Articulating and understanding the phenomenological manifesto

Abstract

In the mid-nineties, Routledge brought out The Mechanical Mind. Authored by Tim Crane, this was a readable introduction, overview and rationale for approaching the philosophy of mind from a particular outlook. Specifically, it identified and defended the core and foundational assumptions that inform mainstream analytic philosophy of mind. The book advanced a kind of ‘ideological argument’ in that its author recognized that attraction to its central idea “depends on accepting a certain picture of the world; the mechanical/causal world picture. This picture sees the whole of nature as obeying certain general causal laws – the laws of physics, chemistry, biology, etc. – and it holds that psychology too has its laws, and that the mind fits into the causal order” (Crane 1995, p. 62).