ABSTRACT
William Hasker’s essay is engagingly structured as an extended abductive inference aimed to demonstrate that emergent dualism is a better explanation of our common-sense beliefs about the mind and the neurophysiological correlates of conscious experience than idealism, materialism, and Cartesian dualism. As for panpsychism, he sees some affinity between its conjectured combinatorial evolutionary emergence of human consciousness and his own emergentist speculations. Since we will deal with panpsychism in our response to Leidenhag, this leaves us to respond, first, to Hasker’s unsympathetic rejection of idealism, then to comment on his criticisms of neo-Cartesian dualism, and finally, to critique his own emergentist explanation of the origin of mental substances as the ontological basis for human consciousness.
