Philosophy of mind

The study of mental events, mental functions, mental consciousness, mental prosperities and the nature of mind is referred to as Philosophy of mind. It is branched out from modern analytic philosophy. The philosophy of mind mainly deals with the relation of the mind to the physical body. Though it also deals with the issues of mind that has nothing to do with the body, the central issue of the philosophy is to reckon the relationship between mind and body.

There are two main schools which toiled very much to resolve the mind-body problem. They are Dualism and monism. Dualism takes us back to Aristotle, Plato and to the Yoga schools of India.

The writings of Aristotle and Plato have the earliest discussions of dualist. It starts dealing with the mental phenomena telling that it is non-physical. Dualism in short is the relationship between the matter and mind. The eastern Sankhya and the yoga schools have expressed dualism in the Hindu philosophy.

A normal person would answer the question what is mind by identifying with their self, their soul, their personality and some other entities. But, they would refuse to accept the face that mind is just the brain. The fact there is just one ontological entity can play these many roles and to be too mechanistic is somewhat unbelievable.

In the philosophy of mind, many modern philosophers emphasized the fact that the critical faculties should be used to examine the assumptions and to determine the real basis of the assumptions.
There are many arguments that favored dualism in this period. One other important argument that favored dualism very much was that the physical and the mental seem to have irreconcilable properties. There is a subjective quality in the mental events whereas in the physical events there is no subjective quality. A good example is that one can directly ask what a blue sky looks like, what a burnt finger feels like but if someone is going to the ask what a surge in the uptake of glutamate in the dorsolateral portion of the hippocampus feels like, this would look awkward. It won’t make any sense directly.

If all our thoughts are the due to the physical cause, then there would be no reason for assuming that these thoughts are also the consequent of a reasonable ground. This is the main concept of the Argument from Reason.

The philosophy of mind has also had great impact in the concept of self.