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A my K ind 4. The essays It was against this scientific backdrop – from psychology to neuroscience to computer science – that the philosophical debates discussed in this volume played out Not all of these debates were influenced by these empirical developments in the same way, and in some cases the influence is significantly more pronounced than in others But as I turn now to the twelve chapters of this volume, it should become clear that many of the preoccupations of 20th-century philosophy of mind are deeply influenced by the science of the century The volume begins with Phillip Walsh and Jeff Yoshimi’s discussion of the phenomenological tradition initiated by Edmund Husserl and then developed by figures such as Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Simone de Beauvoir As the study of phenomena – things as they appear as opposed to things as they really are – phenomenology is essentially the study of consciousness Though the work of the phenomenologists and the work of analytic philosophers of mind developed in isolation from one another for most of the 20th century, there is considerable thematic overlap between them and, as Walsh and Yoshimi show, there was also an increasing convergence between these areas of study by century’s end After providing a comprehensive overview of the phenomenological tradition in 20th-century philosophy, Walsh and Yoshimi turn to philosophical issues in which the intersection between phenomenology and philosophy of mind is particularly salient The first concerns perceptual content, where the work of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty has interesting points of contact with contemporary debates about non-conceptual content and the plausibility of representationalism While these points of contact have been increasingly explored in recent years, the second issue discussed by Walsh and Yoshimi – that of the phenomenology of the mindbody debate – still remains largely unexplored As Walsh and Yoshimi convincingly show, Husserl’s own phenomenology of the mind-body problem can help to elucidate the space of possibilities available for philosophical consideration In particular, by rejecting unlimited supervenience and endorsing only partial supervenience – by claiming, that is, that only some of an agent’s mental processes supervene on that agent’s physical processes – Husserl opens the door to a wider range of possible positions than was usually accepted in 20th-century philosophy of mind (Here Walsh and Yoshimi’s discussion connects nicely with the themes explored by Julie Yoo in Chapter 7.) In Chapter 2, I trace the discussion of the mind-body problem in 20th-century philosophy The dualist consensus that had dominated philosophical thinking about the relation between the mind and the brain since Descartes’ work in the 17th century came under significant pressure throughout most of the 20th century The story told here is perhaps well known – early in the century, philosophers were inclined towards various versions of behaviorism, which then was supplanted in mid-century by the development of the identity theory, which was in turn largely supplanted in the 60s and 70s by functionalism In this chapter, however, I attempt 10
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