An Intellectual Entertainment: A Dialogue on Mind and Body

This dialogue on the mind/body relation is a sequel to my dialogue ‘On the Nature of the Mind’, but can be read independently of it. The five disputants include an imaginary neuroscientist from California, an Oxford don from the 1950s, a lady, Peter Strawson and Alan White. They examine the peculiar idioms of having: having a body, having a mind, having a soul and having a self. To have a mind, it is concluded, is not to own anything, but to be able to do a variety of things: to reason from premises to conclusions; to act, think, and feel things for reasons. To have a body is to possess a variety of somatic characteristics. Hence a distinction is drawn between the body one is, and the body one has. Accordingly, the problem of the relation between my mind and my body simply disintegrates, since there can be no relation between my intellectual abilities and my somatic features.