From Physicalism to Experience and Return

This dissertation is mainly devoted to analytic metaphysics and philosophy of mind. In a nutshell, it pursues two main goals. First off, a clarificatory goal: the dissertation states and clarifies both physicalism (that is, the ontolological claim according to which everything is nothing over and above basic physical entities) and some anti-physicalist arguments known as conceivability arguments (viz. arguments against physicalism which are based on premises about the coinceivability of certain scenarios; more precisely, scenarios which turn out to be controversially linked to conscious experience). Second, the thesis tries to develop and defend a relatively new kind of physicalism named Russellian physicalism (since it is partly inspired by some of Bertrand Russell's insights on these issues). To be precise, Russellian physicalism is the conjunction of physicalism and Russellian monism, a theory recently rose to prominence and holding that some fundamental entities metaphysically constituting conscious experiences are such that physics is silent (in a certain relevant sense) about them. My main conclusion is that Russellian physicalism is an highly recommendable theoretical option, since it is both genuinely physicalist and immune to anti-physicalist conceivability arguments.