Abstract

This volume contains papers from a 1962 Symposium in the Philosophy of Mind held at Wayne State University. There are seven essays, each accompanied by lengthy and usually quite astute comments, and followed by a shorter rejoinder. Chisholm contributes a refinement of his much discussed criteria for intentional connectives: "On Some Psychological Concepts and the 'Logic' of Intentionality." The scare quotes are well-placed around "Logic," as it is Chisholm's intuitive rather than formal logical perspicacity which carries the weight of the argument. Ayer's paper, "The Concept of a Person," has already been published in his book of the same name. The most deliberate exercise in epistemic logic is Castañeda's paper, "Consciousness and Behavior: Their Basic Connections." This essay deserves close scrutiny, as it represents a disciplined attempt to rehabilitate more traditional conceptions of consciousness and, particularly, self-consciousness. Putnam has some more to say about minds and machines in "The Mental Life of Some Machines." In what is possibly the best paper in the volume, Sellars develops the dialectic that runs from phenomenalism, through various forms of realism, to a critical scientific realism mediated by a Kantian-style phenomenalism. Aune's comments on the paper are very illuminating. Alston, owing to the delay in publication of the Symposium, joins a bit late the list of those who are criticizing and rejecting the logical barrier between reasons and causes that has been erected by Melden et al. Finally, Firth tries to delimit our concept of seeing by arguing in a manner more suggestive than definitive for causal criteria for the use of the term. The general tone of the volume is exploratory.—E. A. R.