Philosophy of Mind

Classical Questions

Thinking philosophically about the mind is by no means an exclusively modern enterprise. Descartes is considered to be the father of modern philosophy of mind. Yet the mind had surely been an [Page 565]object of philosophical interest long before Descartes. Such ancient Greek thinkers as Plato and Aristotle had much to say about the nature of the mind and mental activity; they offer views on perception, memory, and representation. Classical Indian sources such as the Advaita Vedanta school of philosophy and the Buddhist Abhidharma tradition developed rich typologies of mental phenomena, programs for cultivating elevated mental states and self-discipline, and sophisticated attempts to explain how the mind fits into the causal structure of the physical universe. This latter metaphysical concern gives rise to one of the perennial problems of philosophy of mind, East and West: the mind-body problem. The mind-body problem concerns the issue of how best to characterize the nature of the mind-body relation. In his Phaedo, Plato speaks to this problem by arguing for a kind of dualism: that the mind or soul of the individual is substantially distinct from the body because the former is immaterial and eternal but the latter has neither of these properties. Two thousand years later, Descartes argued that mind and body thus have fundamentally distinct natures, which he labeled substance dualism, because physical substances (e.g., bodies) are essentially extended in space, and moreover, because mental phenomena (e.g., thoughts, images, memories, and representations) are substances essentially lacking extension in space. Descartes was clearly aware that minds are intimately linked to bodies and even posited the pineal gland as the seat of this union. Nevertheless, he insisted (following Plato) that the mind is not reducible to the body and that it can continue to exist after death. To be a human person, according to Descartes, is therefore to be a unique entity endowed with a dual nature consisting of both an extended material body and an unextended immaterial mind. Importantly, however, Descartes insisted (again, following Plato) that the essence of a human person is the mind, or consciousness; the body is peripheral to identity. This assumption has been a common one throughout the history of western philosophy.

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