Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Human beings definitely have minds. Other creatures on this planet or elsewhere may have minds. Inanimate objects such as rocks do not have minds. These claims will no doubt seem unexceptionable to all but the most perverse. Yet in attempting to understand them fully, the original intuitions on which they are based can get pushed and stretched to such an extent that, in the end and without any perversity, we can come to have doubts. It is as if our everyday and unexamined conception of the mind contains features that, when examined, undermine the very conception itself. This observation may strike some as an unnecessarily pessimistic way to begin an introduction, but such a reaction ignores the central role that perplexity has always played in philosophy. In most disciplines, problems define at most the outer boundaries – the frontiers – of investigation, not the subject matter itself. For example, whilst the research programme of molecular biology is determined by what it is about biological structure and chemistry that we do not know, the subject itself – what someone would study in a textbook – is a growing compendium of what we have already found out. With philosophy, matters are, if anything, the reverse. Uninformed opinion sometimes mockingly implies there isn't any thing like philosophical knowledge, that philosophy makes no advances. This is not true. There has ... log in or subscribe to read full text