ABSTRACT
When doing philosophy one sometimes cannot avoid the feeling that one is running just in order to stand still; and no more so than in philosophy of mind. Currently this is one of the most imaginative, fertile, and hotly contested areas of research. Nevertheless, I think it is fair to say that, despite this productivity, we are still just as far from a solution to its central problem as we ever were. What, then, is this problem that appears so intractable? Philosophy of mind, as most professionals presently working in the field conduct it, is almost exclusively concerned with the mind–body problem. Like many philosophical problems, it is surprisingly easy to set up but is something for which it is considerably harder to find anything like a fully satisfying solution. Human beings are minded creatures: we believe and disbelieve things; we agree and argue about these; we fall into love and despair; we enjoy the caress of our lover’s hands and suffer agonising pain, we savour and find repulsive the flavour of coffee; and so on. Yet, we are also material creatures, made up of flesh and bone, themselves made up of nothing more than the same physical stuff as all other physical things. In fact, as educated modern people, we believe that we are either principally or perhaps even entirely material creatures, subject to the same natural laws as everything else in the world. How is it that mindedness, with its apparently intangible characteristics such as meaningfulness, rationality, and conscious experience, inhabits a material world that is exhaustively governed by natural laws and is, in itself, devoid of such characteristics? How is it that creatures of mere flesh and bone are minded? The French philosopher Merleau-Ponty neatly captures this puzzlement when he says ‘How significance and intentionality could come to dwell in molecular edifices or masses of cells is a thing that can never be made comprehensible’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962, p. 351). Of course, scientific investigations of these ‘masses of cells’, especially advances in the brain sciences and associated disciplines, help us to better understand the workings of complex human physiology, but can they dispel the philosophical puzzlement: how is it that this stuff is responsible for mindedness? This question is of the utmost moment in philosophy and its importance lies in the fact that it goes to the very heart of who we think we are, our conception of the world around us, and our understanding of our place in that world.
