The Mind–Body Problem
September 30, 2016 Jonathan Westphal
The mind-body problem—how the physical brain relates to the nonphysical mind—has troubled philosophers from Descartes to Kripke. Jonathan Westphal's book reviews the major proposed solutions: dualism, physicalism, antimaterialism, and scientific theories of consciousness. He then presents his own version of neutral monism, a largely forgotten approach held by Ernst Mach, William James, and Bertrand Russell, which treats mind and matter as two aspects of a single neutral substance. Westphal's version is unique among neutral monist theories because it offers an account of how mind and body interact.