These days, neu­ro­science seems to have a monop­oly on the mind. Flip to the sci­ence sec­tion of an estab­lished news­pa­per or mag­a­zine, and you’ll like­ly see the most allur­ing head­lines describ­ing the lat­est neur­al find­ings. So, now that pow­er­ful meth­ods of neu­roimag­ing can delve deep­er into the struc­ture of the brain than ever before, is there any­thing that we don’t know about the mind? Well, yes. Apart from stat­ing that it is a man­i­fes­ta­tion of the brain, sci­ence doesn’t offer much to explain what the mind is. In an unfor­tu­nate turn for neu­ro­science, no amount of brain scan­ning will reveal that, either.

It is at this sort of junc­ture that sci­ence pass­es the baton to phi­los­o­phy. Over the past few weeks, we’ve brought you two intro­duc­to­ry phi­los­o­phy cours­es (Crit­i­cal Rea­son­ing for Begin­ners and A Romp Through Ethics for Com­plete Begin­ners) by Oxford University’s Mar­i­anne Tal­bot.

Today, we bring you anoth­er of Talbot’s excel­lent philo­soph­i­cal primers: A Romp Through the Phi­los­o­phy of Mind.  The five-part lec­ture series begins with a dis­cus­sion of René Descartes’ dual­ism, which com­pris­es the idea that the mind is non-phys­i­cal and is there­fore dis­tinct from the body. The course then moves through an expo­si­tion of Iden­ti­ty The­o­ry, accord­ing to which all of our men­tal states are mere­ly man­i­fes­ta­tions of an anal­o­gous set of brain process­es. Once Tal­bot out­lines the draw­backs to each of these the­o­ries, she explains the views of sev­er­al oth­er phe­nom­e­no­log­i­cal camps, includ­ing the epiphe­nom­e­nal­ists, who see men­tal states as real but not phys­i­cal, and elim­i­na­tivists, who do not think that men­tal states are real at all. She then prompt­ly pro­ceeds to upend these con­cep­tions of the mind. As with all of Talbot’s pre­vi­ous cours­es, this one is high­ly rec­om­mend­ed.

A Romp Through the Phi­los­o­phy of Mind is cur­rent­ly avail­able on the Uni­ver­si­ty of Oxford web­site in both audio and video for­mats, and also on iTune­sU. (See the lec­tures above.) You can find it list­ed in our col­lec­tion of Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es, along­side class­es like Con­tem­po­rary Issues in Phi­los­o­phy of Mind & Cog­ni­tion, Hegel’s Phe­nom­e­nol­o­gy of Spir­it, and Mer­leau-Pon­ty’s Phe­nom­e­nol­o­gy of Per­cep­tion. They’re all part of our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Ilia Blin­d­er­man is a Mon­tre­al-based cul­ture and sci­ence writer. Fol­low him at @iliablinderman, or read more of his writ­ing at the Huff­in­g­ton Post.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Oxford’s Free Course Crit­i­cal Rea­son­ing For Begin­ners Will Teach You to Think Like a Philoso­pher

Learn Right From Wrong with Oxford’s Free Course A Romp Through Ethics for Com­plete Begin­ners

The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy With­out Any Gaps – Peter Adamson’s Pod­cast Still Going Strong

Most times when I hear some­one on a tear about the dan­gers of “polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness” I roll  my eyes and move on. So many such com­plaints involve ire at being held to stan­dards of basic human decen­cy, say, or hav­ing to share resources, oppor­tu­ni­ties, or pub­lic spaces. But there are many excep­tions, when the so-called “PC” impulse to broad­en inclu­siv­i­ty and soft­en offense pro­duces mon­sters of con­de­scend­ing pater­nal­ism. Take the above omnibus edi­tion of “Kant’s Cri­tiques” print­ed by Wilder Pub­li­ca­tions in 2008. The pub­lish­er, with either kind but painful­ly obtuse motives, or with an eye toward pre-empt­ing some kind of legal blow­back, has seen fit to include a dis­claimer at the bot­tom of the title page:

This book is a prod­uct of its time and does not reflect the same val­ues as it would if it were writ­ten today. Par­ents might wish to dis­cuss with their chil­dren how views on race, gen­der, sex­u­al­i­ty, eth­nic­i­ty, and inter­per­son­al rela­tions have changed since this book was writ­ten before allow­ing them to read this clas­sic work.

Where to begin? First, we must point out Wilder Pub­li­ca­tions’ strange cer­tain­ty that a hypo­thet­i­cal Kant of today would express his ideas in tol­er­ant and lib­er­al lan­guage. The sup­po­si­tion has the effect of patron­iz­ing the dead philoso­pher and of absolv­ing him of any respon­si­bil­i­ty for his blind spots and prej­u­dices, assum­ing that he meant well but was sim­ply a blink­ered and unfor­tu­nate “prod­uct” of his time.

But who’s to say that Kant didn’t damn well mean his com­ments that offend our sen­si­bil­i­ties today, and wouldn’t still mean them now were he some­how res­ur­rect­ed and forced to update his major works? More­over, why assume that all cur­rent read­ers of Kant do not share his more repug­nant views? Sec­ond­ly, who is this edi­tion for? Philoso­pher Bri­an Leit­er, who brought this to our atten­tion, humor­ous­ly titles it “Kant’s 3 Critiques—rated PG-13.” One would hope that any young per­son pre­co­cious enough to read Kant would have the abil­i­ty to rec­og­nize his­tor­i­cal con­text and to approach crit­i­cal­ly state­ments that sound uneth­i­cal, big­ot­ed, or sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly dat­ed to her mod­ern ears. One would hope par­ents buy­ing Kant for their kids could do the same with­out chid­ing from pub­lish­ers.

None of this is to say that there aren’t sub­stan­tive rea­sons to exam­ine and cri­tique the prej­u­di­cial assump­tions and bias­es of clas­si­cal philoso­phers. A great many recent schol­ars have done exact­ly that. In her Phi­los­o­phy of Sci­ence and Race, for exam­ple, Nao­mi Zack observes that “accord­ing to con­tem­po­rary stan­dards, both [Hume and Kant] were vir­u­lent white suprema­cists.” Yet she also ana­lyzes the prob­lems with apply­ing “con­tem­po­rary stan­dards” to their sys­tems of thought, which were not nec­es­sar­i­ly racist in the sense we mean so much as “racial­ist,” depen­dent on an “ontol­ogy of human races, which under­lay Hume and Kant’s val­ue judg­ments about what they thought were racial dif­fer­ences” (an ontol­ogy, it’s worth not­ing, that pro­duced sys­temic and insti­tu­tion­al racism). Zack respects the vast gulf that sep­a­rates our judg­ments from those of the past while still hold­ing the philoso­phers account­able for con­tra­dic­tions and incon­sis­ten­cies in their thought that are clear­ly the prod­ucts of will­ful igno­rance, chau­vin­ism, and unex­am­ined bias. An informed his­tor­i­cal approach allows us to see how books are not sim­ply “prod­ucts of their time” but are sit­u­at­ed in net­works of knowl­edge and ide­ol­o­gy that shaped their authors’ assump­tions and con­tin­ue to shape our own—ideologies that per­sist into the present and can­not and should not be papered over or eas­i­ly explained away with skit­tish warn­ing labels and didac­tic lec­tures about how much things have changed. In a great many ways of course, they have. And in some sig­nif­i­cant oth­ers, they sim­ply haven’t. To pre­tend oth­er­wise for the sake of the chil­dren is disin­gen­u­ous and does a grave dis­ser­vice to both author and read­er.

via Leit­er Reports

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Man Shot in Fight Over Immanuel Kant’s Phi­los­o­phy in Rus­sia

100 Free Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es Online

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness