Abstract
This chapter, after surveying some of the most recalcitrant dilemmas of modern philosophy of mind, argues that we can get rid of them by revising their usually unchecked presumptions from the perspective of a paradigmatically different conceptual framework, namely, scholastic Aristotelian hylomorphism. In particular, the chapter points out that our false presumptions are historically rooted in those late-medieval conceptual developments that first allowed the emergence of the apparent possibility of “Demon-skepticism”, which lies at the bottom of the modern idea of identifying the mind as “the self”, the seat of consciousness, in stark contrast with the body, an unconscious physical, biological mechanism. As opposed to this conception, the chapter presents the earlier scholastic Aristotelian paradigm, which it dubs “hyper-externalism”, as the conceptual framework that rightly excludes the apparent possibility of “Demon-skepticism”, the ultimate ground of our false dilemmas listed earlier.
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Notes
- 1.
For a discussion of treatments of Russell’s problem-sentence in medieval logic without his theory of descriptions, and also without the false presupposition that reference commits one to existence, see Klima 2001, pp. 197–226.
- 2.
The subsequent discussion of Ockham’s externalism and its contrast with what I call Aquinas ’ “hyper-externalism ” partly overlaps with my presentation of basically the same issues in Klima 2015a. However, while the discussion there focused on paradigmatically different medieval conceptions of semantic content and their relation to the contemporary contrast between linguistic internalism and externalism , the point of the discussion here is to show how the nominalist conception of mental content contributed to the emergence of the modern notion of subjectivity, in stark contrast to an earlier paradigm that avoids the false presuppositions and consequent dilemmas of this modern notion.
- 3.
Note that although I think the notion of a BIV as defined here is closely related to both Descartes ’ and Putnam ’s conceptions, it is not intended to capture their original intentions.
- 4.
For a formal statement and more detailed discussion of this argument, see my exchange with Claude Panaccio in Klima and Hall 2011.
- 5.
In this description, I am using the modern conception of sound, according to which it is nothing but the vibration of the air generated by a sounding object. So, on this conception, the term ‘sound’ refers to the modulation of the airwaves in esse reale. However, on the Aristotelian medieval conception, the term ‘sound’ would rather refer to a sensible quality of the sounding object that causes these airwaves, namely, its state of vibration that is encoded by the vibrations of the air. So, on this conception, the air vibrations would be just encodings (species) of the sound of the sounding object, whence the vibrations of the air would be nothing but the vibrations of the sounding object in esse intentionale . But this is just another way of saying that what wewould call sound in the air is just an encoding of the sound of the sounding object, properly identifying the ultimate source of information in the process of encoding, transmitting, transcoding, and decoding information.
- 6.
References
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Klima, G. (2016). Mind vs. Body and Other False Dilemmas of Post-Cartesian Philosophy of Mind. In: García-Valdecasas, M., Murillo, J., Barrett, N. (eds) Biology and Subjectivity. Historical-Analytical Studies on Nature, Mind and Action, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30502-8_3
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