David Chalmers just blogged about an Australian radio show entitled The Mind-Body Problem Down Under, and I’ve just finished listening to the podcast. It was prompted by the 50th anniversary of the publication of U.T.Place’s ground-breaking paper “Is Consciousness A Brain Process?”. Although Place himself died a few years ago, they were able to interview Jack Smart and a number of the other architects of the identity theory – and Chalmers, of course, who has abandoned identity in favour of a (rather shaky) dualism.
Leaving aside the inevitable(?) bits about “as with sport Australians punch above their weight in the international philosophy community”, it’s a very nice account of how philosophy broke out of the quagmire of “the linguistic turn” and started moving towards a balanced accomodation with the physical sciences, especially neuroscience. Definitely worth listening to.