John Heil

When first published, John Heil's introduction quickly became a widely used guide for students with little or no background in philosophy to central issues of philosophy of mind.ãee Heil provided an introduction free of formalisms, technical trappings, and specialized terminology.ãee He offered clear arguments and explanations, focusing on the ontological basis of mentality and its place in the material world.ãee The book concluded with a systematic discussion of questions the book raises--and a sketch of a unified metaphysics of mind--thus inviting scholarly attention while providing a book very well suited for an introductory course. This Third Edition builds on these strengths, and incorporates new material on theories of consciousness, computationalism, the language of thought, and animal minds as well as other emerging areas of research.ãee With an updated reading list at the end of each chapter and a revised bibliography, this new edition will again make it the indispensable primer for anyone seeking better understanding of the central metaphysical issues in philosophy of mind.ãee.

The book is intended as a reader-friendly introduction to issues in the philosophy of mind, including mental-physical causal interaction, computational models of thought, the relation minds bear to brains, and assorted -isms: behaviorism, dualism, eliminativism, emergentism, functionalism, materialism, neutral monism, and panpsychism. The Fourth Edition reintroduces a chapter on Donald Davidson and a discussion of 'Non-Cartesian Dualism', along with a wholly new chapter on emergence and panpsychism. A concluding chapter draws together material in earlier chapters and offers what the author regards as a plausible account of the mind's place in nature. Suggested readings at the conclusion of each chapter have been updated, with a focus on accessible, non-technical material. Key Features of the Fourth Edition Includes a new chapter, 'Emergence and Panpsychism' (Chapter 13), reflecting growing interest in these areas Reintroduces and updates a chapter on Donald Davidson, 'Radical Interpretation' (Chapter 8), which was excised from the previous edition Updates 'Descartes' Legacy' (Chapter 3) to include a discussion of E. J. Lowe's arresting 'Non-Cartesian Dualism', also removed from the previous edition Includes a highly revised final chapter, which draws together much of the previous material and sketches a plausible account of the mind's place in nature Updated 'Suggested Reading' lists at the end of each chapter.

It is an old charge against Locke that his commitment to a common substratum for the observable qualities of particular objects and his empiricist theory about the origin of ideas are inconsistent with one another. How could we have an idea of something in which observable qualities inhere if all our ideas are constructed from ideas of observable qualities? In this paper, I propose an interpretation of the crucial passages in Locke, according to which the idea of substratum is formed through an elaborate mental process which he calls “supposition.” It is the same process we use when we form the idea of infinity − another problematic idea for an empiricist. In the end, Locke was more liberal than most empiricists in subscribing to the existence of ideas far removed from experience, because he accepted supposition as a legitimate way of constructing new ideas.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the deepest problems currently exercising philosophers of mind arise from an ill-begotten ontology, in particular, a mistaken ontology of properties. After going through some preliminaries, we identify three doctrines at the heart of this mistaken ontology: (P) For each distinct predicate, “F”, there exists one, and only one, property, F, such that, if “F” is applicable to an object a, then “F” is applicable in virtue of a’s being F. (U) Properties are universals, not particulars. (D) Every property is either categorical or dispositional, but not both. We show how these doctrines influence current philosophical thinking about the mind, suggest and defend an alternative conception of properties, and indicate how this conception provides answers to two puzzles besetting contemporary philosophy of mind: the problem of mental causation and the problem of qualia.

Peter van Inwagen’s Consequence Argument makes salient the difficulties facing attempts to reconcile determinism and agency. Others go further. Derk Pereboom, for instance, contends that science provides compelling evidence that no action is free, and Galen Strawson argues that conditions for genuinely free action are flatly unsatisfiable. Against such skepticism about free will, the paper introduces considerations in support of the idea that there are probably good reasons to think that conditions for free actions—real agency—are sometimes satisfied, that ascriptions of agency are sometimes true, but that truthmakers for these ascriptions could be wholly deterministic in a way that might seem to, but does not in fact, place them at odds with the possibility of genuinely free action.

The mental causation debate has proved unfruitful because philosophers involved set out from incommensurable starting points. Some begin with the thought that we must look to scientific practice to locate causal kinds. Psychology is a successful science, so psychological properties must be causally efficacious. Metaphysicians who say otherwise have a cockeyed conception of causation. Others find such arguments beside the point. Scientific practice suggests that mental properties are causally relevant to physical goings-on, but the question is not _whether_ this is so, but _how_ this could possibly be so. Perhaps the impasse stems from assumptions both sides share but rarely acknowledge.