Physical Realization

How can physicalism be true? How can all facts about the world, including facts about our mental states, be constituted by facts about the distribution in the world of physical properties? Sydney Shoemaker’s answer to this question involves showing how the mental properties of a person can be ‘realized in’ the physical properties of that person, and how all instantiations of properties in macroscopic objects can be realized in microphysical states of affairs. Physical Realization will be essential reading for many philosophers in the fields of metaphysics and the philosophy of mind.