Discuss the Concept of Nonreductive Materialism

Despite the progress made in rebutting the classical objections to materialism, and despite the current popularity, in English-speaking philosophy, of functionalist physicalism as a philosophy of mind, uneasiness remains that materialism accords insufficient recognition to consciousness and its highest expressions—music, literature, love, and fine feeling generally, as well as culture, morality, and religious aspiration.

In response to this, there have been some attempts at a softer materialism that tries to accord to the physical a primary but not exclusive place. While everything depends on the physical, it does not reduce to the physico-chemical, but rather supervenes upon it.

The most thorough attempt in this direction is J. F. Post’s The Faces of Existence (1987). A further step away from extreme materialism is taken in Nicholas Maxwell’s The Human World in the Physical Universe (2001), which advocates a dual-aspect position while clinging to the central materialist claim that the universe is a closed system, in which the only causally effective forces are the physical ones.