Functionalism and Behaviourism - Essay

As a response and alternative to Cartesian dualism, behaviourism was the widely accepted interpretation of human mind activities for most of the twentieth-century. Ryle as an analytical behaviourism philosopher argued that mental terms represent the style of behaviours or dispositions, not the internal states (Ryle, 2009, pp. 1-13). In contrary, Fodor questioned if Ryle’s theory can address all human behaviours as there are many mental terms that their dispositional versions require some other mental terms. He appended that, even though, all mental conditions can be analysed to their dispositional forms, it only defines mental terms while, on the other hand, psychology looks for causal analysis of mental activities. Fodor accused Ryle of confusing between conceptual and causal theories about the mind. 

Dualism and the Issue of Brain Damage - Essay

In Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes argued that the mind and the body are independent but inter-correlated while the mind can exist without the body; what is known as essential dualism. Based on this theory, the mind is not a material thing because it has none of the properties that material things have such as spatiality and divisibility. However, there are some facts that challenge Descartes’ idea of the immateriality of the mind as well as its independence from the body. One of those facts that dualism cannot explain is what happens to some brain damaged people (Descartes, 2008, p. 14).