Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Mind

  • Physicalist Christology? Notes on Merricks

     "And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us . . . . (John 1:14) Physicalism is popular among philosophers these days. So it is no surprise that Christian philosophers are drawn to it as well, including those who subscribe to the central teaching that God the Son, the second person of the Trinity,…

  • Thinking Meat?

    Question: Is it my brain that feels and thinks when I feel and think?  Argument A.  Meat can't think.  My brain is meat.  Therefore, what thinks in me when I think is not my brain. A in Reverse: What thinks in me when I think is my brain.  My brain is meat. Therefore, meat can…

  • Conscious Experience: A Hard Nut to Crack

    This is an addendum to Thomas Nagel on the Mind-Body Problem. In that entry I set forth a problem in the philosophy of mind, pouring it into the mold of an aporetic triad: 1) Conscious experience is not an illusion. 2) Conscious experience has an essentially subjective character that purely physical processes do not share.…

  • Thomas Nagel on the Mind-Body Problem

    Nagel replies in the pages of NYRB (8 June 2017; HT: Dave Lull) to one Roy Black, a professor of bioengineering: The mind-body problem that exercises both Daniel Dennett and me is a problem about what experience is, not how it is caused. The difficulty is that conscious experience has an essentially subjective character—what it…

  • Mental Act Nominalism with an Application to Divine Simplicity

    This entry continues a discussion with Dan M. begun here.   Before we get to the main event, a terminological quibble.  A view that denies some category of entity I would call eliminativist, not nominalist. I say this because one can be a nominalist about properties without denying their existence. Tom is a tomato of…

  • Nagel on Dennett: Is Consciousness an Illusion?

    A NYRB review. (HT: the enormously helpful Dave Lull) To put it bluntly and polemically: Thomas Nagel is the real thing as philosophers go; Daniel Dennett is a sophist. My Nagel category; my Dennett category. Killer Quote: I am reminded of the Marx Brothers line: “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying…

  • The Primacy of the Intentional Revisited

    Long-time reader writes, I was going through some of your posts from earlier this month (Belief, Designation, and Substitution, January 10, 2017) and was interested in seeing your comment that "[l]inguistic reference is built upon, and nothing without, thinking reference, or intentionality."   . . . I have to say that your above sentence was…

  • Intentionality, Potentiality, and Dispositionality: Some Points of Analogy

    The influential Austrian philosopher Franz Brentano took intentionality to be the mark of the mental, the criterion whereby physical and mental phenomena are distinguished. For Brentano, (i) all mental phenomena are intentional, (ii) all intentional phenomena are mental, and (iii) no mental phenomenon is physical. (Franz Brentano, Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt (1874), Bk. II, Ch.…

  • An Indiscernibility Argument for Dualism: Does it Beg the Question?

    Here is a simple indiscernibility argument for substance dualism, presented simply: 1. If two things are identical, then whatever is true of the one is true of the other, and vice versa.2. It is true of me that I can (logically) exist disembodied.3. It is not true of any body that it can (logically) exist…

  • Two Senses of ‘Mystery’ and McGinn’s Mysterianism

    Joel Hunter writes, In the context of an exchange between a Catholic and a Protestant, I came across a quote of Gerard Manley Hopkins that reminded me of your posts on mysterianism.   You do not mean by mystery what a Catholic does. You mean an interesting uncertainty: the uncertainty ceasing, interest ceases also. This happens…

  • On the Separation and Attachment of Soul and Body

    I was purchasing shotgun ammo at a gun store a while back.  The proprietor brought out a box of double-aught buckshot shells which he recommended as having "the power to separate the soul from the body."  The proprietor was a 'good old boy,' not someone with whom  a wise man initiates a philosophical discussion.  But his colorful…

  • A Curious Extrapolation

    The old man's libido on the wane, he thinks more clearly and more truly about sexual matters.  And when the waning of all his physical forces and endowments reaches its term — will he then think best of all, or not at all? The dove soars through the air  and imagines it could soar higher…

  • God and Mind: Indiscernibility Arguments

    Are the Christian and Muslim Gods the same?  Why not settle this in short order with a nice, crisp, Indiscernibility argument?  To wit, a. If x = y, then x, y share all intrinsic properties.  (A version of the Indiscernibility of Identicals)b. The God of the Christians and that of the Muslims do not share…

  • “And the Word Was Made Flesh and Dwelt Among Us” (John 1:14)

    Let us meditate this Christmas morning on the sheer audacity of the idea that God would not only enter this world of time and misery, but come into it in the most humble manner possible, inter faeces et urinam nascimur, born between feces and urine, entering between the legs of a poor girl in a…

  • Strawson’s Vacuous Materialism

    In Does Matter Think? I wrote: . . . I don't dogmatically claim that matter could not have occult or hidden powers.  Maybe the meat between my ears does have the power to think.  But then that meat is not matter in any sense we currently understand.  And that is my point.  You can posit…