Beyond the Modern University: Toward a Constructive Postmodern University by Marcus Ford

Author:Marcus Ford [Marcus Ford]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2008-01-06T16:12:00+00:00

But if modern materialism solves or avoids the problems of early modern dualism, it has problems of its own. Among the most troublesome aspects of reality to account for are experience, freedom, and moral responsibility. What does it mean to say that, strictly speaking, there is no experiencing subject and that what we experience is nothing more than the activity of molecules in our head? Although no one would deny that there are molecules in the brain, how does this fact account for experience? How is it that nonexperiencing entities somehow come together to produce a single, unified experience? Or, to ask a closely related question, how is it that bits of matter, lacking any intentionality, self-determination, or purposiveness, come together in such a way as to produce beings that experience themselves as freely intending to do one thing rather than another? In rejecting the dualistic proposal that there are two kinds of being, one of which has experience and freedom, the materialist gains philosophical consistency but at the cost of explanatory adequacy. Indeed, some late modernists simply admit that they have no idea how to explain experience. The philosopher Galen Strawson, for example, writes:

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