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Mind & Morals

Philosophizing about the Mind

Massimo Pigliucci takes a brief look at the history and current schools of philosophy of mind.

I have had the idea of writing this article in mind for some time now, and yet it is not entirely clear what this very sentence might mean. Is a mind distinct from ideas that somehow float inside it? Am I a different thing from my mind? Is there any interesting sense in which my mind is distinct from my brain and all its sensorial inputs and motory outputs? Arguably, these questions made no sense before René Descartes. In fact, the very word ‘consciousness,’ which we think of as inextricably connected to our concept of mind, did not exist in anything like the modern sense before the 17th century. Philosophers before Descartes did not have a ‘mind-body’ problem because they followed Aristotle, for whom the very fact of being a living entity meant you had mental qualities.

Descartes broke with the Aristotelian and medieval traditions by recognizing that living matter is just matter, thereby kicking off three centuries of scientific reductionism with all its impressive achievements and methodological pitfalls.

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