What exactly is the mind? One popular view is that minds are just brains. Another is that minds are software routines running on neurological hardware. If you are tempted by either of these views, you are faced with the task of reconciling familiar characteristics of conscious experiences with the apparently very different features of brains and their operations.
John Heil offers an alternative conception of the mind grounded in a metaphysical account of the contents of the world. On the way, he gives a guided tour of the most prominent accounts of the nature of the mind, including dualist, materialist, behaviorist, functionalist, interpretationist, and eliminativist accounts of the nature of mind, along with a critical assessment of recent trends in the subject.
The Author
John Heil is Professor of Philosophy at Davidson College, North Carolina. He is the author of The Nature of True Minds (1992) and First-Order Logic: A Concise Introduction (1994). |