Van Huyssteen J.W. (editor) Encyclopedia of Science and Religion

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reasons. As a result, there is renewed interest in

metaphysics, which has revealed that it often me-

diates between science and religion.

See also DUALISM; EPISTEMOLOGY; KANT, IMMANUEL;

ATERIALISM; NATURALISM; NATURE; ONTOLOGY

Bibliography

Brooke, John H. Science and Religion: Some Historical

Perspectives. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University

Press, 1991.

Brooke, John H.; Osler, Margaret J.; and van der Meer, Jitse

M. eds. Science in Theistic Contexts: Cognitive Dimen-

sions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.

Dhanani, Alnoor. “Islam.” In The History of Science and

Religion in the Western Tradition: An Encyclopedia,

ed. Gary B. Ferngren; Edward J. Larson; Darrell W.

Amundsen; and Anne-Marie E. Nakhla. New York:

Garland, 2000.

Hull, David L., and Ruse, Michael, eds. The Philosophy of

Biology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1998.

Kaiser, Christopher B. Creational Theology and the History

of Physical Science: The Creationist Tradition from

Basil to Bohr. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1997.

Lindberg, David C., and Numbers, Ronald L. God and Na-

ture: Historical Essays on the Encounter between

Christianity and Science. Berkeley: University of Cali-

fornia Press, 1986.

McMullen, Emerson T. “Anatomy and Physiology to 1700.”

In The History of Science and Religion in the Western

Tradition: An Encyclopedia, eds. Gary B. Ferngren;

Edward J. Larson; Darrell W. Amundsen; and Anne-

Marie E. Nakhla. New York: Garland, 2000.

Midgley, Mary. Science as Salvation: A Modern Myth and

its Meaning. London and New York: Routledge, 1992.

Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. Religion and the Order of Nature.

New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Qadir, C. A. Philosophy and Science in the Islamic World.

London and New York: Routledge, 1988.

Richards, Robert J. “Kant and Blumenbach on the Bil-

dungstrieb: A Historical Misunderstanding.” Studies in

the History and Philosophy of Biology and Biomedical

Sciences 31 (2000): 11–32.

Southgate, Christopher; Deane-Drummond, Celia; Murray,

Paul D.; Negus, Michael R.; Osborn, Lawrence; Poole,

Michael; Stewart, Jacqui; and Watts, Fraser. God, Hu-

manity, and the Cosmos: A Textbook in Science and

Religion. Edinburgh, UK: T&T Clark, 1999.

Van Inwagen, Peter. Metaphysics. Boulder, Colo.: West-

view, 1997.

JITSE M. VAN DER MEER

MILLENNIALISM

Millennialism constitutes the belief that at some

point in the future the social world will be trans-

formed into a utopian world of peace, justice,

prosperity, and fellowship. The revolutionary qual-

ity of the idea derives from the focus on this

“worldly” transformation (as opposed to the

“other-worldly” promises of spiritual salvation after

death) and its ultimately optimistic vision of a hu-

manity that is redeemable “in the flesh.” The vision

takes both religious forms, such as Christianity’s

“thousand year reign of the saints,” and secular

forms, such as utopianism, communism, and

Nazism. Both because it has always proved wrong

(that millennium has still not arrived) and because

of its radical and often violent forms, millennialism

has provoked the hostility of many people, espe-

cially writers who view it retrospectively. As a re-

sult, millennialism has left only a vestigial trace in

the documentary record, and it seems to have

played a significantly larger role in the oral dis-

course and actions of the time, especially during

periods before the expectations proved false. His-

torical writing was a hostile medium for the record-

ing of millennial passions, and retrospective ac-

counts often strip millennial commitments from

major figures such as Charlemagne and Isaac New-

ton. Historians have just begun to reconsider this

body of documentation and assess its larger role.

Millennialism is, at base, a profoundly opti-

mistic view of a perfectible future. It takes a wide

variety of forms, from a hierarchical vision of im-

perial perfection imposing order and harmony

from above, to a demotic world of “holy anarchy”

where there is no state and self-regulating saints

live in perfect equality. Moreover, the anticipated

apocalyptic transformation that moves humankind

from its current “fallen” condition perfection can

range from a cataclysmic one of immense destruc-

tion that leaves only a tiny remnant of saved

“saints,” to a vast, pacific, and voluntary transfor-

mational one that embraces “all the nations of the

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world” which no longer “lift up sword against

[other] nation[s], nor study war any more” (Isa.

2:2–4; Mic. 4:1–4). Finally millennialism can en-

dorse various combinations of a passive stance, in

which, for example, God will act and humans

should wait in penitence, or an active stance, in

which chosen agents fulfill God’s apocalyptic vi-

sion. Depending on how peaceful or violent the

apocalyptic scenario, active behaviors can range

from revivalism and proselytizing (e.g., Peace of

God in France, 980s–1030s; Year of the Great Al-

lelulia in Northern Italy, 1233; the Great Awaken-

ings in America, 1730s–1740s and 1820s–1840s)

to holy war and genocidal slaughters of the ene-

mies of good (e.g., the Crusades of the eleventh

to thirteenth centuries; the Jihads of the seventh

century onward; totalitarian purges of the twenti-

eth century).

Although in contemporary usage the term mil-

lennialism refers to any form of this-worldly col-

lective salvation, its original meaning, from the

Latin mille (one thousand) and anni (years), came

from the marriage of messianic expectations and

apocalyptic “world-ending” beliefs in the crucible

of postexilic Judaism under the rule of first Persian,

then Greek, then Roman imperial authorities. Here

the Babylonian notion of a “great cycle” of seven

(planetary) thousand-year ages joined with the bib-

lical notion of a seven-day creation to produce a

vision of the fate of the physical universe (cre-

ation) from genesis to consummation, passing

through six thousand-year days/ages of travail, and

climaxing at the completion of 6,000 years with

the advent of the sabbatical millennium, the thou-

sand years where the “saints” would reign.

Millennialism and chronology

This marriage of millennialism with chronology be-

came especially strong in early Christian circles,

and contributed significantly to the immense inter-

est of Western Christian chronographers in pre-

cisely calculating both the history of the world and

the patterns of yearly and liturgical cycles (compu-

tus), with which the larger cycles were expected to

harmonize (which they do not). For the first thou-

sand years of Christian history, the sabbatical mil-

lennium served primarily to delay apocalyptic ex-

pectations of an imminent end by using

chronologies that pushed the apocalyptic year off

by centuries.

Problems arose when the several-century long

buffer of the anti-apocalyptic early adopters of the

era mundi (the age of the world) approached its

end, leaving those who inherited these increas-

ingly apocalyptic chronographies in their sixtieth

century. Although scholars have not yet been able

to get a sense of the process in any detail, the

long-term record over the course of the first Chris-

tian millennium (first to eleventh centuries) indi-

cates clearly that at the approach of the millennial

date, chronographers chose to “correct” their cal-

culations, consistently adopting new systems that

“put off” the end yet another several centuries.

Thus, around 200

C.E., chronographers adopted an

era mundi that located the present in 5,700 and

the year-6,000 in 500

C.E. At the approach of that

date in the fifth century, chronographers adopted a

second era mundi that pushed the year-6,000 off

until 801

C.E. At the approach of this second mil-

lennial date in the eighth century, chronographers

adopted the anno Domini system, putting off the

end the current millennium (and, by implication,

the sixth and last “age”) another two to three cen-

turies to the year 1000 or 1033. These crises, in-

spired both by approaching apocalyptic dates and

by the intractably asymmetric nature of planetary

movement, had the unintended but significant

consequence of intensifying Western European

abilities to measure time, the only science to

progress in the early middle ages.

Transformative apocalyptic beliefs and the

“making” of the millennium

The apocalyptic scenarios accompanying the sab-

batical millennium tended, as do most Christian

and Jewish scenarios, to emphasize passive, cata-

clysmic apocalyptic expectation, since both the

date and the actions were in God’s hands. But al-

ready by the second year-6,000 (801

C.E., the year

following Charlemagne’s imperial coronation),

there emerged a new and unusual form of active,

transformational millennialism that channeled the

disappointment of failed expectations into projects

aimed at transforming the world. Some of the Car-

olingian theologians, normally known for their

lack of originality, demonstrate an innovation that

treats the “mechanical arts” as a form of redemp-

tive knowledge and activity. This attitude reverses

a classical disdain in Greco-Roman high culture for

manual labor, and reflects a biblical respect for

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manual labor that was part monastic, part millen-

nial (“swords into plowshares …”).

At the turn of the millennium, demotic active

millennialism had an extraordinary period of some

fifty years (980s to 1030s) in France, during which

large crowds gathered in open fields and the

weapons-bearing elite took public oaths to exempt

the unarmed (peasants and clerics) from their vio-

lence and rapine. This wave of popular millennial-

ism, unusually affirmed and encouraged by the ec-

clesiastical and lay ruling groups (bishops, abbots,

dukes, counts, kings), produced the largest active,

transformational, demotic millennial movement in

recorded history and seems to have aroused a

great deal of energy among the commoner class,

both in terms of their passion for Christianity and

in their economic and social initiatives over the

next three centuries.

The rise and spread of radically egalitarian

(often heretical) apostolic movements that en-

gaged in technology-based work (e.g., weaving)

characterizes the centuries after 1000

C.E., a period

of widespread and vigorous social, technological,

and economic revolutions in Western Europe that

transformed both urban and rural regions over the

course of the next three centuries. In this period,

especially with the “renaissance of the twelfth cen-

tury,” ecclesiastical writers invoked technology as a

salvific and growing body of knowledge, and

utopian fantasies appear in which automatons an-

imated with magical arts play prominent roles.

By the late twelfth century, the visionary ex-

egete Joachim of Fiore (d. 1202) had brought a re-

vival of millennial thinking and action back to the

most elite ecclesiastical circles with his notion of

the dawning of the third age of “spiritual men.”

The power of this way of reading history as a

process of (three) stages, with the present poised

on the transition to the final, perfected age, to be

brought about by active individuals (spiritual men),

has proved one of the most potent in Western his-

tory (consider, for example, Karl Marx’s historical

dialectic). Such a system has remarkable resilience

in dealing with disappointment: Every failure could

take refuge in a renewal and reformulation of the

preparatory project of spreading the working of

the spirit. And in each new formulation, the role

for human action increased and the role for a God,

who did not deliver on the promises that prophets

repeatedly made in his name, decreased. This

drove European Christians on a steady path from a

passive scenario, in which God created the millen-

nium (premillennialism), toward an increasingly

active, humanly driven one (postmillennialism).

And the most effective scenarios—effective not

in actually bringing about the millennium, but, in

their unintended and long-lasting consequences—

involved technology. The millennial origins of the

West’s peculiar passion for technology seem to de-

rive from a notion that if humankind could regain

the knowledge it had before the Fall, it could recre-

ate Eden. While there are multiple traces of this be-

lief in the Middle Ages, its conflict with Augustine

of Hippo’s (354–430) doctrine of original sin kept it

at the margins of official culture. But this desire to

regain pre-lapsarian knowledge gained great force

in the latter half of the fifteenth century with the

translation of the Corpus Hermeticum, a Gnostic

text from the first century

C.E. attributed to Hermes

Trismegistus. The self-styled magus, who turned to

this text to gain the original knowledge (prisca the-

ologica) of humankind, believed that at last the

time had come to create and transform nature.

Francis Yates argues that these men, the her-

metic magi, played a central role in the emergence

of modern science, not so much by developing ra-

tional thought, but by “changing the will,” un-

leashing the passion for the knowledge to trans-

form and perfect nature. Even Francis Bacon

(1561–1626), a vocal opponent of the magi, in-

voked hopes of pre-lapsarian knowledge through

science in his call for the Royal Historical Society,

as well as his utopian work The New Atlantis

(1626). Utopian thought represented the first stir-

rings of secular millennialism, and, beginning with

Bacon, they increasingly featured technology and

scientific research. The rational, demythologized

scientific tradition that is identified as beginning in

the early modern period (sixteenth century to eigh-

teenth century) appears to have arisen as an unin-

tended consequence of this passion for esoteric

knowledge. For almost a thousand years, Augus-

tine had enforced on intellectuals the humility of

original sin: “Fallen man” should not seek to

change this world. That enforced humility ceded to

a wave of active, transformational millennial en-

thusiasm that remains to the present.

The links between activist millennial hopes for

creating a more perfect society on Earth and the

advancement of science and technology from the

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fifteenth century onward are legion. The most

striking link concerns Isaac Newton (1642–1727), a

figure who, retrospectively, represents the giant of

modern science and rationality. The millennial vi-

sionary poet and artist William Blake (1757–1827)

heaped contempt on Newton, describing the con-

stricted view of the world in Newton’s cosmogony

as “single vision and Newton’s sleep.” But a closer

look at the vast and largely unpublished work into

which Newton poured so much energy reveals a

man at once magus (alchemical work) and classic

biblical millennialist (ancient chronology designed

to calculate the advent of the Parousia [the Second

Coming of Jesus Christ]). Similar millennial dimen-

sions can be found when one examines closely the

careers of other great scientific figures, revealing

the role of millennial hopes as a motivator for the

scientist, as well as millennial rhetoric as a useful

way to attract large sums of funding. Even Roger

Bacon (1219–1294) linked the Antichrist to science

as part of an appeal to the pope to fund his proj-

ects concerning teaching, learning, and dissemi-

nating scientific knowledge.

Modern millennialism and scientific

megaprojects

Nor has this millennial dimension waned with

time. On the contrary, one of the greatest and most

portentous projects in history, the invention of

atomic bombs, took place in the framework of a

war of democratic Western culture against the ag-

gression of technologically empowered Nazi mil-

lennialists (tausendjähriger Reich means “millen-

nial kingdom”). The Manhattan Project, the United

States initiative during the early 1940s to produce

the first atomic bomb, has served as the standard

for all subsequent grand scientific projects (e.g.,

space exploration) that raise enormous funds and

create a cultural faith in the powers of science and

technology, new stages in the “religion of technol-

ogy.” As an unintended consequence, the atomic

bomb has revivified apocalyptic fears of the cata-

clysmic end of the world, just when conceptual

scientific schemata had robbed earlier apocalyptic

scenarios of any credibility.

Millennial dreams continue to breathe their in-

spirations into the great undertakings of modern

humans, from the messianic belief in “modern civil

society” spread the world over (the biblical quota-

tion “nation shall not lift up sword against nation”

is inscribed on a wall at United Nations Plaza in

New York) to the fear of the apocalyptic annihila-

tion of humankind, whether from environmental

pollution and global warming, nuclear threats from

the cold war, or terrorism. But this millennial think-

ing continues to inspire new directions in science

as well. New fields of research, such as artificial in-

telligence and artificial life, have secured funding

by appealing to the millennial dreams of both sci-

entists and their backers. The pioneers of artificial

intelligence speak about downloading the brain

from the troublesome mortal coil and into nearly

immortal silicon bodies, of launching an evolu-

tionary step that would compare with the creation

of the universe and the emergence of life, or more

modestly, with the emergence of homo sapiens.

Their visionary enthusiasm, simplistic dualism, and

boundless megalomania are typical millennial

characteristics and make clear how important it is

for scientists to better understand their own mil-

lennial past. Then scientists and the broader cul-

ture might not make naïve and, in this age of

immense technological potency, potentially dan-

gerous choices.

But avoiding the dangers of millennial hubris

should not lead, as many rationalists argue, to the

jettisoning of the millennial vision. On the con-

trary, the millennial vision serves as one of the

great inspirations for scientific and technological

development. As Blake commented in Marriage of

Heaven and Hell (1790), “what is now proved was

once only imagined.” Of course, not all that is now

imagined will be proved, just as not every millen-

nial idea leads to science. But the reverse—how,

how much, and what kind of millennial imagina-

tion leads to science?—poses interesting questions,

well worth trying to answer.

See also ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE; END OF THE WORLD,

ELIGIOUS AND PHILOSOPHICAL ASPECTS OF;

SCHATOLOGY

Bibliography

Benz, Ernst. Evolution and Christian Hope: Man’s Concept

of the Future from the Early Fathers to Teilhard de

Chardin, trans. Heinz G. Frank. Garden City, N.Y.:

Doubleday, 1966.

Fried, Johannes. Aufsteig aus dem Untergang: Apokalyptis-

ches Denken und die Entstehung der modernen Natur-

wissenschaft im Mittelalter. Munich: C.H. Beck, 2001.

Head, Thomas, and Landes, Richard, eds. The Peace of

God: Social Violence and Religious Response around

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the Year 1000. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,

1992.

Jacob, Margaret C. “Millenarianism and Science in the Late

Seventeenth Century.” Journal of the History of Ideas

37 (1976): 335–341.

Jacob, Margaret C. The Cultural Meaning of the Scientific

Revolution. Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University

Press, 1988.

Landes, Richard. “Lest the Millennium Be Fulfilled: Apoca-

lyptic Expectations and the Pattern of Western

Chronography, 100–800

C.E.” In The Use and Abuse of

Eschatology in the Middle Ages, ed. Werner Verbeke,

Daniel Verhelst, and Andries Welkenhysen. Leuven,

Belgium: Leuven University Press, 1988.

Landes, Richard. “While God Tarried: Modernity as

Frankenstein’s Millennium.” Deolog 4 (1997): 6–27.

Mannheim, Karl. Ideology and Utopia. London: Lund

Humphries, 1936.

Manuel, Frank. The Religion of Isaac Newton. Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1974.

Maurer, Reinhart. “The Origins of Modern Technology in

Millenarianism.” In Philosophy and Technology, ed.

Paul T. Durbin and Frederick Rapp. Dordrecht,

Netherlands: Kluwer, 1983.

Mendel, Arthur. Vision and Violence (1992). Reprint, Ann

Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000.

Noble, David. The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of

Man and the Spirit of Invention. New York: Knopf,

1997.

Reeves, Marjorie. Joachim of Fiore and the Prophetic Fu-

ture. New York: Harper, 1977.

Tuveson, Ernest Lee. Millennium and Utopia: A Study in

the Background of the Idea of Progress. Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1949.

Weber, Eugen. Apocalypses: Prophecies, Cults, and Millen-

nial Beliefs through the Ages. Cambridge, Mass.: Har-

vard University Press, 1999.

Webster, Charles C. Great Instauration: Science Medicine

and Reform, 1626–1660. New York: Holmes &

Meier, 1976.

Yates, Frances Amelia. Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic

Tradition. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964.

RICHARD LANDES

IND-BODY DUALISM

See D

UALISM; MIND-BODY THEORIES; SELF

MIND-BODY THEORIES

Mind-body theories are putative solutions to the

mind-body problem. The mind-body problem is

that of stating the exact relation between the mind

and the body, or, more narrowly, between the

mind and the brain. Most of the theories of the

mind-body relation exist also as metaphysical the-

ories of reality as a whole. While debates over the

mind-body problem can seem intractable, science

offers at least two promising lines of research. On

the one hand, parts of the mind-body problem

arise in research in artificial intelligence and might

be solved by a better understanding of the rela-

tions between hardware and software. On the

other hand, the study of emergence in biological

systems may illuminate the mind-body relation.

Mind-body dualism

Dualism, or mind-body dualism, is the theory that

both minds and brains exist, and no mind is a

brain and no brain is a mind, nor is a mind any

part of a brain or a brain any part of a mind. Hin-

duism and non-Advaitic Vedanta entail mind-body

dualism because if the soul migrates through dis-

tinct incarnations then it is something that can exist

independently of the body. If the fusion of atman

with Brahman preserves atman’s individuality,

then atman can exist without the existence of a

human body.

The earliest Western philosopher to endorse

dualism was the pre-Socratic Pythagoras (c.

569–475

B.C.E.). He inherited the ancient Egyptian

religious doctrine that a nonphysical part of the

person survives death, and he believed in the rein-

carnation of the soul. If Plato (c. 427–347

B.C.E.) is

not correctly read as an idealist, then he was a

mind-body dualist. In his dialogue The Phaedo es-

pecially, Socrates advanced arguments for the con-

clusion that the soul survives bodily death. Aristo-

tle (384–322

B.C.E.) held that the soul is the “form”

of the human body. He was nevertheless a mind-

body dualist because he insisted that the intellec-

tual part of the soul is immortal, even though he

offered functionalist or materialist accounts of af-

fective and sensory faculties.

Orthodox Christianity is not mind-body dualist

in that human immortality consists in the hope of

bodily resurrection, or the living again of the

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whole person by the grace of God, not in the im-

mortality of a disembodied soul. Although the term

soul is sometimes used in the Old and New Testa-

ments it does not there explicitly denote an imma-

terial mental substance that could exist whether or

not the body exists. The soul in this strong meta-

physical sense was introduced into Christianity

during the fourth and fifth centuries by Augustine

of Hippo who, believing Platonism and Christian-

ity mutually consistent and true, sought to fuse

them into a single philosophical system. Augus-

tine’s synthesis accounts for the subsequent Chris-

tian belief in mind-body dualism even though a

guarantee of the immortality of the soul would

seem to make the hope of resurrection redundant.

On the other hand, it might be that some resurrec-

tion can only be one’s own resurrection if one is or

one has a soul. If that is right, the immortality of

the soul is a logical presupposition of the truth of

Christianity.

The seventeenth-century French philosopher

and mathematician René Descartes (1596–1650) ar-

gues in his Meditations (1641) that the only fact of

which he can be certain is that he exists. The evi-

dence of the senses, the truths of mathematics, and

the whole physical world are ultimately dubitable,

but his own existence cannot be doubted, because

if he doubts, then he exists. On these premises

Descartes concludes that he is a thing that thinks

and that does not depend on the physical world,

which includes his own body. Cartesian dualism is

the view that each person is essentially a substan-

tial soul that is distinct from the body.

Materialism

Materialism is the theory that the mind is the brain,

or nothing over and above the brain. The ancient

Greek atomist Democritus maintains that there

exist only atoms and the void. Atoms are indivisi-

ble material particles and the void is the infinite

empty space in which atoms are in motion. If

atomism is true, then everything is either an atom

or reducible to atoms. If there are minds or mental

states then they are reducible to atoms and if

atoms are physical then minds are physical.

Thomas Hobbes, the seventeenth-century Eng-

lish political theorist and philosopher, was a foun-

dationalist about geometry: Unless the statements

of geometry are true then no statement can be true.

Geometry is the mathematics of space so it follows

that everything is spatial. If everything spatial is

physical then everything is physical, and so mate-

rialism is true. Hobbes has an account of how peo-

ple come to be mislead into dualism or otherwise

believing in nonphysical realities. Because a mind

does not seem to be straightforwardly a physical

object, people falsely assume it is a nonphysical

object, but this is an abstraction caused by thinking

away just some material properties, notably solid-

ity. Hobbes thinks that if people think of anything

they can only think of it as physical. One thinks of

a ghost as having certain physical properties, per-

haps extension and indeterminate shape. This sort

of criticism of putative nonphysical realities was

later adopted in the 1930s by the Vienna Circle,

who sought to replace religion by natural science.

The mind-brain identity theory was influential

from the mid-1950s into the 1980s. The main claim

of the British philosopher U.T. Place’s seminal 1956

paper “Is Consciousness a Brain Process?” is that

consciousness is strictly or numerically identical

with a physical process in the brain. The identity in

question is a contingent and a posteriori one, not a

necessary and a priori one. Place’s claim is not to

have proved that consciousness is a brain process,

but to have removed a priori philosophical objec-

tions to it as a scientific hypothesis.

Idealism

Idealism is the theory that only minds exist and

that physical objects, including the human body,

are dependent on minds or consciousness for their

existence. Although nondualistic, Vedanta entails

the idealist doctrine that only subjective centers of

experience exist and the empirical world is only an

appearance. The first systematic thinker who could

be construed as an idealist is the pre-Socratic

monist Parmenides of Elea in the sixth and fifth

centuries

B.C.E. Parmenides believed that only

what can be thought exists.

Plato insists that the Forms (eidos) are non-

physical types or essences that exist independently

not only of space and time but the human mind.

However, the Forms are in principle graspable by

the human mind given appropriate training, and

the soul “participates” in them before birth and

after death. To the extent that the Forms are ideal,

Plato is an idealist because he thinks the empirical

world depends upon the Forms for its existence.

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The third-century neo-Platonist philosopher Ploti-

nus (205–270

C.E.) is plausibly construed as an ide-

alist because he maintains that the empirical world

is ultimately an emanation of the One, which is at

least nonphysical and spiritual and possesses men-

tal properties.

The eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish Bishop

George Berkeley argues that it makes no sense to

claim that physical objects exist independently of

the possibility of thinking of them or perceiving

them. He also argues that the concept of matter, or

a physical substratum of which the properties of a

physical object are properties, is incoherent.

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant

(1724–1804) is usually read as an idealist because

his own name for his philosophy was transcen-

dental idealism. However, transcendental idealism

is the epistemological doctrine that humans are

cognitively constituted in such a way that people

may only know things as they appear to them, not

as they really are in themselves. People are psy-

chologically equipped to formulate philosophical

questions but not to answer them. There are no

metaphysical propositions because putative claims

about a reality beyond space and time are neither

true nor false. So the word idealism in transcen-

dental idealism is best read as antirealism. In so far

as a solution to the mind-body problem may be ex-

tracted from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781),

it entails a repudiation of Cartesian mind-body du-

alism for misusing the category “substance” out-

side space and time, and an implicit endorsement

of the construction of the mental-physical distinc-

tion out of a prior monism of phenomena.

It is in the writings of Kant’s successors Johann

Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) and Friedrich Wilhelm

Joseph von Schelling (1775–1854) that transcen-

dental idealism becomes a kind of idealism. Georg

Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s (1770–1831) Absolute

Idealism is the doctrine that the multiplicity of

kinds and degrees of consciousness are ultimately

aspects or shapes (Gestalten) of the one ultimate

cosmic consciousness called Geist. On this thesis,

which is partly Brahmanist and partly neo-Platon-

ist, the distinction between mental and physical ul-

timately depends on Geist.

Logical behaviorism

Logical (or analytical) behaviorism is the theory

that minds can be reduced to publicly observable

bodily behavior. According to this theory, any

statement about minds or mental states may be

translated into a claim or set of claims about actual

or possible bodily behavior that is in principle ob-

servable. Logical behaviorism is a reduction of the

inner to the outer, the subjective to the objective,

the private to the public, the first person singular to

the third person singular.

The German-born American positivist philoso-

pher Carl Gustav Hempel (1905–1997) is a logical

behaviorist in this defined sense. Austrian philoso-

pher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) and British

philosopher Gilbert Ryle (1900–1976) offer subtle

analyses of the uses of ordinary psychological lan-

guage designed to show that seemingly Cartesian

or introspective language in fact takes on its mean-

ing from shared uses in a public world. In particu-

lar, Wittgenstein argues in his Private Language Ar-

gument in Philosophical Investigations (1953) that

there have to be public third-person criteria for

psychological ascriptions. Mental concepts cannot

take on meaning by a kind of private ostensive

definition, a sort of inner private labeling of one’s

own sensations. In that case, there would be no

criterion for the correctness of a putative ascrip-

tion: There would be nothing it would consist in

for the ascription to be true or false. It follows that

there are no logically private psychological ascrip-

tions, and mental terms do not take on meaning

only from one’s own case.

Nevertheless, Wittgenstein would strongly re-

sist being called a behaviorist. Ryle, who in The

Concept of Mind (1949) argues that the myth of

Cartesianism does not have to be true in order for

people’s psychological vocabulary to be meaning-

ful, was not wholly uncomfortable with the label.

Functionalism

Functionalism is the theory that a mind is a set of

states essentially causally related to sensory inputs,

behavioral outputs, and one another. Functional-

ism may be partly understood as an attempt to

overcome certain shortcomings of logical behav-

iorism. Behavior seems neither necessary nor suf-

ficient for mentality. It is not sufficient because it

does not follow from the fact that someone be-

haves in a particular way that they are in a partic-

ular mental state. Behavior is not necessary for

mentality because from the fact that a person is in

a particular mental state it does not follow that they

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MIND-BODY THEORIES

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behave in a particular way. Mind does not seem to

be behavior. Mind seems to be the inner cause of

behavior. The contemporary philosophers David

Lewis and Hilary Putnam have argued that being in

a mental state is being in a functional state, a state

caused by sensory inputs and causing behavioral

outputs. Functionalism does not entail a view

about the intrinsic nature of a mental state, so in a

sense avoids the mind-body problem. However,

with the addition of just one extra premise—only

physical events may be causes or effects—func-

tionalism is a kind of materialism. Functionalism is

consistent with the assumption of cognitive science

that a person is best viewed as an information pro-

cessing system.

Double aspect theories

According to double aspect theories, mind and

body are two aspects of some jointly presupposed

reality that is intrinsically neither mental nor phys-

ical. Dutch-Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza

(1632–1677) argued that reality has two essential

properties: thought and extension, or conscious-

ness and physical size. The totality of what is could

appropriately be called “God” or “Nature” (deus

sive natura). As parts of the whole, human minds

and bodies are two aspects of an underlying real-

ity. Thought cannot exist without extension, nor

extension without thought. As in many double as-

pect theories, this raises the question of what the

underlying reality is if it is allegedly neither mental

nor physical. Spinoza’s answer is existence or

being. However, the concept of existence or being

has proved recalcitrant to analysis by philosophers

from the ancient Greek Parmenides to Martin Hei-

degger in the twentieth century.

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) endorsed two

kinds of double aspect theories at different stages

of his intellectual career. He endorsed the empiri-

cist view that mind and matter are logical con-

structions of sense data: the contents of sensory ex-

perience as they are directly given. Intrinsically,

mind and matter are neither mental nor physical. In

An Outline of Philosophy (1927) Russell argues that

there can be no distinction between mental and

physical unless fundamentally there exist events

that are not clearly mental or physical. In particular

the smallest events postulated by science have no

intrinsic mental properties and, on Russell’s en-

dorsement of the De Broglie/Shröedinger view of

matter, are nonmaterial constituents of matter.

Peter Strawson argues in Individuals (1959)

that the concept of a person is primitive with re-

gard to the distinction between mind and body.

Unless humans are already possessed of the con-

cept of the person as a whole, they are not in a po-

sition to draw a mind-body distinction. There is a

considerable class of predicates that are not clearly

only mental or only physical, for example “is smil-

ing,” or “is running.”

The philosopher and psychologist William

James (1842–1910) invented the term neutral

monism for the view that there are items neither

mental nor physical that are ontologically or epis-

temologically prior to the distinction between mind

and matter.

Phenomenology

Phenomenology offers ways of marking the dis-

tinction between mental and physical, and diag-

noses of how the mind-body problem is thinkable.

Phenomenology is the description of appearances

just as they are given to consciousness. Assump-

tions about their objective reality or causal rela-

tions are suspended or bracketed by an epoché

(Greek: suspension of judgement). The ambition

of phenomenology is to show how knowledge, in-

cluding all scientific, religious, and philosophical

knowledge is possible. The philosopher Edmund

Husserl (1859–1938) grounded knowledge in the

transcendental ego, a subjective source of experi-

ence that one’s own being ultimately consists in,

even after ontological commitment to the empirical

human being has been suspended by the epoché.

The transcendental ego is purportedly neither

mental nor physical, and phenomenology is pur-

portedly prior to the drawing of that distinction.

However, the construction of the world out of acts

of consciousness on some interpretations entails

idealism and Husserl sometimes called his own

philosophy transcendental idealism. As is the case

with Kant, however, the claim that consciousness

of an object is necessary and sufficient for the ob-

jective giveness of that object does not appear to

entail that the object is dependent on conscious-

ness for its existence. Husserl’s teacher and phe-

nomenological predecessor, the Austrian philoso-

pher and psychologist Franz Brentano

(1838–1917), argued that the essence of con-

sciousness is intentionality directedness towards

an object.

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MIND-BRAIN INTERACTION

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Twentieth century phenomenologists Heideg-

ger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jean Paul Sartre

all reject the epoche and the transcendental ego

and argue that the mental-physical distinction is

dependent on the fundamental existential category

being-in-the-world.

Conclusion

The mind-body problem cannot be solved scientif-

ically. The brain is billions of atoms in motion in

empty space. No amount of empirical observation

and experimental testing will explain how aware-

ness is generated by matter in motion. Although it

is obvious that ordinary mental states depend em-

pirically on the brain, their subjective interiority of

those same states is scientifically inexplicable. The

uniqueness of one’s own mind is ultimately expli-

cable only if we are souls.

See also ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE; CONSCIOUSNESS

STUDIES; DESCARTES, RENÉ; EMERGENCE;

XPERIENCE, RELIGIOUS: COGNITIVE AND

NEUROPHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECTS; FUNCTIONALISM;

DEALISM; MATERIALISM; MIND-BODY THEORIES;

IND-BRAIN INTERACTION; NEUROSCIENCES; PLATO

Bibliography

Barnes, Jonathan, ed. Early Greek Philosophy. London:

Penguin, 1987.

Berkeley, George. The Principles of Human Knowledge

with Other Writings. London: Fontana Collins, 1977.

Borst, Clive V., ed. The Mind-Brain Identity Theory. Lon-

don: Macmillan, 1970.

Davidson, Donald. Essays on Actions and Events. Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1980

Descartes, René. Discourse on Method and The Medita-

tions, trans. F. E. Sutcliffe. Harmondsworth, UK: Pen-

guin, 1974

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Phenomenology of Spirit

(1807), trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1977.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason (1781), trans.

Norman Kemp Smith. London: Macmillan, 1978.

Lycan, William G. Mind and Cognition: A Reader. Oxford:

Blackwell, 1990.

Place, U. T. “Is Consciousness a Brain Process?” British

Journal of Psychology 47 (1956): 44–50.

Plato. Phaedo, trans. David Gallop. Oxford: Oxford Uni-

versity Press, 1975.

Priest, Stephen. Theories of the Mind. Boston: Houghton

Mifflin, 1991.

Robinson, Howard, ed. Objections to Physicalism. Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1993

Russell, Bertrand. An Outline of Philosophy (1927). Lon-

don and New York: Routledge, 1995.

Ryle, Gilbert. The Concept of Mind. London: Hutchinson,

1949.

Solomon, Robert C., ed. Phenomenology and Existential-

ism. Washington D.C: University Press of America,

1980.

Strawson, Peter. Individuals: As Essay in Descriptive Meta-

physics. London: Methuen, 1959.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations.

Oxford: Blackwell, 1952.

STEPHEN PRIEST

MIND-BRAIN INTERACTION

That psychophysical interaction occurs seems ob-

vious. How it occurs seems inexplicable. It is a

presupposition of common sense but prima facie

inconsistent with science that mental events cause

physical events and physical events cause mental

events. If a commander’s decision is a cause of an

air strike, then a physical event has a mental cause.

If eating overripe cheese causes vivid dreams, then

a mental event has a physical cause. However, if

the physical universe is a closed deterministic sys-

tem, then any physical event is caused by distinct

physical events sufficient for its occurrence. If

physical causes are sufficient for physical effects,

then nothing else is necessary, so no mental cause

is necessary for any physical event to happen. It

follows that mental causation is redundant in the

physical universe.

The Third Law of Thermodynamics states that

the quantity of energy in the universe is constant.

If there were mental causation, extra energy would

be introduced into the universe, so if the Third

Law of Thermodynamics is true there is no mental

causation.

It is just as scientifically inexplicable how

mind, consciousness, or awareness could be pro-

duced by the brain. The brain is the most complex

object known to exist. Nevertheless, for all its neu-

rological complexity, the brain is only billions and

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MIND-BRAIN INTERACTION

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billions of wholly physical atoms moving through

empty space. It is hard to see how billions and bil-

lions of atoms could give rise to awareness: the

reader’s own awareness of this page, for example.

Consciousness seems to be so radically qualita-

tively distinct from matter in motion it is unimagin-

able how it could arise out of it.

It is extremely difficult to specify exactly how

it is possible for a neurological event to cause a

mental event, or a mental event to cause a neuro-

logical event. If there exist both minds and bodies

then the logically possible permutations of psy-

chophysical interaction would seem to be these:

Minds affect bodies but bodies do not affect minds;

Bodies affect minds but minds do not affect bod-

ies; Minds affect bodies and bodies affect minds;

Minds do not affect bodies and bodies do not af-

fect minds.

If the mental states of human beings bring

about physical effects, then human beings are not

wholly explicable in terms of scientific laws. One

account of this inexplicability is that humans are

spiritual beings. Humans as spiritual beings is ex-

plicable in turn if they are made in the image of

God. It is then unsurprising if the finite mind-body

relation is partly like the infinite God-world rela-

tion. If we could understand how the mental and

the physical interact in causal relations, some in-

sight might be gained regarding divine creation

and divine intervention.

Cartesian problems

The pre-Socratic philosopher Anaxagoras (c.

500–c. 428

B.C.E.) famously claimed that “Mind …

causes all things,” but he neglected to explain

how. Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E) claimed in the

Nicomachean Ethics that choice is the efficient

cause (sufficient condition) of action, so if choices

are mental and actions are physical, there is men-

tal causation. Nevertheless, Aristotle provided no

account of how mental causation is possible. Dur-

ing the seventeenth century, the French philoso-

pher and mathematician René Descartes argued for

two-way psychophysical causal interaction be-

tween the immaterial soul and the human body,

but he admitted to being incapable of explaining

how this was possible.

One solution to the problem is to deny that

there is causation in either direction, a view en-

tailed by the psychophysical parallelism endorsed

by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), the Ger-

man philosopher and mathematician, and his

French partial contemporary Nicholas Male-

branche. Leibniz argued that God has caused a

“pre-established harmony” and thereby initiated

the causal chain that results in mental events and

the causal chain that results in physical events,

which are correlated rather like the motions of two

clocks, each of which tells the right time and there-

fore the same time. Malebranche agreed that God

initiated both causal chains but claimed further that

God intervened to determine the timing of each

mental event and each physical event. Male-

branche’s version of psychophysical parallelism is

sometimes called occasionalism for this reason. In

the monist theory of Baruch Spinoza, the seven-

teenth-century Dutch-Jewish philosopher, thought

and extension are two aspects of one substance

and do not interact causally.

Much contemporary work on mental causation

is also a reaction to Cartesianism. Descartes’s mind-

body dualism is rejected, but his recognition of

psychophysical interaction is accepted. The at-

tempt is then made to explain how mental causa-

tion is possible.

Anomalous monism

The most influential theory of mental causation of

the last quarter of the twentieth century was

anomalous monism, advocated by Donald David-

son (b. 1917), Professor of Philosophy at the Uni-

versity of California at Berkeley. Davidson argues

in his 1970 paper “Mental Events” that mental

events cause physical events because they are

physical events. Davidson’s motivation is to relieve

the appearance of contradiction between three

principles that he thinks are true: causal interac-

tion, the nomological character of causality, and

the anomalism of the mental.

According to the principle of causal interaction

at least some mental events cause physical events

and at least some physical events cause mental

events. For example, if intentions, perceptions, and

decisions are amongst the causes of the sinking of

a battleship in a naval engagement then a physical

event has at least some mental causes. If the

perception of a physical object, say a battle-

ship, causes beliefs then a mental state has at least

some physical causes. On the principle of the

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