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Why the Mind Matters: The Manifest Image of the World

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Abstract

This chapter considers what arguably is the focal point of the conflict between the scientific and the manifest image of the world, namely normativity, which concerns not only human action, but already thought. The chapter works out an argument for persons being ontologically primitive insofar as they formulate, endorse and justify scientific theories among others. Against this background, it elaborates on how both the scientific and the manifest image lead to human freedom, sets out a twofold conception of freedom and goes into the consequences of that freedom, pointing out that there is no knowledge—scientific or otherwise—that infringes upon human freedom.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See notably Descartes, Principles of philosophy, part 2, § 5.

  2. 2.

    See e.g. Jackson (1998, ch. 4) for such an account.

  3. 3.

    See notably Sellars (1981). See Seibt (1990) for pursuing a process ontology. Strawson (2017) combines a process ontology with panpsychism.

  4. 4.

    See the last chapter of the—serious—book Bohm and Hiley (1993, ch. 15); and see Bohm (1980). See Pylkkänen et al. (2015) for an analysis that seeks to take these remarks seriously.

  5. 5.

    See e.g. Papineau (2002) for endorsing that option.

  6. 6.

    See in particular the argument of Brandom (2015, pp. 80–85, 231–235) for raising such doubts.

  7. 7.

    See notably Dennett (1991, ch. 6), and the discussion between Searle and Dennett in Searle (1997).

  8. 8.

    Prolegomena § 13, note III; quoted from Kant (2002, p. 85); “Wenn uns Erscheinung gegeben ist, so sind wir noch ganz frei, wie wir die Sache daraus beurteilen wollen” in the German original.

  9. 9.

    See e.g. Esfeld (2001, ch. 3) for a detailed account.

  10. 10.

    Cf. also the fundamentalism about reasons advocated by Scanlon (2014).

  11. 11.

    See the papers in Brüntrup and Jaskolla (2017) for contemporary research on panpsychism , as well as Benovsky (2019).

  12. 12.

    Cf. also the normative, relationalist view of reasons of Scanlon (2014).

  13. 13.

    See also the argument of Bilgrami (2006, pp. 62–64).

  14. 14.

    Quoted from the translation Kant (1996, p. 269); “Der bestirnte Himmel über mir, und das moralische Gesetz in mir” in the German original, Critique of practical reason (1788), conclusion (Beschluß).

  15. 15.

    See in particular the papers in Correia and Schnieder (2012).

  16. 16.

    See Lance and O’Leary-Hawthorne (1997) for a treatise on the implications of this for translations.

  17. 17.

    Cf. for instance how Dürr et al. (2013, ch. 2) derive the Heisenberg uncertainty relations from the axioms of Bohmian quantum mechanics.

  18. 18.

    See e.g. Brandom (2015, pp. 30–32) for explaining the distinction between right-wing and left-wing Sellarsianism.

  19. 19.

    See De Caro and Voltolini (2010) and De Caro (2015) for that term and a defence of the associated view.

  20. 20.

    English translation Sartre (1956); see in particular introduction, part IV.1 and conclusion.

  21. 21.

    Prolegomena § 13, note III; quoted from Kant (2002, p. 85); see Sect. 3.2 above.

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  1. Section de Philosophie, University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland

    Michael Esfeld

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Esfeld, M. (2020). Why the Mind Matters: The Manifest Image of the World. In: Science and Human Freedom. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37771-7_3

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