ABSTRACT
In The Concept of Mind Gilbert Ryle writes from the agent stance and ascribes mental predicates to persons. An equally powerful motive was Descartes's seeing mind-body dualism as the best available foundation for belief in the immortality of the soul. Mindists of one stripe or another have not overlooked The Concept of Mind. Their objections, however, all seem to miss the mark. The author turns now to criticisms of Ryle from a subclass of mindists who identify the mind with the brain or the brain and the central nervous system, Philosophers who take this view of the mind have adopted the spectator stance with a vengeance. The claim for the identity of mind and brain rests on discoveries in physiology such as the finding that some depressed patients show brain states that are markedly different from those of people who are not depressed and that inducing appropriate alterations in the patients' brain states can relieve their depression.
