Philosophy of Mind Seminar…

1. Philosophy of Mind Seminar… The Authors

2. Note: the following has been abstracted from the Grolier Encyclopedia. Rene Descartes The French philosopher Rene Descartes, b. Mar. 31, 1596, d. Feb. 11, 1650, was one of the most important and influential thinkers in human history and is sometimes called the founder of modern philosophy. Writing at the beginning of the scientific revolution, he made major contributions to both philosophy and mathematics. His principal philosophical work, Meditations on First Philosophy,

3. was first published in 1641, the year before Galileo Galilei died and Isaac Newton was born. In late 1628, as the result of a speech in Paris in which he argued that the sciences must be founded on certainty, he was encouraged by Cardinal Pierre de Berulle (1575-1629) to develop his own philosophical system. Shortly afterward, he settled in Holland, which offered him seclusion and more intellectual freedom, and began work on his first major treatise, Rules for the Direction of the Mind. This work was never completed and was published posthumously in 1701. Upon hearing of Galileo's condemnation by the Inquisition in 1633 for defending the Copernican system, Descartes suppressed publication of his own work The World, in which he had taken the same position.

4. His three most important philosophical works, the Discourse on Method--which was a preface to his Dioptrics, Meteors and Geometry--the Meditations on First Philosophy, and the Principles of Philosophy, were all published in the period from 1637 to 1644. Cartesian Philosophy Descartes adopted the strategy of withholding his belief from anything that was not entirely certain and indubitable. To test which of his previous beliefs could meet these conditions, he subjected them to a series of skeptical hypotheses. For example, he asked himself whether he could be certain he was not dreaming. His most powerful skeptical hypothesis, that there is an evil genius trying to deceive him, challenges not only the belief that the physical world exists,

5. but also belief in simple statements of fact, and thus would seem to call into question the validity of reason itself. But not even an evil genius could deceive someone into believing falsely that he existed. "I think, therefore I am" is thus beyond skeptical doubt. From this Archimedean point, "I think, therefore I am," Descartes attempted to regain the world called into doubt by his skeptical hypotheses. Descartes is known as the father of the mind-body problem. He claimed that human beings are composites of two kinds of substances, mind and body. A mind is a conscious or thinking being, that is, it understands, wills, senses, and imagines. A body is a being extended in length, width, and breadth. Minds are indivisible, whereas bodies are infinitely divisible.

6. The "I" of the "I think, therefore I am" is the mind and can exist without being extended, so that it can in principle survive the death of the body. Despite having different natures, Descartes thought that mind and body causally interact. The human mind causes motions in the bodies by moving a small part of the brain. Motions in that same part of the brain produce sensations and emotions. This problem of whether mental entities are different in nature from physical entities continues to be a primary concern of philosophers and psychologists.

7. Descartes argued that bodies differ from how they appear through senses. Colors, sounds, tastes, smells, heat, and cold are merely sensations existing in thought, and there is nothing in bodies that resembles them, just as there is nothing in bodies that resembles our sensation of pain. Instead the properties of bodies are those which are capable of being quantified, namely, extension and its modes, shape, size, and motion. All the phenomena in the created world external to human beings, such as gravity, magnetism, and the cohesion of bodies, as well as the complex functioning of living organisms including human bodies, he believed could be explained solely by mechanistic physics, that is, by the motions and collisions of bodies.

9. A Raymond Smullyan brainteaser tends to be a labyrinthine den of logic, mathematics, and philosophy. The Oscar Ewing professor emeritus of philosophy at Indiana University, Smullyan, SB'55, has written eight books of logic problems and is finishing his latest, The Riddle of Scheherazade: Amazing Logic Puzzles, Ancient and Modern, based on the Eastern tale Thousand and One Nights.

11. As Waynflete Professor of metaphysical philosophy at Oxford and as editor of the journal Mind for nearly twenty-five years, Gilbert Ryle had an enormous influence on the development of twentieth-century analytic philosophy. • In "Systematically Misleading Expressions" (1932) Ryle proposed a philosophical method of dissolving problems by correctly analyzing the derivation of inappropriate abstract inferences from ordinary uses of language. Applying this method more generally in "Categories" (1938), Ryle showed how the misapplication of an ordinary term can result in a category mistake by which philosophers may be seriously misled.

12. Dealing with the traditional mind-body problem in The Concept of Mind (1949), Ryle sharply criticized Cartesian dualism, arguing that adequate descriptions of human behavior need never refer to anything but the operations of human bodies. This form of logical behaviorism became a standard view among ordinary-language philosophers for several decades. Ryle's Dilemmas (1954) and Collected Papers (1971) cover a wide range of topics in philosophical logic and the history of philosophy.

14. Daniel C. Dennett (born 1942) is an American philosopher and cognitive scientist, presently (2003) employed as Austin B Fletcher Professor of Philosophy and director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. Dennett's research centers on the philosophy of the mind and cognitive science. He is the author of several major books on evolution and consciousness. He is a leading proponent of the theory known by some as Neural Darwinism

16. Thomas Nagel is a professor of philosophy and law at New York University. He is known within philosophy of mind as an advocate of the idea that consciousness and subjective experience cannot be reduced to brain activity. One of his most famous articles is "What is it like to be a bat?" This article was originally published in 1974 in the journal The Philosophical Review but has since been reprinted in several books that are concerned with consciousness and the mind,

17. such as The Mind's I by Daniel Dennett and Douglas Hofstadter. (Also reprinted in Readings in the Philosophy of Psychology, edited by Ned Block and the book Mortal Questions.) Nagel first argued that the subjective experience of consciousness can never be attained through the objective methods of reductionistic science. Second, Nagel concluded that because of the general problem of subjective experience, "we cannot even pose the mind-body problem" in a sensible way and "it seems unlikely that a physical theory of mind can be contemplated." While many philosophers of mind and cognitive neuroscientists accept the fundamental distinction between the subjective and the objective, they often have not accepted Nagel's dismal conclusions. For example, philosophers and biologists such as Daniel Dennett and Gerald Edelman have gone ahead and proposed theories of mind and consciousness.

19. The End