Niklas Toivakainen – författare

This volume brings together a collection of essays that explore in a new way how unacknowledged moral concerns are integral to debates in the philosophy of mind.The radical suggestion of the book is that we can make sense of the internal dynamics and cultural significance of these debates only when we understand the moral forces that shape them.Drawing inspiration from a variety of traditions including Wittgenstein, Lacan, phenomenology and analytic philosophy, the authors address a wide range of topics including the mind/body-problem, the problem of other minds, subjectivity and objectivity, the debates on mindreading, naturalism, reductive physicalism, representationalism and the ‘E-turn’; Dennett’s heterophenomenology, McDowell’s neo-Kantianism, Wittgenstein’s ‘private language’ considerations and his notion of an ‘attitude towards a soul’; repression, love, conscience, the difficulties of self-understanding, and the methods and aims of philosophy. Through a combination of detailed, immanent criticism and bold constructive work, the authors move the discussion to a new level, beyond humanistic or conservative critiques of naturalism and scientism.

This volume brings together a collection of essays that explore in a new way how unacknowledged moral concerns are integral to debates in the philosophy of mind.The radical suggestion of the book is that we can make sense of the internal dynamics and cultural significance of these debates only when we understand the moral forces that shape them.Drawing inspiration from a variety of traditions including Wittgenstein, Lacan, phenomenology and analytic philosophy, the authors address a wide range of topics including the mind/body-problem, the problem of other minds, subjectivity and objectivity, the debates on mindreading, naturalism, reductive physicalism, representationalism and the ‘E-turn’; Dennett’s heterophenomenology, McDowell’s neo-Kantianism, Wittgenstein’s ‘private language’ considerations and his notion of an ‘attitude towards a soul’; repression, love, conscience, the difficulties of self-understanding, and the methods and aims of philosophy. Through a combination of detailed, immanent criticism and bold constructive work, the authors move the discussion to a new level, beyond humanistic or conservative critiques of naturalism and scientism.

This is a book about the moral-existential nature of, and the desire inscribed in, the deadlocks generated by our attempts to ground and exhaustively explain the concerns that provoke philosophical reflection.While the book argues that these deadlocks are symptomatic of an impossibility internal to the very enterprise of grounding and explanation, it does not, however, declare any substantial groundlessness. Rather, the book shows that the choice between secure ground and groundlessness, or between final explanations and the inexplicable, is ultimately arbitrary. Instead, through readings of the so-called hard problem of consciousness, of Descartes’ first principle of philosophy, of Plato’s dialogue Gorgias, and of Lacan and Wittgenstein, Toivakainen argues that the actual point of significance, the sense of the impossibility or deadlock, must be traced back to the claims of desire that inform the very movement of grounding and explanation, a desire that is inscribed in a constitutive and inescapable address between self and other. In short, the book translates and rewrites points of structural deadlock into their (original) moral-existential landscapes by following traces of desire.