Physicalism has never held any appeal for me. ‘It is false that the mind is non-physical’ seems to me plainly false. It seemed obvious to me, even as a student, that physicalism must be false, if it is taken to be the view that there is nothing outside the things …
Today I would like to write about dualism and the origins of the mind-body problem. Dualism is of course a view that comes in quite a number of different forms, but Descartes’ form was two-way interactionist dualism. He himself did not allow the existence of the mind-body problem, much less …
I wrote my little book on The Mind-Body Problem (MIT, 2016, in the Essential Knowledge Sequence), partly because I was attracted to the idea of a little book that would tell you all you need to know about the problem. The other titles in the series are about things like …
Wittgenstein (1953) observed, “[w]hen I raise my arm, I do not usually try to raise it” (p. 623). On his view, trying occurs when, for example, you want to raise your arm, yet someone is holding it down, or it’s numb, or you want to be called on to speak …
Some people thrive under pressure, while others, like me, get anxious, then crash and burn. Why does anxiety lead people some individuals to perform far worse than would be expected of them, why does it lead them to, as it is said, “choke under pressure”? No one fully knows the …
Can you think productively while in action? Or, once you’ve practiced what to do, is it better to let everything run offline? This week, I’ll try to say something by way of response to these questions, drawing on my book Thought in Action: Expertise and the Conscious Mind (OUP, 2016). …
Style and Content In yesterday’s post, style and content were represented as two separable elements. On the one hand, there is the content of memory. And on the other there is a style that exists – in the form of embodied and affective Rilkean memories – when content has been …
