Students and professors gathered in Smith Hall Room 205 on Thursday to listen to the second in this year’s Philosophy Today lecture series.
The lecture titled “What is Physicalism,” was given by Alyssa Ney, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of California, Davis.
The lecture began with Torin Alter, a professor of philosophy at the University, inviting Scott Hestevold, a professor of philosophy at Alabama, to introduce Ney.
“Physicalism is something that’s guided all my work,” Ney said. “You can state it really simply at first as the view that the world is the way physics says it is, but what I’m going to be trying to argue here is that that really simple characterization is not really going to work out.”
Ney began by placing physicalism against other views that are “roughly in the same ball park” of topics.
“There are lots of comprehensive metaphysical views that have been defended,” Ney said. “When you look at the history of philosophy, you see idealism, the view that everything is ideas or everything is somehow something mental.”
Ney then juxtaposed materialism and physicalism, saying that they are views most in line with each other, but how they’re also different.
“The view that’s most in line with physicalism that most people will say is the historical predecessor to physicalism is materialism,” she said. “Sometimes people will use the terms physicalism and materialism interchangeably.”
Ney said that the two are indeed different, though. She said that, if she’s talking about matter, then that’s something that’s solid “like a table,” whereas the kinds of things physics talks about, “a lot of those things aren’t solid” as she mentioned electromagnetic fields, protons and a bit of space time.
“To say everything is matter no longer strikes a lot of people as correct,” she said.
She went on to say that there are problems with this, though, as there are all kinds of “obvious things” that “physics just doesn’t talk about.”
“If you want to understand what physicalism is, you don’t just simply understand it as the view that the world is the way physics says it is,” she said. “Physics isn’t trying to talk about everything that exists, what it’s trying to talk about are the fundamental things, and so the better view is that the world is fundamentally the way that physics says it is.”
Ney said the way you can think of this is to somehow put all sciences into ordered levels like a pyramid structure in the example she showed, with physics at the bottom as the foundation for all the others including chemistry, cell biology, organismal biology, etc., and how each science comes with its own domain of objects.
“What makes physics fundamental is you can make claims, ordinary claims on all these different sciences, but it’s always possible to ask ‘why is that the case,’ and then when you get an answer to that you can follow that with another ‘why’ question,” Ney said.
