The Undivided Self: Aristotle and the ‘Mind-Body Problem’, by David Charles

Abstract

This important and challenging book is the fruit of many years of engagement with Aristotle’s thinking about the soul-body relation by one of the most distinguished experts in the field. David Charles does what many have tried to do during the past fifty years, but he does it with more radicalism and ingenuity than, as far as I can see, anyone has done before. He applies Aristotle’s psychological hylomorphism to the modern mind-body problem arguing that it is both distinctive and philosophically preferable to all other positions in the post-Cartesian theoretical landscape, including recent so-called neo-Aristotelian theories of the mind. The book conveys a very clear philosophical message. According to Charles, contemporary analytic philosophy of mind is still very much in the grip of a profoundly Cartesian way of distinguishing mind and body. This, he argues, besets it with a problem which is both superfluous and prevents it from an adequate understanding of the phenomena of the mental: modern analytic philosophers of mind continue to conceive of mind and body as definitionally separate, that is, in such a way that their definitions do not contain reference to each other. Charles’ point is that definitional separability is the common conceptual core shared by all post-Cartesian treatments of the mind-body problem, that it is a residue of Descartes’ substance-dualism, and that it suffices by itself to create the host of problems characteristic of the post-Cartesian predicament. How can definitionally separate entities interact with each other? How do they come to form unified psychophysical selves in the first place? Charles argues that this way of carving up reality makes truly gapless accounts of the relation between mind and body impossible from the outset. The underlying conceptions of the purely physical (res extensa) and the purely mental (res cogitans), that is, the conceptions that gave rise to the mind-body problem in the first place, are false abstractions, and the very cause of the need to somehow bridge or otherwise overcome the gap they produce.