The great poet W. H. Auden wrote, in "In Memory of Sigmund Freud": "If often he was wrong and, at times, absurd To us is no more a person Now but a whole climate of opinion." Freud's 'deepening' of the mind is now, I think--and rightly so--part of our 'folk psychology': that is, we understand each other at least in part in terms of categories derived from Freud. If the existence of the unconscious does not admit of 'scientific' confirmation--as its critics allege--or if those criticisms rest on overly narrow conceptions of what scientific confirmation amounts to--as its defenders allege--the fact is, as Auden's poem and considerable other work testifies, we live now in a post-Freudian age, and we now understand ourselves in terms of categories inherited from Freud. It has been claimed that Freud's categories have no more relevance to lived experience than the Greek gods, in response to which I simply ask you to consider whether the testimony of your own experience counts for or against the...

Your question goes to the heart of debates about personal identity, and even goes back to the early modern starting point for those debates, the chapter on personal identity in John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding . Much discussion about personal identity has turned on the question of whether personal identity is to be located in psychological continuity or in bodily continuity of some sort; if one is inclined to think that the identity of a person is to be identified with the identity of her brain, then personal identity does indeed seem to consist in bodily continuity. Your question goes even further, for you wonder whether the brain is to be identified as the locus of personhood, so that a person just is her brain. One thing that this view has going for it is that it seems that all human persons have had--it's not clear whether we can know, without doing brain scans, that all human persons have brains--brains. So having a brain would seem to be necessary for being a...

The question of how emotions are related to brain states is an excellent one. Empirical research has long been underway to try to identify areas of the brain associated with emotions; the best-known exponent of this research program is probably Antonio Damasio, who has articulated his approach to the relation between emotions and the brain in several popular books, including Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain and Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain . Very few philosophers would deny that there is some relation between mental states and brain states--indeed, even the paradigm early modern dualist, Descartes, believed that there was some relation between most mental states, with the exception of clear and distinct ideas, and brain states--but there is considerable disagreement about the nature of their relation. Some philosophers have claimed that mental states are identical to brain states; some philosophers have claimed that mental states supervene or...

This is a very interesting question--sociopaths and psychopaths have long figured in the literature on free will, but relatively little sustained attention has been devoted to the question of whether they are morally responsible for what they do until quite recently. One psychopath who has been treated at length is Robert Alton Harris, who figures prominently in Gary Watson's paper, "Responsibility and the Limits of Evil: Variations on a Strawsonian Theme": although the paper treats Harris's case at length, its chief aim is not to to determine whether Harris is morally responsible but instead to examine the relation between reactive attitudes and judgments of freedom and responsibility, and thereby to illuminate P. F. Strawson's fascinating and amazing article, "Freedom and Resentment." Recent sustained engagements with the question of whether psychopaths can be morally responsible include P. S. Greenspan, "Responsible Psychopaths," Philosophical Psychology , 16/3, 2003; Paul Litton, "Responsibility...

I think that there is both considerable clinical evidence--that is, evidence from psychoanalytic sessions--and evidence from everyday life in support of the postulation of unconscious mental states in order to explain certain behavior, including slips of the tongue, forgettings, etc. There are, however, certain philosophers--in particular, Adolf Grünbaum--who do not recognize what I have called 'clinical evidence' as evidence, and who have argued that there is no empirical basis for psychoanalysis. (There have been a number of rejoinders to Grünbaum, including a paper by David Sachs originally published in The Philosophical Review , and an essay by Thomas Nagel in The New York Review of Books . Partisans of Grünbaum's position, however, have found those rejoinders completely unconvincing. Janet Malcolm's Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession is a very interesting treatment of psychoanalysis in general, and also of how one might go about finding evidence for certain psychoanalytic claims,...

This is a deep and interesting question, which goes to the heart of the topic of personal identity, and reflects a tradition that stretches back to John Locke's treatment of the topic in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding . A preliminary note is in order, however: most contemporary treatments of personal identity--and that of Locke as well--do not turn on whether personal identity is determined by the body (one's 'physical appearance') or the soul, but in terms of whether personal identity is determined by the identity of the body or the mind. (By framing the question in this way, philosophers who are agnostic about the existence of the soul, or thinking substance--like Locke--or who deny its existence--like many participants in recent philosophical debates on the topic, can engage it without having to take up the issue of whether there is such thing as a soul.) Interestingly enough, the kind of 'thought experiment' that you propose to illustrate your question is one that Locke himself...

One might argue for this conclusion as follows: the way things look, sound, taste, feel, etc.--what some philosophers call 'secondary qualities'--cannot be identical to any physical properties, because physical properties of things are either what philosophers have called 'primary qualities'--e.g., size, shape, motion, and the like--or they are more fundamental properties of physical systems, to which secondary qualities are not identical; consequently, secondary qualities are not reducible to physical properties. (Admittedly, this is a highly schematic argument. It should, however, be noted that someone who endorsed an argument like this might of course admit that although secondary qualities are not identical or reducible to any physical property, of course secondary qualities are related to physical qualities, perhaps even in a lawlike way, that admits of scientific investigation.)

I think that the answer to this question depends on what one take a thought to be. If by 'thought', one means an actual, occurrent mental state, then surely it is possible to have a thought that no one else has ever had: if sensory perceptions are thoughts, then every distinct event that one experiences is a thought that no one else has ever had (or will ever have again, for that matter); if thoughts are taken to be conceptually mediated, and hence--here I simplify--linguistically mediated, then, given that we often generate new sequences of words that have never been uttered before (as we learn from Chomsky), then surely many of our linguistically mediated thoughts will constitute new sequences of words, and, hence, be thoughts that no else has ever had before. But it is more likely that by 'thought' was meant the content of the thought--that is, what one was thinking about. Given that one may think about one's sensory experiences, it seems to be trivially true that the contents of one's thoughts were...

I think that how one sees the relation between intelligence and morality might well depend on how one conceives of morality. If one had a strongly intellectualist conception of morality--as, arguably, Plato and certain early modern Rationalists, such as Leibniz, had--then one might well think that an agent's capacity for moral reflection might well depend directly on her intelligence, and so one might conclude that a more intelligent agent would at least have the capacity to be a more moral agent as well (although, of course, s/he might fail to exercise that capacity). By contrast, if one thought that morality was a matter of following the law (as, for example, early modern natural law theorists, such as Pufendorf, thought), or that it was a matter of habituation (as, at least on certain interpretations, Aristotle thought), then one might think that the capacity to be a moral agent would be altogether independent of one's capacity for moral reflection. Indeed, certain philosophers have suggested that...