Abstract
The philosophy of mind is the chapter of ontology that deals with the most basic and universal traits of the human mind, It can be either traditional (prescientific) or contemporary (science-oriented). The traditional philosophy of mind is, in a nutshell, the hypothesis that everything mental happens in the immaterial mind. This is the view of shamans and priests, as well as that of psychoanalysts, psychics, and New Age cultists. Idealist philosophers, linguists indifferent to real speakers, as well as many psychologists, concur. The famous philosopher Hilary Putnam (1975, 291) put it memorably, “We could be made of Swiss cheese and it wouldn’t matter.” And the founder of possible-worlds metaphysics denied the identity of mental states and brain states because one might imagine a brain state that is not a mental state, as well as a mental state existing without the corresponding brain state (Kripke 1971, 162–163). Thus, the fact that zombies are conceivable is used to prop up a philosophy of mind indifferent to the science of mind.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Reference
Bestmann, Sven, Jürgen Budewig, Hartwig R. Siebner, John C. Rothwell, and Jens Frahm. 2004. Functional MRI of the immediate impact of transcranial magnetic stimulation on cortical and subcortical motor circuits. European Journal of Neuroscience 19: 1950–62.
Bressler, Steven L., Wei Tang, Chad M. Sylvester, Gordon L. Shulman, and Maurizio Corbetta. 2008. Top-down control of human visual cortex by frontal and parietal cortex in anticipatory visual spatial attention. Journal of Neuroscience 28: 10056–61.
Elman, Jeffrey K., Elizabeth A. Bates, Mark H. Johnson, Annette Karmiloff-Smith, Domenico Parisi, and Kim Plunkett. 1998. Rethinking innateness: A connectionist perspective on development. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Ferrer, Emilio, Elizabeth D. O’Hare, and Silvia A. Bunge. 2009. Fluid reasoning and the developing brain. Frontiers in Neuroscience 3: 46–51.
Kosfeld, M., M. Heinrichs, P.Zak, U. Fischbacher, and E. Fehr. 2005. Oxytocin increases trust in humans. Nature 435: 673–6.
Machamer, Peter, Lindley Darden, and Carl F. Craver. 2000. Thinking about mechanisms. Philosophy of Science 67: 1–25.
Mahon, Bradford Z., and Adolfo Caramazza. 2009. Concepts and categories: A cognitive neuropsychological perspective. Annual Reviews of Psychology 60: 27–51.
Pastalkova, Eva, Vladimir Itskov, Asohan Amarasingham, and György Buzsaki. 2008. Internally generated cell assembly sequences in the rat hippocampus. Nature 321: 1322–7.
Pavlov, I. P. 1955. Selected works. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House.
Prather, J. F., S. Peters, S. Nowicki, and R. Mooney. 2008. Precise auditory-vocal mirroring in neurons for learned vocal communication. Nature 451: 305–10.
Purves, Dale, Elizabeth M. Brannon, Roberto Cabeza, Scott A. Huettel, Kevin S. LaBar, Michael L. Platt, and Marty G. Woldorff. 2008. Principles of cognitive neuroscience. Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates.
Sobel, N., V. Prabhakaran, E. E. Desmond, G. H. Glover, R. L. Goode, E. V. Sullivan, and J. D. Gabrieli. 1998. Sniffing and smelling: different subsystems in the human olfactory cortex. Nature 392: 282–8.
Wright, John Paul, Kim N. Dietrich, M. Douglas Ris, Richard W. Hornung, Stephanie D. Wessel, Bruce P. Lanphear, Mona Ho, and Mary N. Rae. 2008. Association of prenatal and childhood blood lead concentrations with criminal arrests in early adulthood. PLOS Medicine 5: 0732–9.
Kripke, Saul. 1971. “Identity and Necessity”. In Identity and individuation, ed. Milton K. Munitz, 135–64.
Hebb, Donald O. 1949. The organization of behavior. New York: Wiley.
–––––. 1967a. Scientific research, 2 vols. New York: Springer-Verlag Rev. ed.: Philosophy of science, 2 vols. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
–––––. 2006a. Chasing reality. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Bindra, Dalbir, ed. 1980. The brain’s mind. New York: Gardner Press.
–––––. 1980. Essay on mind. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Mountcastle, Vernon. 1998. Perceptual neuroscience: The cerebral cortex. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Zeki, Semir. 1993. A vision of the brain. Oxford: Blackwell.
–––––. 1954 [1894]. Anti-Dühring. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House.
––––––. 1997. The mystery of consciousness. New York: New York Review.
Lachs, John. 1963. Epiphenomenalism and the notion of cause. Journal of Philosophy 60: 141–6.
––––. 1980a. The mind-body problem. Oxford: Pergamon Press.
––––––. 2006. Philosophy of mind, 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: Westview.
–––––. 1977b. Emergence and the mind. Neuroscience 2: 501–9, 1977
Sherrington, Charles. 1964. Man on his nature. New York: New American Library.
Bartlett, Frederic. 1932. Remembering: A study in experimental and social psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tulving, Endel. 2002. Episodic memory: From mind to brain. Annual Review of Psychology 53: 1–25.
Raichle, Marcus. 2006. The brain’s dark energy. Science 314: 1249–50.
Feldman, Daniel E. 2009. Synaptic mechanisms for plasticity in neocortex. Annual Review of Neuroscience 32: 33–55.
Craver, Carl F. 2009. Explaining the brain. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Fodor, Jerry A. 1983. The modularity of mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Karmiloff-Smith, Annette. 2006. The tortuous route from genes to behavior: A neuroconstructivist approach. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience 6: 9–17.
Bennett, Max, and Peter Hacker. 2003. Philosophical foundations of neuroscience. Oxford: Blackwell.
Geschwind, Norman. 1974 (1965). Disconnexion syndromes in animals and man. In Selected papers on language and the brain, 105–236. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Reidel.
Clark, Andy. 2008. Supersizing mind: Embodiment, action, and the cognitive extension. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Paradis, Michel. (2004). A neurolinguistic theory of bilingualism. Amsterdam: John Benjamin.
Penfield, Wilder, and Waldo Rasmussen. 1968. The cerebral cortex of man: A clinical study of localization of function. New York: Hafner.
Thompson, Richard F. 2005. In search of memory traces. Annual Review of Psychology 56: 1–23.
Gray, Jeremy R., and Paul M. Thompson. 2004. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 5: 471–82.
Cattell, Raymond B. 1987. Intelligence: Its structure, growth, and action. Amsterdam: North Holland.
Dehaene, Stanislas, and Lionel Naccache. 2001. Towards a cognitive neuroscience of consciousness: basic evidence and a workspace framework. Cognition 79: 1–37.
Singer, Wolf. 2009. Consciousness and neuronal synchronization. In ed. Laureys and Tononi, 43–52.
Damasio, Antonio R. 1994. Descartes’ error: Emotion, reason, and the human brain. New York: G. P. Putnam.
Phelps, Elizabeth A. 2006. Emotion and cognition. Annual Reviews of Psychology 57: 27–53.
Pessoa, Luiz. 2008. On the relationship between emotion and cognition. Nature Reviews/Neuroscience 9: 148–58.
Bunge, Silvia A., and I. Kahn. 2009. Cognition: An overview of neuroimaging techniques. In Encyclopedia of neuroscience, ed. L. R. Squire, vol. 2, 1063–7. Oxford: Academic Press.
Logothetis, Nikos K. 2008. What we can do and what we cannot do with fMRI. Nature 453: 869–78.
Whitson, Jennnifer A., and Adam D. Galinsky. 2008. Lacking control increases illusory pattern perception. Science 322: 115–7.
Rizzolatti, Giacomo, and Laila Craighero. 2004. The mirror-neuron system. Annual Review of Neuroscience 27: 169–92.
Hickok, Gregory. 2009. Eight problems for the mirror theory of action understanding in monkeys and humans. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 21: 1229–43.
Shorter, Edward. 1997. A history of psychiatry. New York: Wiley.
Galilei, Galileo. 1953 [1623]. Il saggiatore. In Opere, ed. F. Flora. Milano-Napoli: Riccardo Ricciardi.
–––––. 1996. The conscious mind: In search of a fundamental theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Schacter, Daniel L. 2001. The seven sins of memory. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.
Lieberman, Matthew D., and Naomi I. Eisenberger. 2006. A pain by any other name (rejection, exclusion, ostracism) still hurts the same. In ed. Cacioppo, Visser, and Pickett, 167–88.
Dennett, Daniel. 1991. Consciousness explained. Boston: Little, Brown.
–––––. 1974a. Treatise on basic philosophy, vol. 1: Sense and reference. Dordrecht, NL: Reidel.
Stoljar, Daniel. 2006. Ignorance and imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
–––––. 1977c. Levels and reduction. American Journal of Physiology: Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology 2: 75–82.
–––––. 2003a. Emergence and convergence. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
–––––. 1973a. Philosophy of physics. Dordrecht, NL: D. Reidel.
–––––. 1967. Zettel, ed. G. E. M. Anscomb and G. H. von Wright. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2010 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Bunge, M. (2010). Minding Matter: The Plastic Brain. In: Matter and Mind. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 287. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9225-0_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9225-0_9
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-9224-3
Online ISBN: 978-90-481-9225-0
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawPhilosophy and Religion (R0)