Hegel's Philosophy of Mind

Total Page:16

File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb

Hegel's Philosophy of Mind This is a reproduction of a library book that was digitized by Google as part of an ongoing effort to preserve the information in books and make it universally accessible. https://books.google.com :AnoN LIBRARY .‘0 Z: .0 ‘24 .>. HEGEL’S PHILOSOPHY OF MIND WALLACE £onbou H E N R Y F R O W D E OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS \VAREHOUSE AMEN CORNER, E.C. Qlem @orfi NIACMILLAN 8: Co., 66 FIFTH Avmzua HEGEL’S PHILOSOPHY OF MIND TRANSLA TED FROM THE ENC YCL OPAEDIA OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL scIENcEs WITH fiibe Jnfrobucforg Gangs WILLIAM WALLACE, M.A., LL.D. FELLOW OF MERTON COLLEGE I AND “'I'IYTE'S PROFESSOR OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD Oxforb AT THE CLARENDON PRESS 1894 JZ/ é aforb PRINTED AT THE CLARENDON PRESS BY HORACE HART, PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY ..o. .0000. 0" rr ' f . O O. I ‘l(( ‘ r . .0... .. .‘ ¢ ['1’ ( t o ' 00 0 on "r ' ‘ ‘ Q.... 0000 c I " ‘ " 0 0.00.0. ‘0 r (r r! . 00 I a f f . I 0", . .. 0. l t (It a a'r u'l ' ' r ' ¢'¢av .' I r' r t ' " r (r rrrr r r: :rr ¢r ( c r (r ‘rff r err r r ' ( r r t f( f {ff (((r £ M?)Hafiz PREFACE ._¢~__ I HERE offer a translation of the third or last part of Hegel’s encyclopaedic sketch of philosophy,—the Philo~ sophy of Mind. The volume, like its subject, stands complete in itself. But it may also be regarded as a supplement or continuation of the work begun in my version of his Logic. I have not ventured upon the Philosophy of Nature which lies between these two. That is a province, to penetrate into which would require an equipment of learning I make no claim to,— a province, also, of which the present-day interest would be largely historical, or at least bound up with historical circumstances. The translation is made from the German text given in the Second Part of the: Seventh ,‘violumemful-Iegel’s ’ Collected Works, occasionallyY‘édrréciediliy léa‘mpar'ison": 1 3} 1v: ‘ with that found in the second third editions (at: 1:821 and 1830) published by the autliéri 3 Bi hm; reprodticeli‘", only Hegel’s own paragraphs, and entirely ,the Zusd'tze of the editors. These addend‘a'LW‘hichi‘ar’e in origin lecture-notes—to the paragraphs are, in the text of the Collected Works, given for the first section only. The psychological part which they accompany has been barely treated elsewhere by Hegel : but a good popular Vi PREFACE. exposition of it will be found in Erdmann’s Psycholo gz'sche Briefe. The second section was dealt with at greater length by Hegel himself in his Philosophy qf Law (1820). The topics of the third section are largely covered by his lectures on Art, Religion, and History of Philosophy. I do not conceal from myself that the text offers a hard nut to crack. Yet here and there, even through the medium of the translation, I think some light cannot fail to come to an earnest student. Occasionally, too, as, for instance, in §§ 406, 459, 549, and still more in §§ 552, 573, at the close of which might stand the words Lz'beram' am'mam meam, the writer really ‘lets himself go,’ and gives his mind freely on questions where speculation comes closely in touch with life. In the Five Introductory Essays I have tried some times to put together, and sometimes to provide with collateral elucidation, some points in the Mental Philo sophy. I shall not attempt to justify the selection of subjects for special treatment further than to hope that they form a more or less connected group, and to refer for a study of some general questions of system and ‘__.,_meth9d=to _my.l?rqlsg_ome1_ns to the Study of Hegel’s ‘§:,_§Philps<§péyl:wl§icli aspjebri 5.113105: simultaneously with CONTENTS INTRODUCTORY ESSA Y5. PAGE ESSAY I.—ON THE SCOPE or A PHILOSOPHY or MIND . xiii i. Philosophy and its parts . xiii ii. Mind and Morals . xxiv iii. Religion and Philosophy . xxxv iv. Mind or Spirit . xlix ESSAY II.—Ams AND Mmuons 0F Psvcuowcv . liii i. Psychology as a Science and as a part of Philosophy liii ii. Herbart . lXii iii. The F aculty-Psychology and its Critics . lxxiii iv. Methods and Problems of Psychology . lxxx ESSAY Ill.—ON some PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECTS or E'rmcs xciv i. Psychology and Epistemology . xcix ii. Kant, F ichte, and Hegel . cvi iii. Psychology in Ethics . cxvi iv. An Excursus on Greek Ethics . cxxix ESSAY IV.——PSYCHO-GENESIS . cxlvi i. Primitive Sensibility . cxlvii ii. Anomalies of Psychieal life . clix iii. The development of inner freedom . clxx ESSAY V.—Ermcs AND Pou-rrcs . clxxvi i. Hegel as a Political Critic . clxxvii ii. The Ethics and Religion of the State . clxxxvii viii CONTENTS. THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. PAGE INTRODUCTION What Mind is . Subdxbision SECTION I. MIND SUBJECTIVE . IO SUB-SECTION A. ANTHROPOLOGY. Tm: SOUL 12 (a) THE PHYSICAL SOUL . I4 (a) Physical qualities 15 ()9) Physical allerah'ons I7 (7) Sensz'bilily (b) Tm: FEELING SOUL . 25 gu) The Feeling Soul in its I'mmedr'my . 37 (B) Self-fieling 36 (7) Habil 39 (0) THE ACIUAL SOUL 44 SUB-SECTION B. PHENOMENOLOGY OF MIND. CON SCIOUSNESS 47 (a) CONSCIOUSNESS PROPER 50 (a) Sensuous conserbusness . 5o (B) Sense'percephbn (7) The Intellect 52 (b) SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS . 53 (a) Appetite . 53 (B) Self-consaousness recogm'h've 55 (7) Universal self-ronseiousness 57 (r) REASON 58 SUB-SECTION C. PSYCHOLOGY. MINI) 59 1a) THEORETICAL MIND 64 (a) Intuition 67 (B) Representation 7O (an) Reeollechon 70 (BB) Imagination 72 (77) Memory 84 (7) Thinking 89 COJVTENTS FAG E (b) MIND PRACTICAL 91 (a) Prach'ml sense . \B) The im/mlses and drain . 95 (7) Happiness 99 (0) FREE MIND I00 SECTION II. MIND OBJECTIVE 103 SUB-SECTION A. LAW . 107 (a) PROPERTY . 107 (b) CONTRACT . 108 (c) RIGHT vzrsus WRONG 109 SUB-SECTION B. THE MORALITY OF C0Nsc1ENCE 1 13 (a) PURPOSE 114 (1:) INTENTION AND WELFARE . 114 (c) GOODNESS AND WICKEDNESS 115 SUB-SECTION C. THE MORAL LIFE OR SOCIAL ETHIcs 119 AA. THE FAMILY ‘ 121 BB. CIVIL SOCIETY . 122 (a) T he System of Wants I22 (b) Administration of justwe 125 (0) Police a_nd Corporation 129 cc. THE STATE . 131 (a) Constitutional Law 131 (B) External Public Law I47 (7) Universal History I47 SECTION III. ABSOLUTE MIND 167 SUB-SECTION A. ART . 169 SUB-SECTION B. REVEALED RELIGION I75 SUB-SECTION C. PHILOSOPHY 181 INDEX . I99 FIVE INTRODUCTORY ESSAYS IN PSYCHOLOGY AND ETHICS ESSAY I. ON THE SCOPE OF A PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. THE art of finding titles, and of striking out headings which catch the eye or ear, and lead the mind by easy paths of association to the subject under exposition, was not one of Hegel’s gifts. A stirring phrase, a vivid or picturesque turn of words, he often has. But his lists of contents, when they cease to be commonplace, are apt to run into the bizarre and the grotesque. Gener ally, indeed, his rubrics are the old and (as we may be tempted to call them) insignificant terms of the text books. But, in Hegel’s use of them, these conventional designations are charged with a highly individualised meaning. They may mean more—they may mean less —than they habitually pass for: but they unquestion ably specify their meaning with a unique and almost personal flavour. And this can hardly fail to create and to disappoint undue expectations. (i.) PHILOSOPHY AND ITS PARTS. Even the main divisions of his system Show this conservatism in terminology. The names of the three parts of the Encyclopaedia are, we may say, non XIV ON THE SCOPE OF A PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. significant of their peculiar contents. And that for a good reason. What Hegel proposes to give is no novel or special doctrine, but the universal philosophy which has passed on from age to age, here narrowed and there widened, but still essentially the same. It is conscious of its continuity and proud of its identity with the teachings of Plato and Aristotle. The earliest attempts of the Greek philosophers to present philosophy in a complete and articulated order— attempts generally attributed to the Stoics, the school men of antiquity—made it a tripartite whole. These three parts were Logic, Physics, and Ethics. In their entirety they were meant to form a cycle of unified knowledge, satisfying the needs of theory as well as practice. As time went on, however, the situation changed: and if the old names remained, their scope and value suffered many changes. New interests and curiosities, due to altered circumstances, brought other departments of reality under the focus of investigation besides those which had been primarily discussed under the old names. Inquiries became more specialised, and each tended to segregate itself from the rest as an independent field of science. The result was that in modern times the territory still marked by the ancient titles had shrunk to a mere phantom of its former bulk. Almost indeed things had come to such a pass that the time-honoured figures had sunk into the misery of rats faz'ne'ants; while the real business of knowledge was discharged by the younger and less conventional lines of research which the needs and fashions of the time had called up. Thus Logic, in the narrow formal sense, was turned into an ‘art’ of argumentation and a system of technical rules for the analysis and synthesis of academical discussion.
Recommended publications
  • Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Chemistry
    Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Chemistry Jaap van Brakel Abstract: In this paper I assess the relation between philosophy of chemistry and (general) philosophy of science, focusing on those themes in the philoso- phy of chemistry that may bring about major revisions or extensions of cur- rent philosophy of science. Three themes can claim to make a unique contri- bution to philosophy of science: first, the variety of materials in the (natural and artificial) world; second, extending the world by making new stuff; and, third, specific features of the relations between chemistry and physics. Keywords : philosophy of science, philosophy of chemistry, interdiscourse relations, making stuff, variety of substances . 1. Introduction Chemistry is unique and distinguishes itself from all other sciences, with respect to three broad issues: • A (variety of) stuff perspective, requiring conceptual analysis of the notion of stuff or material (Sections 4 and 5). • A making stuff perspective: the transformation of stuff by chemical reaction or phase transition (Section 6). • The pivotal role of the relations between chemistry and physics in connection with the question how everything fits together (Section 7). All themes in the philosophy of chemistry can be classified in one of these three clusters or make contributions to general philosophy of science that, as yet , are not particularly different from similar contributions from other sci- ences (Section 3). I do not exclude the possibility of there being more than three clusters of philosophical issues unique to philosophy of chemistry, but I am not aware of any as yet. Moreover, highlighting the issues discussed in Sections 5-7 does not mean that issues reviewed in Section 3 are less im- portant in revising the philosophy of science.
    [Show full text]
  • Mind Body Problem and Brandom's Analytic Pragmatism
    The Mind-Body Problem and Brandom’s Analytic Pragmatism François-Igor Pris [email protected] Erfurt University (Nordhäuserstraße 63, 99089 Erfurt, Germany) Abstract. I propose to solve the hard problem in the philosophy of mind by means of Brandom‟s notion of the pragmatically mediated semantic relation. The explanatory gap between a phenomenal concept and the corresponding theoretical concept is a gap in the pragmatically mediated semantic relation between them. It is closed if we do not neglect the pragmatics. 1 Introduction In the second section, I will formulate the hard problem. In the third section, I will describe a pragmatic approach to the problem and propose to replace the classical non-normative physicalism/naturalism with a normative physicalism/naturalism of Wittgensteinian language games. In subsection 3.1, I will give a definition of a normative naturalism. In subsection 3.2, I will make some suggestions concerning an analytic interpretation of the second philosophy of Wittgenstein. In the fourth section, I will propose a solution to the hard problem within Brandom‟s analytic pragmatism by using the notion of the pragmatically mediated semantic relation. In the fifth section, I will make some suggestions about possible combinatorics related to pragmatically mediated semantic relations. In the sixth section, I will consider pragmatic and discursive versions of the mind-body identity M=B. In the last section, I will conclude that the explanatory gap is a gap in a pragmatically mediated semantic relation between B and M. It is closed if we do not neglect pragmatics. 2 The Hard Problem The hard problem in the philosophy of mind can be formulated as follows.
    [Show full text]
  • Trends in Philosophy of Mind and in Philosophy of Neuroscience
    Trends in Philosophy of Mind and in Philosophy of Neuroscience Juan José Sanguineti School of Philosophy, Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, Rome, Italy Published with permission of Springer Science + Business Media, 2015 In P. A. Gargiulo, H. L. Mesones-Arroyo (eds.), Psychiatry and Neuroscience Update. Bridging the Divide, Springer, Heidelberg 2015, pp. 23-37. DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-17103-6 Abstract. This paper presents current trends in philosophy of mind and philosophy of neuroscience, with a special focus on neuroscientists dealing with some topics usually discussed by philosophers of mind. The aim is to detect the philosophical views of those scientists, such as Eccles, Gazzaniga, Damasio, Changeux, and others, which are not easy to classify according to the standard divisions of dualism, functionalism, emergentism, and others. As the variety of opinions in these fields is sometimes a source of confusion, it is worth the effort to obtain an overall panorama of the topic. A general conclusion on epistemological and ontological issues, concerning the relationship between neurobiology and philosophy and the multi-level account of the embodied mind, is proposed. Key words: Dualism, monism, behaviorism, functionalism, reductionism, emergentism, enactivism, mind, mental acts, self, body, soul, person. 1. Introduction Philosophical questions concerning the nature of the mind and its relationship with the body are usually addressed by philosophy of mind. This area of philosophy inherits the traditional issue of the relationship between the soul and the body, interpreted in modern terms as the mind and the brain. Whereas the classical view of the problem was thoroughly ontological, going back to ancient philosophers as Plato and Aristotle, philosophy of mind, born in the twentieth century, is generally more epistemological, posing its object of inquiry within a scientific framework.
    [Show full text]
  • An Introduction to Late British Associationism and Its Context This Is a Story About Philosophy. Or About Science
    Chapter 1: An Introduction to Late British Associationism and Its Context This is a story about philosophy. Or about science. Or about philosophy transforming into science. Or about science and philosophy, and how they are related. Or were, in a particular time and place. At least, that is the general area that the following narrative will explore, I hope with sufficient subtlety. The matter is rendered non-transparent by the fact that that the conclusions one draws with regard to such questions are, in part, matters of discretionary perspective – as I will try to demonstrate. My specific historical focus will be on the propagation of a complex intellectual tradition concerned with human sensation, perception, and mental function in early nineteenth century Britain. Not only philosophical opinion, but all aspects of British intellectual – and practical – life, were in the process of significant transformation during this time. This cultural flux further confuses recovery of the situated significance of the intellectual tradition I am investigating. The study of the mind not only was influenced by a set of broad social shifts, but it also participated in them fully as both stimulus to and recipient of changing conditions. One indication of this is simply the variety of terms used to identify the ‘philosophy of mind’ as an intellectual enterprise in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.1 But the issue goes far deeper into the fluid constitutive features of the enterprise - including associated conceptual systems, methods, intentions of practitioners, and institutional affiliations. In order to understand philosophy of mind in its time, we must put all these factors into play.
    [Show full text]
  • The Causal Efficacy of Consciousness
    entropy Article The Causal Efficacy of Consciousness Matthew Owen 1,2 1 Yakima Valley College, Yakima, WA 98902, USA; [email protected] 2 Center for Consciousness Science, University of Michigan Medical School, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA Received: 10 June 2020; Accepted: 17 July 2020; Published: 28 July 2020 Abstract: Mental causation is vitally important to the integrated information theory (IIT), which says consciousness exists since it is causally efficacious. While it might not be directly apparent, metaphysical commitments have consequential entailments concerning the causal efficacy of consciousness. Commitments regarding the ontology of consciousness and the nature of causation determine which problem(s) a view of consciousness faces with respect to mental causation. Analysis of mental causation in contemporary philosophy of mind has brought several problems to the fore: the alleged lack of psychophysical laws, the causal exclusion problem, and the causal pairing problem. This article surveys the threat each problem poses to IIT based on the different metaphysical commitments IIT theorists might make. Distinctions are made between what I call reductive IIT, non-reductive IIT, and non-physicalist IIT, each of which make differing metaphysical commitments regarding the ontology of consciousness and nature of causation. Subsequently, each problem pertaining to mental causation is presented and its threat, or lack thereof, to each version of IIT is considered. While the lack of psychophysical laws appears unthreatening for all versions, reductive IIT and non-reductive IIT are seriously threatened by the exclusion problem, and it is difficult to see how they could overcome it while maintaining a commitment to the causal closure principle.
    [Show full text]
  • Naturalism and the Mind-Body Problem
    Blog | Bookstore | Contact | Phil of Religion/Apologetics | Academic Papers Naturalism and the Mind-body Problem John M. DePoe The mind-body problem is a particularly difficult problem for naturalism. A strict naturalist is committed to believing tha t all reality is material/physical or reducible to the material/physical realm. Our immediate, introspective awareness of the realm of consciousness, thoughts, and other qualitative mental experiences seems to lie outside the purview of a naturalistic worl dview. In this essay, I will show the main attempts to "naturalize" the mind, and show how they fail. Since the mind seems to include fundamentally immaterial and non-physical elements, we have good reasons to reject naturalism. Reductive Materialism One of the first attempts to naturalize the mind tried to reduce mental entities to material/physical entities. Reductive accounts do not deny that the mind and mental concepts exists. The "mind" exists, on reductive accounts, but it is reducible/identifiable to certain material/physical things. Two exemplifications of this approach are philosophical behaviorism and type identity theories. Philosophical Behaviorism Philosophical behaviorism, which was championed by Gilbert Ryle in his classic work in philosop hy of mind, The Concept of Mind , attempts to explain the alleged immaterial aspects of the mind in terms of observable behavior. Philosophical behaviorism follows from this sort of reasoning: 1. Every mental sentence (i.e., sentence using mental terms) can be analyzed by, or shown to be equivalent in meaning to, a sentence that uses only behavior terms and other nonmental terms. Hence, 2. We need not use mental terms and mental sentences for purposes of describing behavior.
    [Show full text]
  • PRAGMATISM AS a PHILOSOPHY of ACTION (Paper Presented at the First Nordic Pragmatism Conference, Helsinki, Finland, June 2008)
    1 PRAGMATISM AS A PHILOSOPHY OF ACTION (Paper presented at the First Nordic Pragmatism Conference, Helsinki, Finland, June 2008) Erkki Kilpinen University of Helsinki When I gave the doctrine of pragmatism the name it bears, – and a doctrine of vital significance it is, – I derived the name by which I christened it from pragma, – behaviour – in order that it should be understood that the doctrine is that the only real significance of a general term lies in the general behaviour which it implies. Charles S. Peirce, May 1912 cited by Eisele (1987:95).1 Introduction: Action ahead of knowledge on pragmatism’s philosophical agenda Although the very founder of the pragmatic movement is adamant that this philosophy is inherently related to action – or behaviour as Peirce laconically says here – philosophers have been curiously reluctant to recognize this. Of course one finds in the literature comments about how pragmatists often talk about action, and some commentators feel that they talk about it too often, at the expense of traditional philosophical problems. To see this is not yet, however, to see the essential pragmatist point; in what sense they talk about action. Their usage of this term and the underlying idea differ from what is customary in other philosophical approaches. Pragmatism namely approaches all theoretical and philosophical problems as problems that in final analysis are related to action. In mainstream philosophy, both in its positivist-analytic and phenomenological versions, action is a contingent empirical phenomenon demanding an explanation. In pragmatism, action is a universal phenomenon which in itself begs no explanation but rather makes the starting point for explanations.
    [Show full text]
  • Kant's Metaphysics of the Self
    Philosophers’ volume 10, no. 8 ot many philosophers would turn to Kant for a positive view august 2010 about the metaphysics of the self (the referent of ‘I’). On the Imprint N contrary, most of Kant’s interpreters read him as warning that any attempt to give a positive account of the self’s nature is doomed to failure, and as building his theories without metaphysical assump- tions about the self.1 This broad interpretive approach, which I’ll call the “anti-metaphysical interpretation,” often sees Kant’s project as an- Kant’s Metaphysics ticipating Wittgenstein’s claims that the self or subject “doesn’t belong to the world, but is a limit of the world.”2 In some form or other, the anti-metaphysical interpretation is pres- ent in all major discussions of Kant’s views on the self. In a 1993 sur- of the Self vey of the literature, Günter Zöller stated that “[d]ifferences of method and philosophical approach aside, the interpretations … show a re- markable agreement in their understanding of Kant’s thinking self as a form or structure that eludes any attempt at reification.”3 The consen- sus now is similar — for instance, in the most recent book on the topic Arthur Melnick argues that in Kant’s theoretical philosophy the self should be understood as something like an activity precisely because this avoids construing it as an entity of any sort.4 In what follows, I argue that not only is the anti-metaphysical in- terpretation mistaken, but that Kant offers us a subtle, plausible meta- physical account of the self that has no direct analogue in the contem- porary literature.
    [Show full text]
  • Immanuel Kant and the Development of Modern Psychology David E
    University of Richmond UR Scholarship Repository Psychology Faculty Publications Psychology 1982 Immanuel Kant and the Development of Modern Psychology David E. Leary University of Richmond, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarship.richmond.edu/psychology-faculty- publications Part of the Theory and Philosophy Commons Recommended Citation Leary, David E. "Immanuel Kant and the Development of Modern Psychology." In The Problematic Science: Psychology in Nineteenth- Century Thought, edited by William Ray Woodward and Mitchell G. Ash, 17-42. New York, NY: Praeger, 1982. This Book Chapter is brought to you for free and open access by the Psychology at UR Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Psychology Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of UR Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. 1 Immanuel Kant and the Development of Modern Psychology David E. Leary Few thinkers in the history of Western civilization have had as broad and lasting an impact as Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). This "Sage of Konigsberg" spent his entire life within the confines of East Prussia, but his thoughts traveled freely across Europe and, in time, to America, where their effects are still apparent. An untold number of analyses and commentaries have established Kant as a preeminent epistemologist, philosopher of science, moral philosopher, aestheti­ cian, and metaphysician. He is even recognized as a natural historian and cosmologist: the author of the so-called Kant-Laplace hypothesis regarding the origin of the universe. He is less often credited as a "psychologist," "anthropologist," or "philosopher of mind," to Work on this essay was supported by the National Science Foundation (Grant No.
    [Show full text]
  • The Chemical Philosophy of Robert Boyle: Mechanicism, Chymical
    DOROTHY F. SCHMIDT RESEARCH NEWS | COLLEGE OF ARTS AND LETTERS Images (l/r): Book cover of “The Chemical Philosophy of Robert Boyle: Mechanicism, Chymical Atoms, and Emergence,” Oxford University Press; Marina Banchetti, Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy. The Chemical Philosophy of Robert Boyle: Mechanicism, Chymical Atoms, and Emergence The Department of This Summer, Oxford University Press will release Dr. Marina Banchetti’s book The Chemical Philosophy of Robert Boyle: Philosophy is pleased Mechanicism, Chymical Atoms, and Emergence. Banchetti to announce that specializes in phenomenology, philosophy of mind and the each of its faculty history and philosophy of science with a current focus on the history and philosophy of chemistry. The book argues for a members has a book novel interpretation of Boyle’s chemical philosophy, proposing to be released or that Boyle regarded chemical qualities as non-reducible under contract to be dispositional and relational properties that emerge from, and supervene upon, the mechanistic structure of chemical atoms. completed this year. (continued) The Chemical Philosophy of Robert Boyle: Mechanicism, Chymical Atoms, and Emergence Banchetti’s arguments are strengthened by a detailed mereological analysis of Boylean chemical atoms as chemically elementary entities, which establishes the theory of wholes and parts that is most consistent with an emergentist conception of chemical properties. More generally, Banchetti contextualizes Boyle’s work within the framework of the 17th century mechanistic theory of matter. Banchetti interprets Boyle’s experimental work as a scientific research programme, in the Lakatosian sense, to better explain the positive and negative heuristic functions of the mechanistic theory of matter within his chemical philosophy.
    [Show full text]
  • Philosophy of Mind and the Problem of Free Will in the Light of Quantum Mechanics
    Philosophy of Mind and the Problem of Free Will in the Light of Quantum Mechanics. Henry P. Stapp Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory University of California Berkeley, California 94720 Abstract Arguments pertaining to the mind-brain connection and to the physical effectiveness of our conscious choices have been presented in two recent books, one by John Searle, the other by Jaegwon Kim. These arguments are examined, and it is explained how the encountered difficulties arise from a defective understanding and application of a pertinent part of contemporary science, namely quantum mechanics. The principled quantum uncertainties entering at the microscopic levels of brain processing cannot be confined to the micro level, but percolate up to the macroscopic regime. To cope with the conflict between the resulting macroscopic indefiniteness and the definiteness of our conscious experiences, orthodox quantum mechanics introduces the idea of agent-generated probing actions, each of which specifies a definite set of alternative possible empirically/experientially distinguishable outcomes. Quantum theory then introduces the mathematical concept of randomness to describe the probabilities of the various alternative possible outcomes of the chosen probing action. But the agent-generated choice of which probing action to perform is not governed by any known law or rule, statistical or otherwise. This causal gap provides a logical opening, and indeed a logical need, for the entry into the dynamical structure of nature of a process that goes beyond the currently understood quantum mechanical statistical generalization of the deterministic laws of classical physics. The well-known quantum Zeno effect can then be exploited to provide a natural process that establishes a causal psychophysical link within the complex structure consisting of a stream of conscious experiences and certain macroscopic classical features of a quantum mechanically described brain.
    [Show full text]
  • Materialism and “The Soft Substance of the Brain”: the Case of Diderot Charles T. Wolfe Department of Philosophy and Moral S
    Materialism and “the soft substance of the brain”: the case of Diderot Charles T. Wolfe Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences Sarton Centre for History of Science Ghent University Longer draft (2015) of paper forthcoming in British Journal of History of Philosophy (a number of additional citations appear in published version) Abstract Materialism is the view that everything that is real, is material or is the product of material processes. It tends to take either a ‘cosmological’ form, as a claim about the ultimate nature of the world, or a more specific ‘psychological’ form, detailing how mental processes are brain processes. I focus on the second, psychological or cerebral form of materialism. In the mid-to-late eighteenth century, the French materialist philosopher Denis Diderot (1713-1784) was one of the first to notice that any self-respecting materialist had to address the question of the status and functional role of the brain, and its relation to our mental, affective, intellectual life. After this the topic grew stale, with knee-jerk reiterations of ‘psychophysical identity’ in the nineteenth-century, and equally rigid assertions of anti-materialism. In 1960s philosophy of mind, brain-mind materialism reemerged as ‘identity theory’, focusing on the identity between mental processes and cerebral processes. In contrast, Diderot’s cerebral materialism allows for a more culturally sedimented sense of the brain, which he describes in his late Elements of Physiology as a “book – except it is a book which reads itself”. Diderot thus provides a lesson for materialism as it reflects on the status of the brain, science and culture.
    [Show full text]