My own basic introduction to these issues is the Philosophy of Mind

in the Teach Yourself series. It is now out-of-print but available used from Amazon.

 

 

A new edition is due to be published in Summer 2012

 

For more information about the existing book, click here.

 

Outline notes, suitable for AS/A2 level students, are available on:

• Aristotle: body and soul

just click on the 'Notes' link above to see the pdf file

The Philosophy of Mind is a fascinating area of study. It concerns fundamental questions about the nature of the self, issues of how our minds and our bodies interact, and the broader questions about the nature of consciousness.  It links to science, in that we experience ourselves as free and outside the series of physical causes that might suggest that everything is completely determined on the physical level. It links also with religion, in that many religious people believe in some form of life after death or reincarnation. Does that make any sense? Is disembodied life possible? How does it relate to our idea of what it is to be a person?

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Great book by Julian Baggini!                                 

I've just finished reading The Ego Trick by Julian Baggini, and can highly recommend it. It tackles the old question of how we can remain the same person through all the changes we undergo in life. What is it that makes us who we are?

Written in a clear and direct way, it includes comments from a whole range of thinkers - not just professional philosophers - to which the author adds his personal evaluations and comments. His quest to understand personal identity takes in people as diverse as theologian Richard Swinburne, neuroscientist Susan Greenfield, a Tibetan lama and the most articulate of western Buddhists, Stephen Batchelor, along with many others who recount their experience of the sense of self through changes that may seem to threaten identity, including having a sex change. Although an easy read, there is serious substance here, based on Baggini's Ph.D. research.

The book explores the old question of what it means to be a you, an individual human being. Baggini reviews and examines both the 'pearl' approach to the self (there is a special, unique 'me' inside here somewhere) and the 'bundle' view (that we are a bundle of mental events, made possible by the brain, which come together to make us who we are - an idea that goes back to early Buddhism), which he favours. The 'ego trick' of the title is the way in which the various parts of this animated, thinking, feeling body, give the sense of being a unique self. He also explores the related issues of life after death and the future of the self. 

I've not expressed any of that well, nor done justice to his arguments... Julian does it all far better, and you need to read the book to appreciate the depth that lies beneath his easy style. Click the box on the right to order from Amazon in the UK or here to order it from Amazon.com in the USA.

[Although approaching the subject differently, and suggesting a model (through memory and 'mapping') for the way we develop the 'trick' that is our sense of self, there are some interesting parallels here with my own book Me.  Click on the box top right for more information about that book and others in the Art of Living series.]

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The nature of consciousness is one of the key areas of exploration in the Philosophy of Mind. Indeed, once we stop to think about it (and we don't do that very often, because being conscious is such a natural thing that we accept it uncritically), the whole relationship between being conscious of something and the thing of which we are conscious is a curious thing. Is consciousness something that is simply going on in the brain - and therefore something that will be explained completely as neuroscience becomes more specific about brain functioning? Huge numbers of questions crop up once you start to unpack these things.

 

Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of Mind is the classic, oft-quoted text on logical behaviourism. You may not like his conclusions, but in terms of clarity of thought and lucid argument, his book takes a lot of beating. Famous for arguing that to mix physical and mental descriptions, or causes, as though they could simply be set alongside one another as a  'category mistake', and for caricaturing Descartes' dualistic view of the self as ' the ghost in the machine',  this book helps to clarify exactly what we mean when we call an action 'intelligent', or 'wise'. But don't be totally taken in, for Ryle really does no more that substitute a 'ghost in the machine' for a 'ghost in the action', or that's my view. See what you think.

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

For a readable and easy introduction to some of these issues, along with my own personal view about what it means to develop a sense of 'me', see Me.