scholarly journals The Mind-Body Problem in Contemporary Analytic Philosophy: A Review of the Main Approaches

2019 ◽  
pp. 158-179
Author(s):  
Анатолий Анатольевич Парпара
Keyword(s):  
Human Brain ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Body Problem ◽  
Human Person ◽  
Analytic Philosophy ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Property Dualism ◽  
Critical Comparison ◽  
Christian Apologetics ◽  
The Mind

В статье рассматривается современная постановка вопроса о взаимоотношении духовного и телесного начала в человеке и основные варианты его решения в аналитической философии. Прежде всего, субстанциальный дуализм, ведущий начало от Декарта, противопоставляется материалистическому редукционизму (теория тождества и функционализм). Далее обсуждаются более «компромиссные» направления: антиредукционизм и дуализм свойств, в том числе эпифеноменализм. Рассматривается вопрос, насколько мозг может быть уподоблен вычислительной машине (компьютерная метафора сознания). Для каждого решения приводятся ключевые аргументы и контраргументы, оценивается значимость философии сознания для христианской апологетики. Намечается связь современной проблематики с работами русских исследователей начала XX века (Г. И. Челпанов, В. В. Зеньковский). The objective of the article is to review modern approaches to interaction between the mental and the physical in the human person in the analytic philosophy. It starts with the critical comparison between the mind-body dualism, inaugurated by Descartes, and the materialistic reductionism including the identity theory and functionalism. The next step is to discuss some more “compromising” approaches as the antireductionism and the property dualism including the epiphenomenalism. The author discusses the question, to which extent the human brain may be compared to a computer (the computer metaphor). Each solution is supplemented with the key pro and contra arguments, while the mind philosophy is evaluated from the positions of its instrumentality for the Christian apologetics. The author shows the connections between modern approaches and works of the Russian researchers on the early 20th century (G. Chelpanov,V. Zenkovsky).

Real Selves: Persons as a Substantial Kind

1991 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 87-107
Author(s):  
E. J. Lowe
Keyword(s):  
Body Problem ◽  
Human Person ◽  
Human Case ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Animal Body ◽  
Biological Substance ◽  
Mind Body Problem ◽  
The Mind

Are persons substances or modes? (The terminology may seem archaic, but the issue is a live one.) Two currently dominant views may be characterized as giving the following rival answers to this question. According to the first view, persons are just biological substances. According to the second, persons are psychological modes of substances which, as far as human beings are concerned, happen to be biological substances, but which could in principle be non-biological. There is, however, also a third possible answer, and this is that persons are psychological substances. Such a view is inevitably associated with the name of Descartes, and this helps to explain its current unpopularity, since substantial dualism of his sort is now widely rejected as ‘unscientific’. But one may, as I hope to show, espouse the view that persons are psychological substances without endorsing Cartesianism. This is because one may reject certain features of Descartes's conception of substance. Consequently, one may also espouse a version of substantial dualism which is distinctly non-Cartesian. One may hold that a person, being a psychological substance, is an entity distinct from the biological substance that is (in the human case) his or her body, and yet still be prepared to ascribe corporeal characteristics to this psychological substance. By this account, a human person is to be thought of neither as a non-corporeal mental substance (a Cartesian mind), nor as the product of a mysterious ‘union’ between such a substance and a physical, biological substance (a Cartesian animal body). This is not to deny that the mind—body problem is a serious and difficult one, but it is to imply that there is a version of substantial dualism which does not involve regarding the ‘mind’ as a distinct substance in its own right.

How Brains Think

Dialogue ◽  
1973 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-86
Author(s):  
David Coder
Keyword(s):  
Nervous System ◽  
Human Brain ◽  
Body Problem ◽  
Phenomenological Research ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Mind Body Problem ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Short Time

J.J.C. Smart once opined that if we were able to keep a human brain alive outside the skull, there would be no philosophical reason to believe that it could not think, and every physiological reason to believe that it could (“Materialism,” Journal of Philosophy, LX (1963), 651–662, pp. 659–660). Only a short time later, Wilfred Sellars asserted that if one were to deflesh and de-bone a human being, keeping the nervous system intact and discarding the rest, what one would have left would be, in all essentials, a person: a “core person,” Sellars says, thinking perhaps of apples (“The Identity Approach to the Mind-Body Problem,” Review of Metaphysics, XVIII (1965), 430–451, pp. 441–442). Since then, Bernard Gert has provided this view with an argument, describing an example which proves, in his opinion, that it makes sense to speak of brains as thinking. (“Can a Brain Have a Pain?” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, XXVII (1967), 432–436).

scholarly journals Metaphilosophical pessimism of C. McGinn

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-42
Author(s):  
Alexey S. Pavlov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Body Problem ◽  
Analytic Philosophy ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Research Literature ◽  
Demarcation Criterion ◽  
Cognitive Closure ◽  
Cognitive Limitations ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Performative Contradiction

This article is dedicated to the metaphilosophical pessimism of C. McGinn. McGinn is known as a main proponent of “new mysterianism” in the contemporary analytic philosophy of mind. According to mysterianism, we can’t solve the mind-body problem because of the natural cognitive limitations on our side. McGinn’s view on the nature of philosophy is the component of this conception. In general, mysterian metaphilosophy didn’t get enough coverage in the research literature but it deserves a bigger interest. McGinn argues that philosophy is actually a combination of unsolvable problems. He identifies the scientific/philosophical demarcation criterion as the potential solvability for the human mind. However, this metaphilosophical position faces serious difficulties. At first, if the objections of U. Kriegel and D. Dennett are right and the mysterian cognitive closure thesis is not sufficiently proved, then the termination of research on a number of philosophical issues may also be an unreasoned decision. Secondly, there is a threat of performative contradiction. But we could try to explain this contradiction by considering the style of analytic philosophy itself which is characterized by dialogical form and free dealing with the ideas considered as possible options. In the article, the standard methods of historicophilosophical investigation are used including the comparative analysis and the principle of objective analysis of a text in the work with sources.

Contemporary Metaphysics

Philosophy ◽  
2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allan Hazlett
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Analytic Philosophy ◽  
Ordinary Language ◽  
Logical Positivism ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Ordinary Language Philosophy ◽  
Language Philosophy ◽  
Absolute Idealism ◽  
Aristotelian Tradition

There is no general agreement or consensus about how to define metaphysics. The word itself derives from the title of one of Aristotle’s books, one that deals with decidedly metaphysical issues, but intuitively metaphysical issues are discussed by Aristotle as much in his other works as in the Metaphysics. Contemporary metaphysics ranges over a broad set of questions: questions about what reality is like, at its most fundamental; questions about the nature of human agency and perception; questions about the legitimacy of metaphysics itself. The only way to know what contemporary metaphysics is about is to understand the relevant texts, issues, and figures. Hence this article, which presents important and influential background readings in the various subareas of metaphysics. These “areas” of metaphysics (like the various “areas” of philosophy) are deeply interconnected, to say the least. Indeed the quotes used here indicate doubts about the very idea of distinct “areas.” On this score, the artificiality of the divisions employed here cannot be overemphasized. This article is concerned with contemporary metaphysics in the “analytic” tradition, and as such it ignores some important philosophers. Most importantly, this article does not cover the historical background to contemporary analytic metaphysics, which includes the Aristotelian tradition that still shapes contemporary metaphysical thinking; the Humean empiricism and Kantian idealism to which analytic metaphysicians owe so much; and finally, the “Absolute Idealism” of F. H. Bradley (the negative reaction to which helped spawn “analytic” philosophy as we know it). Nor does it cover early-20th-century analytic philosophy, including logical positivism, or ordinary language philosophy. The aim here is to provide background reading for those concerned with contemporary metaphysics. The texts selected are mostly from the last half of the 20th century, and, for the most part, they are those that have had the most impact on contemporary debates.

scholarly journals The Metrics of Landscape. Stereo fieldwork by Francisco Afonso Chaves and other Portuguese Explorers

Artnodes ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victor Flores
Keyword(s):  
Visual Perception ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Scientific Instrument ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Scientific Practices ◽  
The World ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The 19Th Century

Although the invention of the stereoscope in 1832 shed new light on the anomalies of vision and on the constructive role of the mind in visual perception, this became no obstacle to its scientific uses throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. On the contrary, combined with photography, the stereoscope embodied both the imperialist politics of the 19th century and its scientific ideology. These pairs of twin images perfected photography as an accurate and credible scientific instrument and gave explorers the chance to map, calculate and “grab the world in an image”. The use of stereo photography in geodesic and topographic fieldworks is one of the best evidences of such scientific practices, largely overlooked by stereo photography studies. Here, we introduce the stereoviews by Portuguese explorers such as Francisco Afonso Chaves, an early-20th-century Azorean naturalist, and analyse a particular series of Verascope glass plates which represent theodolites photographed during his fieldwork. The identification of common uses of theodolites in the stereo collections of other explorers suggests the advantage of expanding fieldwork to the laboratory, a fact David Brewster (1856) would naturally recognise as a “rational pleasure”.

The Mind-Body Problem Revisited

1975 ◽  
Vol 20 (8) ◽  
pp. 660-660
Author(s):  
MADGE SCHEIBEL ◽  
ARNOLD SCHEIBEL
Keyword(s):  
Body Problem ◽  
Mind Body Problem ◽  
The Mind
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