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Can you recommend a good contemporary book that is considered a definitive or classical exposition of Physicalism?
I have started reading Daniel Stoljar's Physicalism, but while it seems good, it is laid out in such a way that makes me suspect that it is more like his take on Physicalism than a widely accepted exposition.
Yes, I rather doubt that Stoljar's "physicalism has no formulations on which it is both true and deserving of the name" expresses the consensus among physicalists, even if he adds that this "does not entail that philosophical problems stated in terms of it have no reasonable formulation". See Montero's review of his book for perspective.
But Stoljar is right to quote Lange that physicalism (or materialism as it used to be called) is "as old as philosophy", and there are plenty of modern practitioners who disagree with each other on both content and exposition. Perhaps Physicalism and its Discontents collection gives a more or less comprehensive look:"A group of distinguished philosophers, comprising both physicalists and their critics, consider a wide range of issues including the historical genesis and present justification of physicalism, its metaphysical presuppositions and methodological role, its implications for mental causation, and the account it provides of consciousness". Specifically on the mind-body problem something close to a canonical physicalist exposition is Dennett's Consciousness Explained.
