Milinda’s Questions - Philosophy of Mind

Category Archives: Philosophy of Mind

Kim* on Philosophy of Mind

*(not this guy)
Kevin Kim is a reader and occasional commenter on this blog, and a blogger himself. Moreover, he’s the author of a (self-published) book entitled Water from a Skull: Essays on Religious Diversity, Christianity, Buddhism, Mind, and Other Things that Matter. I recently purchased a copy, thinking that reading it […]

¶ Posted 01 April 2008 † Alan Cook § ‡ Comments (0)

Vesuvius Day Linkdump

On the 1,928th anniversary of the destruction of Pompeii, let’s see what’s erupting around the Internet.
Here’s a review that my friend Darien Large wrote several years ago of Roger Penrose’s Shadows of the Mind. There’s a lot of other interesting stuff in the Daliverse; browse around a while.

I recently discovered that Peter Medawar’s classic […]

¶ Posted 24 August 2007 † Alan Cook § Buddhism ‡ Comments (2)

Griffiths review, concluded

(previous installment here)
The concluding chapter of OBM is quite brief. Griffiths summarizes his findings thus:
It seems, then, that in looking at the Indian Buddhist debates surrounding the attainment of cessation the following conclusions can be drawn about the basic Buddhist view of the relations between the mental and the physical. First, the mental and […]

¶ Posted 07 June 2007 † Alan Cook § Metaphysics § Buddhism ‡ Comments (1)

More Mindless-ness

Here, after much too long, is the long-promised continuation of my review of Paul Griffiths’ On Being Mindless: Buddhist Meditation and the Mind-Body Problem. No, this isn’t the complete review; I’ve drafted a conclusion, but need to consult the text again on a couple of points. (That’s one difficulty involved in writing about […]

¶ Posted 02 June 2007 † Alan Cook § Buddhism ‡ Comments (2)

Conscious plant people?

(go here for an explanation of that heading)

Philosopher Pete Mandik was interviewed for an article on consciousness in vegetative patients in today’s Wall Street Journal; Pete tells us about it at Philosophy of Brains. Apparently when you give verbal instructions to vegetative patients telling them to imagine doing certain things, there’s activity in the […]

¶ Posted 08 September 2006 † Alan Cook § ‡ Comments (1)

Minds and Thermostats

Note: This is an edited repost of a post on my predecessor blog. Original date: February 9, 2005. Remarks in italics are editorial comments added at time of reposting.

My pal Roger responded to an earlier post on David Chalmers (which I’ll try to repost also) with a question:

I wonder — where […]

¶ Posted 30 August 2006 † Alan Cook § ‡ Comments (0)

Duelling over Dualisms

There’s a very interesting discussion going on over on Bill Vallicella’s Maverick Philosopher about the “standard arguments” against mind/body dualism. Bill starts out by quoting Elliot Sober:
If the mind is immaterial, then it does not take up space. But if it lacks spatial location, how can it be causally connected to the body? When […]

¶ Posted 22 August 2006 † Alan Cook § Metaphysics ‡ Comments (3)

Siderits on Subjectless Pains

The following is quoted from pp. 39-41 of Mark Siderits’s Personal Identity and Buddhist Philosophy: Empty Persons (Ashgate Publishing Company, Burlington, VT, 2003.) It’s posted here as a supplement to my previous post.
The Reductionist denies that persons ultimately exist, but affirms the existence of such psychological events as pains. Since, Schechtman might assert, […]