Book contents
1 - Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
What is the philosophy of mind? One might be tempted to answer that it is the study of philosophical questions concerning the mind and its properties – questions such as whether the mind is distinct from the body or some part of it, such as the brain, and whether the mind has properties, such as consciousness, which are unique to it. But such an answer implicitly assumes something which is already philosophically contentious, namely, that ‘minds’ are objects of a certain kind, somehow related – perhaps causally, perhaps by identity – to other objects, such as bodies or brains. In short, such an answer involves an implicit reification of minds: literally, a making of them into ‘things’. Indo-European languages such as English are overburdened with nouns and those whose native tongues they are have an unwarranted tendency to suppose that nouns name things. When we speak of people having both minds and bodies, it would be naïve to construe this as akin to saying that trees have both leaves and trunks. Human bodies are certainly ‘things’ of a certain kind. But when we say that people ‘have minds’ we are, surely, saying something about the properties of people rather than about certain ‘things’ which people somehow own. A more circumspect way of saying that people ‘have minds’ would be to say that people are minded or mindful, meaning thereby just that they feel, see, think, reason and so forth.
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- An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind , pp. 1 - 7Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000
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