Introduction

should Freud be taken seriously as a philosopher of mind?

pp. 1-14

in: Jerome C. Wakefield, Freud and philosophy of mind I, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018

Abstract

Sigmund Freud is not generally considered an important figure in the history of philosophy of mind. In this book, I argue that this is a mistake and that implicit within Freud's scattered comments on unconscious mental states is a sophisticated and still-relevant philosophical argument against the Cartesian equation of mental with consciousness. Although Freud gave up on the "hard problem" and was a quasi-mysterian about consciousness, he separated the mental from consciousness, postulated intrinsic intentionality in brain tissue, and posed the "not quite as hard but still quite difficult" problem—as yet unresolved—of how non-conscious brain states can possess intrinsic intentionality.