1 PHILOSOPHY OF MIND IN THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL TRADITION Philip J Walsh and Jeff Yoshimi 1. Introduction Contemporary phenomenology and philosophy of mind are vast areas of research In the PhilPapers database, phenomenology has over 34,000 entries, and philosophy of mind contains over 92,000 entries, distributed across consciousness, intentionality, perception, and metaphysics of mind, among others.1 The two areas come together at many points – think of two galaxies colliding But the metaphor is not quite apt They are not independent bodies of research that happen to overlap but are rather two phases of a continuous tradition that diverged for a time and are now, at least partially, reintegrating (the image of a diverging and reconverging flock of starlings – a murmuration – comes to mind) Philosophy of mind in the 20th century is typically understood in terms of a certain historical progression (cf Chapter 2): after rejecting introspection as unreliable, the behaviorists of the 1930s–1950s sought to understand the mind strictly in terms of publicly available data But behaviorism cannot account for certain inner feelings and states, so the identity theory emerged in the late 1950s as a viable physicalist alternative (Place 1956; Feigl 1958; Smart 1959) The identity theory posits a strict, reductive identity between brain states and mental states However, the one-to-one link between psychological terms and corresponding physical terms was problematic, since terms like “pain” seem to have a one-many relation to physical kinds (many types of system can feel pain) To address this issue, functionalists described mental states as states of a kind of finite state machine or probabilistic automaton, defined by a pattern of relationships between inputs, outputs, and other internal states (Fodor 1974; Putnam 1967) These systems have the attractive feature that they can be multiply realized in different physical systems Thus, octopi and humans can be in pain It is “non-reductive” physicalism because it does not posit a 1–1 identity relation between mental states and brain state types, but rather a many-one implementation relation (Stoljar 2015) Functionalism continues to be a dominant theory of mind 21