Mental Content

Aimed at philsophy graduates this book investigates mental content in a systematic way and advances a number of claims about how mental content states are related to the body and the world. Internalism is the thesis that they are; externalism is the theory that they are not. The critical disagreement between these two theses concerns their differing conceptions of the relation between the mind and the world. Is the mind fundamentally autonomous with respect to the world, or does the world enter into the very nature of mind? This study offers an original account of the dilemma and proposes significant advances in the disputes about mind and brain, personality, externalism and internalism, and teleological explanations.