“In philosophy, the problem is philosophy itself; moreover, in every instance this problem is stated according to the historical and personal situation in which the philosopher finds himself, and this situation is in turn determined in large measure by the philosophic tradition to which the particular philosopher belongs. The entire philosophical past is included in every act of philosophizing.”

Julián Marías

“It is odd that someone who has occupied a place, often only in the background of your thoughts, but also often in the very center of them, who then perhaps for months has lived with you all the working hours of the dty and often in your dreams, should slip your consciousness so completely that you can remember neither his name nor what he looks like. You may even forget that he ever existed. But on occasion it does not happen like that.”

W. Somerset Maugham

To define “practical” we should start with a contrast with “theoretical”. In science, the separation is not difficult to make. But philosophy is not and has never been scientific. Philosophy is always theoretical. There is no way to verify philosophical theories. Epistemically, then, philosophy is never practical. Any history of philosophy, which is the only reputable way to define philosophy, is about the continuity and elaboration of philosophical thought. Philosophical thought is abstract in the sense of wanting to transcend history towards permanence and universality. Aristotle did not write with slaves in mind, but he found a place for slaves in his philosophy. Philosophy is essentially systemic and comprehensive. It is impossible to deal in abstractions and resist the temptation to make incursions into all aspects of the historical. Nowadays, a philosopher would be foolhardy indeed to include nature into his musings, but at the beginning all natural sciences were part of philosophy. This was possible because there was not only little competition from science but even mathematicians considered that they were part of a tradition of thinking about reality which was above and beyond Herodotus or Thucydides. The task of the history of philosophy is to delve into the thought of individual philosophers, to find in them consistency and coherence, but also to find the ways in which Plato and Aristotle are linked, how they were influenced by the Pre-Socratics, and how their thought went on being influential through the ages. But it is possible to write about the history of ancient Greece, Rome, and nascent Europe without invoking what philosophers were thinking. Boethius, the last great Roman philosopher, was a politician, but his philosophy had little influence on the barbarians who destroyed Rome and laid the foundations for modern European states. It is if anything the other way around: politics influencing philosophical thought; the historical invading the abstract.

            Politics and history are, therefore, practicalities as opposed to the theoretical- philosophical. Augustine tried to be at once philosophical and practical. His Confessions abound in philosophical insights, but they were intended to persuade unbelievers. Augustine is not considered a major influence on the Christianization of Rome and the barbarians. And his City of God was only conceived as a contrast, an invention to condemn and, in some manner, to supplant and compensate for the pagan, circus-loving, and crumbling empire he lived in, somewhat like Rousseau’s social contract was a fiction to combat the autocratic ancient régime, at least so his muddled theory was interpreted. We can, therefore, consider that politics is at the other extreme of philosophy in practical matters. Yet we shouldn’t dismiss outright any possible connection between the practical and the philosophical. For Kant, “practical philosophy” referred to ethics, which is appropriate enough, but what that part of his philosophy tried to do was to give rational grounds for all morals. Apart from Kant’s arguments, there was little originality in his goal. He certainly would have liked the world to be better, but he in effect justified the world as it was. Hegel went further than Kant in that he endeavored to make history and politics domains within philosophical thought. Unlike Kant, who wanted to make philosophy practical by relating it to society, Hegel went instead into society and brought into philosophy what he considered to merit the systemic and abstract character of philosophical thought. But Hegel’s conclusions and his method were not ultimately very practical. His historical dialectics are no substitute for logic and his politics were extremely conservative. One of his followers, Karl Marx, was very practical indeed, but to be this he chose economics and politics over true philosophical thought, which he considered transient and biased as part of a class-based social superstructure. Marx ultimately didn’t care much for philosophy and his followers can only claim a philosophical mantle for him by implication and extrapolation.

            Bertrand Russell took a different approach to the practicality of philosophy. Or rather he took two approaches, if you consider that arithmetic needs to be justified by logic. It is true that logic, being truly universal and heritable, has “primacy” over numbers, which are empirical, but mathematical calculations are so exact and accurate that logarithms, such as multiplication tables for exponentiation, suffice to demonstrate their validity. It is instructive and entertaining and even “philosophical” to show how numbers can be logically derived using predicate logic, as Douglas R. Hofstadter demonstrated in his work Gödel, Escher, Bach: an eternal golden braid, but the practicality of this is questionable and Hofstadter’s conclusion—that artificial intelligence is possible—is contested by many philosophers, which they probably shouldn’t if quantum computing has any possibility at all of becoming a reality. When Russell tackled the entire history of philosophy he strained to make it relevant to politics. To do this, he had to assert questionable claims and contort the category of philosophical thought in such a way as to include in philosophy much writing that does not belong there as well as to establish remote and unlikely links between ideas and political events.

            Russell asserted that the biography of the legendary Spartan law-giver Lycurgus by Plutarch, who was not a philosopher, “had a great part in framing the doctrines of Rousseau, Nietzsche, and National Socialism”. This is as far-fetched as the statement that the classical Greek conception of “government by cultured gentlemen” was the antecessor of an enlightened 18^th century ruler such as Joseph II Habsburg. Another daring reach was his claim that the Catholic church “brought philosophical beliefs into a closer relation to social and political circumstances”. This is tantamount to saying that Thomas of Aquinas rather than a product of his time was its shaper, which not even neo-Thomists would dare affirm. The church was indeed practical, but the philosophers who, through Aristotle, gave philosophical grounds for its doctrines, were justifying a fait accompli and not the other way around. Jaroslav Pelikan, a specialist on medieval philosophy, argued that the proofs of God’s existence, which Thomas famously stated, were not really a defense against atheism, which had few if any followers in the Middle Ages, but a celebration by the Church Triumphant of its eminence; hence, that even theologically they had little relevance, much less so to society. Russell traces the Catholic Church’s opposition to Holy Roman emperors to Augustine’s City of God. He does not really go that far, but almost, because his belief was that Augustine sustained with his work the Church’s policies. But Church-imperial relations had more to do with international politics than with anything that Augustine could even have imagined.  More advisedly, Russell makes Augustine the inspiration for Calvin and the Geneva theocracy he founded, for it is true that Augustine believed in pre-destination, but as his Confessions state over and over, it was through God’s promptings that he was led from his erroneous beliefs to Christian faith. If God could do this for him, the implication was that he could also do it for any sinner. Calvin never bared his soul the way Augustine did.

            Russell is particularly emphatic on Rousseau’s political influence, but on this he is not entirely on his own. Although Rousseau was too disperse to be considered a systemic or systematic thinker, any historian of philosophy is bound to include a commentary on the “social contract”. Julían Marías, a very competent Spanish historian of philosophy, considers that Rousseau’s “ideas were an essential element in the background of the [French] Revolution and influenced European political thought for a long time”. But Russell makes him vastly more influential. The “social contract” at the origin of the state from lawlessness, embodies the renunciation of all individual wills into the “will of all”, which is the “sovereign”. Marías points out that Rousseau also posited the “will of the majority”, which is the base of democracy. But in Russell the “sovereign” is much more powerful than that. It is what remains when individual differences cancel each other out, thus in theory it represents the “will of all”. The “sovereign”, therefore, has to do away with any form of “corporativism”, which would distort the “will of all”. Now, one would think that this went against Italian fascism in which “democracy” is expressed through the bonding of the different sectors of society. But Russell takes another tack. He admits that Rousseau was in favor of a system of checks and balances, such as Montesquieu proposed. But the salient feature in his view of Rousseau is the “sovereign” itself, which will inevitably be corrupted by power and lead not to democracy but to the Reign of Terror under Robespierre, to Prussian autocracy as defended by Hegel, and to totalitarianism in Germany and the USSR. For him, what Rousseau did was to pay lip service to democracy while in reality defending the worst excesses of dictatorship. With curious inconsistency for a philosopher who made logic the centerpiece of philosophy, previously Russell had written that “Rousseau and the romantic movement extended subjectivity from theory of knowledge to ethics and politics, and ended, logically, in complete anarchism such as that of Bakunin”. You could well ask of him: either tyranny or its absolute rejection, but you cannot have both.

            In his politico-philosophical genealogies, Russell is much more daring. He writes: “Since Rousseau and Kant there have been two schools of liberalism, which may be distinguished as the hard-headed and soft-hearted. The hard-headed developed, through Bentham, Ricardo, and Marx, by logical stages into Stalin; the soft-hearted, by other logical stages, through Fichte, Byron, Carlyle, and Nietzsche [again and again this potpourri of philosophy and non-philosophy], into Hitler.” He admits that this is too “schematic” to be “quite true”, but he does not make any real disclaimer and, what grates even more, is that the philosopher who only trusted logic could speak of “logical stages” without even attempting to spell them out. This was left to the nonplussed reader. From his schema one could have described Hitler as a “Byronian liberal romantic” and Stalin as an “utilitarian liberal Marxist”. Marx would have turned in his grave if he had been able to read that he was being associated with Bentham, one of the pillars of laissez-faire capitalism. Hitler’s ghost wouldn’t have given a damn, because he was neither a philosopher nor a liberal nor anything but an egomaniacal, psychopathic murderer whose only work, Mein Kampf, is so superficially and impenetrably unreasonable that even Mussolini, who was at least partly its inspiration, called it “unreadable”. Russell’s struggle to make philosophy relevant to history and politics was misguided. But there is a far better explanation for his concern with the philosophical origins of totalitarianism. It is also the best way to refute his political contentions.

            Russell missed at least three times. If there is a consensus, it is that his attempt to derive arithmetic from logic is incomplete. During World War I he was jailed for his pacifism, which has a lingering odor of “non-valor”. (D.H. Lawrence at least had the excuse that he was not only a pacifist but also downright anti-patriotic.) And Russell’s anti-nuclear activism in London, which in practical terms amounted to unilateral disarmament, never went anywhere because it had nowhere to go. What seems self-evident is that Russell, who, by the time of World War II, was too old to be jailed for refusing conscription, was so traumatized by this conflict that he could not but do his utmost to make philosophy relevant to it. What his history of philosophy demonstrated, then, is not the influence of philosophy on politics but the utter irrelevance of philosophy to even the most momentous of historical events. The only possible connection between philosophy and Hitlerism is that Nietzsche’s sister, Elisabeth, whom the philosopher disliked (though she admired him), compiled after his death selections of his unpublished writings which then appeared as The will to power, but, first, some historians have called this work a virtual forgery, and second, it had nothing to do with the rise of Hitler, who needed no tutors for his own will to power. Nietzsche was not anti-Semitic and it is a matter of dubious speculation whether he would have hailed National Socialism as conforming to his beliefs. He did defend the so-called “over-man”, but he did not attribute its qualities to the German masses as Hitler did. Nietzsche probably would have been repelled by Nazi vulgarity.

            There are some senses in which philosophy can be said to very practical. Boethius’ Consolation of philosophy embodies one of them. This work was written in jail while the philosopher awaited execution, which came one year after his initial imprisonment. It tries to reconcile God’s omniscience with free will, but one can see through it to Boethius’ submission, inevitable in the circumstances, to divine will, and anyway philosophy would not be something an ordinary convict would recur to before facing capital punishment. There is a still older sense of philosophy as practical and that is in the maxim “know thyself”, often associated with the figure of Socrates. But we know Socrates through the Platonic dialogues and these usually conclude in paradoxes and non-sequiturs, which are hardly conducive to self-knowledge. Knowing one self is more easily said than done. As Shakespeare showed in the figure of Hamlet’s Polonius, it is not so much a hard task as a mandate to be trite. Since the empiricist David Hume, try as he might, could not find anything in himself that could be called the “self”, then pseudo-philosophical talk on “self-knowledge” for him was empty. The subject itself did not exist. Though it hardly requires philosophical training to discover this, our “selves” are propositions about how we conceive our lives, which is not always in the same way, and these propositions are as often as not reflections of the positions that we occupy in society, which determine how others see us and can serve as correctives to our view of our selves or even determine those views. It would not be very sensible to consider myself a genius if I could not produce some work that made others coincide with my opinion of myself. I could still live with this illusion, but I would have to keep it to myself if I did not want to be the object of ridicule, which would certainly do little for my self-esteem.

            What we are doing here are pirouettes around the concept of mind. Hume was starkly philosophical about selfhood. But it is only commonsensical to think that he was wrong. If there were no “selves”, then we would all logically have to be the same, and what would death then matter to any one? If there is no self to defend, I wouldn’t much care whether I lived or died. We may not be able to say something completely objective about our individual selves, but Hume based his argument on reflection from awareness, and awareness is the one idea that induces a consensual belief in mind. If mind exists, as it has to be a predicate of humanity, and not just of philosophers, a philosophy of mind would be extremely “practical”. But is such a thing possible at all?

            To put a machete to all the brush around the theme, philosophy would not exist without mind, not to speak of anything else. The common denominator of mind through time is the awareness of mind. But philosophy as the history of philosophy has not been, well, of one mind about the value of the awareness of mind. It is possible to do a succinct history of philosophy, perhaps, as Russell would put it, too schematic to be “quite true”, from the reliance that philosophers have put on the awareness of mind and the consequences that derive from this awareness. If not entirely “true”, it would not be without some justification. The root of the problem is the relation between mind and the world. When philosophy started gestating, Parmenides defined that relation in a forthright manner: “The thing that can be thought and that for the sake of which the thought exists is the same; for you cannot find thought without something that is, in relation to which it is uttered.” There can be different interpretations of this, especially what Parmenides meant by “in relation to which it is uttered”, which seems to imply that you cannot express what does not exist. But the wider and distinct sense of what Parmenides said, apart from any “mysticism” about the union of self and world or the immutability of being, is that perception is reliable. There is no question here of doubt about the existence of mind and world in unbreakable connection through the senses.

            Of Plato it is argued that he placed little value on the perception of the world, because for him there existed a realm of ideas which were the perfect models for the things that we see, although he never denied that we see what we see. Sensible Socrates never consistently disputed the ultimate reliability of perception and Plato’s world of ideas, if it could be reached through philosophy, would be as real, hence as perceivable, as the shadowy things that inhabit the world around us. Plato never spoke of ideas as “unreal” in a robust, earthy sense and he certainly did not propose any special means with which to grasp them outside of the faculties that man is already endowed with. To get to the ideas you had to go through the objects that we perceive and, as there is no other way to grasp ideas, then, however we grasped them, it had to be in a manner at least analogical to perception. Anyway, it is those who believe that Plato fathered the “Christian soul” that make a great fuss about whether Plato really believed that that there existed trans-perceptual things, and it is those who look at Plato in a cold, rational manner who dismiss the “world of ideas” as allegory or as a vague and purely subjective aspiration to immortality. Parmenides’ pronouncement would remain valid for philosophers from when it was uttered to when it was first seriously questioned. It is true that Sextus Empiricus, often disdained as derivative yet for all that the only ancient Greek sceptic whose work has come down to our times almost intact, did a seemingly exhaustive catalogue of the ways in which the world could deceive the senses, but he never proposed mind as an alternative source of knowledge nor did he propose anything about knowledge other than a “wait and see”, non-committal attitude. There is no “sceptical philosophy” in the systemIc, affirmative sense that philosophy requires, at least not in Sextus Empiricus, which again may be why he is given no more than a mediocre status.

            The philosopher who first turned to mind as more reliable than perception and thus gave a revolutionary spin to philosophy was the Frenchman René Descartes. Descartes was a scientist and especially he was a mathematician, which means that he was partial to only those propositions that could be accepted without doubt. He was not foolish enough to believe that there did not exist a world in which people and things existed in space, but there was no logical relation between his thought of this world and the world itself, and at least through mind he thought he could formulate some irrefutable propositions, such as making ideas as “clear and distinct” as possible. Why would he put more faith on this questionable enterprise than on perception, is precisely because he believed that, except about God, faith had no place in knowledge and perception required more faith than the self-evident truth that he existed. If we consider that we have only memory to assure the continuity of perception and memory is very fallible, then Descartes’ method of “systematic doubt” does not seem quite as preposterous as it sounds. It was so un-preposterous that every important philosopher that came after him and until the early 19^th century started with either his premises or something like them. If before, on Parmenides’ account, perception and mind were taken for granted. after Descartes perception was not taken for granted and mind engendered a lot of philosophical speculation. Post-Cartesian philosophy is about the solution that other philosophers gave to Cartesian scepticism and the deductions they made along the way. Descartes’ own solution was that God would not permit that what he saw could be an illusion engendered perhaps by some “malicious demon”, but he was adamant on that mind was wholly different from matter, maybe, just maybe, communicating through the  pineal gland, but this was based on the erroneous belief that this organ in the brain has no duplicate, like the two frontal lobes. Descartes shifted the emphasis from perception to the awareness of perception and in the process created the problem of mind-matter dualism.

            Despite perceptual scepticism, Cartesianism gave on the whole a boost to science within philosophy, which is somewhat ironical for, when philosophy turned its back on mind-matter dualism (for a time), it looked towards science as a model. Cartesianism also kept bringing God into the philosophical realm (as opposed to theology), but as a given and not something that had to be proven. John Locke was not really a Cartesian, but his probing into “human understanding” was a direct consequence of Descartes’ emphasis on mind rather than on what impinges on mind. The Dutch philosopher Benedict Spinoza was definitely Cartesian, but he did not invoke God as the solution to dualism but conceived of a pantheistic universe in which dualism was irrelevant, for, in essence, if God was in all things for an individual to look at the world would be as if he was seeing himself. Leibniz was a mathematician like Descartes and he took on the Cartesian problem lock, stock, and barrel. He invented what he called “monadology”. No one really knows exactly what that is but it is usually described, analogically, as if God had set up two clocks at the same time, one in the mind and another outside the mind, and made them run concurrently with unerring precision. British philosophy derived from Cartesian dualism is called “empiricism”, although its emphasis on mind makes this qualifier seem somewhat oxymoronic, but there was reason in it. Locke was so un-sceptical about perception that he recurred to the concept of tabula rasa (clean slate) as the premise of his epistemology which was psychological in nature. There were no inborn concepts and all knowledge derives from experience. Bishop Berkeley was meticulous about external reality, but, like Descartes and Leibniz, he believed that the reliability of perception was guaranteed by the existence of God. From a “realistic” epistemic perspective, the most important of the empiricists was David Hume, who developed two very important arguments: one, that in going over the caravan of his experience he did not find anything called the “self”, and, two, that cause-and-effect could not be shown from logic and were therefore consecutive associated events (“constant conjunction”). The Cartesian imprint in Hume is that his appreciations were basically mental. Newton had already formulated the laws of gravity. Hume was not trying to refute them, but he made a distinction between logic, which, like Descartes, he placed on a pedestal, and empirical science, which can always be subjected to doubt. Despite Newton, Hume was not entirely misguided in questioning the immutable validity of science, for Einstein did come along and questioned some of the implications of Newton’s laws, such as that time and space are separate absolutes. Hume was both Cartesian—in his scepticism about the cause-and-effect relation—and anti-Cartesian in his denial the first of Descartes’ “clear and distinct ideas”: the existence of the thinking self (“cogito”).

            By the time that Hume wrote, strict dualism was passé, but the sequels of Cartesianism were not. One of the reasons why Kant is considered a watershed philosopher is because he did not agree with Hume about cause-and-effect. Kant did not deny the problem of dualism, but he went the roundabout way of refuting Hume in order to be done with it. His philosophy, which was systemic, is often subsumed under the tag of “transcendental idealism”. Kant retained the stress on mind that Descartes introduced, but, unlike Locke, he believed that the “framework” of knowledge was innate and this included time and space and particularly cause-and-effect. True to the Cartesian tradition, he invented the expression the “thing in itself”, which he claimed that mind could never grasp, to refer to objects outside of their awareness by the self. This was obvious enough, for mind cannot have in itself the things it perceives. What mind did have was the “phenomenon”, so propertied that it qualified as knowledge. Kant’s philosophy puts an end to at least one phase of dualism and it is after him also that relatively quickly philosophy and psychology took divergent paths. Another great systematizer, G.F.W. Hegel, could give himself with abandon to “philosophy of mind”, a phrase which arguably he invented—although his work on the subject is really known as “the phenomenology of mind”—but it did not have pride of place in his synthesis of all conceivable philosophical themes, among which, as we saw, he placed history, law, and even politics. Hegel is often classified as a post-Kantian, but, given his eminence and influence (some claim that during most of the 19^th century all philosophy was Hegelian), he should be set apart from the group of “German idealists” (Fichte foremost), who did abstruse elaborations on Kant, usually relegated to irrelevance in most histories of philosophy. Schopenhauer was also Kantian, but. unlike the other German idealists, he came up with an argument that at first sight appears unlikely, but is at least an original derivation from Kant. Schopenhauer proclaimed that the supreme reality is the will. In his ethics, his “practical philosophy”, Kant had made the principle of the “categorical imperative”, or the “moral law” that ethical conduct was free and should be rational, more real that “phenomena”. If that was the case, Schopenhauer argued, then “will” is the encompassing reality of the universe. All things were imbued by will and the reality of all things stemmed from will. This philosophy was at the other extreme of Descartes. [1] But Cartesianism was not entirely played out. Far from it.

            Since philosophy had given mind pride of place, it was almost inevitable that, just as Newton single-handedly hived off physics from philosophy—which philosopher would have dared venture into electromagnetism or atomic weights or the speed of light?—there should arise the study of mind itself as the independent discipline known as psychology. The idea of psychology was already consensual and as such was included in Diderot’s 18th century encyclopedia. But it was during the 19^th century that psychology made advances that gave content to what was previously a concept with a great deal of potential. There had been some strictly psychological speculation about mind, but it was of the sort that was described as “folk psychology”, which means distinguishing between broad mental types such as reason, emotions, will power, instincts, and so on, derived mostly from introspection, hence characteristically Cartesian. But psychology really came into its own in Germany, where there began a series of attempts to apply scientific and even mathematical criteria to mental phenomena (not in the Kantian sense). These beginnings culminated with the foundation of experimental psychology through the researches of Hermann von Helmholtz and Wilhelm Wundt. Helmholtz believed that sensations are converted into perception, which led to the immortal conclusion that perception is a “subconscious inference”. Wundt wrote what would become the standard textbook on experimental psychology, Principles of physiological psychology, and founded the first laboratory devoted exclusively to psychological experimentation.

            While this was happening, philosophy took on the subject of mind again in the person of Franz von Brentano. Brentano considered that mind was “intentional” in the sense that it was “meaningful” or “meaning giving”, which created for him the dilemma of how nonsense could be meaningful in any sensible way. Beyond this, Brentano went not much further. But one of his students, Edmund Husserl, adopted philosophy of mind with a vengeance. He wrote endlessly and minutely about the mind’s meaningfulness. Very succinctly, he made a distinction within mind between “noema”, the ability to give meaning, and “noemata”, the objects of “noema”. Husserl was very consistent and rigorous in his arguments, but his premise was exactly the same as Descartes: that the yields of mental processes are reliable. What he “achieved” was the most monumental justification of Cartesianism ever. To defend himself from the accusation of subjectivism—in a few words, to emit opinions rather than facts—he called his system “phenomenology” and he described his method as the “bracketing” of thought. But however you looked at it, what Husserl relied on was introspection. After Husserl, Cartesianism had a new lease on life and, without having to avow it, some great philosophers of continental Europe went on assuming that it was valid to put their trust on mental yields.

            Although, as we shall see below, the reaction against philosophy of mind was as “continental” as phenomenology, because of the influence of Bertrand Russell and the British tradition that he spawned, in modern history of philosophy a contrast is frequently made between philosophy in Britain and philosophy in the rest of Europe. A disciple of Husserl, and like him addicted to inventing phrases, such as “Dasein” (roughly synonymous with “existence”), many of them derived from the Kantian “being-in-itself”, Martin Heidegger argued obscurely and at length that the self realizes itself in the attitude it takes towards its consciousness of death, which was more than the mere awareness of its inevitability. Sartre, a follower of Heidegger (although the latter became a Nazi and Sartre claimed membership in the French World War II résistance), defended free will from the concept of “nihilation”, or the assumption that each decision is self-originated or that the past does not weigh upon volition. [2] It was Sartre who popularized the concept of “existentialism”, which he defined ambiguously as that “being” is opposed to or is more important than “essence”, a distinction which is largely forgotten but which for a time made many people try to make heads or tails of it. Existentialists traced their lineage to the Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard, who exalted the depth of commitment and the agony of religious belief, as in the story of Isaac, the father who was disposed to sacrifice his own son, Jacob, on God’s orders. Existentialists were generally indifferent to epistemology, with the exception of Maurice Merleau-Ponty who proposed a cognitive theory involving subconscious elements.

            Long before Sartre but not too long before Heidegger, there had arisen a tendency in philosophy which broke with philosophy of mind in general and specifically with phenomenology. The first outspoken anti-Husserlian, a former comrade of Husserl, was Gottlob Frege. In his lifetime, Frege was not widely influential but he said forthrightly that philosophy should have nothing to do with statements about mind, even in its bare bones definition as “intentionality”. Propositions should be subjected to logical analysis, as he pretended to show with the example that it is only in a context that it is possible to confuse, say, the “morning star” and the “evening star”. The context is, of course, mind, which was thus shown to be ambiguous and unreliable. Frege believed that arithmetic could be derived from logic, which was precisely the project that Russell and Alfred North Whitehead undertook. For that, Frege invented a form of predicate logic, which Russell, who admired Frege, refuted with the paradox of the class of all classes which are not members of themselves. Frege admitted that his notational system could not solve that problem, the importance of which is that set theory, crucial to mathematical logic, is incomplete because it does not encompass the class which Russell derived logically. Russell refined Frege’s system of notations and thus invented “predicate logic”, but logicians consider that even with this tool it is not possible to derive all arithmetical calculations, mainly because numbers are infinite, so you have to assume that what is valid for a finite set is also valid for an endless set. The point of all this is that a branch of philosophy developed in which epistemology was the main concern with the double cornerstones of logic and empirical evidence. Russell relegated mind to what he called “propositional attitudes” (beliefs, hopes, desires, affects in general) which were not amenable to true philosophical analysis. The reliability of perception was not questioned. Memory was assumed. The rise of analytical philosophy, as this movement is called, was approximately coincident with a similar tendency in psychology.

            As we saw, experimental psychology, no matter how disciplined, still relied on unreliable first-person accounts, which made possible that a purely subjectivist approach to mind such as Gestalt psychology could appear and make the patently controversial assumption that perception was a whole that could not or should not be decomposed into sensations. Thus it was that in America psychology took a turn even more radical than that of analytical philosophy by asserting, in short, that actions speak louder than words. This was behaviorism, which ignored mind as such, not even leaving for it the wiggle room that Russell allowed, and, recurring to Locke’s tabula rasa concept, developed methods, called “conditioning”, by which conduct could be induced or modified. These methods were shown to be quite effective with animals, such as Pavlov’s dogs, and it was thought that they could be as practicable with humans. Practical behaviorism never quite lived up to its claims, but its basic contention about mind thrived. Nevertheless, even at the height of its influence, behaviorism could make no sense of behavior without, in some manner, involving motivation, and motivation was decidedly mental. Other similar objections would eventually lead to its gradual downfall.

            Before this, analytical philosophy was having problems of its own. A group of philosophers called the Vienna circle was part of the general analytical-philosophy trend. Their most prominent member was Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was admired by Russell, although he did not entirely reciprocate the admiration. Wittgenstein contended that logic, and in particular predicate logic, was tautological, basically in that, despite its axioms, operators (signs which permitted transmutations and transformations), and derivations, it did not advance knowledge one whit. Though initially a meta-mathematical tool, predicate logic was also used to make natural-language propositions unambiguous. Thus: the expression “all men are mortal”, should be replaced by the formula “for all of class ‘x’ (men), it is a fact that it has the property ‘y’ (mortal).” This is what is called quantification and it is what distinguished predicate logic from traditional syllogistic or Aristotelian logic (also propositional logic). But Wittgenstein pointed out, among other arguments, that, since negation was a logical operator, it was just as valid to state the contrary: that men are not mortal. He also believed that the tautological nature of logic should permit its derivation from one axiom, presumably the principle of the excluded middle or the relation of identity (also tertium non datur). What Wittgenstein argued was that logic had to take semantics or meaning into account. Russell didn’t quarrel strenuously about these points, although he should have. But then Wittgenstein made what is called the “linguistic turn”, which many consider to be a crucial junction in analytical philosophy.

            Wittgenstein was as adamant as behaviorists against the yields of introspection. Wittgenstein himself was a seemingly emotion-less person who, during a period of self-effacement when he taught in a primary school in rural Austria, was so unsparing of the rod that he was fired for physically abusing his pupils. After the Holocaust became undeniable, Wittgenstein, who was Jewish, seemed totally indifferent to it. (His family was wealthy enough in Austria to obtain a certificate of “Aryanization”.) But even Wittgenstein could not entirely ignore mind, nor for that matter logic, so he proposed that all philosophical issues came down to language and syntax. He insisted that logic and all of philosophy lay in the expression of language and that philosophy in particular consisted in the clarification of linguistic expressions. If this was achieved, then all philosophical problems would be resolved. He was, in effect, embarked on an anti-philosophical campaign within philosophy itself. This was as far as Russell’s patience could go and there was a break between the two men. Wittgenstein’s position was fraught. His linguistic approach to philosophy did not actually preclude philosophizing as long as the language was precise, which was not really that different from Descartes’ precise ideas, but Wittgenstein excluded from it any propositions about mind, which was an arbitrary step.

            Starting from the Kantian distinction between “analytical” (self-evident) and “empirical” propositions, the American philosopher W.V.O. Quine argued that, because of the “intensionality” of language (the connotations of words), synonymy was impossible, and if synonymy was discarded, then logic, which requires the possibility of the identity of terms, had no application to philosophical expression. This was also a blow against the “linguistic turn”, although Quine himself was fascinated by language and imagined that any language could be derived from the “ostensive definition” of things (pointing them out).  Quine was emphatic on that it was possible to have a “prescriptive epistemology”, one that taught “correct” ways of thinking, which is at the opposite pole of behaviorism. Other analytical dogmas had also come under fire. For Russell and the Viennese thinkers, truth was paramount, but the best they could come up with was that the expression “snow is white” is true because snow was indeed white, so you could drop the quotations in the expression (“disquotional” definition). (This definition is basically the same as “redundancy” and “deflation”.) This put a premium on perception, but when the British philosopher Alfred Ayer tried to formulate this idea he said something to the effect that all metaphysical thought was false, which, as it could not proven empirically, and was in effect a metaphysical pronouncement, constituted a denial of his own generalization (Ayer’s paradox). The upshot of all this was that mind, which initially analyticity shunned, came in again through the backdoor, so to speak. The knockout punch against the attempt to contain the inevitable was delivered by the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle, a Witttgensteinian, who authored a book titled Concept of mind (1949), in which he reasoned, not unlike Hume, that thought was an instant and consciousness was, therefore, the awareness of awareness, hence an epiphenomenon, not something in itself but a result of something else. Wittgenstein was extremely disappointed and that was the end of that.

            So if mind was again at the forefront of philosophy, what tack was to be taken? Ryle assumed awareness and awareness entailed “consciousness”—despite Ryle’s opposition to any such thing—but consciousness had many metaphysical implications, such as soul, free will, and immortality. The ghost of Descartes was haunting the anti-subjectivist gains of analytical philosophy. After the behaviorist tidal wave—and even as it was taking place—psychology had continued talking about mind. But psychology was not committed to soul. It was instead oriented towards cognition, and cognition was an implicit part of the analytical agenda. The problem was how to keep the faith in analyticity and still accept first-person accounts, which Wittgenstein considered anathema. The obvious goal was how to eliminate subjectivism from first-person accounts, which was possible, of course, because if someone remitted an account of a perception that a psychologist or a philosopher could confirm, then subjectivity was reduced to a minimum. There were other influences at work. Computational science was on the rise and since machines could reason, albeit in a programmed, elementary sense, then conceivably the processes of thought could be studied through computers. But any philosopher worth his salt could see through this. A machine could calculate, but it could not handle language. It could, for instance, do a mechanical translation from Chinese to English, but it didn’t really know what it was doing. The theoretical basis of computing was the imaginary device invented by Alan Turing which accepted an input and decided whether it was acceptable or unacceptable either when it was first posited or later if the initial input led to error or inconsistency, because the machine could go back as many steps as were needed and could erase the input and substitute it with another. This works fine with logic or mathematics, but not with words or verbal arguments. Here the machine was stymied. An opening to mind through programming was made by the linguist Noam Chomsky who tried to encompass with complicated equations how the mind had an innate ability (a module) with which to compose specific sentences in any language from an infinite number of structural possibilities. This accorded with scientific criteria and it also underscored the cognitive importance of innateness and of the subconscious. It gave rise to the theory of a symbolic language proper to mind, again a gross violation of Wittgenstein’s strictures, among which was that a language that could not be expressed as a natural, communicative language was not a language at all. Chomsky at least demonstrated the possibility of a computational access to mind.

            There was another seemingly scientific approach to mind that was consistent with Chomsky’s modularism. Ryle had postulated that thought was ultimately physical. This raised a host of issues, all of which could actually be traced to Cartesian mind-matter dualism. Exactly in which way were mind and brain related? This was definitely a philosophical conundrum and it gave rise to “identity theory”, which included many variations, including “functionalism”, although it is usually said that functionalism was a reaction to identity theory. But the facts speak for themselves. Identity theory claims that mental states are the same as brain states and what functionalism claims is that mental states can also be identical to matter other than the brain. Functionalism is, therefore, the computational equivalent of mind-brain identity. Already in the 19^th century it was known that certain parts of the brain were related to certain events that had a mental source, such as speech and memory. Identity theory led some “philosophers” to take an interest in neurology as it impinges on mind, in what, from the 19^th century premise, it followed that the brain was extremely specialized, or as Chomsky and Jerry Fodor, the “language of mind” proponent, would have it, that it was “modular”. “Neuro-philosophers” relegated philosophy of mind to “folk psychology”, but at least made a claim on philosophical status by arguing that, while neurology got to the bottom of how mind functions, so-called “loans” from first-person accounts were provisionally acceptable. Experimental psychology had also been refining 19^th century methods with modern machines, specifically brain-scanners such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), to determine, for example, whether perception contains a pre-perceptual or subconscious phase. These experiments highlighted what Helmholst already knew, which was that the subconscious plays a significant role in cognition. Experimental psychology assumes a neutral stance towards psycho-neurology, but in general has a tendency towards “holism”, the view that cognitive functions are constantly interactive as against “brain specialization”. “Connectionism” is a holistic version of functionalism. Some philosophers of mind who are not particularly keen on neurology still maintain their functionalist belief in modularism.

            Thus, analytical philosophy of mind today presents a somewhat mixed, even inconsistent, set of perspectives. It has to choose on whether to take a backseat to neurology or commit itself to functionalism. The latter is more accommodating to first-person accounts (basically to introspection) but concocts expressions, such as “heterophenomenology”, to defend its analytical credentials. Daniel Dennett, the inventor of the latter sesquipedalian equivalence to first-person accounts, has been attempting a synthesis between functionalism and experimental psychology. But some modularist functionalists should in principle be in full agreement with the foundational neurological principle of brain specialization. Nevertheless, functionalists are in general placing their bets on artificial intelligence, which if achieved would in some unforeseen manner acquire affects (like the computer HAL in the film 2001: Space Odyssey). Explicitly or not, there has resulted a race between neurology and functionalism to see who gets to have the final say on mind. A crucial difference between the two “horses” is that psycho-neurology is often unabashedly deterministic whereas philosophers of mind and experimental psychologists, though inclining towards determinism, shy away from a total denial of free will.

            The essays in this work are in the analytical philosophy of mind tradition in the sense of accepting the validity of “loans” from psychology or first-person accounts but restricting them to very broad categories (elementary ”folk psychology”) and hewing to the strictly logical derivations that can be made from such loans. The problem of keeping subjectivism under a leash was stated by the experimental psychologist Max Velmans in these terms: “Traditionally, science has adopted the third-person, external observer perspective, and…it is possible, in principle, to translate first-person accounts of mental activity into third-person accounts (for example, into information-processing models which make no appeal to consciousness entering into cerebral activity). But the fact that first-person accounts can be translated into third-person accounts does not alter the fact that subjects have a first-person perspective from which to view the world, including their own activity.” In writing these essays, we observed that for “consensual” first-person accounts we generally gravitated towards the personal pronoun “we”; for less than consensual accounts, to the pronoun “you”; and for potentially controversial accounts, to the pronoun “I”. The pronoun “one” is a stab at impersonality, hence in theory closer to “we” or “you”, but more likely a compromise between these and the “I” perspective. We noted that sometimes, unwittingly, in one paragraph we transited from one pronoun to another. Also, in place of “I” we sometimes used the so-called “royal we”, which is often considered presumptuous but is in fact a case of being too humble to be asserting “I did this” or “I proved that”. Just the opposite of regal despite appearances!

            The use in this work of individual related but not concatenated essays has its theoretical justification. There are three types of sequences: (1) logical or natural sequences such as numbers; (2) arbitrary or conventional sequences such as the alphabet; (3) rational sequences. Philosophy aspires to rational sequence “relative” to natural sequences. But there is no philosophical work which is not partly repetitive, which is flawless in its development, which, in sum, could not have been done otherwise, at worse with profit and at best without loss of cogency. In the normal course of affairs, books are written according to precedences. Order of precedences implies that concepts and arguments appear by warrant. Much thought goes into arguments before the arguments are actually stated. The final result of such thought should be the best order for such arguments. In practice, it is found, one, that there are areas of thought in which precedence is inapplicable; and two, that no matter how hard one tries to keep concepts and arguments in a queue, they keep, not just trying, but actually jumping it most inconsiderately. There is no reliable manner to place in an order of precedence fundamental concepts. In these essays, the one on thought already adumbrates much of the material on memory and both essays assume the existence of the specific self, which is the subject of the third essay.  Hence, willy-nilly I keep getting ahead of myself. However, a collection of essays, rather than the “organic whole” that a book is supposed to be, does tend at least to make the problem of back-and-forth references less complex by compartmentalizing its subjects. But this does not mean that these essays cannot be part of a larger whole. In fact, they were adapted from an existing and much longer unfinished manuscript. In certain sections of the original manuscript, I try to make certain claims that encompass the entire work. In those texts a part of the whole "becomes" the whole. In a sequence of P's, one of them is conceptually equivalent to W. This can also be expressed as the whole encompassing the "whole". In addition to these derivations about the form of the work, some sections refer backwards to previous distinctions and forward to as yet unformulated hypotheses. Thus, even though I tried to follow a strict rational sequence, I could not avoid shattering it in different ways. Although the distinction between text and arguments puts the whole exercise into perspective, the fact remains that it is impossible to follow one unique and necessary line of development in a philosophical work. In individual essays, however, one is not necessarily or strictly committed to these constraints. Nevertheless, they are ordered in a manner such that each one implies the following ones and as an aggregate they are all consistent with each other, or at least none contains arguments that contradict the arguments in the others. It is up to the reader to decide whether I have succeeded.