ABSTRACT
This chapter is a review of mindism and its opposing school of thought, personism. Personism originates in the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Gilbert Ryle. Because mindism has been in the making for more than three hundred years, some of its later forms diverge wildly from their Cartesian source. Since knowledge is mind-based and the only minds people can know are their own, knowledge is always private to each person. Personists oppose two particular mindist claims: The first is the mindbody dualists' claim that the mind is an immaterial entity yoked to a material body. The second is the quite different claim that since everything is reducible to matter, the mind must be identical with the brain. The author aims to bring to the fore the positive side of their work—their attention to persons and persons' doings as the proper subject for the philosophy of mind.
