Presocratic Minds

Abstract

Abstract According to the mixture at any one time of the body as it travels, so is the structure of men’s thinking. (Parmenides) As a man’s constitution changes, so changed thoughts are present to him. (Empedocles) Our understanding shifts with bodily changes. (Democritus) Whatever exists is material, and what is taken to be mental and thus immaterial either does not exist or is really identical with something material. (Corman and Lehrer) We suggest that there are no mental phenomena that will in the end prove recalcitrant to our style of physicalist theory. (Smith and Jones) To explain the mind, we have to show how minds are built from mindless stuff. (Minsky) In a volume devoted to the concept of a person, it is appropriate to include a discussion of the first European philosophers, known collectively as the Presocratics. Although the concepts expressed in English by ‘self’ and ‘person’ have no exact equivalent in the language of the early Greeks, there was in their time a way of regarding thought processes and the thinking subject which is directly related to this topic. As is shown by the brief sample of quotations given above, the materialist theory of mind and its activities has its origins in the Presocratics and continues through the history of philosophy to contemporary physicalism.