Chapter 5: Mind and BodyThe Problem of Consciousness

Introducing Philosophy, 10th editionRobert C. Solomon, Kathleen Higgins,

and Clancy Martin

Incorrigibility

• The “immediate” certainty that you feel in the case of your own conscious experience

• Provides a defense against materialism; but when Freud introduced the unconscious, he claimed that not everything mental is knowable and that therefore surely not everything “in the mind” can be described incorrigibly

Privileged Access

• One, and only one, person can experience what is going on inside one’s own head: this is privileged access (the privacy of mental events)

• Our states of mind have the very peculiar status of being always knowable to ourselves but possibly not to others

• The way we establish our own identity is categorically different from how others know it

Thomas Nagel (1937-)• Nagel argues that it’s in the nature

of consciousness that the problem is so “intractable”

• American philosopher at New York University

• Broad-ranging thinker who has written on topics from sex and death to political philosophy and racism in South Africa

• The author of Mortal Questions and The View from Nowhere

Edmund Husserl (1859-1938)

• German-Czech philosopher and mathematician; founder of phenomenology, a modern form of rational intuitionism

• With Gottlob Frege, fought John Stuart Mill’s empiricist view of necessary truth and developed an alternative view: matters of necessity are not matters of experience but rather of a special kind of intuition

• Best-known works are Ideas (Vol. 1) (1913) and Cartesian Meditations (1931)

• Edmund Husserl attacks the spatial metaphors that people use when talking about consciousness

• There are acts of consciousness, and there are the objects of those acts A phenomenologist would analyze my seeing a tree into (1) my act of seeing and (2) the tree as seen

• Husserl’s conception of consciousness is called intentionality. To say that consciousness is intentional means that our conscious acts are always directed toward objects

• We should not talk about conscious acts as self-contained “contents” that are mysteriously coordinated with the movements of our bodies

• Among our various acts as persons are intentional conscious acts as well as physical actions

• There is no problem of “coordination” or interaction

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961)

• French “existentialist,” the most serious of the existential phenomenologists who followed Husserl in France

• Most important work is his Phenomenology of Perception (1945)

• Known for political writings and art criticism

• In Structure of Behavior (1942) he argued that the human body cannot be considered merely another “fragment of matter,” merely a body, but rather must be viewed as the center of our experience

• Attacks dualism from the side that has so far seemed least controversial, the idea that the human body is just another “bit of matter”

• Describes a “dialectic” between mind and body, by which he means that there is no ultimate distinction between them; mind and body are nothing other than a single entity

• One cannot treat a person as an uneasy conglomerate of mental parts and body parts but rather must begin with the whole person

• [au1: first ref to this person:]Strawson has a similar view, arguing for what he calls cognitive experience

William James (1842-1910)• Perhaps the greatest American

philosopher (and psychologist) to this day

• Developed the particularly American philosophy of pragmatism from the brilliant but obscure formulations of his colleague at Harvard, Charles Sanders Peirce, into a popular and still very powerful intellectual force

• Born in New York City and graduated from Harvard with a medical degree but decided to teach at Harvard rather than practice medicine

• James’ best-known work in philosophy, besides his Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907), is The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

• He also established himself as one of the fathers of modern psychology with his Principles of Psychology (1890)

• Argues that there is no such thing as consciousness as an entity, only different functions of experience