Paul Austin Murphy repudiates a blasé reduction of mind to matter by one of the discoverers of the structure of DNA. In Francis Crick’s 1994 book, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul, he wrote the following oft-quoted passage: “‘You’, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of …
Francis Crick’s Deliberately Provocative Reductionism Read More »
Frank S. Robinson ‘chooses’ to remind ‘us’ of problems some contemporary philosophers have with these central human concepts. In 2012, Sam Harris, one of the famed ‘four horsemen’ of New Atheism, published a book called Free Will, arguing that it doesn’t exist. He’s a neuroscientist, and he contends that the more science learns how our …
Brett Wilson explores personal identity with John Locke and a dodgy 3D printer. Imagine that in the distant future, while working on a recalcitrant 3D printer, you accidentally cut off your hand. For a moment you consider printing a mechanical replacement, but you are nostalgic about biology, so you rush with your severed limb to …
Güven Güzeldere asks where we are now with the mind-body problem. While the mind-body problem has been around for a long time, it is no less compelling for philosophers today. This is not to say that we are in the same place with regard to understanding it as the philosophers of bygone ages. On the …
Massimo Pigliucci takes a brief look at the history and current schools of philosophy of mind. I have had the idea of writing this article in mind for some time now, and yet it is not entirely clear what this very sentence might mean. Is a mind distinct from ideas that somehow float inside it? …
An introduction to our special section by this issue’s editor, Charles Echelbarger. Almost from the earliest days of philosophy, philosophers have concerned themselves with questions directly or indirectly related to the concept of ‘mind’. Until very recent times, they didn’t think of gathering those concerns under a single heading such as metaphysics or epistemology or ethics. …
David Wong on two ancient Chinese philosophers with very different approaches to moral reasoning. How we develop good judgment about what to do in a particular situation? In the modern Western tradition, the dominant answer to this question comes in the form of a ‘top-down’ model of moral reasoning that derives concrete judgment from general principle …
Rui Vieira thinks of a number. What exactly are the objects of mathematics, and how do they relate to our knowledge of them? Since Plato (427 BC–347 BC) such questions have been central to the philosophy of mathematics. Plato realized that mathematics seems to involve perfect circles, triangles, and so on. But as Plato also noticed, there are …
Nicola Webber asks you (and you). When we think of a person, we usually think of someone with a brain and a single unified consciousness. This view has come under fire from some philosophers who argue it’s possible for more than one person to inhabit a body – a possibility hinted at through ‘split brain’ patients, …
Justin Holme represents his self to you. Is the world made of one type of stuff, or at least two? We’re familiar with the physical world, but consciousness appears to be a different type of stuff altogether. The two main theories about the relationship of the physical world to consciousness are materialism (a type of monism, where …