socialmedian: It ain't in the head

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It ain't in the head

Source: The TLS

Oct 16, 2009

Summary

Philosophy, you understand, is a very pharmacopoeia of cures that are worse
than the corresponding diseases. This started a long while ago; perhaps with
Plato’s suggestion that, although there is a problem about how so many
different things can all be chairs, philosophy can fix it: there is only one
chair that is really a chair, the Chair on which no one can sit; the One
Chair that is in Heaven. This kind of philosophical overkill, having once
got started, has never stopped. Thus Descartes: the way to explain how your
mind causes your body to move is to say that the pineal gland performs a
miracle each time it does. Or Berkeley: the way to avoid scepticism about
perceptual beliefs is to say that chairs, tables and everything else are
made of ideas. Or Wittgenstein and Ryle: the solution of the epistemological
problem about how anybody can know whether anybody else is in pain is that
(other people’s) pains reduce to their pain behaviours, there being, by
assumption, no epistemological problem about recognizing them. Or take
Carnap and Ayer: the way to understa ...Read the full article

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