Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LM, online at historyof philosophy.net. Today's episode, Image Problems, Arnod v. Malbranch on

ideas. Some philosophical dilemmas are hard to resolve because two opposing answers both seem attractive and plausible.

Take Cartesian dualism.

It's very tempting to say that thinking is an activity divorced from the body, because mental life feels so distinctive.

Also, then we might get to survive bodily death, which would be a welcome bonus.

But it's also tempting to say that thinking is a physical process,

because it is affected by the states of our organs, especially the brain, and because it would also

be a welcome bonus if the mind could be studied by science. Then there are dilemmas where both

answers seem unattractive. Take another central philosophical dispute of the period we've been covering,

the question of free will.

Determinism seems to make genuine freedom impossible, thus depriving us of moral responsibility.

But if free choices are indeterministic and uncaused, then they would seem to be inexplicable, random, and arbitrary.

Another less familiar debate that falls into this second category would be the disagreement over representationalism. This is the view that when we are conscious of something, we are

representing it through a mental state, not unlike the way that a picture represents the

thing shown in the picture. Thus, if I see or think about a giraffe, there's something like an image of the

giraffe in my mind, and the reason I am grasping the giraffe is that the image somehow corresponds

to her. This idea is much discussed by philosophers nowadays and has deep roots in the history

of philosophy. For instance, the Epicureans thought that we see things when atomic images,

shed by bodies, reached the eyes. But it was really in the 17th century that it became

prominent, thanks to an intense and long-running controversy between Marbranche and Anode.

This controversy is, I think, a great example of a philosophical dispute where both sides look to be

wrong. Representationalism has what looks like an enormous drawback. Though I seem to be aware of the

...