The uniqueness of life: a review of Peter Hacker’s “Human Nature: the Categorial Framework” and its implications for the mind-body problem and our understanding of mental disorder

Peter Hacker is an eminent philosopher and one of the world’s leading authorities on Wittgenstein. He has published a four volume analytical commentary on the Philosophical Investigations and a brilliant little book on Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mind, now sadly out of print (1). He is also well known for his debunking of neuroscientific reductionism in…

Philosophy Part 3: Knowledge of mental states and behaviour – insights from Heidegger and others.

Wittgenstein illustrates that mental states are not private, universally identical brain processes or mental events. They are manifested in, and characterised by socially meaningful, recognisable patterns of human behaviour. We can never understand or know such states by looking in the brain or constructing models or theories of what particular mental states consist of and…

Philosophy Part 2: How should we think about mental states? The contribution of Ludwig Wittgenstein.

There are two broad approaches to the ‘mental’ that Wittgenstein’s ideas challenge. One is that all our feelings, thoughts and behaviours are caused by, or ‘epiphenomena’ of, a specific brain state or process. This is sometimes referred to as ‘physicalism’ (‘epiphenomenalism’ being one variant of physicalism). On this view- the one that much neuroscience is…

Philosophy Part 1: Why philosophy matters!

This is the first of a series of blogs presenting a philosophical analysis of the modern mental health system and what it is concerned with. 20th century philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, much of whose later work concerns our thinking about the ‘mind’, suggested that the role of philosophy is to identify and clear-up conceptual confusions. Many…