Philosophy of Mind
Consciousness, intention, and the mind-body problem.
- ConsciousnessSubjective experience itself; the 'hard problem' is explaining why physical processes give rise to it.Concepts
- David ChalmersNamed the hard problem of consciousness and argued that explaining function leaves experience untouched.Figuresb. 1966
- G.E.M. AnscombeEnglish analytic philosopher (1919–2001), Wittgenstein's literary executor and translator, professor at Cambridge after Wittgenstein and Anscombe's own Oxford career, whose Intention (1957) founded modern philosophy of action and whose 1958 essay Modern Moral Philosophy initiated the late-twentieth-century revival of virtue ethics and reshaped Anglophone moral philosophy.Figures20th Century
- Henri BergsonFrench philosopher (1859–1941), professor at the Collège de France and Nobel laureate in Literature (1928), whose major works — Time and Free Will, Matter and Memory, Creative Evolution, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion — elaborated a philosophy of duration, intuition, and creative evolution that shaped early twentieth-century French thought and was the dominant philosophical reference in French intellectual life before being eclipsed by phenomenology and existentialism.Figures20th Century
- Mind-Body ProblemThe question of how mental states relate to physical states — Descartes' dualism inaugurated the modern version.Concepts
- Thomas NagelAsked what it is like to be a bat, and argued that objective description leaves something out.Figuresb. 1937