Title

Oppy on the Argument from Consciousness

School/Department

Talbot School of Theology

Publication Date

2012

Abstract

Graham Oppy has launched the most effective criticism to date of an argument for God’s existence from the existence of irreducible mental states or their regular correlation with physical states (AC). I seek to undercut Oppy’s central defeaters of AC. In particular, I argue, first, that Oppy has not provided successful defeaters against the use of a distinctive form of explanation—personal explanation—employed in premise (3) of AC; second, I expose a confusion on Oppy’s part with respect to AC’s premise (5), and show that this confusion results in a failure to grasp adequately the dialectical force of (5). As a result, Oppy fails to offer adequate rejoinders to (5), or so I shall argue.

Keywords

Consciousness; Graham Oppy;

Publication Title

Faith and Philosophy

Volume

29

Issue

1

First Page

70

Last Page

83

DOI of Published Version

10.5840/faithphil20122914

Link to Full Text

Share

COinS