Philosophy of Mind

by Dale Jaquette and Dale Jacquette

This is a survey of important and contemporary topics in the philosophy of mind. It provides explanations of theories and criticism, illustrated with everyday examples, and outlines the strengths and... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0130309338
• ISBN13: 9780130309334
• Release Date: December 1993
• Publisher: Prentice Hall
• Length: 168 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

fits body to reality and fits mind to body

I have enjoyed the cogency of the author's arguments in this book, after having appreciated his writing style and irrefutable logic in his more recent "Ontology." This is NOT a two star book and most definitely NOT "very bad philosophy" as the other reviewer claims. The previous reviewer must have missed the part where Jacquette firmly grounds the emergent mind in explicit materialism. It is there on page 19: "The idea is that nonphysical properties may emerge from or supervene on material substance if they achieve a certain complexity, in somewhat the same way that life emerges evolutionarily from or supervenes on certain kinds of properly organized material substances." And then on page 96: "The aboutness or intrinsic intentionality of thought, and the ability to think and imagine whatever we like, to project nonexistent intended objects and states of affairs for consideration, distinguishes thought, mind, and the mental or psychological from behavioral-material-functional systems and states considered only as such. It confers a dignity on mind that we experience as freedom of will and action. If the mind is intentional, and if intentionality is an ineliminable, irreducible, and mechanically nonreplicable property of mind, then the mind is a new category of entity in the material world. Mind emerges naturally from living matter in complex biosystems at a comparatively late evolutionary stage. But, because of its intentionality, the mind is qualitatively different from nonmental, purely mechanical things." In my opinion, that is good philosophy. Very good, indeed.