Month: May 2014

• May 30, 2014

  Being open to being surprised

  One claim I made about self-knowledge a couple of posts ago needs to be brought out. This is that we know ourselves, in part, when we know our dispositions. The occasion for this reflection is an upcoming workshop that Ian Prinsloo and I are putting on at the Banff Centre in the middle of June. The…
• May 29, 2014

  Minding: An overview

  Let me sum up what I have written about our mental lives over the past 10 odd posts. Recall the thesis with which I disagree: Because the human mind, like the human body, tends to be sickly and ill, it seeks healing or cures. I have argued all of the following: 1.) There is a disanalogy between…
• May 28, 2014

  How self-knowledge is possible

  I pick up where I left off in the last post. Recall, first of all, that the picture of the mind as a some ‘place’ or ‘substance’ that contains important things (ideas, faculties, images, conceptions) deep within me is a mistaken picture of minding. Recall, second of all, that the question which springs from the picture of the mind…
• May 26, 2014

  How self-knowledge became necessary yet impossible

  The idea that the mind is a substance-like thing or an executive set of functions (a dashboard of sorts) residing in the head will lead to perplexities. I have already held that the mind is not ‘substance-like,’ that it does not reside in the head, that it does not contain a suite of activities, and that it…
• May 24, 2014

  Mind and world: Isolation or world-involvement

  Recall where we are. We are in the midst of dismantling an erroneous picture of the mind and, in so doing, we are making it possible to inquire into the everyday mental activities we perform: into how they operate, into how they involve us n the world, and into how to bring them out when they…