Mind

Introduction

Ideas are mental constructs that arise in the human mind as a result of cerebral activity. They are embedded in the cognitive capacity of the human brain to process, categorize, and creatively reorganize information. The mental ability to create complex ideas is a prerequisite for the development of abstract mental images—concepts—that are the foundation of knowledge. Without this mental capacity, it would be impossible to conceptualize an abstract notion such as power.

Discussion

Philosophy of mind is the branch of philosophy concerned specifically with mental phenomena. It deals with questions about the nature of mental phenomena and their place in the causal structure of reality, the mind's connection with action and behavior, and its knowledge of both itself and other minds. Consciousness and subjectivity are also central topics. Philosophy of mind houses philosophy of psychology, which is a consideration of the philosophical foundations of psychology. Topics of analysis include psychological concepts (e.g., belief, desire, and intention), the models and methods employed by psychological inquiry, and the mechanisms posited by psychology as being responsible for different cognitive processes. Increasingly, there tends to be a great deal of overlap between philosophy of mind and philosophy of psychology (Brune & Brune-Cohrs, Pp. 437-455).

Classical Question:

Thinking philosophically about the mind is by no means an exclusively modern enterprise. Descartes is considered to be the father of modern philosophy of mind. Yet the mind had surely been an object of philosophical interest long before Descartes. Such ancient Greek thinkers as Plato and Aristotle had much to say about the nature of the mind and mental activity; they offer views on perception, memory, and representation. Classical Indian sources such as the Advaita Vedanta school of philosophy and the Buddhist Abhidharma tradition developed rich typologies of mental phenomena, programs for cultivating elevated mental states and self-discipline, and sophisticated attempts to explain how the mind fits into the causal structure of the physical universe (Clark & Chalmers, Pp. 7-19).

Contemporary Issues:

Despite some prominent defenders, dualism is no longer a widely held view, mainly because of the rise of materialism and the influence of both behaviorism and functionalism in the early to middle parts of the 20th century. Materialism is the view that the mind, like everything else in the universe, is ultimately a physical entity "He [men] must now consult his reason and not merely respond to the promptings of desire" (Rousseau 69). Behaviorism was a kind of materialist thesis. Proponents rejected Cartesian dualism and the notion of mind as some sort of immaterial substance or interior theater of psychological activity, arguing instead that mental talk could be translated into talk about externally observable behavior and dispositions to behave in certain ways, under certain environmental conditions, without loss of meaning (Rosch, Pp. 192-232). Behaviorism came in multiple forms; sorting out these views is beyond the scope of this entry. But competing formulations of behaviorism were united by a dismissal of conceiving of mind in terms of its interiority, an inner structure purportedly accessible via introspection. Critics, however, balked at the idea of jettisoning ...