Abstract

(from the publicity materials) This important new collection of essays deals with a subject much in vogue--dualism, the idea that mind and body are distinct entities, and that the mind, however one may choose to define it, cannot be analyzed in purely physical terms or somehow reduced to the behavior of purely material objects. /// The contributors, well-known in their respective fields of philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and computer science, share a common front in that they all reject both the commonsense viewpoint of "naive realism" and the philosophical program of "reductionism" which attempts to account for the mental as in some way reducible to, or identical with, material processes in the brain and nervous system. In addition to believing that the brain and the mind are distinct entities but intimately related in that events in consciousness must be presumed to mirror and reproduce the impact of brain events, they also hold to the opinion that the conscious mind is able to influence what happens outside it, by way of bodily movements etc., which are likewise mediated by the brain and nervous system. /// The book will shake up some entrenched positions, compel some serious rethinking, and confer upon the dualist approach a degree of respectability that, in a modern context, has long been denied it.