“Know thyself” is the dictum which appeared on the front of the temple in Delphi. But what does that mean and why is it important? Presumably, it means to know, first and foremost, one’s own character and it is important because only by knowing one’s character can one be aware …
Neutral monism has a fascinating history, from Mach and Chancey Wright (b. 1830 in Northampton MA, where I happen to live) through William James, the American New Realists, including E.B. Holt and Ralph Barton Perry, many of them very much Harvard figures, Bertrand Russell, from 1919 to 1927, to Moritz …
I really like so-called neutral theories of mind-body relations. The “neutral” here means that the theories do not try to extract mind from matter by tortuous logical means, nor do they try to dissolve matter into mind, as idealism does. Most philosophers think that Wittgenstein and Ryle were behaviorists, but …
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 …
