A Historical Diagnosis

Abstract

Pluralism is a fringe position in debates about the metaphysics of mind as the large majority of philosophers endorse either physicalism or dualism. While my proposal of a pluralist theory of the mind contrasts with contemporary philosophy of mind, I argue that it shares many assumptions with philosophical positions that were popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The aim of this chapter is to propose a historical diagnosis of the development of analytic philosophy of mind and of the exclusion of a wide range of positions that do not qualify as physicalism or dualism. I develop this historical diagnosis on the basis of the case study of Moritz Schlick’s monist parallelism. Schlick challenges both materialism and dualism by insisting that we can describe the world in terms of different but equally fundamental conceptual systems. Materialism is wrong in assuming the priority of the physical perspective, while dualism is mistaken in the assumption that two equally fundamental conceptual systems must refer to metaphysically distinct realms of reality. While this monist parallelism was the dominant position in German philosophy of mind from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, it disappeared with the rise of analytic philosophy of mind in the second half of the twentieth century. I argue that post-war philosophy of mind presupposed the “ontological priority of the physical” and left no room for alternative positions such as monist parallelism, pluralism, positivism, or idealism.