Volume 9, Issue 2, 2009
Janez Bregant
Pages 219-232
Physicalism, or Something Near Enough
Good Enough to Be a Global Theory?
The article critically examines Jaegwon Kim’s book Physicalism, or Something Near Enough (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). It recognizes the »near enough type of physicalism« involving functional reduction and covering the relational properties of qualia. Its intrinsic qualites are left out, but since it is qualia’s differences and similarities that matter, i.e. which affect our cognition and behaviour, this is, according to Kim, “no big loss”. While appreciating the book’s effort to offer an intelligible physicalistic theory of the world, the paper concludes that it fails to do so.