ABSTRACT
In this final chapter it is time to review the state of play in the philosophy of mind and to draw some tentative conclusions of our own. The key questions, as we have seen, are what it is that makes something a mental state and how such states explain behaviour. The Cartesian answer is that a mental state is a conscious state, and, because wholly accessible to consciousness, a state of a substance that is in principle independent of bodies in the external world, namely the mind. Such mental states explain bodily behaviour through a mysterious interface with the body, which thereby moves to bring about results recommendable to reason. What supposedly differentiates creatures with minds from lower animals is, indeed, that the former’s acts are done for reasons, and thus via the intervention of the mind, while the latter’s occur only through a chain of physical causes. For some consideration to play the role of a reason thus requires it to be scrutinized by the subject and appreciated as a reason. For, though Descartes himself has an abstract and impersonal view of the connections that the light of reason reveals to us, this image of light gives an essential role to the subject of consciousness as seeing these connections by means of this light. Things count as reasons for her only in virtue of the subject’s first personal perspective upon them. That she must play this role in order to judge and act for reasons explains, we may note, why the states that can count as reasons must be conscious states.
