Title

This course explores one of the classic problems of philosophy—the mind-body problem. No previous philosophical knowledge is needed to understand the material we shall cover. The major topics to be explored are materialism, idealism, and dualism. These are the views, respectively, that body is basic and mind is somehow built out of matter, the view that mind is basic and that matter is somehow built out of the mind, and the view that both are basic and neither is built out of the other. Along the way we shall always worry about the possibility of mind-body interaction, on the view under discussion. More specific topics discussed are the nature of symbolic representation, the character of consciousness, the peculiar view of matter endorsed by modern science, the nature of computation and thought.