Arnaud Dewalque

According to a standard narrative, the philosophy of mind officially started in the 1950s with the decline of analytic behaviourism, the emergence of the mind–brain identity theory, and its subsequent critique by functionalism. Yet, a closer look at the history of analytic philosophy reveals this narrative to be oversimplistic and fraught with problems. Many early British analytic philosophers—starting with philosophers of what may be termed the ‘Cambridge family,’ such as G.F. Stout, G.E. Moore, B. Russell and C.D. Broad—were already engaged in extensive debates about the knowledge, structure and nature of the mind. Interestingly, their writings also contain many influential intuitions which later came to be regarded as central for contemporary philosophy of mind—such as the transparency intuition, the zombie intuition or the intuition underlying the knowledge argument. The aim of this book is twofold. First, it seeks to challenge the standard narrative by investigating, reconstructing, and assessing the contribution of early British analytic philosophers to philosophical debates on the mind, with a special focus on philosophers of the Cambridge family. Second, it explores the extent to which the views and groundbreaking intuitions of these authors can contribute to current-day discussions in philosophy of mind and closely related issues.

Call experientialism about mentality the view that being in a mental state amounts to having an experience, while having a mind amounts to being capable of having experiences. In short, experience is a mark of the mental. Although experientialism has largely fallen out of favor, it was once the predominant view in the Cambridge School of analysis, explicitly endorsed by G.F. Stout, G.E. Moore and the early Russell, among others. Drawing on their views, I briefly discuss three challenges to experientialism and argue that they can all be successfully addressed. My conclusion is that experientialism is a respectable view of mentality.

This paper addresses Lotze’s influence on James Ward’s panpsychism and offers a brief assessment of their views. Both Lotze and Ward endorse a strong version of panpsychism, namely pure mentalism, according to which the constituents of reality deceptively appear to be material while in fact they are purely mental. Section 1 presents Ward’s own version of pure mentalism as an attempt to improve on Lotze’s. Section 2 argues that this attempt fails and raises some difficulties for pure mentalism in general. Section 3 sketches an alternative metaphysical view, on which mind and matter are both essentially distinct and essentially inseparable.