Branches of Philosophy

Philosophy of Mind

The branch of philosophy that studies the nature of mental states and their relation to the physical body: what a thought, a sensation, or a feeling actually is, whether it can be identical with a state of the brain, and how the felt, subjective quality of experience fits into a world otherwise describable in purely physical terms. The field studies mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness and its neural correlates, the ontology of the mind, and the nature of cognition and thought, alongside its paradigmatic dispute, the mind-body problem. Dualism and monism are its two central schools of thought, though nuanced positions have arisen that fit neither category neatly: dualism entered Western philosophy through Rene Descartes in the seventeenth century, with substance dualists holding that the mind is an independently existing substance and property dualists holding instead that it is a group of properties emerging from, but not reducible to, the brain, while monism holds that mind and body are not ontologically distinct at all.

Facts

Disputed

Key Debate

Substance dualism against physicalism: Descartes held that mind and body are two distinct substances that causally interact, while contemporary physicalists hold that mental states are identical to, or wholly realized by, physical states of the brain, with property dualists and panpsychists defending positions in between. 1

The mind-body problem: whether the mind is identical with, or wholly produced by, the physical brain, or is something genuinely non-physical that interacts with it. Substance dualists, following Descartes, hold that mind and matter are two distinct kinds of thing; physicalists hold that every mental fact is, at bottom, a physical fact about the brain; property dualists and panpsychists occupy positions in between. No side has closed the case.

Central Question

Is the mind identical with the physical brain, or something genuinely distinct from it, and how does subjective, felt experience arise from or relate to physical processes? 1

Key Debate

The hard problem of consciousness: David Chalmers distinguished the easy problems of cognitive science, explaining functions such as memory, attention and reportability, from the hard problem of explaining why physical or neural processes are accompanied by subjective, what-it-is-like experience at all, a gap physicalist theories of mind have not closed to general satisfaction. 1

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The Ghost in the Machine, Reconsidered

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Descartes left philosophy with a picture so vivid it earned its own insult: a person is not a body with a ghost inside it steering by remote control, animating flesh from some separate, unextended realm. That is the charge Gilbert Ryle would later level at substance dualism, and it names exactly what Descartes' Meditations commits to. Mind and body, for Descartes, are two really distinct kinds of thing. The body is extended, divisible, mechanical, obeying the same laws as any other physical object. The mind is unextended, indivisible, a thinking thing whose whole nature is to doubt, understand, affirm, deny, will, imagine and sense. They interact, famously and awkwardly, somewhere in the pineal gland, but interaction across two totally different kinds of stuff was never going to be the tidy part of the theory. What survives Ryle's insult is the observation the ghost picture was trying to capture, however clumsily: a toothache hurts in a way no description of nerve firing seems to capture. Physicalism answers that mental states simply are physical states of the brain, or are realized by them, no ghost required. But saying a state has a certain causal role, or is identical to some neural pattern, has never fully closed the gap between what a state does and what it is like to be in it. That gap outlived Descartes' pineal gland by three and a half centuries, and it is why Philosophy of Mind is still, at bottom, an argument about whether physics is the whole story or only the outside of one.

What It Is Like to Be Something

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Thomas Nagel asked a question that sounds almost too simple to be a philosophical argument: what is it like to be a bat. Not what a bat's brain does, not how sonar works, not which neurons fire when a bat navigates in the dark, all of which a sufficiently patient physiology could in principle describe completely. Nagel's question is about the bat's own point of view, the felt quality of echolocating a moth from the inside, and his claim is that no amount of objective, third person description, however complete, delivers that. You can know everything physical there is to know about a bat and still not know what it is like to be one, because that knowledge is essentially a first person kind, tied to a particular point of view rather than freed from one. This is the philosophical vocabulary that has since collected under the word qualia, the felt, subjective quality of an experience, the redness of red or the specific ache of a headache, considered apart from whatever causal role it plays. A physicalist owes an account of why creatures with the right neural architecture have any felt quality at all rather than none, why there is something it is like to be a bat and, so far as anyone can tell, nothing it is like to be a thermostat, even though both are physical systems responding to their environment. That question, sometimes called the hard problem, is not a request for more neuroscience. It is a request for an explanation of why physical processing is accompanied by experience at all, and it is the reason Nagel's small, almost whimsical question about a bat still organizes a serious argument.

Philosophy of Mind

54 entries

Movement

School of Philosophy

Era

Tradition

Nationality

Influenced By

In Group

Birthplace / Region

Alexius Meinong

Anaxagoras

Anton Wilhelm Amo

Ashok Gangadean

Berit Brogaard

Bill Brewer

Brian O'Shaughnessy

C.D. Broad

Colin McGinn

Crispin Wright

Curt John Ducasse

Daniel Dennett

David Chalmers

David H. M. Brooks

Derek Parfit

Donald Davidson

Edmund Husserl

Elizabeth Anscombe

Evelyn Pluhar

Frank Jackson

Fred Dretske

G.E.M. Anscombe

Gilbert Ryle

Hamid Vahid-Dastjerdi

Harry Frankfurt

Hilary Putnam

István Aranyosi

J.L. Austin

Jacques Derrida

Jacques Lacan

Jerry Fodor

John McDowell

John Searle

Jonathan Bennett

Karolina Hübner

Kim Jaegwon

Krishna Chandra Bhattacharya

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Ned Block

Nick Zangwill

Noam Chomsky

P.F. Strawson

Patanjali

Patricia Churchland

Paul Churchland

Paul Feyerabend

Pietro Pomponazzi

Rene Descartes

Saul Kripke

Susanne Langer

Thomas Nagel

Ward Jones

Wilfrid Sellars

Willard Van Orman Quine

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