philosophy of mind summary

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philosophy of mind, Branch of philosophy that studies the nature of mind and its various manifestations, including intentionality, sensation and sense perception, feeling and emotion, traits of character and personality, the unconscious, volition, thought, memory, imagination, and belief. It is distinguished from empirical studies of the mind (e.g., psychology, biology, physiology, sociology, and anthropology) by its method, which emphasizes the analysis and clarification of concepts. See also cognitive science.

George Berkeley Summary

George Berkeley was an Anglo-Irish Anglican bishop, philosopher, and scientist best known for his empiricist and idealist philosophy, which holds that reality consists only of minds and their ideas; everything save the spiritual exists only insofar as it is perceived by the senses. Berkeley was the

Bertrand Russell Summary

Bertrand Russell was a British philosopher, logician, and social reformer, a founding figure in the analytic movement in Anglo-American philosophy, and recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950. Russell’s contributions to logic, epistemology, and the philosophy of mathematics established

Hilary Putnam Summary

Hilary Putnam was a leading American philosopher who made major contributions to metaphysics, epistemology, the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of language, the philosophy of science, the philosophy of mathematics, and the philosophy of logic. He is best known for his semantic externalism,

David Hume Summary

David Hume was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist known especially for his philosophical empiricism and skepticism. Hume conceived of philosophy as the inductive, experimental science of human nature. Taking the scientific method of the English physicist Sir Isaac Newton as