Mental Reality

Front Cover
MIT Press, 1994 - Body, Mind & Spirit - 337 pages
In Mental Reality, Galen Strawson argues that much contemporary philosophy of mind gives undue primacy of place to publicly observable phenomena, nonmental phenomena, and behavioral phenomena (understood as publicly observable phenomena) in its account of the nature of mind. It does so at the expense of the phenomena of conscious experience. Strawson describes an alternative position, "naturalized Cartesianism," which couples the materialist view that mind is entirely natural and wholly physical with a fully realist account of the nature of conscious experience. Naturalized Cartesianism is an adductive (as opposed to reductive) form of materialism. Adductive materialists don't claim that conscious experience is anything less than we ordinarily conceive it to be, in being wholly physical. They claim instead that the physical is something more than we ordinarily conceive it to be, given that many of the wholly physical goings-on in the brain constitute -- literally are -- conscious experiences as we ordinarily conceive them.
 

Contents

Introduction
1
Three Questions
23
Agnostic Materialism Part 1
43
Agnostic Materialism Part 2
81
Mentalism Idealism and Immaterialism
107
Mental
145
Natural Intentionality
177
Pain and Pain
215
The Weather Watchers
251
Behavior
291
The Concept of Mind
317
References
325
Index
331
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