K atalin F arkas I provide this sketch of Descartes’ conception of the mind because much of the following discussion will be usefully understood by the various critiques’ deep or superficial disagreement with certain elements of the Cartesian conception In one way or another, many philosophers in the 20th and 21st century objected to the idea that a solitary mind deceived by an evil demon or evil scientist can have the same mental features as we do; or to the idea that the physical basis of mental phenomena can be restricted to the brain; or to the idea that pure cognition is largely independent of the body This chapter focuses on developments in the analytic philosophical tradition (for a critique of the Cartesian conception in continental philosophy, see, for example, Hubert Dreyfus’s commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time ( Dreyfus 1991) I will not attempt to reconstruct all pros and cons in the debates I mention; for state-of-the-art summaries of these issues, it is worth consulting, for example, Lau and Deutsch (2014) and Wilson and Foglia (2011) Instead, I shall try to trace some broad historical tendencies that influenced philosophical thinking on the boundaries of the mind “Externalism” or “anti-individualism” 2.1 The semantic tradition Gottlob Frege is often identified as one of the first and most influential figures in the history of analytic philosophy.3 Frege proposed the first systematic modern theory of semantics, that is, a theory of how the semantic values (the truth and reference) of linguistic expressions are determined Semantics and symbolic logic have then gone on to become two of the greatest success stories in the history of analytic philosophy, and no doubt this is the reason why Frege is regarded as one of the founders of the tradition, despite the fact that he was a German thinker, deeply rooted in a philosophical tradition that was quite different from the English-speaking empiricism that forms a more congenial historical background to analytic philosophy I mentioned above the occasionally reoccurring anxiety in philosophy about the apparent lack of progress in the several thousand years’ history of the subject Semantics and logic have been seen by many as finally offering the prospect for real progress in philosophy, not just in semantic theory itself, but also as a tool to get a better grip on a wide range of philosophical issues We can find a vigorous expression of this sentiment, for example, in Timothy Williamson’s 2004 paper “Must Do Better” Williamson’s idea of progress in philosophy is well expressed in these complimentary words about Michael Dummett’s contribution to the realism/anti-realism debate: Instead of shouting slogans at each other, Dummett’s realist and antirealist would busy themselves in developing systematic compositional semantic theories of the appropriate type, which could then be judged and compared by something like scientific standards (Williamson 2006, 179) 258