Philosophy of Mind

Abstract

The paper is aimed to substantiate the definition of the notion “philosophy of mind”, which would allow us to differentiate philosophy of mind from a number of natural sciences studying the mental. Also, this definition is intended to show the place of the philosophy of mind in the context of other philosophical disciplines. The paper demonstrates that the characteristic feature of the philosophy of mind is the focus on the study of the mental in its relation to the body and the world. The main task of this discipline is to clarify the ontological and epistemological relations between mental and physical phenomena. Such an understanding of the philosophy of mind allows us to distil two main sections of this discipline: metaphysics of mind and epistemology of mind. The main problem of the metaphysics of mind is the mind-body problem. In contemporary philosophy of mind, this problem is most notably represented by the problem of consciousness, that is the problem of providing a naturalistic explanation of the phenomenal aspects of consciousness. At the centre of the epistemology of mind is the problem of perceptual knowledge, which requires clarification of the nature of the cognitive relationship between mind and world. The core of this problem is the problem of perception, to solve it means to explain the apparent similarity between veridical and illusory (hallucinatory) perception of some object.