Chapter 5 Mind and Body The Problem of

Chapter 5: Mind and Body The Problem of Dualism Introducing Philosophy, 10 th edition Robert C. Solomon, Kathleen Higgins, and Clancy Martin

The mind is not the same as the brain. It has no shape, no weight, and has the awkward property of being observable by one and only one person • How does a body interact with something that has none of the crucial characteristics of the body? • How can things so different as ideas and sensations interact with nervous systems and brain cells?

• Descartes offers the solution of causal interactionism: mental changes cause bodily changes and vice versa • Critics maintain that “different substances cannot interact”

• Leibniz offers the solution that there is no mind-body interaction and that monads are not physical • God programmed us so that our mental activities and our so-called bodily activities are exactly coordinated. This is called parallelism • There is no causal interaction in parallelism

• For Spinoza, mental events and physical events are different aspects of the same “something, ” in his case the same substance

Bertrand Russell (1872 -1970) • One of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century • As a young man wrote, with Alfred North Whitehead, a book called Principia Mathematica (1903), which set the stage for modern logic and foundations of mathematics and gave logic a central role as a philosophical tool

• Russell wrote an enormous number of philosophical books on virtually every topic, including several notorious polemics in favor of what was branded “free love” and atheism • He was a persistent and harsh critic of religion in general, and Christianity in particular, as a source of what he called superstition and legitimized murder • He was a committed pacifist during World War I and wrote at least one of his most famous books while sitting in prison for his antiwar activities

• Like his famous predecessor David Hume (with whom he has much in common), Russell was too controversial for most universities, and a famous court case prevented him from teaching at the City College of New York • He won the Nobel Prize in 1950 • He claimed that our experiences and ideas are one aspect of some events or activities of which the various chemical reactions of the brain are another aspect. This theory has often been called the dual aspect theory