Abstract
If you’re going to call a volume ‘Philosophy in Mind’ you should eventually point out that in one crucial sense, the mind cannot possibly matter as much to philosophy today it has in the recent past. As David Stove has recently reminded us (Stove 1991), most of the good philosophers writing in the 19th century took it for granted that the world as a whole was in some sense psychic — penetrated through with thought or mentality — and hence that the study of Mind was the proper foundation for the study of absolutely everything. These days, of course, we can hardly take the idea seriously. Metaphysical idealism of the old German sort strikes us as simply incredible. And while the facts surrounding the eclipse of idealism are no doubt complex, it’s not very hard to say what it is about the way we think now that places the view beyond the pale of serious possibility.
I think many persons now see all or part of what I shall say: but not all do, and there is a tendency to forget it, or to get it slightly wrong. In so far as I am merely flogging the converted, I apologize to them.
J.L. Austin, ‘The Meaning of a Word’
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Rosen, G. (1994). Objectivity and Modern Idealism:What is The Question?1 . In: Michael, M., O’Leary-Hawthorne, J. (eds) Philosophy in Mind. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 60. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-1008-2_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-1008-2_17
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