{"id":12623,"date":"2009-05-21T19:00:57","date_gmt":"2009-05-21T19:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2009\/05\/21\/modern-materialism-as-essentially-cartesian\/"},"modified":"2009-05-21T19:00:57","modified_gmt":"2009-05-21T19:00:57","slug":"modern-materialism-as-essentially-cartesian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2009\/05\/21\/modern-materialism-as-essentially-cartesian\/","title":{"rendered":"Modern Materialism as Essentially Cartesian"},"content":{"rendered":"

Arthur W. Collins, The Nature of Mental Things<\/em>, Notre Dame 1987, pp. 61-62:<\/font><\/p>\n

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Modern materialists have been so profoundly convinced by the general structure of Cartesian thinking about the mind that they manage to promote only a materialist version of a philosophy of mind that is essentially Cartesian in its underlying attitudes and its extensive matters of detail.  Contemporary mind-brain materialism is a body-body dualism  Materialists typically accept the Cartesian idea of an inner mental realm.  Contemporary repudiation of  dualism is generally a consequence of the extension of scientific knowledge in the biological field and the acceptance of a comprehensive evolutionary naturalism.  Many thinkers now sympathize with the materialist rejection of mental substance.  Impenetrable mysteries will be a part of the the understanding of the mind as long as a ghostly substratum for consciousness and mental activity is tolerated.<\/font><\/p>\n

[. . .]<\/font><\/p>\n

Materialism is on the wrong track because the trouble with Cartesian philosophy of mind lies in its conception of  a realm of inner mental things and events comprising conscious mentality.  This is the aspect of Cartesianism that is retained by materialists to this very day.  So the chief defect of materialism, in my view, is that it is a species of Cartesian philosophy of mind.<\/font><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Collins' beef is with the notion of a "realm of inner mental things."  But what exactly is his problem?  Isn't there a tolerably clear sense in which memories, for example, are inner?  It's a metaphor of course; we are not speaking of spatial<\/em> interiority.  Memories and such are not spatially inside of anything, which is why mind = brain materialism is absurd.    That thoughts are literally in the head is Unsinn<\/em>.  That we sometimes talk this way cuts no ice, e.g., "He got it into his head to take up golf." And surely behaviorism is dead as a dog and out for the count:  beliefs, desires , memories, etc. cannot be understood  in terms of behavior or dispositions to behave.  I'll have to read more of Collins to see what he is driving at.  But I suspect I will no more fully understand what he is driving at than I ever understood what Wittgenstein was driving at.<\/font><\/p>\n

I agree with Collins that contemporary materialism  is dualistic in that it is a brain-body dualism, or as he says, a "body-body dualism."  And I agree that it is absurd to attempt to identify thoughts with events in a hunk of intracranial meat.  But once the absurdity of behaviorism is appreciated, how avoid some notion of inner goings-on?<\/font><\/p>\n

<\/font> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Arthur W. Collins, The Nature of Mental Things, Notre Dame 1987, pp. 61-62: Modern materialists have been so profoundly convinced by the general structure of Cartesian thinking about the mind that they manage to promote only a materialist version of a philosophy of mind that is essentially Cartesian in its underlying attitudes and its extensive … Continue reading “Modern Materialism as Essentially Cartesian”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12623","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mind"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12623","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12623"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12623\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}