Act (Mental)

Consciousness constitutes the basic difference between mere physical movement and a human act – but not every state of consciousness is mental. Indeed, not every mentally conscious movement is an act; only those that involve or presuppose premeditation are and out of these are the logical constructs (called conduct) that are susceptible to moral evaluation. Fundamental concepts in the philosophy of mind and ethics are at play here, namely, the physical, the conscious, the mental, and the deliberative, which are perhaps easy to enumerate but hard to elucidate.

As far as the philosophy of mind is concerned in the present connection, two issues are urgent. In the first case, what makes the difference between the merely physical and the conscious and, in the second, between the merely conscious and the mental? In some Western philosophies of mind, these two issues are not even distinguished because of an historical conflation of mind with consciousness. An African philosopher, mindful of...