The Enigma of the Mind The Mind-Body Problem in Contemporary Thought [Paperback]

This book deals with one of the most fascinating problems of Western culture: the mind/body relationship.Originally published in Italian, this critical historical survey of one of the fundamental debates in the philosophy of mind--the relationship of mind and body--provides a unique interpretation of the problem based on major recent philosophical contributions.Originally published in Italian, this critical historical survey of one of the fundamental debates in the philosophy of mind--the relationship of mind and body--provides a unique interpretation of the problem based on major recent philosophical contributions.Sergio Moravia's The Enigma of the Mind (originally published in Italian as L'enigma della mente) offers a broad, lucid, critical and historical survey of one of the fundamental debates in the philosophy of mind: the relationship of mind and body. The book has two central aims--to sketch the major recent contributions to the mind-body problem from philosophers of mind, and, once this framework is established, to articulate a particular interpretation of the mental and the mind-body problem.The enigma of the mind: introduction to a metaphor; 1. Toward a physical science of the mental; 2. The apogee of physicalism; 3. The obscure relationship; 4. Psychology as alchemy; 5. The mind as function; 6. The mind as property and as event; 7. The mind as language; 8. Speaking in many different ways; 9. The mind as mode of subjective experience; 10. The mind as 'subject' and as 'being-in-the-world'; Appendix: The mental as intentional/'personal' emergence. ...his book should be of interest to scholars of Vico and to all partisans of humanistic thinking....provides a thorough critical and historical assessment of the mind-body problem....I like what I read in Moravia'a critical assessment of the current approaches to the mind-body problem. Marcel Danesi, New Vico Studies 14