/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.17724777]

What's a good book to learn about philosophy of mind if I don't have any background in philosophy? I took proof based math courses in college if that makes any difference.

[Anonymous No.17724796]

>>17724777
>if that makes any difference
it doesn't

[Anonymous No.17724836]

Simo Knuuttila has a good sourcebook if you want some structure and to dive into primary sources. You should first of all distinguish philosophy of mind in the general sense from the specific subset of analytic philosophy, Philosophy of Mind. Whatever your opinion on the latter, it is a distinct sub-discipline with its own norms and history and those might not even be of interest to someone who studies philosophy of mind in the general sense. Any book you get called "Introduction to Philosophy of Mind" is probably going to represent the analytic one.

The analytic sub-discipline version is its own walled garden. I would say it's shit, others might disagree, but if you enter into a walled garden you should be aware that's what you're doing.

You are the math type, so you have probably already interacted with the analytic philosophy sorts so maybe that's the math you will go down. However I would at least recommend that you look at continental philosophy of mind, which tends to look more historically at different metaphysical systems in the development of philosophy, and includes major subsets of its own like phenomenology (hermeneutic, transcendental, and embodied).

I recommend reading Jean-Pierre Dupuy's critique of cognitivism before signing up for the cognitive science / analytic-style Philosophy of Mind approach. Not only is the walled garden I mentioned, it's also a recruiting depot for AI/machine learning/cognitive science research that isn't all that philosophical. Dreyfus' critique in What Computers Can't Do is also a classic if you end up falling down that rabbit hole.

Other than that, I recommend just learning various historical approaches to philosophical study of the mind. You could think heuristically in terms of metaphysics of mind (thinkers who try to explain the structure of cognition in relation to some metaphysical framework of the world in general) and epistemological approaches to the mind (thinkers who presume that before we can talk about the external world we need to have some kind of "immanently justified" framework for understanding the mind's operations, how it has access to truth in the first place, etc.). Obviously most thinkers tend to have metaphysical and epistemological aspects, but you might find that they place more emphasis on one or the other, or take one as their starting position, from which to derive the other.

[Anonymous No.17724840]

>>17724836
>with the analytic philosophy sorts so maybe that's the math you will go down.
Freudian slip, meant path you will go down.

Also here:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSzzuYDEQ4KBjMaqwqeYEiLxrRr83xwpi

[Anonymous No.17725019]

>>17724840
>>17724836
Thank you for your answer, anon. I did mean the analytic sub-discipline when I said philosophy of mind, though mostly because I thought that's where I would be more comfortable and hoped my lack of background wouldn't matter too much, but I've heard about the distinction between analytic and continental branches and would like to learn how each one approaches the subject. I was looking at Lowe's introduction to philosophy of mind right now. I'm guessing that one's about the analytic approach. Do you know of any book that would be about the same level but discusses the continental approach/approaches?
I'll check Dupuy's critique out. Thanks again.

[Anonymous No.17725030]

Ignore analytic philosophy whatever you do. It's just autism unleashed.

[Anonymous No.17725095]

>>17725019
I was actually reading Dupuy recently and found his characterisation of the differences between analytic/continental philosophy pretty good. He said they both have merits, but continentals are often willfully obscurantist, and analytics are often shallow and tedious. I don't entirely agree with the obscurantism complaint, I just see philosophy as necessarily esoteric, and look at gaining entry to a philosopher like Husserl or Merleau-Ponty as a fun challenge, but that's obviously because I'm biased as a continental guy.

Speaking freely from my position of bias here (so take it with a grain of salt), I think continental obscurantism and analytic tediousness can both be managed, so they're secondary issues - the real risk of the analytic approach is the shallowness. They just don't achieve the same depth. Analytics are too cut off from the historical tradition (whatever they might say to the contrary, and most of them admit this anyhow), and they tend to think in sclerotic "classic problems" that can be logically divided and subdivided instead. Sometimes these problems are interesting, and maybe they're even good places to start off when learning philosophy, but in my experience they smuggle in whole ways of viewing the world as unconscious axioms of their questioning in the first place. Usually this amounts to naive representationalist epistemologies, naive realist ontologies, native materialist/naturalist metaphysics and associated naive empiricist epistemologies, etc. This originally came from a healthy resistance to overgrown British idealism, a form of Hegelianism, but it has become much worse.

Lowe does look like a typical Oxbridge analytic. I don't know if there's anything singular from the continental perspective unless you want to just jump into phenomenology. Continental philosophy in general has been phenomenology heavy since Kant, it's sort of presumed that your philosophy has to start with an account of how the subject can know anything external to begin with (and this often includes depth-psychological studies of how things "present" FOR the subject, like phenomenology, and hardcore reflexive linguistic philosophies).

I wonder if you'd find James' Principles of Psychology a fun starting point. It's neither analytic nor continental, or I guess it's both if you prefer to call pragmatism a subset of analytic.

[Anonymous No.17725107]

>>17725095
Also if you are interested in phenomenology, you could do a few of Hubert Dreyfus' lectures on Merleau-Ponty (or Heidegger, he has another set of those). They're free online. He's Anglo so he kind of approaches phenomenology in a non-obscurantist way.

[Anonymous No.17725217]

>>17724777
There is an introduction by Edward Feser

[Anonymous No.17725236]

>>17724777
>>17725217
Seconding this, Feser's Philosophy of Mind is very entry level, and it's less biased towards Thomism than the rest of his stuff.

[Anonymous No.17725248]

>>17725019
Continental philosophers don't deal with the traditional themes of philosophy like the mind body problem these days, for traditional philosophical work there is only the analytic tradition.

[Anonymous No.17725286]

>>17724836
Analytic philosophy is not a "Walled Garden", they actually interact with other disciplines like cognitive science. Unlike Continental philosophers who have more or less stopped doing philosophy after the war.