Volume 26, Number 17 · November 8, 1979
Does Mind Matter?
By P.B. Medawar
The Self and Its Brain: An Argument for Interactionism
by Karl R. Popper, by John C. Eccles
Springer International, 597 pp., $17.90
That thinking is something which goes on in the brain is a proposition to which we all assent unless we are being deliberately 'difficult' about so commonplace a belief. Yet the evidence that it does so is very circumstantial and indirect, and some philosophers have expressed doubts about the matter. Mind, they have argued, is not a 'thing' for which a place can be allocated. But from a commonsensical point of view the evidence that makes us think of the brain as the seat of thinking and as the fountain of voluntary action is too persuasive to be dismissed.
Review, 2899 words
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