Ridling Zaine. Philosophy: Then and Now. A look back at 26 centuries of thought

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Ridling, Philosophy Then and Now: A Look Back at 26 Centuries of Thought

948

gland cannot perform the functions that Descartes attributed to it, though its

precise functions are still unknown.)

It is an implication of interactionism that there cannot be a complete

explanation of brain functioning exclusively in terms of the laws of neurology

because of the intervention at crucial moments of the influences of the mind.

This limitation has struck many scholars as an important difficulty. One way

around it is epiphenomenalism, the view that the body can affect the mind but

that the mind cannot affect the body. Mental events are mere by-products of

brain activity, like the exhaust from an engine or the shadows cast by moving

figures. When the mind would appear to be affecting the body, as when the

experience of pain seems to cause one to grimace, the epiphenomenalist

hypothesizes that the very brain state that produces the experience of pain also

produces the grimace.

Dualists of either the interactionist or epiphenomenalist persuasion are

committed to the existence of causal relations between body and mind. Some

philosophers, struck by how entirely different mind and matter are supposed

to be on the dualist hypothesis, have held it to be impossible that they could

affect each other. Psychophysical parallelism avoids this difficulty by

postulating that mind and body are like two perfect clocks, each with its own

mechanism but in constant and uniform correlation with the other.

Unfortunately, the analogy does not hold very well, for the mind does not

seem to have the kind of internal mechanism that would account for any

precise sequence of its successive states, and without such a mechanism it

would be implausible to expect a constant but noncausal correlation between

those states and states of the body.

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Immaterialism

Some philosophers have held the doctrine of immaterialism, so named

by Bishop George Berkeley, one of the classic British Empiricists, in whose

view everything that exists is mental, of “the stuff that dreams are made on,”

and there is no such thing as the material. There are two major alternatives

here: that reality consists of one vast, all-encompassing mind, or that it

consists of a plurality of minds. The former position is sometimes called

absolute Idealism; the latter, which Berkeley himself held, is sometimes called

subjective Idealism.

The philosophy of Berkeley represents a highly developed and

energetically defended statement of the position that reality consists wholly of

minds, the divine Mind and the multiplicity of finite minds that includes all

men. Whatever exists does so either because it is a mind or because it is

dependent upon a mind; nothing material exists. Berkeley argued that the

notion of the material should play no role in one’s thinking, for its existence is

unverifiable, its postulation unnecessary, and, at bottom, the very notion is

self-contradictory. How does Berkeley view the status of tables and chairs,

rocks, the Moon, and all of the other apparently material things that everyone

accepts as existing? Berkeley agreed that they do indeed exist but only as

collections of ideas that exist in the mind of God and that are often caused by

God to exist in the minds of men as well.

There are well-known difficulties in Berkeley’s view. His account of the

nature of tables and other objects cannot be accepted as an account of the

meanings of these terms because it is implausible to think that the concept of a

divine Mind is somehow part of their meaning. Nor does it seem a plausible

scientific theory about such objects because of its ad hoc character and its lack

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of predictive value. If the notion of God is dropped, however, the philosopher

is left with the phenomenalistic theory that such objects are collections of

appearances. But phenomenalism also has serious difficulties; in particular, it

cannot in the end account for the difference between real objects and illusions

because it cannot provide an account of the difference between circumstances

in which perceptions are veridical and those in which they are not.

The other variety of immaterialism, called absolute Idealism, derives

from certain doctrines of Immanuel Kant and of the classical German Idealists

who followed him – Johann Fichte, Friedrich Schelling, and G.W.F. Hegel –

concerning the fundamental dependence of reality on mind or spirit in general.

Among the several philosophers who have defended this view, there was, at

the turn of the 20th century, F.H. Bradley, whose Appearance and Reality

(1893; 2nd edition 1897) comprises its most systematic exposition and

defense. Bradley denied that a plurality of minds exists and insisted that there

is only one infinite Mind, Idea, or Experience that comprehends all of

existence within it.

Neutral Theories

Another important view has been that neither the mental nor the physical

is really fundamental; each is an aspect of some underlying reality that is

neither mental nor physical but neutral between them. There are many variants

of such a view. Spinoza, a 17th-century Rationalist, held that the underlying

substance, which encompassed all of reality and which he called God or

Nature, had both thinking (the mental) and extension (the material) as

attributes. A modern version of this position is that of Peter Strawson, a

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leading philosopher of the Oxford “ordinary language” school, who differs

from Spinoza in holding that there is a multiplicity of substances, some of

which are purely material and some of which are persons (thus he is not really

a monist). Strawson conceives of persons as substances whose nature is to

have both mental and physical attributes. Thus, one and the same substance

can have both qualities, and the difference between the mental and the

physical is conceived as a basic difference between the qualities.

A different approach was suggested in some of Hume’s writings and

diversely stated by the Pragmatist William James and by various Positivists

(Ernst Mach, Rudolf Carnap, and A.J. Ayer). They postulate a number of

particular entities, experiences that go to make up minds when they are related

in certain ways, as by the laws of association and memory, and that go to

make up bodies when the entities are related in other ways, as by the laws of

perspective. Thus, a person’s mind is conceived to be just the collection of his

experiences, whereas a physical object is conceived to be just the collection of

experiences that people can have of it. Here the difference between the mental

and physical consists in the different kinds of relations obtaining between the

neutral particulars, experiences.

Recently, it has been suggested by certain Linguistic philosophers that

the difference between mind and body lies in two different kinds of language

or conceptual systems: the physicalistic-conceptual language, on the one hand,

with its spatiotemporal terms, and person-talk, on the other, with its reference

to norms for assessing the rationality, moral responsibility, and ethical value

of human actions.

Existentialist and Phenomenological philosophers have expressed

similar conclusions, supported not so much by linguistic considerations as by

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general observations of man’s condition as a being in the world, with a body,

which he experiences and which, by its nature, affects his experience. Man

can be viewed as a spatiotemporal aggregate, an object for observation, study,

and manipulation, an instance of the laws of nature. But man can also be

viewed as a self-moved mover, a being who alters himself and the world

through the decisions he makes, who determines values and invests things

with those values, who can make his life and his world according to the values

that he determines, and who, in the end, can negate his values and even

terminate his life by choice. Here the philosopher finds surprising similarities

between some Analytic philosophers of the English-speaking world and the

more speculative continental philosophers.

The Analysis of Mental Phenomena

When the specific phenomena that go to make up the mental are

considered, one finds that they all raise philosophical issues, only some of

which can be sketched here. Mental phenomena are traditionally divided into

three areas: the cognitive, which is concerned with knowledge; the affective,

with feeling; and the volitional, with action. It is no longer believed that this

division reflects the three so-called basic faculties that comprise the mind;

nevertheless, as a very rough classification, it provides a convenient approach

to the variety of mental phenomena.

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The Cognitive

Many philosophers since Plato have taken man’s ability to know as the

characteristic distinguishing him from all other animals. The very name of his

species, Homo sapiens, means “man the knower.”

If one asks what knowledge is, he has raised the central problem of a

major field of philosophy, epistemology. But there is also a very important

psychological aspect to knowledge, and that is where the philosophy of mind

becomes relevant. It is often claimed, for example, that knowing that

something is so entails believing that it is so; and the nature of belief lies

clearly within the province of the philosophy of mind. Since a person does not

lose a belief when he is not consciously attending to it, the approach to belief

most in favor today is to treat it as a disposition, which, like all such, comes to

open expression only sporadically. Other psychological phenomena falling

within the area of the cognitive are attention, sense perception, understanding,

memory, inference, and doubt. The view that each of these requires a

subjective experience has been effectively refuted in the writings of Ludwig

Wittgenstein, one of the seminal thinkers of modern Linguistic Analysis.

Remembering that the oven is still turned on may consist in nothing but

getting up in the middle of a conversation, going over to the oven, and turning

it off, all the while animatedly continuing the conversation. But exactly why

this is called “remembering that the oven is still on” is not clear. Perhaps the

best that can be said is that there are analogies between such instances of

remembering and other, more self-conscious instances. It is the task of the

philosophy of mind to examine, classify, and analyze the relations among

such phenomena.

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The Affective

Man has not only the capacity to know but also the capacity to respond

emotionally to what he knows. A man may not only believe that some event

will occur, but he may also dread it or welcome it. Concerning the things that

a person knows, he may approve or disapprove, love or hate, pity or envy,

enjoy or abhor. Here, although the subjective experience often plays an

important role, it clearly is not the whole story. To enjoy doing something, as

has been pointed out, is not to do the thing and also undergo a series of

experiences of enjoyment; it may simply be to do the thing when

circumstances permit and make efforts to avoid its cessation or interruption.

But a disposition-to-behave approach will be less successful for other

affective phenomena. For example, people have feelings about the past –

regret, nostalgia, pride – feelings in which future behavior plays a relatively

minor role.

All of the affective phenomena so far considered have the property of

intentionality, of being directed toward an object. It is clear, however, that this

is not a sufficient condition for defining the affective, since it marks out too

broad a scope – including, for example, believing, which, though intentional,

falls not within the affective but within the cognitive. But neither does

intentionality seem to be a necessary condition of the affective. Moods such as

depression, anxiety, or joviality may not have any specific object, though it is

sometimes replied that such emotions take as objects anything the person

happens to think of. Sensations also do not seem to be intentional, even

though they are usually classified as affects. One view is that sensations are

really cognitions – the awareness of some bodily disturbance. The difficulty in

trying to decide whether a sensation is an affect or a cognition further

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illustrates the inadequacy of the classification of mental phenomena into the

cognitive, affective, and volitional.

The Volitional

Intellect and emotion often come to expression in volition and action,

important topics in the philosophy of mind – topics that comprise such

concepts as motive, desire and purpose, deliberation, decision, intention,

attempt, and action, both voluntary and involuntary.

There is a rough distinction to be made between the things that happen

to a person and the things he does or makes to happen. If a person slips on the

ice, it is something that happens to him; if he walks on the ice, it is something

that he does. “Henry slid on the ice” is ambiguous: it may report something

that happened to Henry or something that Henry did, depending upon the

meaning. In this example, the observable event may be the same: from a

photograph of Henry sliding on the ice one may not be able to tell which it is.

The problem of action is primarily to understand this distinction and its

ramifications. Wittgenstein once put the question this way: “And the problem

arises: what is left over if I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact

that I raise my arm?”

There are a number of different answers: (1) Actions are events

produced by causes of certain sorts – volitions or acts of will according to

some theories; beliefs and desires under other theories; and simply persons or

agents in yet another theory. (2) Actions are events that are “caused” in a

special sense; they have a teleological rather than an efficient or mechanical

cause, or an immanent (or originating) cause rather than one that is merely a

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reaction to, or modification of, an action coming from some other source. (3)

Actions are events that are properly characterized and assessed in terms of

rules of conduct, or principles of rational and ethical behavior, and for which

the agent is held responsible, liable, accountable, to be praised or blamed,

rewarded or punished.

Any theory of action is expected to throw light on the issue of free will,

a matter of great importance for ethical theory. If the philosopher holds that

free will is compatible with determinism, any of the views above will allow

for free will. Even if he holds that an action is not free if it has causes that

eventually lie outside the agent, his view will be compatible with the various

views of action unless he holds the version of (1) – that an action is an event

produced by volitions or beliefs and desires – and also holds the additional

thesis (2) – that volitions or beliefs and desires themselves have causes that lie

outside the agent. Only then will there be no freedom of the will.

Some Metaphysical and Epistemological Issues

Personal Identity Through Time

A person, as he goes through life, changes in many ways; but he remains

the person that he was. He is that person who was born on a certain day, that

person who graduated 23rd in a particular high school class, who married on a

certain date in a certain place; he has a particular identity through time. It is

difficult to state what exactly it is that makes a person one and the same self

through time.

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An obvious starting point is the fact that throughout a person’s natural

life he has the same body and that this is what makes him one and the same

person throughout a particular period of time. But there are difficulties in this

view. First, since the body cells are constantly being replaced and in some

instances whole organs are transplanted, it is not clear what makes a particular

body identical with a body that existed, say, 20 years earlier. A second

difficulty arises through the hypothetical possibility of brain transplants; if

two brains were interchanged, in all likelihood there would be a systematic

interchange of memory, beliefs, personality and character traits, skills, and

habits of thought and action. Such a transplant would incline one to say that

not merely a small portion of each body had been interchanged but two people

as well; for one also takes as a criterion of personal identity similarities

through time of memory, personality, skills, and habits. After all, a man is

often willing to say that this is the same person who did something in the past,

not on the basis of knowing that it is the same body but on a quite different

basis – that the person recounts the past situation with great accuracy, exhibits

similar personal reactions, and displays the same skills.

Because two different kinds of criteria, bodily and psychological, are

used for determining personal identity, it is possible to imagine instances of

conflict in which the criterion of bodily identity would indicate that it is a

different person but the psychological criteria would indicate that it is the

same person and vice versa. The Austro-Czech novelist Franz Kafka, known

for his nightmarish works, in his short story Die Verwandlung (1915; The

Metamorphosis) tells of a person who awoke one morning to find, to his

horror, that he had the body of a large insect. Although his family accepted his

conclusion that he was the same person even though he had an entirely

different body, others would have disagreed. There is still, in fact,