The Nature of the Mind :: essays research papers

A lead exponent of the substantial view was George Berkeley, an 18th snow Anglican bishop and philosopher. Berkeley argued that there is no such thing as matter and what creation enter as the material world is nothing but an idea in Gods estimate, and that therefore the human mind is purely a manifestation of the soul. a couple of(prenominal) philosophers take an extreme view today, but the view that the human mind is of a nature or essence somehow different from, and higher(prenominal) than, the mere operations of the hit, continues to be widely held.Berkeleys views were attacked, and in the eyes of many a(prenominal) demolished, by T.H. Huxley, a 19th blow biologist and disciple of Charles Darwin, who agree that the phenomena of the mind were of a unique order, but argued that they can only be explained in reference to events in the brain. Huxley drew on a usage of materialist thought in British philosophy dating to Thomas Hobbes, who argued in the 17th century that ment al events were ultimately physical in nature, although with the biological knowledge of his day he could not say what their physical foot was. Huxley blended Hobbes with Darwin to produce the modern materialist or functional view.Huxleys view was fortify by the steady expansion of knowledge about the functions of the human brain. In the 19th century it was not possible to say with certainty how the brain carried out such functions as memory, emotion, perception and reason. This left the field splay for substantialists to argue for an autonomous mind, or for a metaphysical theory of the mind. unless each advance in the study of the brain during the 20th century made this harder, since it became more and more apparent that all the components of the mind wealthy person their origins in the functioning of the brain.Huxleys rationalism, however, was disturbed in the early 20th century by the ideas of Sigmund Freud, who developed a theory of the unconscious mind, and argued that thos e mental processes of which humans are subjectively aware are only a dinky part of their total mental activity. Freudianism was in a sense a revival of the substantial view of the mind in a unsanctified guise.