INTRODUCTION

In Part I, I discussed two knowledge arguments in the philosophy of religion: Patrick Grim's argument from knowledge de se and the argument from concept possession. To examine these arguments is, of course, an important task in itself. However, in what follows I contrast them with two knowledge arguments in the philosophy of mind: Thomas Nagel's bat argument and Frank Jackson's Mary argument. I argue that my objections to the knowledge arguments in the philosophy of religion are useful in establishing new, effective objections to the knowledge arguments in the philosophy of mind. I claim that Nagel's bat argument is structurally parallel to Grim's argument from knowledge de se and that Jackson's Mary argument is structurally parallel to the argument from concept possession. I try to undermine these knowledge arguments in the philosophy of mind by contrasting them with their counterparts in the philosophy of religion.

In Chapter 2 I discussed Grim's argument from knowledge de se. I argued that the argument was unsuccessful because it appealed to a necessary impossibility. In this chapter I discuss Thomas Nagel's bat argument against physicalism. On the face of it, there is no connection between Grim's argument and Nagel's argument. I argue, however, that Nagel's argument fails for essentially the same reason that Grim's does.

In his famous paper, ‘What Is It Like To Be a Bat?’ (1974), Nagel illustrates the difficulty of characterising phenomenal consciousness in general.