Abstract:

: The mind-body problem concerns Descartes’ question of how material things can cause something completely different in nature: sensations, ideas or mental experiences. Hume does not confront this puzzle head on and never worries about the problem of causation between mental and physical. He nonetheless emphasizes this Cartesian puzzle in terms of representation: how something mental can be about things that are completely different in nature? How perceptions can represent external bodies? His answer is that this is Locke’s double existence view, according to which, there is an external reality behind the “veil of perceptions”. In his words, this view is “the monstrous offspring of the modern philosophy”. I argue that Hume holds that there are only perceptions, which are neither mental nor physical and that minds and bodies are constructions out of such neutral perceptions. This brings him close to Spinoza’s view according to which mind-body distinction is a conceptual rather than a real distinction.

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