The Mind and the Soul

An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind

Jenny Teichman

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138825192
• eBook ISBN: 9781317579496
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The concepts of mind and soul have occupied the thoughts of philosophers throughout the ages and have given rise to numerous conflicting theories. This book provides an incisive and stimulating introduction to central tropics in the philosophy of mind. The author writes about the differences and connections between the ideas of 'mind' and 'soul' and about the metaphysical issues of Dualism, Solipsism, Behaviourism and Materialism. In the course of her account she discusses the arguments of several philosophers including Plato, Descartes, Wittgenstein, Ryle and Hume.

Review of the original edition, 1974:

"It is clear, incisive and unidiosyncratic. Issues and theories are discussed simply yet without serious distortion or vapidity, and the book is full of argument.' – Stewart Candish, Mind

CHAPTER 1

What is the mind? Many different answers, many different kinds of answer, have been given to this question.

Some say, for instance, that the mind is a thing, a substance: others, that it is merely a concatenation of complex states, attributes and dispositions: states, attributes and dispositions, that is, of living human bodies. Others again claim that the mind is a form of energy, a kind of force.

Of those who believe that the mind is a substance, some say that it is a spiritual, or immaterial, or non-physical substance, others, that it is a material substance, made up of organic matter, and found inside the skulls of living human beings.

Usually it is taken for granted that each individual human being has one mind which is, as it were, inseparably attached to him: but some people would deny even this, claiming either that one individual could have two or more minds—perhaps at different times—or that several individuals could share one mind.

In some philosophical writings the mind and the Soul are treated as if they were one and the same entity: in others, the mind is said to be part of the Soul: and there have been thinkers who separate mind and Soul entirely, most usually because of a wish to deny the existence of the Soul while maintaining the reality of mind.

Some philosophers have said that every living thing has a mind, or at any rate, a Soul, but others say or imply that only men and God and the angels have or are minds.

Some philosophers, for example, Leibniz and Teil-hard de Chardin, have believed that every created thing, whether animate or not, has or is a Soul or mind.

There are people who believe that machines such as computers can think, and that they have minds. Others deny the existence of machine-thought, or of machine-minds, or of both.

Faced with such a variety of conflicting theories, we might wonder how we know, if we do know, that all these opinions about the nature of the mind are indeed opinions about the mind. How, for instance, do we know that Dualists and Behaviourists and Materialists are all talking about the same entity? And how do they know that they are?

When a Dualist says that the mind is an independently existing incorporeal substance, and a Materialist counters with the view that it is an ordinary piece of matter; when a Behaviourist, in opposition to both, retorts that it is not a substance at all, but simply certain complex forms of behaviour: when such a three-sided dispute takes place, how can the protagonists feel confident that at least they are all talking about the same it?

Some central notion, however vague, must, it seems, underlie the conflicting philosophical theories about the nature of the mind. There must be some description of the mind to which we can all assent. Perhaps this description will turn out to be hazy, or negative or very incomplete, but it must be a possibility. If it were not a possibility, then we really would have no reason at all to feel confident that two different theories about the mind were in fact two theories about the same thing.

In spite of the puzzling character of the concept of mind, we do for all that have some sort of notion as to what the mind is, we do have some sort of notion as to what the word ‘mind’ means. In the rest of this chapter, I shall make some preliminary remarks about the notion. Some of these remarks will be negative, attempts to say certain obvious things about what the mind is not. Others will be geographical, attempts to place the idea amongst others which are similar, or which relate to it in one way or another, or which contrast with it.

THE MIND AND THE SOUL

Is the mind the same thing as the Soul? Sometimes but not always the two expressions mind and Soul can be used interchangeably. Some philosophers, but by no means all, have implied an identity between mind and Soul.

The claim that the Soul exists seems to be a bigger claim, and a more controversial claim, than the claim that the mind exists. Hence some who are willing to agree (as indeed who is not?) that human beings usually have minds, may well for all that deny the existence of the Soul. One reason for this is that it is the Soul, not the mind, which in the past has been thought of as possibly immortal, or capable of transmigration, or able to exist in a disembodied state. Those who deny the existence of the Soul are very often really concerned with denying the possibility of immortality. But there is no incompatibility between the mortality of man, and the existence of the Soul. Nevertheless the association between the notion of the Soul and a belief in immortality is very strong: no such powerful association exists between the idea of the mind and a belief in immortality. One reason why nowadays the word ‘Soul’ has a somewhat old-fashioned sound is simply that the belief in immortality is not so common as it used to be.

Although they are different, the notions overlap. It is not possible to give a simple yes-or-no answer to the question as to whether the mind and the Soul are identical. In some contexts ‘mind’ means much the same as ‘Soul’ and in other contexts it does not. Generally speaking, however, Soul incorporates more than mind. The word can indeed mean person, as in the phrase ‘poor Soul’. Mind is connected with intellect: it is, supposedly, either that which enables us to think, or that which thinks for us. Some philosophers have written about the mind as if it were an organ (physical or non-physical as the case may be): but it would be strange to say that the Soul was a ‘thinking organ’. Because, on the whole, the Soul has no capacities which belong to it pre-eminently in the way that thinking ‘belongs’ to the mind, it is possible to regard the mind as a part of the Soul, or as an aspect of the Soul. Yet again, on the other hand, Soul and mind are sometimes thought of as separate and even in a way as opposites. For there is a connection between the Soul and the emotions which is partly analogous to that between the mind and the intellect. The word ‘soulful’ never means brainy or clever or intellectual, even if the mind is supposed to be part of the Soul. Soulful often means the opposite of intellectual. Soulful music for example is supposed to be the kind of music which arouses emotion and which does not require much mental effort for its appreciation. If a dog has soulful eyes, that does not mean that he wears a thoughtful expression. ‘Soulless’ does not mean the same as ‘mindless’. A soulless person is one who is cold, unimaginative, unresponsive, wooden and incapable of strong emotion. But he is not actually incapable of thought. In extreme cases a soulless person lacks that kind of imagination and those kinds of responsiveness which are necessary for virtue and for the avoidance of wickedness. To say that a man is soulless might in some cases be tantamount to saying that he lacks pity: that he is callous, and capable of cruelty; and so on. In short, to say that someone lacks Soul can be a moral criticism.

ARE MINDS PARTICULARS, OR IS MIND A KIND OF STUFF?

The adjective mental is used to describe some of the abilities, capacities, powers and (perhaps) acts, of persons. It is a characterizing universal. Mind, being a noun, is not like this. Now, does the word mind work like for instance the words air, water, silver, in naming a kind of stuff, or is it, rather, like cat, dog, table, in being a universal which collects particulars? Or is it a word like wood, which sometimes collects particulars (forests) and at other times names a kind of material? Is it a ‘feature universal’ or is it a ‘sortal universal’?

Energy is a feature universal, for one can ask How much?’ but not ‘How many?’ and although energy is not matter it is in a broad sense a kind of stuff, one can say, in a broad sense, that a ray of light, for instance, is made of, constituted by, this or that form of energy. Certain kinds of excursion into peripheral aspects of the concept of mind, for example, those undertaken by people with an interest in phenomena like telepathy and ESP, provide almost the only reason one might have for thinking of mind as a feature universal. Descriptions of the phenomena just referred to tend to suggest that mind is a kind of energy which flows here and there, or that it is a kind of stuff, a quantity of which might be shared by a collection of persons. On the other hand, so far as I know, no ESP investigators ever actually ask ‘How much mind is there here?’ nor do they ever ask ‘Is X made out of, constituted by, mind?’ It is true that no one ever in fact asks ‘How many minds are there in this room?’ either, except as a joke; nevertheless this question seems to make some sort of sense, whereas the ‘How much?’ question does not. Minds, I conclude, are particulars.

MIND AND MATTER

In everyday life people often speak in ways which imply the existence of a contrast or contrasts between the spiritual and the corporeal, the mental and the physical, the material and the non-material, the physiological and the psychological: and so on. It has been said that Dualism is imbedded in ordinary language: certainly the distinction, whatever it is, between mind and matter is one which most people usually take for granted, at least in their ‘unconsidered talk.’ Even a Materialist must accept a distinction of some sort here, a distinction, for instance, between that which is material and that which is non-material. For otherwise his theory would be nothing but an empty platitude. Even a Materialist can presumably understand such a statement as ‘The mind is not a material thing’ for if he could not understand it how would he be able to deny it, and argue against it?

Perhaps then a brief investigation of that statement, a brief investigation of the term non-material, will throw a little light on that hazy but central notion which constitutes. the starting-point at least of arguments about the nature of the mind.

In the past some people have thought of the Soul as a kind of gaseous stuff, very light and airy, which spreads through the body. The mind, when it too is thought of as like a kind of gas is usually given a more specific location: its place is thought to be inside the head. It is notorious, of course, that no such substance has ever been discovered. All kinds of substances have been discovered in the human body, as forming part of its normal make-up, all kinds of glandular secretions for example, and all kinds of cells: but so far as I know none of these has been regarded as a possible candidate for the role of the Soul. Even those who cannot help thinking of the Soul as a kind of gas know all the same that they don’t mean by gas something which has a chemical make-up and physical characteristics: the Soul is not the sort of gas which could be liquified at minus 200 degrees centigrade for instance. It is a non-material ‘gas.’

There may or may not be something rather odd about the idea of a non-material substance: it is important to realize, however, that there is nothing peculiar about the idea of a non-material something-or-other, a non-material thing-of-some-sort. For the world is full of perfectly ordinary non-material things. Examples include rainbows, and holes in the ground, and the surfaces of objects, and corners, and expressions on faces and so on and so forth. Magnetism is not a material thing, and neither is the Aurora. Electricity, and beams of light, and the sky, are all non-material things.

The central, hazy notion of mind which we all start off with is such that the statement ‘the mind is non-material’ at least makes sense. But what sense? Is this immateriality the same sort of immateriality that is exemplified by, say, a rainbow, or by energy, or by a hole in the ground?

Some Spiritualists hold that Souls, or anyway the Souls of the dead, exist in the form of a kind of energy, a form of vibration. They allege that the living can detect these vibrations with practice. But the evidence for these assertions is, I gather, extremely thin. Furthermore, when physicists do discover new forms of energy neither they nor indeed the Spiritualists claim that the Soul has been identified at last. Energy forms are not real candidates, any more than are glandular secretions, for the role of the Soul. (This may be partly because, as was said earlier, Soul and mind are universals which collect particulars, whereas heat, magnetism, electricity, and the more general term energy are not sortal universals.)

The existence of non-material things like surfaces, corners and holes is logically dependent on the existence of material objects. It is logically necessary, and also immediately obvious, that there cannot be a surface which is not the surface of some object. It may or may not be the case that the existence of mind requires the existence of matter; it is certainly not immediately obvious what the right answer is.

Material objects like boulders and chairs can get in each others’ way, and material stuffs like liquids and gases can mix and merge. Now, minds do not get in each others’ way, neither do they mix or merge, and in this respect they may be said to resemble surfaces, corners and holes. On the other hand, surfaces, corners and holes exist in space and are perceived by the senses: minds are not like that. A hole can be mistaken for a (black) material object, but a mind could not be so mistaken.

Shadows, rainbows, the Aurora, are phenomena whose existence depends causally on the existence of material objects such as raindrops, the sun, clouds, and so on. These phenomena can be detected by the senses, and they exist in space, or at the least, they are ‘presented in space’. Clearly the mind is not a non-material thing in the same...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Index