Collective minds

Insect Minds For Human Minds

This chapter was originally published in the book Human Learning: Biology, Brain, and Neuroscience. The copy attached is provided by Elsevier for the author’s benefit and for the benefit of the author’s institution, for non-commercial research, and educational use. This includes without limitation use in instruction at your institution, distribution to specific colleagues, and providing a copy ...

Human Minds

Before proceeding, let me put to one side one familiar answer to my question. Most people, if asked what distinguishes humans from animals, would probably answer—“language”. Now, I certainly do not want to deny that our uniquely human facility with language plays some part in differentiating us intellectually from other animals. But it seems to me that, on its own, “language” does not add up to...

Mending Minds

Mending Minds. By Paul Winterton. Peter Davies, 1938, 8/6. This book is the result of an investigation undertaken on behalf of one of our great daily newspapers into the conditions obtaining in the Public Mental Hospitals of England and Wales and the subject of mental disease and its treatment in general. Whatever was the original intention of the investigation, the book actually constitutes pe...

Mending Minds

Natural minds

In Natural Minds, Thomas Polger joins a growing number of theorists who defend the mind-brain type-identity theory while casting doubt upon orthodox nonreductive varieties of functionalism in the philosophy of mind. Polger has written a fine book in a fast-paced style that covers a lot of ground. He discusses different kinds of multiple realizability and their support for functionalism (ch. 1),...