After Mind

Abstract

Abstract: The concept of mind and the category of the mental are hugely influential. They are also fundamentally mistaken. They are ill-suited to describing human beings and our place in the world. They are recent, culturally specific, theoretically motivated, and value-laden. They mislead us about ourselves, nonhumans, the nature of psychology, psychiatry, and cognitive science, the nature of decision-making and responsibility, and much else besides. This book argues that we ought to abandon them, and accept that although we think, hope, fear, love, wish, and desire, and although we have inner lives and inner worlds, hidden depths and personalities, we do not have ‘minds’ or ‘mental’ states. It engages with scholarship across medicine, the sciences, anthropology, history, and philosophy. The problems with the concept of mind impact contemporary debates over topics as wide ranging as prison abolition, sex and gender, psychiatry and psychiatric illnesses, autism, animal ethics, legal definitions of decision-making, and much else besides. This book engages in these debates, aiming to offer humane views which eschew the notion of mind. It argues for views of consciousness; the self and the significance of our relationships to one another; the role of metaphor in our self-understanding; the history of psychiatry, psychology, and cognitive science; and much else besides—developing alternative ways of thinking about ourselves and the world. It does not offer a ‘hard-nosed’ materialism, but a view of science, medicine, and nature as expansive, diverse, complicated, and surprising, drawing on contemporary philosophy of science, empirical research, and complexity theory.