Sydney Sharpless Shoemaker

Research focused on issues in philosophy of mind and metaphysics. Shoemaker wrote about personal identity, the mind-body problem, mental causation, the nature of consciousness and perceptual experience, the nature of properties, causality, and the nature of time. He defended a version of physicalism that combines a functionalist view of mind and a psychological account of personal identity and attempted to show how such a view can do justice to the facts of phenomenal consciousness. Shoemaker also defended a causal theory of properties and a related view about how mental properties can be realized in physical ones.