Frank Jackson

Dzieła

• 1982Epiphenomenal Qualia (Epifenomenalne qualia)

  Pokój Mary: pełna wiedza fizyczna o widzeniu barw nie jest wiedzą o tym, jak to jest widzieć czerwień.

• 1998From Metaphysics to Ethics: A Defence of Conceptual Analysis (Od metafizyki do etyki: obrona analizy pojęciowej)

  Wykłady Johna Locke’a z 1995 roku: analiza pojęciowa mówi nam, gdzie w świecie fizycznym umieścić barwę, umysł i wartość.

Stanowisko

“Epiphenomenal Qualia” (1982) contains one of the best-known thought experiments in the philosophy of mind. Mary is a brilliant scientist who has spent her life in a black-and-white room and has learned everything physical there is to know about colour and colour vision. When she leaves the room and sees a ripe tomato, she seems to learn something new: what it is like to see red. If so, not all knowledge is physical knowledge, and physicalism is false. Jackson took the further step of accepting that such “qualia” have no physical effects. He distinguished his argument from Nagel’s question of what it is like to be a bat, which concerns another point of view rather than complete physical knowledge. Replies became a literature of their own: Lewis argued that Mary gains abilities, not information; Dennett denied that she would be surprised; Chalmers built on the argument against physicalism. From the late 1990s Jackson himself became a physicalist and argued that the intuition that Mary learns a new fact is mistaken. In From Metaphysics to Ethics (1998) he defended conceptual analysis as the way to locate colour, mind and value in a physical world, a method later called the “Canberra plan”. He has also written on perception, conditionals and consequentialism.

Życie i kontekst

Frank Cameron Jackson was born in Melbourne in 1943. Both his parents taught philosophy; his father, Allan Cameron Jackson, had studied with Wittgenstein in Cambridge. He studied mathematics and philosophy at the University of Melbourne and took his doctorate at La Trobe University. After posts at Adelaide and La Trobe he succeeded his father in the chair of philosophy at Monash University in 1978. From 1986 he worked at the Australian National University in Canberra, and from 2007 to 2014 he was a regular visiting professor at Princeton. He gave the John Locke Lectures at Oxford in 1995 and was made an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2006.

Dalsze główne dzieła

• Perception: A Representative Theory (1977)
• What Mary Didn’t Know (1986)
• Conditionals (1987)
• Language, Names, and Information (2010)

Pojawia się w

• Debata „Czym jest świadomość?”