Mentalism Vs. Physicalism?

Reviews 355 c:\users\ken\documents\type3702\red\rj 3702 064 red.docx 2018-01-25 6:31 AM MENTALISM VS. PHYSICALISM? Chad Trainer 2045b Raleigh Road Hummelstown, pa 17036, usa stratoflampsacus@aol.com Torin Alter andYujin Nagasawa, eds. Consciousness in the PhysicalWorld: Perspectives on Russellian Monism. NewYork: Oxford U. P., 2015. Pp. x, 462. isbn: 978-0-19-992735-7 (hb). us$62.00. n his autobiography, Bertrand Russell recalls the decreasing degrees of sympathy he felt with most people during his adolescence, especially outside the realm of politics. During these years, upon his grandmother’s discovery of his interest in metaphysics, she thought an adequately reflective dismissal of his interests was “What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind.” Russell notes: “At the fifteenth or sixteenth repetition of this remark, it ceased to amuse me” (Auto. 1: 45). Yet the mind/matter dichotomy persisted as a subject of the utmost interest to Russell for the rest of his long life. By his own account, up until 1912’s Problems of Philosophy, Russell “had accepted matter as it appears in physics. But this left an uncomfortable gulf between physics and perception, or, in other language, between mind and matter” (MPD, p. 78). Later, in the early 1920s, Russell depicted the plight as one wherein “many psychologists, especially those of the behaviourist school, … make psychology increasingly dependent on physiology and external observation, and tend to think of matter as something much more solid and indubitable than mind. Meanwhile the physicists, especially Einstein and other exponents of the theory of relativity, have been making ‘matter’ less and less material” (AMi, p. 5). Such paradoxical reflections prompted Russell to adopt the position of “neutral monism” according to which he forsook the mind/matter dichotomy and understood mind and matter, instead, as different ways of organizing and describing the same “stuff”. From this perspective, Russell noted, “As regards the world in general, both physical and mental, everything that we know of its intrinsic character is derived from the mental side, and almost everything we know of its causal laws is derived from the physical side” (AMa, p. 402). Unsurprisingly, the intrinsic character of the world physically and mentally, as well as its causal laws, abide to this day as areas still ripe for significant speculation. Billed as being the “first book-length treatment” of Russellian monism, Torin Alter and Yujin Nagasawa are the editors of Consciousness in the Physical World: Perspectives on Russellian Monism (abbreviated “CPW ”). The regard in which they hold Russellian monism is high. However, they argue that f= 356 Reviews c:\users\ken\documents\type3702\red\rj 3702 064 red.docx 2018-01-25 6:31 AM Russellian monism “will not become a mature, complete account until a theory of (proto)phenomenal1 composition that yields a plausible solution to the combination problem2 is devised” (CPW, p. 447). Three philosophers they consider to have “arguably anticipated Russellian monism or aspects of the view” (p. 3) are Leibniz, Kant, and James. Relevant, brief excerpts from their works make up the beginning of this volume. Also at the beginning of the volume are excerpts from Russell’s works. They feature his thought on the differences between neutral monism and both materialism and idealism, the knowability of mental events without inference versus the knowability of physical events only with respect to their space-time structure, how “the difference between mind and brain is not a difference of quality but a difference of arrangement”, his philosophy’s main points, and the stages of his philosophical development. Leibniz had argued that perception “cannot be explained by mechanical reasons” and that we must seek its nature in the “simple substance”, which is not constituted by extension alone. For Kant, the “faculty of sensibility’s” origin abides too obscurely for us who cognize our minds via only “inner sense”, thereby dooming us to discover mere appearances, much as we long to comprehend things in themselves. Then, for James, the constitution of “higher” mental states cannot be explained simply as a sum of “lower” ones. He decries the “mind-stuff theory” as unintelligible, arguing instead that states of mind encompassing the knowledge of many...

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