phenomenal consciousness.
Bradford McCall, Regent University, Virginia Beach, VA.