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Books

I Am Not A Brain by Markus Gabriel

Stephen Anderson agrees with Markus Gabriel that our minds aren’t brains.

When the philosopher Thomas Nagel published his book Mind and Cosmos back in 2012 it was not particularly well received by many of his colleagues. Part of that reaction may have been occasioned by his subtitle, which was, ‘Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False’. Many feared that by criticizing materialism and Darwinism, Nagel would automatically reopen the field to theism, which a great many of them seemed quite anxious to prevent at any cost.

A similar kind of anxiety can emerge whenever we get deeply into the philosophy of mind. It immediately precipitates us out of the realm of the securely physical, the stuff of popular science, and into a broader realm inhabited by supposedly spooky entities such as ‘selves’, ‘souls’, ‘values’, ‘volition’, ‘autonomy’, ‘consciousness’, and ‘perceptions’.

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