Mind

About this book

Philosophy begins with puzzlement. So far, you have thought your way through several of these puzzles: your continued identity over time, your relationship to god (if, indeed, there is a god), concepts of right and wrong, and the ways in which we find out about the world. In the next book you will look at the pressing matters of political obligation and authority. In this book, you will be thinking about consciousness, perhaps one of the most puzzling of all the things in heaven and earth. You have encountered consciousness before: in book 1, nigel warburton introduced you to john lockes view that personal identity is a matter of the continuity of our consciousness. But what is our consciousness? What is it to be conscious, and is consciousness all there is to the mind? What, for that matter, is the mind? These are the questions we will consider. Most of the readings for the philosophy of mind (to give this part of the discipline its proper title) can be found in part iv of the set book. We shall look in detail at readings 4 and 12, and also refer to parts of readings 6 and 11. In addition, you will be asked to download three articles from the ou library. You can find advice on how to do this on the exploring philosophy website. There are also audio recordings on the website, which we will discuss. In addition to the usual end-of-chapter online quizzes, there are two online activities for you to complete. Finally, as was true in the other books, technical terms are written in bold in the text. You will be able to find definitions of these in the glossary at the end of the book. The book is divided into four chapters. The first looks at the arguments for dualism that were given by rene descartes. (dualism, roughly, is the view that mind and matter are two fundamentally distinct kinds of thing, and that we are part mind and part matter. ) various problems with descartess argument will lead us, in the second chapter, to investigate an alternative: that there is no immaterial part of us; instead, we are made wholly from matter. In the third chapter, we will look at the radical view that our mental states might not all be in our heads that they might extend into the world around us. Finally, in the fourth chapter, we will assess whether, in our current state of knowledge, we are able to give a satisfactory account of the mind and consciousness at all.