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An Intellectual Entertainment: A Dialogue on Mind and Body

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 July 2014

P. M. S. Hacker
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Abstract

This dialogue on the mind/body relation is a sequel to my dialogue ‘On the Nature of the Mind’, but can be read independently of it. The five disputants include an imaginary neuroscientist from California, an Oxford don from the 1950s, a lady, Peter Strawson and Alan White. They examine the peculiar idioms of having: having a body, having a mind, having a soul and having a self. To have a mind, it is concluded, is not to own anything, but to be able to do a variety of things: to reason from premises to conclusions; to act, think, and feel things for reasons. To have a body is to possess a variety of somatic characteristics. Hence a distinction is drawn between the body one is, and the body one has. Accordingly, the problem of the relation between my mind and my body simply disintegrates, since there can be no relation between my intellectual abilities and my somatic features.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 89 , Issue 4 , October 2014 , pp. 511 - 535
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2014 

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References

1 The words and views here ascribed to the late Alan White are, for the most part, not his own. But I hope he would agree with them, and I believe that they are, at any rate, in the spirit of his work. I hope his shade will forgive the liberty I have taken, and accept them as a tribute to him.

2 Wittgenstein, The Big Typescript (Blackwell, Oxford, 2005)Google Scholar, 317 (page 433 in original TS). He ascribed the insight to Paul Ernst. The same observation was made by Nietzsche.

3 See Gombrich, E. H., ‘Tobias and the Angel’ in Symbolic Images: Studies in the art of the renaissance (Phaidon, London, 1972), 26–30Google Scholar.

4 A point nicely made by Rundle, Bede, Mind in Action (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1999), 26Google Scholar.

5 White, A. R., The Philosophy of Mind (Random House, New York, 1967), 90Google Scholar.

6 Strawson, P. F., Individuals (Methuen, London, 1959), 90–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 Strawson, ibid., 97f.

8 Hacker, P. M. S., Human Nature: the Categorial Framework (Blackwell, Oxford, 2007), 268–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar. All the matters discussed in this dialogue are examined more systematically and in greater detail in this book.