Lecture notes
Class notes Philosophy
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- Philosophy
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- University Of Glasgow
Class notes for Philosophy, Classics and English Literature
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Philosophy 2ALecture 1
- “You have to admit that your mind is an excellent candidate for
your single most defining feature” - Pete Mandik
- What does a mind do?
- Who or what has a mind?
- What does a mind do? What sort of things are classified as
mental?
- Reasoning
- Logic
- Emotions
- Thoughts
- Learning
- Memories
- Perceiving
- Desiring
- Imagining
- Pain
- Nausea
- Is there anything that some or all of these have something in
common?
- Intentionality
- Our mental states seem to be about or directed
towards things
- Mental states can also be about non-existent things
- “There is something it is like for you”
- For some mental states there is something it is like for
you
- E.g. your experiences of looking at bright flowers
- They have a distinctive qualitative character
, - non-spatial/no mass
- Mental spaces dont take up space or have mass
- Special epistemic access
- There are some things about my mind that i seem to
know immediately/directly
- Maybe we are infallible when it comes to certain
aspects of our minds
- I seems that i am in a epistemically privileged with
regard to my own mind
- Who or what has a mind?
- Paradigm examples of things that do not have minds
- Rocks
- Trees
Lecture 1 - Dualism
What is the mind?
- Long standing or transitory
- Beliefs, desires, perceptual experiences, emotion, intention
2 important features of mental states that, some have argued, are
what makes mental states mental
- Consciousness
- Thomas Nagel 1974
- Conscious states are ones in which “there is
something that it is like to be in that state
- Not all your mental states are conscious
- I believe that Nicola Sturgeon is the first minister of
Scotland
- But this was a conscious belief before now
- Intentionality
- This is “aboutness”
, - The belief of Nicola Sturgeon is about her being the first
minister of Scotland
- Your perceptual experience is about her being infront of
you
- These mental states represent a state of affairs in the world
- A crucial feature of these states is that they can be right or
wrong
- Beliefs can be right or wrong
- Perceptual experiences can tell you correctly about the
world or more specifically about illusion or hallucination
- Illusions index
Why would anyone think that your mind is your brain?
- One reason is that without a brain we wouldnt be able to think or
see or hear of feel or have any other mental states
- Whereas we can think without other body parts
- This does not apply to a heart because of heart transplants
- But what about brain transplants
- Certain parts of the brain are correlated with certain mental
states
- Visual cortex etc
- If the activity of the brain is disrupted by using “transcranial
magnetic stimulation”, and thus specify parts of the brain and
prevent someone from using specific mental functions.
Substance Dualism:
“The mind-body problem”
There are 2 basic kinds of theories: dualist and materialist
Dualist theories say that mental phenomena are something over and
above physical phenomena
Materialist theories deny this. They say there are only physical
phenomena
, Dualism comes in 2 kinds:
- Substance
- Property
What exists?
- One common view is that at the most fundamental level that
what exists are substances and properties
- Substances
- are things (individuals or objects) or stuff (material..matter)
- E.g. Tam O;’Shanter, flame, North Sea, the letter A, helium,
cloud
- Properties
- Features of substances
- Redness, height, shape, kindness, beauty
- Properties depends for their existence on substances, for
they wouldn’t exist without being properties of objects or
stuff
- In contrast, substances do not depend on properties
- But substances also cannot exist without having property
- But this can be overcome by noting that this is not a
general point but a specific one
- A particular property instance cannot exist without the
substance of which it is a property, but a particular
substance can exist without that particular property
instance (e.g colour)
Substance dualism is the view that there are 2 kinds of dualism
- Physical and mental
- Descartes is a famous substance dualist
- He thought that there was no void between physical objects so
he thought there was just one material substance. Therefore he
thought of material substance as stuff rather than a thing.
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