Analytic philosophy of mind abandoned its original anti-metaphysical stance during the twentieth century and adopted materialism, which was meant to align with the early program of analysis. By the end of the century, materialism faced a crisis, and efforts to resolve it have reshaped recent philosophical debates about the mind. Current trends suggest possible directions for the field in the coming decades.
Bertrand Russell's neutral monism, a metaphysical view that the fundamental constituents of reality are neither mental nor physical but neutral, evolved through three phases. Initially Russell rejected it due to epistemological commitments. In The Analysis of Mind he proposed a first neutral monism with deflationary theories of object and subject. A second neutral monism, from 1927, introduced intrinsic and extrinsic properties. The author argues Russell's agnostic metaphysics is too reductive for dualists and too mysterious for materialists, and may be more epistemological than metaphysical, potentially misconstrued within the Cartesian mind-matter framework.