> OnWednesday, 16 September 2015, [email protected] > <mailto:[email protected]> wrote: > > I sincerely do find talk about "mind-bodies" basically twisted. A modern > division, a split, is thereby taken for granted, taken as the starting-point. > - A being, be it a human being, or a bee, should remain as the starting point.
I think a lot of the various problems related to mind/body are as much a product of the linguistic basis from which they are argued as anything. Often the semantics undermine the clarity of thought. That said there does appear to be something fundamentally different from phenomenological analysis (whether Peircean, Husserlian, or Heideggarian) and more 3rd person descriptions. Often a lot of confusion results due to not being careful with terms we use such as pain so that we subtly equivocate in our arguments without being aware of what we are doing. Mind is one of those topics that seems quite simple and clear at first glance but which often is muddled when examined carefully. This is true even in Peirce. At least Peirce is more careful to use mind primarily to refer to the process of signs and thus thirdness. (As Edwina noted in an other post) However much of what we call mind in philosophy is more a matter of pure firstness of experience. All that said I think the great error of philosophy was ushered in by Descartes who created an artificial dualism. In a strong way much of Peirce’s work is undoing these errors of Descartes that still propagate through philosophy to this day. I take Peirce to be an externalist both about meaning but also about mental content. This externalism avoids most of the problems of the mental that often are made within philosophy. When we do talk about what we’d call mental dispositions in the more folk tradition it is important to be clear about how we delineate such use. So are we talking about pain as an experience of firstness? A reaction to that firstness (and thus typically a matter of signs of thirdness)? Or more as a physical state process (and thus purely thirdness)? One wishes philosophers were more careful about such matters.
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