Preface

Summary

The following is an interpretive investigation in the history of analytic philosophy. With it, I hope to begin to show what sort of significance the twentieth-century analytic inquiry into the nature of mind, experience, and consciousness has had for the continuing philosophical consideration of the human self-image. I argue that the contemporary debate about the explanation of consciousness, in particular, embodies an important and unresolved set of concerns about this self-image, and that historical investigation allows us to understand the hitherto obscure ways in which the analytic tradition has been defined by its responses to the distinctive philosophical problems of our understanding of ourselves.

Throughout this inquiry, I have adhered to the methodological assumption that the power of philosophy to yield means and methods of understanding that elucidate and edify – its way of making meaning out of the unthought foundations of our ordinary lives – depends, at each specific historical moment, on its way of imaging or imagining the human, of articulating the specific kind of being that human existence involves. In the broader history of philosophy, however, the greatest enduring significance of this articulation has probably not been its theoretical specification, once and for all, of some fixed truth of human nature, but rather its furtherance of the dialectic of our self-understanding, the interminable historical movement in which each successive image of the human defines the means and practices of thought that will ensure its own partial overcoming.