Trevor,
I managed to get away from Canberra late this afternoon on the direct flight to Adelaide. It's been a helluva fortnight working from 7.30 am to close to midnight each night. I went straight down to Victor Harbor after dropping my bags off in the city.

I'm bombed out and I need to try to recover my energy over the weekend. I'm really exhausted.

On a biographical note I came into postgraduate philosophy at Flinders University as a believer in scientific naturalism (eg., Marxism as a critical social science) and left as a critic of it. Most of my time as a postgraduate was spend in trying to find the tools to crawl out of the flybottle of analytic philosophy's understanding of scientific naturalism.

What I encountered in academic analytic philosophy is described in the paragraph below from this text by Matthew Ratcliffe:

"Much of current Anglophone philosophy of mind privileges the scientifically described world over our everyday experience of things and takes as its problematic the issue of how the mind, self or subject might be coherently integrated into the objective world of empirical science. The subject is construed from the start as a kind of thing in the world, whose capacity to experience other worldly things requires an explanation that does not go beyond the natural order. Hence the assumption is that subjects of experience, in order to be philosophically acceptable, must be shown to be just another part of the objective world."

Here is my response to all that Medlin stuff and reductive physicalism that you and many analytic philosophers find so attractive. More on this can be found here and here.

The response in these posts highlight lived bodily existence as a way to deconstruct physicalism. Embodiment is very appropriate to the political life of Canberra since people need to have the tacit knowledge to read what is going on in terms of body language in order to get by and thrive in that hothouse. Embodiment is the key to understanding the political process within Parliament House. A lot of political activity in the hothouse involves, and depends upon, a hermeneutics of factical political life.

Other responses to physicalism you know about: the turn away from philosophy as part of natural science (eg., scientism) to a hermeneutical philosophy that interprets cultural meaning; and the return to everydayness in opposition to science. In previous posts I have highlighted the metaphysics of everydayness (being-in-the-world) described in this paragraph in Matthew Ratcliffe's text:

"Heidegger claims that the world does not first present itself to us as a collection of objects that we look upon from a detached perspective, but as a holistic web of interconnected equipment with which we are inextricably entangled. Objects only show up in the context of a background of purposes, concerns, practices and equipmental dealings that is constitutive of our Being-in-the-world. The subject-object perspective is thus a derivative, incomplete understanding, which is blinded by its failure to recognise the primacy of concernful engagement with things over theoretical scrutiny. Heidegger also proposes that, in our everyday dealings with things, we do not come across other selves as distinct entities, isolated from ourselves. Instead, we are always with others, in an irreducible togetherness or ‘Being-with-others’ that cannot be conveyed through a picture of fundamentally distinct selves relating to other such selves."

Another response by Heidegger to the metaphysics of physicalism is his emphasis on the centrality of mood to our everyday understanding of the world. As Mathew says, Heidegger argues that we do not relate to the world first and foremost through a detached, emotionally neutral stance.Rather we do so through our moods, which disclose the world and render it meaningful in a way that again defies objectivist articulation of scientific naturalism.