Filozofska istraživanja, Vol. 27 No. 1, 2007.
Original scientific paper
The Problem of the Soul and the Mental in Carnap’s Early Writings
Joško Žanić
Abstract
The paper will examine the problem of the soul and the mental in Carnap’s early writings, primarily in the article Von Gott und Seele. Scheinfragen in Metaphysik und Theologie (1929), published as late as 2004, and in Scheinprobleme in der Philosophie (1928). After a preliminary presentation of logical positivism, followed by a short exposition of the notion of the soul in Kant’s first Critique and of the deeply analogous views layed out in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus – both of which are part of the relevant context of Carnap’s approach to the mental – an analysis of Carnap’s theses is given, as well as polemic remarks on them. The paper offers a systematization of Carnap’s views regarding the mental in three components: 1. logico semantical analysis of the word »soul«, 2. logico-epistemological analysis of the accessibility of other minds, and 3. semantico-epistemological analysis of whether the realism-idealism debate makes any sense as regards the reality of other minds. The criticism of Carnap’s views focuses, incorporating more recent insights, on his semantic suppositions, on the thesis of translatability of statements about the mental into statements about the physical, and on the grounding of knowledge in the subjective, instead of the inter-subjective.
Keywords
Rudolf Carnap; logical positivism; the soul; mental states/processes; semantics; theory of mind
Hrčak ID:
15738
URI
Publication date:
2.4.2007.
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