PHGA 6457 The Mind-Body Problem
Professor William Jaworski
Spring 2007
Monday, 2:00–4:00

For the past 350 years philosophers, scientists, theologians, and others have approached the study of human being and behavior from the standpoint of a set of assumptions which originated in the intellectual crisis generated by the scientific revolution. That revolution brought the Greek ideal of knowledge to bear on the natural world – the ideal of a systematic and universal body of mathematically precise explanatory principles. The resulting benefit was what has been arguably the greatest expansion of human knowledge in recorded history. The corresponding cost, however, was a displacement of our ordinary pre-scientific modes of self-understanding – the mental, the moral, the spiritual, etc. – and the loss of what had been a well-articulated philosophical understanding of their interrelations grounded in the Aristotelian philosophical tradition. The troublesome and complicated task of philosophy subsequent to the scientific revolution became that of trying to find a place for mentality, morality, spirituality, and the like in a world that was fundamentally physical – a world that was at its material roots neither mental, nor moral, nor spiritual. The theoretical problems associated with that task have been legion. They include the problems associated with free will and determinism, the problem of finding a rational basis for moral, political, and other normative judgments, and the problems associated with understanding the relationship between human thought and action, on the one hand, and human physiological processes, on the other – what are typically called mind-body problems.

In the seventeenth century, amidst the changing tenor of thinking about the natural world, Descartes developed a compelling characterization of the mental-physical distinction which has remained more or less canonical for Western philosophy since. Combined with other assumptions, this distinction continues to inform contemporary debates, and to generate philosophical problems which after more than three centuries seem as intractable as they ever did. This course is an advanced introduction to mind-body problems. We consider the ways they have shaped and been shaped by developments in the natural and social sciences, and the range of purported solutions to them currently on offer: various forms of substance dualism, dual-attribute theories, reductive, nonreductive, and eliminative varieties of physicalism, and various forms of idealism and neutral monism. Finally, we view post-Cartesian philosophy of mind from a perspective which sees it as a single moment in a broader story of cultural change, a vantage from which its founding assumptions no longer seem fixed points anchored in solid philosophical bedrock but byproducts of what is essentially a fluid cultural situation. We consider the possibility that the correct approach to mind-body problems is not to attempt their solution, but rather their dissolution – a rejection of the original post-Cartesian assumptions on which they were founded in favor of others which are not liable to generating the same difficulties. We examine the theoretical insights of the older, non-Cartesian philosophical outlook which was articulated most clearly in the ancient world by Aristotle, and which was displaced by post-Cartesian thought. Aristotelians had a way of approaching human thought and action which did not generate problems of the sort forming philosophy of mind’s current stock in trade. We consider whether it isn’t possible to retrieve some of the insights of Aristotelian philosophy with an eye to resolving mind-body problems.