Jakub Mihálik: Consciousness in Nature. A Russellian Approach Abstract: This thesis attempts to provide a philosophical answer to the question of how phenomenal consciousness, or experience, can exist in the physical world, i.e. in the world as it is described by science. The thesis has three parts: In the first part (chapter 1) I explicate the concept of phenomenal consciousness and contrast it with other concepts of consciousness common in the literature. Moreover, I suggest that the project pursued in this thesis can be naturally viewed as a part of the more general project of trying to find a stereoscopic view of man, taken by Wilfrid Sellars to be a crucial task for contemporary philosophy. In the second part of the thesis (chapters 2 to 4) I offer a detailed evaluation of the attempts at a materialist reduction of consciousness. While in chapter 2 I explore and critique the approach of apriori physicalism (Dennett, Lewis, Rey, etc.), in chapters 3 and 4, I focus on the more recent doctrine of a posteriori physicalism and especially its most prominent variety called the phenomenal concept strategy (Loar, Papineau, Levin, Schroer, etc.). One problem with a posteriori physicalism is that, as Nida-Rümelin, Goff and others argue, the view cannot make sense of the plausible thesis that our phenomenal...

1 Abstract This doctoral thesis focuses on the analogies between Virginia Woolf's "personal philosophy" and Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy, or in his own words "philosophy of organism." The thesis does not claim that Whitehead's thought directly influenced Woolf's fiction, rather, it makes use of a zeitgeist model. The two contemporaries shared the rejection of long-established dualisms, particularly the Cartesian mind-body dualism, the binaries of subject and object, animate and inanimate matter, the human and the nonhuman, and last but not least the individual and the community. Interested in the philosophical enquiry into the problem of reality and the visible world, Woolf redefines the notion of "things" in her fiction and adopts the processist view that objects may be defined as clusters of events, which are not separate from the perceiving subject but interrelated with it. Moreover, Woolf illustrates her interest in the natural world in most of her works and often suggests that what we normally think to be inert and lifeless matter, may, in fact, also have some proto-conscious, or proto- experiential, qualities like Whitehead's "actual occasions." The second part of the thesis focuses on Woolf's attempt to overcome one's individual identity in favour of adopting a more inclusive and...

Many contemporary naturalistic philosophers have taken it for granted that a robust theory of free will, one which would afford us with an agency substantial enough to render us morally responsible for our actions, is itself not conceptually compatible with the philosophical theory of naturalism. I attempt to account for why it is that free will (in its most substantial form) cannot be plausibly located within a naturalistic understanding of the world. I consider the issues surrounding an acceptance of a robust theory of free will within a naturalistic framework. Timothy O’Connor’s reconciliatory effort in maintaining both a scientifically naturalist understanding of the human person and a full-blooded theory of agent-causal libertarian free will is considered. I conclude that Timothy O’Connor’s reconciliatory model cannot be maintained and I reference several conceptual difficulties surrounding the reconciliation of agent-causal libertarian properties with physical properties that haunt the naturalistic libertarian.