PART FIVE
5A
René DescartesMind and Body
Review Questions
1. Explain Descartes’s reasoning for his claim that he has a clear and distinct idea of “mind.” Are Descartes’s arguments strong or weak?
2. Explain Descartes’s reasoning for his claim that he has a distinctidea of “body.” Are Descartes’s arguments strong or weak?
3 How does Descartes define “mind”?
4. How does Descartes define “body”?
5. Why does Descartes assert that corporeal objects exist, but that they are not exactly such as we perceive by the senses? How does God figure in Descartes’s assertion? Do you agree with Descartes? Explain your answer.
Margaret CavendishA Double Perception
Review Questions
1. Explain why Cavendish claims that the “natural mind and soul of man, not the supernatural or divine,”cannot be separated from matter. Do you agree with Cavendish?
2. Explain Cavendish’s distinction between “rational perception” and “sensitive perception.” Do you agree with Cavendish’s arguments? Explain your answer.
3. According to Cavendish, there is a “double perception” and a “double knowledge.” Explain what Cavendish means by these terms.
4. Cavendish criticizes Descartes’s claim that all other animals besides man lack reason since other animals cannot express their mind, thoughts or conceptions, either by speech or any other signs, as man can do. According to Cavendish, “although they cannot talk or give intelligence to each other by speech,nevertheless each has its own peculiar and particular knowledge.” Explain Cavendish’s arguments in support of her position.
5.. According to Cavendish, “perception, observation, and intelligence do not make reason—reason being the cause, and they the effects.” What does Cavendish mean by this claim?
Anne ConwayOne and the Same Thing
Review Questions
1. Explain what Conway means when she says that “In every visible creature there is a body andaspirit, ora more active and more passive principle.”
2. Explain what Conway means when she says that “spirit and body differ not essentially, but gradually, I shall deduce an argument from the intimate band or union, which intercedes between bodies and spirits.” Do you agree with Conway? Explain your answer.
3. Conway says, “if spirit and body are so contrary one to another, so that a spirit is only life, or a living and sensible substance, but a body a certain mass merely dead; a spirit penetrable and indiscerpible [having no separate parts], but a body impenetrable and discerpible [having separate parts], which are all contrary attributes.” Conway then asks the following question: What is that which joins or unites them together? Explain Conway’s point.
4. Conway asks a series of questions about the spirit: “Why does it require a corporeal eye so wonderfully formed and organized, that I can see by it? Why does it need a corporeal light, to see corporeal objects? Why is it requisite, that the image of the object should be sent to it, through the eye, that it may see it?” Conway uses this to support what claim? Do you agree with Conway?
5. Conway says that if the substance dualists are correct, then how does the mind, which is a non-physical substance, feel pain? Do you think that this is a strong argument against substance dualism? Explain your answer.
Lisa ShapiroThe Correspondence
Review Questions
1. Shapiro argues that in Elisabeth’s correspondence with Descartes, Elisabeth’s main challenge is to move Descartes to think more carefully about what issue?
2. Elisabeth argues that a substance dualist must hold that no matter what condition the body finds itself in—if, for example, a person has fainted—the mind should still be able to exercise its power of thought. Why is this an important issue for substance dualism?
3. Explain Elisabeth’s implication that there are certain limits to or conditions on the soul’s autonomy. Does Descartes agree with Elisabeth?
4. Explain Shapiro’s suggestion that “we can read Elisabeth as here working towards an intermediary position, one between the substance dualism she originally identified with Descartes’ own and the materialism which she then seemed to take to be the only alternative.”
5. Explain why Shapiro thinks that Elisabeth is arguing the following: “For maintaining that thought is an autonomous activity does not require us to claim that it is an independent substance; we need not think of thought as an entity subsisting in and by itself.”
5B
William JamesDoes Consciousness Exist?
Review Questions
1. James says, “I believe that consciousness, when once it has evaporated to this estate of pure diaphaneity, is on the point of disappearing altogether. It is the name of a nonentity, and has no right to a place among first principles.” Do you agree with James?
2.Explain what James means when he says about consciousness, “Let me then immediately explain that I mean only to deny that the word stands for an entity, but to insist most emphatically that it does stand for a function.”
3. James says, “There is, I mean, no aboriginal stuff or quality of being, contrasted with that of which material objects are made, out of which our thoughts of them are made; but there is a function in experience which thoughts perform, and for the performance of which this quality of being is invoked. That function is knowing.” Do you agree with James’s claim that this is what constitutes “knowing”?
4. James says, “ My thesis is that if we start with the supposition that there is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed, and if we call that stuff pure experience, then knowing can easily be explained as a particular sort of relation towards one another.” Do you agree with James’s “supposition that there is only one primal stuff or material in the world”?
5. Explain what James means when he says, “a given undivided portion of experience, taken in one context of associates, play the part of a knower, of a state of mind, of consciousness, while in a different context the same undivided bit of experience plays the part of a thing known, of an objective content. In a word, in one group it figures as a thought, in another group as a thing.”
Thomas NagelWhat Is ItLike to Be a Bat?
Review Questions
1. Explain the main idea behind reductionist theories of mind.
2. Nagel claims that “Without consciousness the mind-body problem would be much less interesting. With consciousness it seems hopeless.” Why does Nagel believe this? Do you agree with Nagel?
3. Nagel says of consciousness, “No doubt it occurs in countless forms totally unimaginable to us, on other planets in other solar systems throughout the universe. But no matter how the form may vary, the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism.” Explain what Nagel means by the phrase “there is something it is like to be that organism.”
4. Explain what Nagel means when he says, “It is useless to base the defense of materialism on any analysis of mental phenomena that fails to deal explicitly with their subjective character. For there is no reason to suppose that a reduction which seems plausible when no attempt is made to account for consciousness can be extended to include consciousness.”
5. Explain what Nagel means when he says, “If the subjective character of experience is fully comprehensible only from one point of view, then any shift to greater objectivity—that is, less attachment to a specific viewpoint—does not take us nearer to the real nature of the phenomenon: it takes us farther away from it.” Do you agree with Nagel?
Patricia Smith ChurchlandThe Hornswoggle Problem
Review Questions
1. Explain what is meant by the Hard Problem of consciousness.
2. Explain Churchland’s argument against the idea that “problems such as the nature of short-term memory, long-term memory, autobiographical memory, the nature of representation, the nature of sensory-motor integration, top-down effects in perception—notto mention such capacities as attention, depth perception, intelligent eye movement, skill acquisition, planning, decision-making, and so forth,” are the so-called Easy Problems. Do you agree with Churchland?
3. What are qualia and how do they figure in the Hard Problem argument?
4. According to Churchland, “There is a vast psychological literature, and a nontrivial neuroscientific literature, on this topic. Some of it powerfully suggests that attention and awareness are pretty closely connected. The approach might of course be wrong, for it is an empirical conjecture.” Explain what Churchland means by “an empirical conjecture.”
5. Churchland says, “What drives the left-out hypothesis? Essentially, a thought-experiment, which roughly goes as follows: we can conceive of a person, like us in all the aforementioned Easy-to-explain capacities (attention, short term memory, etc.), but lacking qualia.” What is Churchland’s argument against this thought-experiment?
Max VelmansHow to Define Consciousness—and How Not to Define Consciousness
Review Questions
1. Velmans says, “Following the success of the brain sciences and related sciences, 20th century theories of mind in the West became increasingly materialistic.” What does Velmans mean by this? Give some examples.
2. Explain what it means to be a “property dualist.” What are some criticisms of this position?
3. Explain what it means to be a “reductionist.” What are some criticisms of this position?
4. What does Velmans mean when he says, “we can say that when consciousness is present, phenomenal content (consciousness of something) is present”?
5. Explain what Velmans means when he says, “To allow a clear distinction between consciousness of oneself and consciousness of things other than oneself, it makes more sense to reserve the term self-consciousness for a special form of reflexive consciousness in which the object of consciousness is the self or some aspect of the self.”
5C
John LockeIdentity and Diversity
Review Questions
1. Explain Locke’s definition of “personal identity.”
2. Explain Locke’s meaning when he says, “we see the substance whereof personal self consisted at one time may be varied at another, without the change of personal identity; there being no question about the same person, though the limbs which but now were a part of it, be cut off.”
3. Explain Locke’s meaning when he says, “it must be allowed, that, if the same consciousness can be transferred from one thinking substance to another, it will be possible that two thinking substances may make but one person.”
4. Explain Locke’s meaning when he asserts that if the same consciousness is preserved, whether in the same or different substances, then the personal identity is preserved. Do you agree with Locke?
5. Explain Locke’s meaning when he says, “For should the soul of a prince, carrying with it the consciousness of the prince’s past life, enter and inform the body of a cobbler, as soon as deserted by his own soul, every one sees he would be the same person with the prince, accountable only for the prince’s actions: but who would say it was the same man.” Do you agree with Locke?
David HumeI Am a Bundle of Perceptions
Review Questions
1. Explain Hume’s point when he asks, “Unluckily all these positive assertions are contrary to that very experience, which is pleaded for them, nor have we any idea of self, after the manner it is here explained. For from what impression could this idea be derived?”
2. According to Hume, “It must be some one impression, that gives rise to every real idea.” Do you agree with Hume? Explain your answer.
3. Hume asserts that “Pain and pleasure, grief and joy, passions and sensations succeed each other, and never all exist at the same time.” Do you agree with Hume? Explain your answer.
4. Explain Hume’s point when he says, “For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure.”
5. According to Hume, “When my perceptions are removed for any time, as by sound sleep; so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist.” Do you agree with Hume? Explain your answer.
J. David VellemanSo It Goes
Review Questions
1. What is the main question that Velleman wants to explore?
2. Explain the difference between “endure” and “perdure” as they refer to a “self.” Which of these ideas do you most agree with? Explain your answer.
3. Explain what Velleman means when he says that an effect produced by “experiential anticipation, in which I prefigure a future experience from the perspective that I expect to occupy in it. A single self appears to have its full existence both now and later, because I who anticipate the experience and the ‘I’ of the anticipated experience become superimposed.”
4. Explain what Velleman means when he says, “I want to suggest that the existence of an enduring self, if it is indeed an illusion, is one of two illusions that go hand-in-hand. A consequence of shedding the one illusion would be to shed the other as well. The other illusion of which I speak has to do with the nature of time.”
5. Explain the difference between what an “eternalist” believes and what a “presentist” believes. Which position do you agree with? If you don’t agree with either one, then state why.
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