PLACE: THE NATURE OF PSYCHOPHYSICAL IDENTITY

In the preceding chapter brief mention was made of the Australian school of materialists. It was noted that in the later works of Feigl, especially in the ‘Postscript’ published in 1967, considerable importance is given to the theories advanced by the exponents of this school. Indeed, Australian materialism plays an extremely significant, and aggressive role on the stage of contemporary thought on the mbp and no discussion of the issue can avoid a confrontation with the radical principles it defends. The Australian school, moreover, has the merit of pointing out the extent to which a seemingly ‘technical’ and circumscribed debate on the relationship between mind and body actually touches on problems far broader in scope: the nature of the mental, the properties of man's higher functions, the method and goals of ‘true’ science in relation to the psychoanthropological universe.

As Max Deutscher once wrote, the conception elaborated by the Australian school is “physicalism … in its most recent incarnation” (Deutscher [1964] 1967, p. 83). When and how did this “incarnation” come about? A firsthand account of the events runs something like this: In 1955 U. T. Place held a series of lectures at the University of Adelaide in which he presented an identity solution to the mbp (or, more precisely, to a fairly restricted part of it).