Preface

Summary

The journey to this book has been a long, tortuous, often broken-off one. My interest in philosophy of mind began with my undergraduate beginnings in philosophy. Descartes' Dream Argument (although not then quite correctly understood) played an especially large role in my wanting to become a philosopher. By the time I finished graduate school, I had discovered, and come under the sway of, the later works of Wittgenstein with their anti-Cartesian outlook. These Wittgensteinian attitudes stayed with me through a long fallow period that followed graduate school.

Still armed with my Wittgensteinian views, my work, beginning in 1984, rapidly began to gel. And a number of papers, beginning with “Pains and pain sensations” in 1986, have appeared in print since then. But as I progressed along the route these papers, each in turn, seemed to set out for me, two things worthy of note occurred. First, my Wittgensteinian outlook began to fade as I progressed. While I still think that Wittgenstein was right about many of the things he said concerning sensations, more and more I have thought less and less of certain of his broader commitments, especially his anti-Cartesian ones. The upshot is that I have come full circle back to my undergraduate appreciation of a Cartesian theory of mind; and, indeed, this book represents a defense of Cartesianism (a version I call Scientific Cartesianism) against Wittgensteinian and post-Wittgensteinian attacks.