Mental Reality

What is distinctive of the mental? In Mental Reality, Galen Strawson argues that the answer is not intelligence, representational content, or intentionality broadly understood, but conscious experience. Strawson challenges neobehaviorist accounts of the mental. He argues that much contemporary philosophy of mind is still confused by positivism and its various offspring. It gives undue primacy of place to nonmental phenomena, publicly observable phenomena, and behavioral phenomena in its account of the nature of mind. Strawson describes an alternative position, naturalized Cartesianism, that couples the materialist view that mind is entirely natural and wholly physical with respect for the idea that the only distinctively mental phenomena are those of conscious experience.

A Bradford Book. Representation and Mind series