Читать книгу What is Philosophy of Mind? - Tom McClelland - Страница 10

The mind invites a huge range of philosophical questions. Some of these we’ve come across in the last two sections – questions about the nature of perception, emotion, pain and so on, questions about the mark of the mental, perspectives and intentionality. And there are countless other questions that we won’t even touch upon. My focus in this book will be on the Three Big Questions:

1 The Mind and Matter Question: What is the relationship between mind and matter?

2 The Knowledge Question: How do we acquire knowledge of our own minds and the minds of others?

3 The Distribution Question: Which things have minds and what kind of mind do they have?

So what marks these out as the questions most deserving of our attention? Over the rest of this section, we’ll see that how we answer has important ramifications for how we answer the smaller questions. It’s hard to give an account of the nature of pain, for example, without taking a stance on the relationship between mind and matter. And over the rest of this book we’ll see that the most important theories in philosophy of mind are defined by how they answer the Big Questions. In fact, the whole history of philosophy of mind can helpfully be framed as the history of thought on these questions. With that in mind, let’s consider each question in turn.