Steven Pinker. Destruction of myths about man. Pseudo-evolutionary reverse engineering
The discussions about the relationship between the mental and the physical, discussed in the previous chapters, can be classified as a metaphysical part of the modern philosophy of consciousness. Despite the undoubted productivity of such discussions, some philosophers express doubts about the possibility of achieving positive results in this area and provide arguments in favor of their point of view. For example, K. McGinn believes that the human mind, which arose through the process of natural selection, is simply not designed to resolve questions of this kind.
John Searle. The representational aspect of the concept of intentionality. Mental states
John Searle was born in Denver, Colorado, in 1932. He studied at the University of Wisconsin from 1949 to 1952 and then went to Oxford, where he remained until 1959. That year, he defended his doctorate, returned to the United States, and settled at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has worked for more than four decades. In 1967, Searle became a professor at the university and two years later published his first book, Speech Acts: Essays in the Philosophy of Language. It was followed by a number of other monographs and collections of articles, including Expression and Meaning: Studies in Speech Act Theory (1979), Intentionality: Essays in the Philosophy of Mind (1983), Mind, Brain, and Science (1984), Rediscovering Consciousness (1992), The Construction of Social Reality (1995), The Mystery of Consciousness (1997), Consciousness and Language (2002), and Mind: A Brief Introduction (2004). Of particular note is Searle’s 1998 book Consciousness, Language, and Society: Philosophy in the Real World, in which he attempted to bring together the main themes of his research.
Daniel Dennett. The functionalist part of the theory of mind. Intentional attitude
Philosophy in the 20th century was dominated by language studies. Gradually, this bias became increasingly pronounced. Being and consciousness dissolved in language, and the world turned out to be a huge text without an Author or a semantic center. Western thought was threatened by relativism and the “deconstruction” of rationality. However, in the last decades of the 20th century, radical changes took place in the philosophical climate. Philosophy was again in demand for its positive function. This was partly due to the rapid development of communication tools and the integration of the world community, which forced people to think about “human universals” against the backdrop of many cultural differences.
Richard Rorty. Language of neurophysiology. Eliminative materialism. People are the same animals
Richard Rorty was born in 1931 in New York. He studied first at the University of Chicago and then completed graduate school at Yale University. He taught at various universities and colleges in the United States: from 1961 at Princeton University, from 1982 at the University of Virginia, and from 1998 at Stanford University.
Postmodernism. Deconstructivism. Breaking down the paradigmatic way of thinking
Recently, the term “postmodernism” has been used to designate the specificity of the worldview attitudes of the newest, “postmodern” culture as a whole, associated primarily with the polyvariant perception of the world, as well as with the accentuated problem of self-identification of culture. Widely used as an interdisciplinary term, it still does not have an unambiguous definition, and functions simultaneously as an external research definition and as an internal constitutive principle, realizing itself in various spheres of human activity – art, politics, economics, philosophy, literature, psychology, science, and so on. More broadly, in the words of U. Eco, postmodern culture offers a special language capable of describing its own achievements.
Structuralism. Social structure. Language as a system of signs. Structural anthropology
The direction in the humanities, which in a later classification received the designation of structuralism, appeared at the beginning of the 20th century and was associated primarily with the concept of structural linguistics of the Swiss linguist and philosopher Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913). This concept significantly influenced the anthropological research of Claude Levi- Strauss (1908-), the only one who called himself a structuralist, the psychoanalytic theory of J. Lacan (see the chapter “Psychoanalysis”), the epistemological concept of knowledge of Michel Foucault (1926-1984), the literary criticism of Roland Barthes (1915-1980) and many others.
Postpositivism. Science is the servant of power. Conventionalism
This term is commonly used to designate the works of several philosophers of the mid-20th century, thematically united around questions of scientific methodology and subjecting the concepts of classical rationality to rethinking. Among the most famous representatives of postpositivism are K. Popper, T. Kuhn, I. Lakatos, P. Feyerabend, M. Polanyi, K. Hübner. In fact, M. Foucault is not far from this movement of thought. Late postpositivism gave rise to the sociology of science.
Neopositivism. Vienna circle. Syntax of scientific knowledge. Criteria for scientific meaningfulness of knowledge
The activities of the Vienna Circle opened a special stage in the development of philosophical positivism – neopositivism. Evolving, the Vienna Circle largely determined the problems of various trends in modern thought – from logical positivism in the versions of B. Russell and A. Ayer and the post-positivism of K. Popper, formed as a critic of the Vienna Circle, to the latest analytical philosophy. Initially, the term “logical positivism” was directly related to the Vienna Circle and denoted a critical attitude to traditional (metaphysical) philosophy and the use of logical methods of language analysis as a universal method for constructing empirical science. It is unlikely that the influence of these ideas on science can be considered fundamental, but in philosophy, the ideas of the Viennese had a noticeable impact.
Wittgenstein. Thinking is inseparable from language. Limits to Human Knowledge
Wittgenstein’s life, as in the case of Kierkegaard, does not seem to be something secondary in relation to his philosophical work. Wittgenstein sought himself in life in the same way as he sought himself in philosophy, and therefore his biography and philosophical works complement each other. Wittgenstein was born in 1889 in Vienna to the family of steel magnate Karl Wittgenstein. He studied at school in Linz, then at the Higher Technical School in Manchester, England. At first, Wittgenstein worked for some time with Frege. Then, on Frege’s advice, in 1911 he went to Cambridge to Russell, whose teaching seriously interested him and with whom he managed (at least for some time) to establish the most friendly relations. 1913 was the year of the death of Wittgenstein’s father, when it turned out that the young philosopher had inherited a large fortune. Wittgenstein donated a significant portion of his inheritance to Austrian cultural figures (including Rainer Maria Rilke and Georg Trakl), and renounced the remainder of his inheritance in favor of his sisters and brothers.
Bertrand Russell. Logical atomism. Natural scientific approach to ideological problems
Bertrand Russell was born in 1872 into an old British aristocratic family. The grandson of British Prime Minister John Russell, Mill’s godson, he graduated from Cambridge with honors, had the title of Lord, and lived for almost a hundred years – he died in 1970 – taking part in the most acute philosophical battles of the 20th century: on the problems of mathematics and logic, on the questions of the methodology of scientific knowledge and the language of science, on the problems of atheism and modern freethinking, on the engagement of intellectuals in political life (he was last imprisoned at the age of 89 for participating in a rally for nuclear disarmament), and finally, on the modern interpretation of the history of philosophy.