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The ‘Body-Mind Problem’ in Philosophy, Psychology and Medicine1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

Extract

There is a story about a distinguished mathematician who had been invited to deliver a course of advanced lectures to other high-powered students of mathematics on a subject about which he was known to have some original ideas. The course, however, got off to a slow start. He devoted three lectures to discussing whether a certain proposition P was or was not self evident. The proposition P was essential to the argument he wanted to develop. Happily, he was able to announce at the opening of his fourth lecture that he had decided that P was self evident. There was an audible sigh of relief. It was now known, on the highest authority, that P was self evident. From that the argument proceeded briskly and with irresistible logic to the lecturer's surprising and devastating conclusions.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1966

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References

page 153 note 2 Professor John Wisdom has reminded me that the germ of truth in this story lies in an authentic anecdote about a lecture delivered by the great G. H. Hardy.

page 156 note 1 Philosophy, Vol. XXI, No. 79. 07 1946.Google Scholar

page 156 note 2 Lord Brain, in later writings, would himself now seem to agree with this.

page 157 note 1 ‘So called’ because the description can be misleading. Even ‘linguistic’ philosophers agree that words are significant in their meanings and uses for, among Other things, helping us to understand the world in which we live.

page 163 note 1 ‘Other Minds’, Philosophical Papers, p. 77.Google Scholar

page 163 note 2 Emotion and the Concept of Passivity’, Proc. Arist. Soc., Vol. LXII.Google Scholar