Chapter 5: Mind and Body The Problem of Consciousness Introducing Philosophy, 10th edition Robert C. Solomon, Kathleen Higgins, and Clancy Martin

Incorrigibility The “immediate” certainty that you feel in the case of your own conscious experience Provides a defense against materialism; but when Freud introduced the unconscious, he claimed that not everything mental is knowable and that therefore surely not everything “in the mind” can be described incorrigibly

Privileged Access One, and only one, person can experience what is going on inside one’s own head: this is privileged access (the privacy of mental events) Our states of mind have the very peculiar status of being always knowable to ourselves but possibly not to others The way we establish our own identity is categorically different from how others know it

Thomas Nagel (1937-) Nagel argues that it’s in the nature of consciousness that the problem is so “intractable” American philosopher at New York University Broad-ranging thinker who has written on topics from sex and death to political philosophy and racism in South Africa The author of Mortal Questions and The View from Nowhere

Edmund Husserl ( ) German-Czech philosopher and mathematician; founder of phenomenology, a modern form of rational intuitionism With Gottlob Frege, fought John Stuart Mill’s empiricist view of necessary truth and developed an alternative view: matters of necessity are not matters of experience but rather of a special kind of intuition Best-known works are Ideas (Vol. 1) (1913) and Cartesian Meditations (1931)

Edmund Husserl attacks the spatial metaphors that people use when talking about consciousness There are acts of consciousness, and there are the objects of those acts A phenomenologist would analyze my seeing a tree into (1) my act of seeing and (2) the tree as seen Husserl’s conception of consciousness is called intentionality. To say that consciousness is intentional means that our conscious acts are always directed toward objects

We should not talk about conscious acts as self-contained “contents” that are mysteriously coordinated with the movements of our bodies Among our various acts as persons are intentional conscious acts as well as physical actions There is no problem of “coordination” or interaction

Maurice Merleau-Ponty ( ) French “existentialist,” the most serious of the existential phenomenologists who followed Husserl in France Most important work is his Phenomenology of Perception (1945) Known for political writings and art criticism In Structure of Behavior (1942) he argued that the human body cannot be considered merely another “fragment of matter,” merely a body, but rather must be viewed as the center of our experience

Attacks dualism from the side that has so far seemed least controversial, the idea that the human body is just another “bit of matter” Describes a “dialectic” between mind and body, by which he means that there is no ultimate distinction between them; mind and body are nothing other than a single entity One cannot treat a person as an uneasy conglomerate of mental parts and body parts but rather must begin with the whole person [au1: first ref to this person:]Strawson has a similar view, arguing for what he calls cognitive experience

William James ( ) Perhaps the greatest American philosopher (and psychologist) to this day Developed the particularly American philosophy of pragmatism from the brilliant but obscure formulations of his colleague at Harvard, Charles Sanders Peirce, into a popular and still very powerful intellectual force Born in New York City and graduated from Harvard with a medical degree but decided to teach at Harvard rather than practice medicine

James’ best-known work in philosophy, besides his Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907), is The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) He also established himself as one of the fathers of modern psychology with his Principles of Psychology (1890) Argues that there is no such thing as consciousness as an entity, only different functions of experience