Ricerc@Sapienza

The focus of this chapter is Aristotle’s resolution of Parmenides’ argument for monism in Physics I 3, in particular the role that this resolution plays in Physics I and its philosophical meaning. It argues that one of Aristotle’s principal aims is to construe a theory of principles that, unlike those of his predecessors, is correct, because it is built (among other things) by solving some major problems left unresolved by his predecessors.

Our aim is to show how materialistic monism, which is the dominant metaphysics of natural sciences, reduces the mental ambit to the brain's physical/biological substrate. We refer to two variants of this monism by pointing out the main reason for their failure, i.e. the hard problem of consciousness. For this reason, we think that a more effective alternative to materialistic monism is neutral monism, of which processual monism is one version that has its own strong specificity.