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Human beings perceive the colors, shapes and sizes of objects, and they have beliefs about trees, rocks, planets and themselves. In short, they possess intentional states. How is this possible, if human beings are wholly physical creatures (as science seems to tell us)? This problem, the problem of intentionality, is at the center of contemporary philosophical debates about the mind. In her recent book A Mark of the Mental, Karen Neander develops an interesting new answer to this problem. Drawing on insights from teleosemantics, causal-informational theories, and similarity theories, she carefully constructs a naturalistic explanation of intentionality that allows us to understand human beings as wholly physical creatures that are, at the same time, subjects with intentional states. In this course, we will discuss Neander’s theory in detail, but we will also reflect on the broader issues raised by her proposal.
Literatur
Neander, Karen (2017): A Mark of the Mental. In Defense of Informational Teleosemantics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. |
