Mind Value And Reality

This volume collects some of John McDowell's influential papers, written at various times over the last two decades. One group of essays deals mainly with issues in the interpretation of the ethical writings of Aristotle and Plato. A second group of papers contains more direct treatments of questions in moral philosophy that arise naturally out of reflection on the Greek tradition. Some of the essays in the second group exploit Wittgensteinian ideas about reason in action, and they open into the third group of papers, which contains readings of central elements in Wittgenstein's difficult later work. A fourth group deals with issues in the philosophy of mind and with questions about personal identity and the special character of first-personal thought and speech.

This is the second volume of John McDowell's selected papers. These nineteen essays collectively report on McDowell's involvement, over more than twenty years, with questions about the interface between the philosophies of language and mind and with issues in general epistemology. Throughout McDowell focuses on questions to do with content: with the nature of content both linguistic and psychological; with what McDowell regards as misguided views about content; and with the form which a proper semantic theory of content should assume.

Value, Reality, and Desire is an extended argument for a robust realism about value. The robust realist affirms the following distinctive theses. There are genuine claims about value which are true or false - there are facts about value. These value-facts are mind-independent - they are not reducible to desires or other mental states, or indeed to any non-mental facts of a non-evaluative kind. And these genuine, mind-independent, irreducible value-facts are causallyefficacious. Values, quite literally, affect us.These are not particularly fashionable theses, and taken as a whole they go somewhat against the grain of quite a lot of recent work in the metaphysics of value. Further, against the received view, Oddie argues that we can have knowledge of values by experiential acquaintance, that there are experiences of value which can be both veridical and appropriately responsive to the values themselves. Finally, these value-experiences are not the products of some exotic and implausible faculty of'intuition'. Rather, they are perfectly mundane and familiar mental states - namely, desires. This view explains how values can be 'intrinsically motivating', without falling foul of the widely accepted 'queerness' objection. There are, of course, other objections to each of the realist's claims. Inshowing how and why these objections fail, Oddie introduces a wealth of interesting and original insights about issues of wider interest - including the nature of properties, reduction, supervenience, and causation. The result is a novel and interesting account which illuminates what would otherwise be deeply puzzling features of value and desire and the connections between them.

Timothy Sprigge has been a major player on the philosophical scene contributing to discussions as diverse as consciousness, the ontology of time, personal identity, animal rights, punishment, censorship and wider issues in metaphysics, ethics and the history of philosophy. He is, however, less well known for his own highly original system of metaphysics and ethics'a synthesis of Absolute Idealism, panpsychism and utilitarianism. The contributions gathered in this volume, written by philosophers of international reputation or by acknowledged scholars in their specialized fields of inquiry, engage themes in his metaphysics and ethics and provide a critical assessment of his ideas and arguments. In a concluding essay, Sprigge answers the most significant objections raised by his critics: the final result is an engaging dialogue on the perennial and most fundamental questions of philosophy.

In Mental Reality, Galen Strawson argues that much contemporary philosophy of mind gives undue primacy of place to publicly observable phenomena, nonmental phenomena, and behavioral phenomena (understood as publicly observable phenomena) in its account of the nature of mind. It does so at the expense of the phenomena of conscious experience. Strawson describes an alternative position, "naturalized Cartesianism," which couples the materialist view that mind is entirely natural and wholly physical with a fully realist account of the nature of conscious experience. Naturalized Cartesianism is an adductive (as opposed to reductive) form of materialism. Adductive materialists don't claim that conscious experience is anything less than we ordinarily conceive it to be, in being wholly physical. They claim instead that the physical is something more than we ordinarily conceive it to be, given that many of the wholly physical goings-on in the brain constitute -- literally are -- conscious experiences as we ordinarily conceive them.

This collection of brief essays and still briefer commentaries is a personal reflection on some topics that have been thematic in the development of my theoretical work. These essays are not meant to extend the theory into yet-uncharted territory, but rather to draw out some of its implications for clinical neuroscience, philosophy of mind, and everyday life. The point of view guiding these reflections can be found in prior works, but the discerning reader will not fail to see a departure from current models of mind and brain based on circuit board diagrams, modular and computational theories that conflict with a processual account in which the mind/brain is more like a living organism. This perspective, which is often at odds with common sense and folk psychology, has particular relevance to our concepts of the self, the inner life, subjective time, adaptive process, and the world represented in perception.

Among the various approaches to the question of the nature of the mind (or soul), Augustine’s philosophical arguments for the existence of an incorporeal and spiritual substance in man and against materialism are here thoroughly examined on their merits as a source of insight for contemporary discussion. This book, originally published in 1986, employs Augustine’s method of introspection, and argues that, as a philosopher, Augustine can teach the modern mind how to detect the reality of such a spiritual subject in and through basic human acts and faculties, such as imagination, memory, knowledge, free-will and self-knowledge. It presents a critical dialogue with various materialistic anthropologies directly addressed by Augustine himself, or those which have arisen at later periods, including epiphenomenalism, mind-brain identity theory, Marxism and others.