Brian King wonders what there is about human minds that’s unique to us. There is a cliché, derived from Aristotle, that ‘man is the rational animal’. While all animals have sensations, appetites and fears, only humans, it is said, have the power to reason. The idea that the human mind is radically different from that …
Adrian Brockless on the proper way to use the words ‘thought’ and ‘consciousness’. The concept of thought is one with which people make mischief. Is thought to do with what it is like to have experiences? How can we know for sure that others think as we do? In what ways are thought and consciousness …
Taylor A. Dunn asks, if free will were a drug, should you take it? If we found out next week that neuroscientists had conclusively demonstrated that free will does not exist and that our so-called ‘choices’ are purely the result of automatic brain functions, I think we would be right to take this news badly. …
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 …