Philosophy of Mind: A Very Short Introduction

Is the neurophysiology of pain all there is to pain? How do words and mental pictures come to represent things in the world? Do computers think, and if so, are their thought processes significantly similar to our thought processes? Or is there something distinctive about human thought that precludes replication in a computer? These are some of the puzzles that motivate the philosophical discipline called "philosophy of mind," a central area of philosophy.

This Very Short Introduction introduces the philosophy of mind, and looks at some of the most interesting and important topics in this fascinating field, including the mind-body problem and dualism. Barbara Montero also discusses minds other than our own, and the problems associated with defining consciousness in animals, aliens and machines. Considering these and other such thorny issues such as physicalism and intentionality, she demonstrates how questions of the philosophy of mind also infiltrate disciplines outside of philosophy, including psychology, neuroscience, economics, evolutionary biology, and linguistics. As she observes, most everyone, at some time or another, has ruminated over the relation between mind and matter.

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Barbara Gail Montero, Associate Professor of Philosophy, City University of New York

Barbara Gail Montero is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York. Most of her research concerns one or the other of two very different notions of body: body as the physical or material basis of everything, and body as the moving, breathing, flesh and blood instrument that we use when we run, walk, or dance. Her recent book Thought in Action: Expertise and the Conscious Mind (OUP, 2016) explores this latter topic. She is also the author of On the Philosophy of Mind (Wadsworth Press, 2009) and co-editor of Economics and the Philosophy of Mind, (Routledge, 2006). She has written over fifty articles, including one for the New York Times, which was reprinted in The Stone Reader: Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments (Norton/Liveright, 2015).