Reality Consists of Mental and Physical Qualities

 

John Dewey (1859-1952)

• Dewey presents an alternative to Descartes' Dualism. He holds that the mind and body are not two kinds of substance. Rather, mind and body properties or functions of a single entity, the natural, organic, living whole.

• Mental and physical events are experiential aspects or natural properties of living persons manifested in their behavior.

• Functionalism: mind and body refer to integrated mental and physical functions of the living human being.

John Dewey

Reality Consists of Mental and Physical Qualities

• The problem of Dualism of mind-body has to do with underlying metaphysical issues:-the denial  of quality in general to natural events; the ignoring of temporal quality and the dogma (religious doctrine this proclaimed as true without proof) of the superior reality of "causes" (p. 375)

• Psycho-physical: denotes the conjunctive presence in activity of need-demand-satisfaction-in the sense that these terms have been identified (knocking Descartes) (p. 375)

• Organization is an empirical trait of some events; it holds sets of specifiable empirical events marked by distinctive qualities and their distinct results, outcomes, or effects. Organization is characteristic of the nature of some events in their sequential linkage.

• The idea that matter, life, and mind are different beings in erroneous. These errors rise form a substantiation of eventual functions.

• "Matter": or the physical, is a character of events when they occur at a certain level of interaction. The notion while mind denotes essence, "matter" denotes existence is incorrect.

• Dewey may be called a materialist due to the fact that he theories that feeling and thought are never independent of physical events

• It is the virtue of the character of events which is termed matter that psycho-physical and intellectual functions can be differentially determined (p. 376)

• Notions we need to disregard to view Dewey's point:
• The notion that the universe is split in two separate and disconnected realms of existence, one physical and the next psychical
• And that this two disconnected beings specifically and minutely correspond

• To gain a better and fuller perceptive display of characters we must take natural events on the two levels of mind and body and institute a point to point correspondence (or "parallelism") between them- this inadequate.

• Dewey's three field of interaction in nature:
1. Physical: more narrower and more external interactions.
2. Life: qualitative differences of living beings, like those of plant and animal, lower or higher animal forms;
3. Association, communication, participation: still internally diversified, consisting of individualities. It is marked, however, by common properties, which define mind as intellect; possession of and response to meanings

• Problems in language cause dome of the difficulty in explain the mind-body relation. We lack the word to describe and designate to the actual existential fact

• Body-mind designate what actually takes place when a living body is implicated in situations of discourse communication and participation.

• Soul is form, spirit informs