ABSTRACT
Contemporary Materialism has antecedents in both the Classical and Modern periods. Leucippus and his student Democritus—and later Epicurus and Lucretius all contend that everything that exists in the world can be explained as configurations of, and interactions among, atoms in the void. In the Modern period, R. Descartes's contemporary, T. Hobbes, and later J. La Mettrie, articulate what can be identified as materialistic theories of mental states. J. J. C. Smart's solution is to argue that mental state terms can be translated, preserving meaning, into "topic-neutral" terms, that is, terms that describe certain properties or relations that can be satisfied by either mental or physical states, processes, or events. A major attraction of scientific behaviorism is its promise to explain behavior by appeal to states and processes that are indisputably physical, and also intersubjectively observable, rather than accessible only to the subjects of those mental states themselves.
