Philosophy of Mind

The Problem and Its Persistence Few philosophical problems are simultaneously so ancient and so resistant as the mind-body problem. In its simplest formulation: what is the relationship between the mind — with its thoughts, sensations, emotions, experiences — and the body, especially the brain? The question seems immediate and even obvious; the difficulty lies in answering it without falling into contradictions or into mysteries greater than the original. Two types of answer present themselves. Dualism holds that mind and body are of distinct natures — that there is something in the mind that cannot be reduced to the physical. Monism holds that there is only one kind of substance or property: in its materialist (or physicalist) version, everything is ultimately physical. The history of philosophy of mind is largely the history of the tension between these positions and of the attempts to overcome it. ...

The Problem Suppose every thought you have, every decision you make, every movement of your body is the necessary result of prior brain states — which in turn result from prior physical states, in a chain stretching back to the Big Bang. If that is true, in what sense are you free to do otherwise than you do? And if you are not free, how can you be held morally responsible for your actions? ...

The Puzzle What makes you the same person you were at age five? The cells in your body have almost completely renewed. Your beliefs, desires, and memories are radically different. Physically and psychologically — nearly everything has changed. And yet we say it is the same person. Why? And if you suffered complete amnesia tomorrow — with no memory of today — would it still be “you”? And if your brain were divided and each half transplanted into a different body, which of the two would be you? ...

Daniel Dennett Daniel Clement Dennett was one of the most influential and provocative philosophers of mind and cognitive science of recent decades. A professor at Tufts University, where he co-directed the Center for Cognitive Studies, he defended throughout his career a thoroughgoing naturalism: mind, consciousness, and free will can be fully integrated into a scientific, Darwinian worldview, leaving no mysterious residue behind. A writer of remarkable clarity and wit, Dennett engaged closely with artificial intelligence, evolutionary biology, and neuroscience, and also became a prominent public figure known for his criticism of religion. He died in April 2024. ...

David Chalmers David John Chalmers is one of the most influential philosophers of mind of the past three decades. Born in Sydney, Australia, and trained in mathematics before turning to philosophy, Chalmers became a professor at the University of Arizona and later at New York University (NYU), where he co-directs the Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness. His debut book, The Conscious Mind (1996), redefined the terms of the debate on consciousness and placed what he named the “hard problem” at the centre of the philosophical and scientific agenda. ...

Donald Davidson Donald Davidson was one of the most original analytic philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century. A professor at the University of California, Berkeley from 1981, following positions at Stanford, Princeton, and Rockefeller, Davidson constructed a philosophical system remarkable for its internal coherence: his philosophy of mind, theory of action, semantics, and epistemology are closely interconnected, articulated around the themes of events, causation, truth, and interpretation. ...

Franz Brentano Franz Brentano (1838–1917) was an Austrian-German philosopher whose work marks one of the quiet turning points of modern philosophy. Born at Marienberg am Rhein into a Catholic family of Italian origin — he was a nephew of the Romantic poet Clemens Brentano — he took his doctorate at Tübingen in 1862 with the thesis Von der mannigfachen Bedeutung des Seienden nach Aristoteles (“On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle”), a study that the young Martin Heidegger read in his adolescence and that would shape an entire twentieth-century lineage of return to Aristotle. Ordained a Catholic priest in 1864, he completed his Habilitation at Würzburg in 1866 and resigned from the priesthood in 1873 amid the crisis opened by the dogma of papal infallibility (Vatican I, 1870). In Vienna, where he taught from 1874 to 1895, he gathered a remarkable constellation of pupils — Husserl, Meinong, Twardowski, Stumpf, Ehrenfels, Marty — out of whom phenomenology, object theory, and the Lvov-Warsaw School would emerge. He lost his chair in 1880 because he married (Austrian law treated former priests as still bound by their vow of celibacy) and was reduced to Privatdozent. He retired in 1895 and lived first in Florence and then in Zurich, where he died, blind, in 1917. ...

Hilary Putnam Hilary Whitehall Putnam was one of the most versatile and intellectually honest philosophers of the twentieth century. Over a career spanning six decades, mostly at Harvard, Putnam pursued an unusual philosophical itinerary: he defended positions that he later criticised with the same energy with which he had established them. He was a functionalist and then rejected functionalism; a scientific realist and then proposed “internal realism”; a sympathiser with logical positivism and then its critic. This willingness for self-criticism is one of the hallmarks of his philosophical style. ...

John Searle John Rogers Searle, born in Denver (Colorado) in 1932 and died in 2025, was Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. His contributions span philosophy of language (speech act theory), philosophy of mind (the Chinese Room argument, biological naturalism), and social ontology (the construction of institutional reality). He is one of the most widely read and debated analytic philosophers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. Key Concepts Speech Act Theory (Speech Acts, 1969): Developing J.L. Austin, Searle systematises the theory. Every speech act involves: ...

Joshua Greene Joshua Greene (b. 1974) is a professor of psychology and director of the Moral Cognition Laboratory at Harvard University. His work stands at the intersection of moral philosophy, experimental psychology, and cognitive neuroscience, and it represents one of the most prominent efforts in the empirical turn within contemporary ethics. Greene does not merely describe how people reason about moral questions; he uses that data to defend an explicit normative claim — that utilitarianism, or more precisely what he calls “deep pragmatic utilitarianism,” is the most defensible theory for adjudicating conflicts among groups with incompatible value systems. ...

Saul Kripke Saul Aaron Kripke was arguably the most technically gifted analytic philosopher of his generation. Born in Omaha, Nebraska, he showed extraordinary aptitude from adolescence: he published his first mature logical article — a completeness proof for modal logic — at eighteen, and corresponded with professional logicians while still in high school. A professor at Princeton and later at the CUNY Graduate Center, Kripke transformed metaphysics, philosophy of language, and modal logic to such a degree that virtually all analytic philosophy after the debates surrounding Naming and Necessity is, in some sense, a response to him. ...

Thomas Nagel Thomas Nagel is one of the most respected contemporary philosophers working in philosophy of mind, ethics, and political philosophy. Born in 1937, he is a professor at New York University (NYU). His work returns obstinately to a single theme: the difficulty of reconciling the inner, subjective perspective of each conscious being with the external, impersonal, objective perspective that science and reason strive for. Known for his lucid prose and the intellectual honesty with which he exposes the limits of his own solutions, Nagel resists both easy reductions and mysticism, holding that certain philosophical problems are genuine and should not be dissolved prematurely. ...

Wang Yangming Wang Yangming (王陽明 Wáng Yángmíng, 1472–1529; courtesy name Bó’ān, personal name Shǒurén 守仁) is the most influential Neo-Confucian thinker of the Ming dynasty and the founder of the so-called “school of mind” (xīnxué 心學). Besides being a philosopher, he was a senior state official and a successful military commander, and his doctrine arose in dialogue with that practical experience. His thought constitutes the chief alternative to the Neo-Confucian orthodoxy of Zhu Xi, the “school of principle” (lǐxué 理學), which dominated the imperial examination system. ...

Wilfrid Sellars Wilfrid Sellars was one of the most profound and original American analytic philosophers of the twentieth century, though less widely read than his influence would warrant. Trained in a tradition that combined analytic rigor with a deep knowledge of the history of philosophy, he set out to articulate what he called the ultimate aim of philosophy: “to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.” His work seeks to reconcile a commitment to science and naturalism with recognition of the normative dimension of thought and knowledge. He taught above all at the University of Pittsburgh, where he formed an influential line of students. ...