David Charles. The undivided self: Aristotle and the 'mind-body' problem

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David Charles (Yale)

The undivided self: Aristotle and the 'mind-body' problem

Aristotle initiated the systematic investigation of perception, the emotions, memory, desire and action, developing his own account of these phenomena and their interconnection. The aim of this book is to gain a philosophical understanding of his views and to examine how far they withstand critical scrutiny. Aristotle's account, it is argued, constitutes a philosophically live alternative to conventional post-Cartesian thinking about psychological phenomena and their place in a material world. It offers a way to dissolve, rather than solve, the mind-body problem we have inherited.

x. A landmark work bringing together Aristotle and contemporary philosophy x. Charles argues that study of Aristotle can offer a persuasive alternative to modern thinking about the mind x. Accessible to readers with no background in ancient Greek philosophy

David Charles is the Harold H. Newman Professor of Philosophy at Yale University

Professor David Charles was a Fellow of Philosophy in Oriel College from 1978 before moving to Yale in 2014 and was a Research Professor in Oxford from 2008 to 2014. He has held Visiting Professorships at Rutgers, UCLA, Brown, Tokyo Metropolitan, Taiwan National and Venice Universities. He was a co-founder of the European Society of Ancient Philosophy and is an Honorary Fellow of the National Technical University of Athens.

"This important and challenging book is the fruit of many years of engagement with Aristotle's thinking about the soul-body relation by one of the most distinguished experts in the field. David Charles does what many have tried to do during the past fifty years, but he does it with more radicalism and ingenuity than, as far as I can see, anyone has done before. . . . The Undivided Self confronts us with important questions about the fundaments of our thinking about mind and nature.It presents a serious challenge to modern interpreters of Aristotle and demands attention from contemporary philosophers of mind." -- Klaus Corcilius, Mind

"This book best shows its brilliance in its subtle analysis of Aristotle's remarks on emotion, desire, perception, and imagination, its grand systematizing ambition, and its spirited defense of the credibility of an Aristotelian approach to philosophical psychology. Charles succeeds in laying a simple, elegant theoretical foundation upon which he is then able to erect an intricate edifice of nuanced observations. This achievement is the culmination of decades of thought about some of the most important issues in Aristotle's philosophical psychology and will be indispensable for those interested in carrying discussion of such issues forward." -- Bryan Reece, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

"the book strikes the reader as an example of how a line of interpretation can be developed into a compelling reading at the hands of a perspicacious scholar. . . . [Charles] offers, in the introduction, different paths of reading his book through its chapters, which makes it all the more appealing to specialists, and to non-specialists as well, in philosophy of mind and ancient philosophy. The range of issues addressed in the volume and its unflagging engagement with these issues will be a source of inspiration to its readers as an example of intellectual courage." -- Refik Güremen, The Classical Review

Transcript

Host: Welcome to the Philosophy podcast, where we interview leading philosophers about their recent work. Today, we're speaking about the book, "The Undivided Self: Aristotle and the Mind-Body Problem", by Professor David Charles, Oxford University Press 2021. The book has received very positive reviews. The Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews' Brian Reese says that the book presents an exciting vision of Aristotle's holomorphic, metaphysics in general. A vision that is likely to set an agenda for those studying multiple areas of Aristotle's philosophy. In Mind, Klaus Corcilius says that "David Charles does what many have tried to do during the past 50 years, but he does it with more radicalism and ingenuity than, as far as I can see, anyone has done before". He applies Aristotle's psychological high-low morphism, the modern mind-body problem arguing that it is both distinctive and philosophically preferable to all other positions in the post-Cartesian theoretical landscape. He also says that "The Undivided Self" has the potential to revive a very important debate about the basic assumptions that underline our thinking about the mind and nature. Finally, in The Classical Review, Refik Guremen says that the book is written in organized appealing both to specialists and non-specialists. The range of issues addressed in the volume and its unflagging engagement with these issues will be a source of inspiration to its readers as an example of intellectual courage. Professor David Charles is the Howard H. Newman Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. Welcome to Philosophy Podcast, Professor Charles. Professor Charles: Very pleasant to join you. Thank you for inviting me. Host: I wanted to start by teeing up the mind-body problem. I wanted to use this quotation from Rebecca Goldstein's novel of the same name, "The Mind-Body Problem because we can get into the technical details of the mind-body problem. Her approach shows its wider significance to us. She says we start to do an ontological tally of what exists. We say, "Well, first of all, there are things, tables, trees, and other people. Then what else? Well, there's my consciousness." All the things that I'm conscious of and which create an entire inner world; all my memories, my associations, my hopes. Once we realize that then we say, "Well look, we've got things, we've got consciousness." Presumably, every person out there has this entire inner world. She says, "The interior decorating of a human being will be lush with particulars not to be found out there in the objects. Some of them are determined by sensation, mood, and memories, others by fewer transient features, such as where she stands on the mattering map." She says, "When you start thinking about what you would have to do this ontological tally, not only to name all the things but also include all of our myriad inner worlds." She notes, the interiority, the privacy of them. The question is, she says, "Can such facts as these be about material bodies? Material bodies exist in the objective and public out there. Are they capable of inner lives? Does a rich and vastly complicated interior gape open in the central guts of some of them? For God's sake, am I who carries an entire world within me a body." I like that for showing the [inaudible] of the mind-body problem in our daily life. Would you agree with that? Professor Charles: No, I think that's an extremely eloquent, articulate statement of how we are encouraged to think about the mind-body problem. I don't align, if I might, two things in Rebecca Goldstein's vivid description. One is the idea of consciousness, as a purely inner world to which, in my case, only I have access. Do you have any access to your inner world? Rather, that's one assumption. That's part of what I call in my book, the idea of the purely psychological, as well as separate realm or domain. Use these thoughts in our inner world. Directly given to us in conscience or experience. The other point of view of what the body, as well as the body, is understood to be something independent from and distinct from consciousness, sentience, and our capacities as agents; [inaudible] you can look at the body or something defined independently of psychological capacities. As you can think of the psychological is defined independently of the external world or indeed material objects. The question is, how do these two realms fit together? My own line of thinking has been, that once the question is posed in those terms, it is probably unanswerable. After all, we've been trying to solve them on the mind-body questions, at least it's Plato. Host: Right. Professor Charles: Certainly since they cut and has been a history of failures. Host: Right. Professor Charles: My interest in taking up your cue from Rebecca Goldstein is whether this is the correct way to formulate the problem. Host: Got you. Yes, I'm looking into that. At one point, we talked about scientism and in relation to the mind-body problem, I hope we get to talk about that. We're talking about the mind-body problem and Aristotle. Aristotle was simply the philosopher in the Abrahamic tradition, Aquinas, Maimonides Al-Farabi. It's clear that you want to do some recovery. Although, Aristotle is such an influence in the Abrahamic tradition. There's a sense that his original way of looking at things needs to be, or has been lost or needs to be recovered. As you've mentioned, you'd seem to point do they carve as the dividing line there. Professor Charles: Yes, although that Tony as well a partial beginning [inaudible] actually. I think your reference to the philosophers and religious traditions between Aristotle and Descartes is extremely important. Actually, I'm editing a collection of essays by many scholars and by many different hands. From my point of view, attempts to pinpoint the way in which the Cartesian problem emerges from modifications in the Aristotelian tradition. There were two, several but two. One was the idea of the self or freedom or consciousness as a separate purely psychological phenomenon, which comes partly from Alexander of Aphrodisias, and partly from the Neoplatonist. Then comes through into the Christian tradition through Neoplatonism. The other side is the development of a more serious material story, which you find in Lucretius and Epicurus and the attempt to take what is physically basic to be metaphysically basic. Host: Right. Professor Charles: I see Descartes and actually, Suarez before him. As it were a Confluence of these two streams which pull apart the Aristotelian in mid-position. I don't think Descartes, although he's a fantastically good philosopher and a brilliant writer. In a way, he really encapsulated movements which you can see in people I've mentioned and also in the common to tradition and Philoponus and Simplicius, who are Neoplatonist writers, who interpret Aristotle in the two-component way, which [inaudible] had encouraged them to do. Host: One of your reviewer's concerns, he says and this is Professor Reese, "I often found myself wondering how helpful it is to center the relevant controversies around Descartes." Is that sense that Descartes is just a label for a much broader change and that's the philosopher you're using? We're talking about the Scientific Revolution and modernization, urbanization. Descartes is more of a label for you than this particular philosopher changed the way. Professor Charles: Well, I think that's absolutely correct, Howard. I see Descartes as a clear exponent and understanding of the implications of what I call two-component thinking. Where one component is to be understood, as Rebecca Goldstein was saying, it was a purely psychological phenomenon." The other component if you understood in terms of a purely material picture. The question is, how do these two things fit together? Descartes's [crosstalk] they were really quite different things, and it was something of a mystery how they fitted together. That's how dualism works and emerges. It's basically the two-component thinking which drives Descartes. As I understand it, emerged from the streams in Pre-Cartesian philosophy. Host: Solution-wise. Right, I understand. Professor Charles: Which in sense Rebecca Goldstein picked up in her novel. Host: Right. I'm pulling from your book, "The initial idea for this book emerged from discussions in a long-running reading group on De Anima, held at Oriel College Oxford. When we decided in 2004, after more than 15 years spent on the second and third books, to read De Anima 8.1, much fell into place. I vividly recall our lively meetings at that time. I just wondered if you could talk about that. It sounded fantastic. Professor Charles: Yes, that was great. From the late 80s. Many of the extremely distinguished within ancient philosophy were very active, as well, for many years in this discussion group. I remember on one occasion, we spent a whole year reading De Anima Book 3 Chapter 5, "The Discussion of the Active Intellect". There were about six or seven of us, now teaching in Princeton or [inaudible] Professor in Oxford, several of my colleagues from Oxford other visiting. Sometimes, we make no progress at all in the text. Next session we begin just where the last session began. What we would do was to go through it as we're theologically very carefully, but also we try to grasp what the conceptual possibilities were. It was both as it were an exercise and also looking at the manuscript edition, which is now being really reconsidered in this area. It was an interesting combination of analytic acuity and philological procedure. That went on for a long time. We actually got in the way of reading the book backward, beginning in Book 3 and moving backward, thinking of this way as a fresh way to look at it. It turned out that we should have begun at the beginning. Host: That sounds great. One of your keywords here is "inextricability". I understand if we look at anger, everyone can agree that anger is inherently both psychic and psychological, and bodily. Inextricability is somewhat stronger than that. Could you explain that? Professor Charles: That's a very important concept. It's very important to be as clear as I can on what the commitments here are. Aristotle was very careful in this conceptual apparatus in this area and worked with ideas to think some things could be inseparable from existence. You couldn't have one without the other. For example, you couldn't have a number two without the number three with the necessary entity. He had a tighter notion of inextricability which he called inextricability in definition, where one can't define what one phenomenon is without essentially referring as part of its nature, to some other object, not some other entity. In the '40s, in the case of anger, the kind of desire for revenge, which anger is, isn't an ordinary desire for revenge plus the body. Host: Right. Professor Charles: It's stressful or intense or hot and bothered, they say, they were kind of desire for revenge. Football coaches in England say, "Don't get mad, get even." In other words, meaning, "Desire for revenge is a dish best served cold." Host: Right. Professor Charles: That doesn't capture anger. That captures as it were cold and calculating desire for revenge. Host: Right. Professor Charles: The kind of desire for revenge, which anger is stressful and physically intense. You get hot and bothered and you get physically agitated, that's the kind of desire for revenge, anger is. Here I was with [inaudible] intuitive example or thinking you don't have a purely psychological bit. The psychological bit as it were, can't be properly defined or understood without reference to some internal physical states. Host: Right. Someone comes along and says, "Well, I can. I'm looking at anger and I'm going through it, but right now I'm just conceiving in my mind, the psychological part of anger." What would Aristotle say about that? Professor Charles: He said, "That's fine. You can do that." We have to be very careful thinking about what we're doing in anything we do. You can abstract from the psychophysical entity. The hot desire for revenge and think of it just to desire for revenge, but don't think you can get back from that to the entity by just adding heat to it. Host: Got you. Professor Charles: His way of putting this is one which Horschel also used later following Aristotle with the notion of snubness. The idea here is don't think of a snub nose as a concavity in the nose. Though, you can concavity and find concavity in the nose and in legs and other objects. The distinctive kind of concavity is the nasal cavity. It's not an all-driven cavity in the nose but a distinctive kind of nasal cavity. Horschel used that in just the way Aristotle did to try to capture the idea of embodied kind of concavity, or the embodied forming attitude in way of thinking. The desire for revenge isn't a desire for revenge. Its anger is the desire for revenge plus heat but a hot kind of desire for revenge. Host: Correct. I understand you want to be economical in your writing. Wouldn't it be not only a desire for revenge but first I'll listen to the idea that also it comes after an insult? Professor Charles: Oh, yes of course. Absolutely. It's also interesting to think about revenge. It's an occasion by insult. It involves this physically involved but also is an ongoing process. Something that can last a long time. Think of the anger of Achilles before the worlds of Troy. Host: Sure. Professor Charles: He went on for days and could only be addressed by the tears of Priam by something as we're which emotionally impacted him. Host: Right. Professor Charles: We tend to think these days of these things as discrete events, one after the other. For Arthur, anger was a process that modified how Achilles behaved, which could have gone longer but was a swage by Priam. You can't understand the process without thinking of it as driven by a desire for revenge on an insult but also expressed in certain bodily ways. Host: Right. Professor Charles: To kind of embodied cognition view, I guess you might say. Host: Right. Robert Solomon gives the example of anger lasting decades. His example was the Women's Movement, you can be angry for a long or Civil Rights Movement. You can be angry for a long, long time. As you say this is maybe more unsettling, it's not only that the psychic part is physical, but it's also true that the physical part has to be psychic. Could you speak to that? Professor Charles: No, absolutely. That's the path of the Athenian picture which is most difficult for us to understand, giving up the miss of the purely psychological. Although, it has a big impact on the questions Rebecca Goldstein was talking about, mother nature and imagination and sensory experience. In a sense that's easier than giving up our work. We think it's more difficult than giving up our notion of the physical. Only two points about that. One is by no means clear what our notion of the physical is. Very often people say, "Well, it's well-studied by Physics." What constrains the physics of the future? Particularly, Physics is concerned with informational systems. What kind of information is it that Physics studied? When you think of neurons, some people talk about the language of neurons, as an informational system, what are the limits of Physics? If we talk of signaling systems, giving action potentials around the brain, the question would be, what are the limits of the correct description of the language of neurons? Host: Might say. Professor Charles: That was a question of what Physics is. To say, its three-dimensional spaciousness essentially, spatiotemporal would allow psychological states to be physical. The most important point is this, what Aristotle was insistent on was, I understand, the thought that anger and desire for revenge are controllers of the process, basic causes which guide our responses to the world. It's not that there are two causes: 1) psychological component and a separate physical component, which is somehow together or overdetermined or one's an epic phenomenon, or one rests on the other. There's one unified phenomenon that drives Achilles to behave in the way he does. Then the question is, how do you have to think of the physical for that to be the case, to think of that as psychophysical? Well, one thought would be in terms of thinking of the body, in terms of capacities as it were the bodies that are capable of reacting to input and output, go to input, in certain kinds of ways. The kind of ways which was shown in Achilles' actions. To take a case was another very good Achillean case. In the case of a physical skill, like weaving or playing a tennis shot, how does the body have to be the body of a skilled weaver? Our thought was at least one thing is true. The body has to have embodied capacities to move in the way the skill requires. Take outside of the problem, here's consciousness and there's a body to find independently of psychological capacities. Against that, you play the idea of the weaver or the tennis player whose body is attuned to reacting to the external world in the way their skill requires. The idea of one strongly unified causal story, then constrains, a notion of the physical. My book is really noting necessity and possibility, the thinking in this way, trying to say it will stand some objections. Host: Right. Professor Charles: I'm deconstructing the Cartesian dialectic pointing to an alternative and trying to knock down an objection or to consider objections to it. There's a further much more positive program, which I'm not engaging in which would dispel out. How am I instantiate these ideas within a modern scientific context? Host: Right. This is where we begin scientism. You sketched the case of how the Aristotelian view. What would someone do once you get this conception of matter in itself? As I understand it, that's fine. That would be another one of these abstractions. We could abstract and think about the physical matter as matter, and then one could build up the scientific project, but understanding that it was built on this abstraction. Am I getting that right? Professor Charles: That's exactly right. I think most claims of Physics is want to make. Namely, if you fix purely physical, you fix the purely psychological. Might well be true, but the basis of the truth. As a reward, the truth would be grounded would be these psychophysical processes and capacitors. It's not what has to deny anything within the scientific picture itself. All those claims can be true. What is in dispute is the idea that what's metaphysically basic. The basis for our understanding of these phenomena has to come from taking the most fundamental particles, whatever they are, and building up from there. Host: Right. Professor Charles: My claim isn't the doctor of science. Anyway, is no part of Physics to say. Host: Right. Professor Charles: What's more, you have to be a metaphysician by starting with the basic physical aspect. That's what I call scientism. Host: Yes. Professor Charles: As it was a brilliant, ambitious project. I try to explain everything in terms of basic physical elements, whatever they may be. That project is problematic because we have no idea what basic Physics is. As were generations now that's an ongoing search. The idea we have to start to pause our metaphysics until it was the golden day when the Scientific Revolution happened. Know what the fundamental particles are on the basis of those understanding as psychological states. It seems to me almost kind of revolutionary in the Marxist existence, Utopia as we're looking for today, far in the future when metaphysics can begin. Host: Right. Professor Charles: Let's put it rather rhetorically, but you see what I mean? Host: Yes, I do. You mentioned Horschel earlier. Professor Charles: Yes. Host: I don't know enough about Horschel know-how. Aristotelian he was, but a lot of times this reminds me of Horschel's project. Reminding us that science needs to be grounded in the life world. Professor Charles: Yes. It was a whole pack of European thought, which I'm not fantastically well-trained in. Horschel was clearly pretty knowledgeable about Aristotle. With the crisis of European thought Europeans had, he used these moves like the [inaudible] move and mental quantity, I take it also follows in that tradition. Another person who thought in this way was Whitehead, who thought that processes were a basic phenomenon and much further than Aristotle did. But thought ended that the Cartesian perspective was an abstraction from certain kinds of processes. Distinct tradition from nutrition or those who tend to engage with a Cartesian programmatic, and ways very similar to what I'm trying to do. Host: Right, absolutely. The name of the book, "The Crisis", kind of saw some stuff. Professor Charles: Yes, exactly. Horschel's idea was the mistake had been made to have a purely mathematical conception on the one side and a notion of matter defined independently of Mathematics on the other. That's exactly parallel to the kind of move I'm making, as to where to have a purely psychological realm with what Rebecca Goldstein was talking about and a purely physical realm to find independently of it in this case. Host: All right. Professor Charles: Let's look at what's in the broader context [inaudible]. Host: One of the reviews was mainly positive, but of course, they say they're concerned. One of them said that in terms of the psychic needing to refer to the body, the question was, what about rationality? For me a concrete example. You talk about Achilles. This is Sarpedon talking to Glaucus. He says, "If you and I could only get out of this war alive, and then be immortal and ageless all of our days, I would never again fight among the foremost or send you into battle. We're men when Glory." As it is, death is everywhere in more shapes than we can count. Since no mortal is immune or can escape, let's go forward either to give glory to another man or get glory from him. This is the sort of thing that we think about that is kind of like higher-level ideas. What am I doing in life? What should my values be, that I don't see immediately how it needs to involve a physical component? Yet, it clearly drives things like anger because it sets up our projects. Professor Charles: That's a very interesting question. Clearly, there are ways of thinking about Aristotle, like the pure observer self, or the self that never sees itself but only sees other things, or the self you can think of as immortal in the Judeo Christian. Host: Right. Professor Charles: In Germany, [inaudible] equivalence in some way. Now ranged against that the following perspective. You ask yourself, what kind of being is it for whom friendship, for example, is valuable? What kind of entity is it, which is capable of acting in the way we do? Taking that and where acting involves also practical reasoning and reflection on action. What kind of being is it for those who think in that way, beginning with, I suppose, our commitments, loyalties, and our friendships? Thinking of those is where springing out of the kind of embodied creatures we are. Host: Right. Professor Charles: From that point of view, the idea of the immortals self is a brilliant abstraction from the self who talks and discusses, and shares enjoyment... Host: That's right. Professor Charles: ...shares discussion, in case of friendship, sees things together as they say. The question is and the Athenian pictures this. Certainly, Arthur Luther's notion of pure intellect, or the active intellect, as it were, which is in some way, like, in his work perspective, some way like the intellect of God or Angels or whatever. Oh God, I'm a little valise in theological terms but he's very careful. It seems to me actually to think that are active intellect is different from the kind of active intellect of an imagined pure intellect. That is based on perception, involves emotional response, and can't be made sense of without commitments and data phenomenon that come from that source. So even if thinking can be defined or some kind without reference to the body, there were all kinds of thinking that are essentially embodied thinking. Host: Right. That makes sense. Yes. And I guess you've already covered your answer to the other clearly anger can be influenced by someone taking testosterone or someone that has a lesion in the brain or something. And those would seem to be not referring to the psychological at all. I guess though, your point would be, yeah, but it fits into the science, which is great, wonderful. In the Aristotelian view, it's an abstraction away from this psycho-physical foundational level. Professor Charles: Yes. That's as far as I get in the book, that's exactly right. But I think when things move carefully and look at the scientific discussions of pain and particularly the kind of modern work on pain management involving discussions of placebo effects, our mindfulness as we interact with pain, for example, or acupuncture treatment, and also the different meanings of pain in different contexts. I think there's a kind of growing awareness of the pain that isn't just wearing something in the amygdala, but it involves memories, a sense of salients, and distance. And then we're into the discussion of how the neuron as we're going to go forward in this project. What is the language in which the neuron signal to one another? Invoking memories, effect, and importance or salience. How does mindfulness work if it works? In terms of giving you some psychological distance. How is that embedded in the circuitry? I think the picture, which we were brought up on that pains, the lesion, and the amygdala, and then there's where our awareness of it. Host: Aware of someone. Professor Charles: As to where is just that kind of loss of the implications? Host: Yeah. Professor Charles: I think it's fascinating when you read a book like the [inaudible] book, the brain, and pains. It was a brain spect in a great pain management specialist. You see how much more complicated. People come to see it in the last 10 or 15 years. They're thinking about pain management. As it were in thinking about what pain is because there are these interesting people who have articles asymbolic[?] where they're aware of pain, but it's not so bad for them. As where it's not that painful for it. And in mindfulness and Placebo a case where it was, the pain can apparently be managed or reduced by the context in which you see it. Host: Yeah. And it's right on to mention the placebo effect. Just recently been seeing a psychiatrist who doesn't want to prescribe a drug if the patient doesn't think it's going to work. Professor Charles: Absolutely. Host: That's why. Professor: Absolutely, I mean, I'm very interested in Clinical Psychology in general as I know you are. One thing that really encouraged me down this line was the observation that certain kinds of depression, cognitive behavioral therapy, interpersonal therapy, and drug treatment are more or less equally effective. Host: Right. Professor Charles: And you ask, I said well, what kind of phenomenon is it, which is open to these two or three different phenomena, assuming it's a unified phenomenon? Host: That's interesting. And then there are also people who aren't in the studies who get over their depression by picking up golf. Professor Charles: Yeah, exactly. Which is some kind of detachment or alternative activity. Get active stimulation. Host: Right. So, one of the things I was surprised by in the thinking of politics, the human is by nature political animals, the policies prior to the individual. And anticipating that someone would say, well, the bees are much more social than humans. Aristotle says, "No, humans are more political even than bees because we had the faculty of language." I was just wondering if you could take these arguments, that the psychic should really be psychic-physical. I wasn't sure why you can't apply and can't use the same arguments to say, especially something like anger, which is so social or political that anger should be inextricably not only psychophysical but psychophysical-social. Professor Charles: That's a very interesting question, which you raised. And I think that's a line of thought, well, worth pursuing [inaudible]. And I would see it like this, if you push the question beginning with a kind of obvious case the case of friendship, for example, and you know that the question, what is the subject in friendship? Should we think of ourselves as a unit? We, the team or the two individual players as were transacting with one another and transacts, were a quid pro quo way. And neither of those is an alternative though which says, well, the notion of the self-involved in friendship is something that is inextricably interpersonal. As we're such that, we have these capacities which are essentially other-directed. Host: Right. Professor Charles: Not as a further entity of the "we", as we're beyond the individuals, but you can't say what the individuals are, except by thinking of them as definitionally what it is to be a human person to be connected in certain ways to another human person. Host: Right. Professor Charles: Then, the question is, what is the requirement for that? What kind of connections are they? Which distinguishes us from highly social animals like bees, where presumably the notion of friendship doesn't seem to apply. How I would try to prosecute, try to develop that line. Host: Okay. Professor Charles: So there's a kind of individualism that permeates much but our thinking. Host: Yeah. Professor Charles: Well, to be a human person is to be defined, either in terms of just my own internal states or is limited to the extent of my body. Host: Correct. Professor: But after that, it's the transaction between me and others as it were for my own self-directed goals. I think you're right. To say that the Athenian[?] picture is different from that, in that, there's an extension, which involves as were the inextricably social. Host: Right. The politics are prior to the individual right there, and the beginning of the politics. Professor Charles: Although these priority claims have to be handled very carefully. Host: Okay. Professor Charles: Because I take it, that means something like politics is the basic definition of what a citizen of the other politics. Host: I see, it doesn't mean more metaphysically, basically. Professor Charles: I don't think you need me that, you're living on one side, there's a really interesting question as was thrown up by his tradition which is, how does a human have to be for interpersonal relations to be as important for us as they are? Host: That's helpful. I wanted to just give the listeners a sense of the book overall. That's the last thing we're running out of time, but I wondered if you could give an overview of chapter 2, you're trying to take all of Aristotle's insights into psychology and the psychophysical nature of our lives and trace them back to Aristotle's metaphysics, as I understand it. We're talking about form, matter, and causation. And I think that this is one of the things that your reviewers were saying was controversial, exciting, or controversial. The idea of an impure form. Professor Charles: Yes, absolutely. Okay, good. I'm thinking of anger physically involved desire for revenge. It's a desire for revenge in a physical form. Not two components. I think then the question is, how far does this extend to the notion of this is like a causal question? Two notions of physical form in general. One way to put this question, I think kind of intuitive way to try to put the question is, how do you have to think of form for it to be causally applications? To make a causal difference to the world? Guys, [inaudible] crack his head triangles don't cut things. Host: Right. Professor Charles: As where abstract entities or mathematics entered is not the kind of thing which heat or cut or divide except of course in geometrical shape. Host: Can I interrupt just for one moment? So when we talk about form, I want the listeners to know, we're not talking about Plato's forms which we talk about or maybe we are. But we're talking about essence. Professor Charles: Well, let's begin slightly further down the mountain right here. Host: Fine. Professor Charles: The thing is the way of the notion of shape. That's what we were thinking, it's form and shape [inaudible]. I think the question we should put it like this, why do round things roll? Take a really simple intuitive case. Host: Right. Professor Charles: Now, his line is not good as circular. Understood as a mathematical entity, as a mathematical property because such mathematical properties are not the kind of things to roll. Host: Correct. Professor Charles: Yep. What kind of circularity is it? This is where he explains why the tires were credible, and then the thought is... Host: It's in mind. Professor Charles: ...don't think that is just the circularity mathematical plus a bit of matter. Host: Right. Professor Charles: Rather it soak in and it mattered waste embodied kind of circularity... Host: Understood. Professor Charles: ...in some robust physical form. Some of his intent is in the physical body. So it's a rigid or elastic kind of thing. And those sticks out his tires[?]. So that's the intuition. How do you have to think of shapes for them to be causal applications? I think his notion of form is kind of built and try to capture that idea. Host: That's very clear. Professor Charles: In the psychological case, the form of anger is a desire for revenge of this hot kind, that's why our blood boils if we get angry and agitated, uncontrolled. The embodied circularity of the tire explains why it rolls in the way. That's why all the cricket was all the baseball cricket ball, which explains why they spin as they do. That's the notion it mattered for, rather than the platonist idea, which is very, which is what causally was opposing, which is the idea of mathematical form plus a matter defined independently of us all[?]. Host: Good. Professor Charles: That does not the kind of intuitive way of putting it. There's a lot of scholarly debate in this area. But I want to give you the intuitions, behind a notion of form which explains why animals behave as they do criminals[?]. Host: Understood. And so, the idea is you're taking this impure form would mean it's essentially unmattered. Professor Charles: Exactly. Host: And you're taking that two cases of humans, something like anger. Professor Charles: Yes, exactly. I mean, that's a very good way to put it. I'm thinking of forms as essentially unmattered, and our kind of cognition speaking very generally, as essentially embodied cognition. Where you can't say what the kind of cognition is, without thinking of it as a bodily form. There is an embodied form, not cognition plus the body, but cognition as it were bodily in this nature. Host: Fascinating. Yeah, that's great. Okay. Well, thank you so much Professor for joining me. It was really enlightening and I think the book is great, and hopefully, listeners will know more about it and what it contains. Professor Charles: I'd like to thank you all the students for some very interesting questions and also for pushing me on the social restroom. Host: Okay. Professor Charles: And also, on the connection took us all and also on the further project I haven't really gauged in and I'm not sure I have the ability to engage with, which is to say how its implications for this viewpoint, for understanding how informational systems in the brain, our best to be understood. Naturally, understand the component. We don't understand that is where a signaling system is. Host: Yes, that's interesting. I know there are a lot of forthcoming books from you already, so I know you have a lot on your plate already. But anyway, I hope to talk to you about those in the future. Thank you very much for joining me. Professor Charles: Thank you again. I appreciate it. Thank you very much. Host: Okay. [END]

Host: Welcome to the Philosophy podcast, where we interview leading philosophers about their recent work. Today, we're speaking about the book, "The Undivided Self: Aristotle and the Mind-Body Problem", by Professor David Charles, Oxford University Press 2021. The book has received very positive reviews. The Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews' Brian Reese says that the book presents an exciting vision of Aristotle's holomorphic, metaphysics in general. A vision that is likely to set an agenda for those studying multiple areas of Aristotle's philosophy. In Mind, Klaus Corcilius says that "David Charles does what many have tried to do during the past 50 years, but he does it with more radicalism and ingenuity than, as far as I can see, anyone has done before".

He applies Aristotle's psychological high-low morphism, the modern mind-body problem arguing that it is both distinctive and philosophically preferable to all other positions in the post-Cartesian theoretical landscape. He also says that "The Undivided Self" has the potential to revive a very important debate about the basic assumptions that underline our thinking about the mind and nature. Finally, in The Classical Review, Refik Guremen says that the book is written in organized appealing both to specialists and non-specialists. The range of issues addressed in the volume and its unflagging engagement with these issues will be a source of inspiration to its readers as an example of intellectual courage. Professor David Charles is the Howard H. Newman Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. Welcome to Philosophy Podcast, Professor Charles.

Professor Charles: Very pleasant to join you. Thank you for inviting me.

Host: I wanted to start by teeing up the mind-body problem. I wanted to use this quotation from Rebecca Goldstein's novel of the same name, "The Mind-Body Problem because we can get into the technical details of the mind-body problem. Her approach shows its wider significance to us. She says we start to do an ontological tally of what exists. We say, "Well, first of all, there are things, tables, trees, and other people. Then what else? Well, there's my consciousness." All the things that I'm conscious of and which create an entire inner world; all my memories, my associations, my hopes. Once we realize that then we say, "Well look, we've got things, we've got consciousness." Presumably, every person out there has this entire inner world.

She says, "The interior decorating of a human being will be lush with particulars not to be found out there in the objects. Some of them are determined by sensation, mood, and memories, others by fewer transient features, such as where she stands on the mattering map." She says, "When you start thinking about what you would have to do this ontological tally, not only to name all the things but also include all of our myriad inner worlds." She notes, the interiority, the privacy of them. The question is, she says, "Can such facts as these be about material bodies? Material bodies exist in the objective and public out there. Are they capable of inner lives? Does a rich and vastly complicated interior gape open in the central guts of some of them? For God's sake, am I who carries an entire world within me a body." I like that for showing the [inaudible] of the mind-body problem in our daily life. Would you agree with that?

Professor Charles: No, I think that's an extremely eloquent, articulate statement of how we are encouraged to think about the mind-body problem. I don't align, if I might, two things in Rebecca Goldstein's vivid description. One is the idea of consciousness, as a purely inner world to which, in my case, only I have access. Do you have any access to your inner world? Rather, that's one assumption. That's part of what I call in my book, the idea of the purely psychological, as well as separate realm or domain. Use these thoughts in our inner world. Directly given to us in conscience or experience. The other point of view of what the body, as well as the body, is understood to be something independent from and distinct from consciousness, sentience, and our capacities as agents; [inaudible] you can look at the body or something defined independently of psychological capacities. As you can think of the psychological is defined independently of the external world or indeed material objects. The question is, how do these two realms fit together? My own line of thinking has been, that once the question is posed in those terms, it is probably unanswerable. After all, we've been trying to solve them on the mind-body questions, at least it's Plato.

Host: Right.

Professor Charles: Certainly since they cut and has been a history of failures.

Host: Right.

Professor Charles: My interest in taking up your cue from Rebecca Goldstein is whether this is the correct way to formulate the problem.

Host: Got you. Yes, I'm looking into that. At one point, we talked about scientism and in relation to the mind-body problem, I hope we get to talk about that. We're talking about the mind-body problem and Aristotle. Aristotle was simply the philosopher in the Abrahamic tradition, Aquinas, Maimonides Al-Farabi. It's clear that you want to do some recovery. Although, Aristotle is such an influence in the Abrahamic tradition. There's a sense that his original way of looking at things needs to be, or has been lost or needs to be recovered. As you've mentioned, you'd seem to point do they carve as the dividing line there.

Professor Charles: Yes, although that Tony as well a partial beginning [inaudible] actually. I think your reference to the philosophers and religious traditions between Aristotle and Descartes is extremely important. Actually, I'm editing a collection of essays by many scholars and by many different hands. From my point of view, attempts to pinpoint the way in which the Cartesian problem emerges from modifications in the Aristotelian tradition. There were two, several but two. One was the idea of the self or freedom or consciousness as a separate purely psychological phenomenon, which comes partly from Alexander of Aphrodisias, and partly from the Neoplatonist. Then comes through into the Christian tradition through Neoplatonism. The other side is the development of a more serious material story, which you find in Lucretius and Epicurus and the attempt to take what is physically basic to be metaphysically basic.

Host: Right.

Professor Charles: I see Descartes and actually, Suarez before him. As it were a Confluence of these two streams which pull apart the Aristotelian in mid-position. I don't think Descartes, although he's a fantastically good philosopher and a brilliant writer. In a way, he really encapsulated movements which you can see in people I've mentioned and also in the common to tradition and Philoponus and Simplicius, who are Neoplatonist writers, who interpret Aristotle in the two-component way, which [inaudible] had encouraged them to do.

Host: One of your reviewer's concerns, he says and this is Professor Reese, "I often found myself wondering how helpful it is to center the relevant controversies around Descartes." Is that sense that Descartes is just a label for a much broader change and that's the philosopher you're using? We're talking about the Scientific Revolution and modernization, urbanization. Descartes is more of a label for you than this particular philosopher changed the way.

Professor Charles: Well, I think that's absolutely correct, Howard. I see Descartes as a clear exponent and understanding of the implications of what I call two-component thinking. Where one component is to be understood, as Rebecca Goldstein was saying, it was a purely psychological phenomenon." The other component if you understood in terms of a purely material picture. The question is, how do these two things fit together? Descartes's [crosstalk] they were really quite different things, and it was something of a mystery how they fitted together. That's how dualism works and emerges. It's basically the two-component thinking which drives Descartes. As I understand it, emerged from the streams in Pre-Cartesian philosophy.

Host: Solution-wise. Right, I understand.

Professor Charles: Which in sense Rebecca Goldstein picked up in her novel.

Host: Right. I'm pulling from your book, "The initial idea for this book emerged from discussions in a long-running reading group on De Anima, held at Oriel College Oxford. When we decided in 2004, after more than 15 years spent on the second and third books, to read De Anima 8.1, much fell into place. I vividly recall our lively meetings at that time. I just wondered if you could talk about that. It sounded fantastic.

Professor Charles: Yes, that was great. From the late 80s. Many of the extremely distinguished within ancient philosophy were very active, as well, for many years in this discussion group. I remember on one occasion, we spent a whole year reading De Anima Book 3 Chapter 5, "The Discussion of the Active Intellect". There were about six or seven of us, now teaching in Princeton or [inaudible] Professor in Oxford, several of my colleagues from Oxford other visiting. Sometimes, we make no progress at all in the text. Next session we begin just where the last session began. What we would do was to go through it as we're theologically very carefully, but also we try to grasp what the conceptual possibilities were. It was both as it were an exercise and also looking at the manuscript edition, which is now being really reconsidered in this area. It was an interesting combination of analytic acuity and philological procedure. That went on for a long time. We actually got in the way of reading the book backward, beginning in Book 3 and moving backward, thinking of this way as a fresh way to look at it. It turned out that we should have begun at the beginning.

Host: That sounds great. One of your keywords here is "inextricability". I understand if we look at anger, everyone can agree that anger is inherently both psychic and psychological, and bodily. Inextricability is somewhat stronger than that. Could you explain that?

Professor Charles: That's a very important concept. It's very important to be as clear as I can on what the commitments here are. Aristotle was very careful in this conceptual apparatus in this area and worked with ideas to think some things could be inseparable from existence. You couldn't have one without the other. For example, you couldn't have a number two without the number three with the necessary entity. He had a tighter notion of inextricability which he called inextricability in definition, where one can't define what one phenomenon is without essentially referring as part of its nature, to some other object, not some other entity. In the '40s, in the case of anger, the kind of desire for revenge, which anger is, isn't an ordinary desire for revenge plus the body.

Host: Right.

Professor Charles: It's stressful or intense or hot and bothered, they say, they were kind of desire for revenge. Football coaches in England say, "Don't get mad, get even." In other words, meaning, "Desire for revenge is a dish best served cold."

Host: Right.

Professor Charles: That doesn't capture anger. That captures as it were cold and calculating desire for revenge.

Host: Right.

Professor Charles: The kind of desire for revenge, which anger is stressful and physically intense. You get hot and bothered and you get physically agitated, that's the kind of desire for revenge, anger is. Here I was with [inaudible] intuitive example or thinking you don't have a purely psychological bit. The psychological bit as it were, can't be properly defined or understood without reference to some internal physical states.

Host: Right. Someone comes along and says, "Well, I can. I'm looking at anger and I'm going through it, but right now I'm just conceiving in my mind, the psychological part of anger." What would Aristotle say about that?

Professor Charles: He said, "That's fine. You can do that." We have to be very careful thinking about what we're doing in anything we do. You can abstract from the psychophysical entity. The hot desire for revenge and think of it just to desire for revenge, but don't think you can get back from that to the entity by just adding heat to it.

Host: Got you.

Professor Charles: His way of putting this is one which Horschel also used later following Aristotle with the notion of snubness. The idea here is don't think of a snub nose as a concavity in the nose. Though, you can concavity and find concavity in the nose and in legs and other objects. The distinctive kind of concavity is the nasal cavity. It's not an all-driven cavity in the nose but a distinctive kind of nasal cavity. Horschel used that in just the way Aristotle did to try to capture the idea of embodied kind of concavity, or the embodied forming attitude in way of thinking. The desire for revenge isn't a desire for revenge. Its anger is the desire for revenge plus heat but a hot kind of desire for revenge.

Host: Correct. I understand you want to be economical in your writing. Wouldn't it be not only a desire for revenge but first I'll listen to the idea that also it comes after an insult?

Professor Charles: Oh, yes of course. Absolutely. It's also interesting to think about revenge. It's an occasion by insult. It involves this physically involved but also is an ongoing process. Something that can last a long time. Think of the anger of Achilles before the worlds of Troy.

Host: Sure.

Professor Charles: He went on for days and could only be addressed by the tears of Priam by something as we're which emotionally impacted him.

Host: Right.

Professor Charles: We tend to think these days of these things as discrete events, one after the other. For Arthur, anger was a process that modified how Achilles behaved, which could have gone longer but was a swage by Priam. You can't understand the process without thinking of it as driven by a desire for revenge on an insult but also expressed in certain bodily ways.

Host: Right.

Professor Charles: To kind of embodied cognition view, I guess you might say.

Host: Right. Robert Solomon gives the example of anger lasting decades. His example was the Women's Movement, you can be angry for a long or Civil Rights Movement. You can be angry for a long, long time. As you say this is maybe more unsettling, it's not only that the psychic part is physical, but it's also true that the physical part has to be psychic. Could you speak to that?

Professor Charles: No, absolutely. That's the path of the Athenian picture which is most difficult for us to understand, giving up the miss of the purely psychological. Although, it has a big impact on the questions Rebecca Goldstein was talking about, mother nature and imagination and sensory experience. In a sense that's easier than giving up our work. We think it's more difficult than giving up our notion of the physical. Only two points about that. One is by no means clear what our notion of the physical is. Very often people say, "Well, it's well-studied by Physics." What constrains the physics of the future? Particularly, Physics is concerned with informational systems. What kind of information is it that Physics studied? When you think of neurons, some people talk about the language of neurons, as an informational system, what are the limits of Physics? If we talk of signaling systems, giving action potentials around the brain, the question would be, what are the limits of the correct description of the language of neurons?

Host: Might say.

Professor Charles: That was a question of what Physics is. To say, its three-dimensional spaciousness essentially, spatiotemporal would allow psychological states to be physical. The most important point is this, what Aristotle was insistent on was, I understand, the thought that anger and desire for revenge are controllers of the process, basic causes which guide our responses to the world. It's not that there are two causes: 1) psychological component and a separate physical component, which is somehow together or overdetermined or one's an epic phenomenon, or one rests on the other. There's one unified phenomenon that drives Achilles to behave in the way he does. Then the question is, how do you have to think of the physical for that to be the case, to think of that as psychophysical? Well, one thought would be in terms of thinking of the body, in terms of capacities as it were the bodies that are capable of reacting to input and output, go to input, in certain kinds of ways. The kind of ways which was shown in Achilles' actions.

To take a case was another very good Achillean case. In the case of a physical skill, like weaving or playing a tennis shot, how does the body have to be the body of a skilled weaver? Our thought was at least one thing is true. The body has to have embodied capacities to move in the way the skill requires. Take outside of the problem, here's consciousness and there's a body to find independently of psychological capacities. Against that, you play the idea of the weaver or the tennis player whose body is attuned to reacting to the external world in the way their skill requires. The idea of one strongly unified causal story, then constrains, a notion of the physical. My book is really noting necessity and possibility, the thinking in this way, trying to say it will stand some objections.

Host: Right.

Professor Charles: I'm deconstructing the Cartesian dialectic pointing to an alternative and trying to knock down an objection or to consider objections to it. There's a further much more positive program, which I'm not engaging in which would dispel out. How am I instantiate these ideas within a modern scientific context?

Host: Right. This is where we begin scientism. You sketched the case of how the Aristotelian view. What would someone do once you get this conception of matter in itself? As I understand it, that's fine. That would be another one of these abstractions. We could abstract and think about the physical matter as matter, and then one could build up the scientific project, but understanding that it was built on this abstraction. Am I getting that right?

Professor Charles: That's exactly right. I think most claims of Physics is want to make. Namely, if you fix purely physical, you fix the purely psychological. Might well be true, but the basis of the truth. As a reward, the truth would be grounded would be these psychophysical processes and capacitors. It's not what has to deny anything within the scientific picture itself. All those claims can be true. What is in dispute is the idea that what's metaphysically basic. The basis for our understanding of these phenomena has to come from taking the most fundamental particles, whatever they are, and building up from there.

Host: Right.

Professor Charles: My claim isn't the doctor of science. Anyway, is no part of Physics to say.

Host: Right.

Professor Charles: What's more, you have to be a metaphysician by starting with the basic physical aspect. That's what I call scientism.

Host: Yes.

Professor Charles: As it was a brilliant, ambitious project. I try to explain everything in terms of basic physical elements, whatever they may be. That project is problematic because we have no idea what basic Physics is. As were generations now that's an ongoing search. The idea we have to start to pause our metaphysics until it was the golden day when the Scientific Revolution happened. Know what the fundamental particles are on the basis of those understanding as psychological states. It seems to me almost kind of revolutionary in the Marxist existence, Utopia as we're looking for today, far in the future when metaphysics can begin.

Host: Right.

Professor Charles: Let's put it rather rhetorically, but you see what I mean?

Host: Yes, I do. You mentioned Horschel earlier.

Professor Charles: Yes.

Host: I don't know enough about Horschel know-how. Aristotelian he was, but a lot of times this reminds me of Horschel's project. Reminding us that science needs to be grounded in the life world.

Professor Charles: Yes. It was a whole pack of European thought, which I'm not fantastically well-trained in. Horschel was clearly pretty knowledgeable about Aristotle. With the crisis of European thought Europeans had, he used these moves like the [inaudible] move and mental quantity, I take it also follows in that tradition. Another person who thought in this way was Whitehead, who thought that processes were a basic phenomenon and much further than Aristotle did. But thought ended that the Cartesian perspective was an abstraction from certain kinds of processes. Distinct tradition from nutrition or those who tend to engage with a Cartesian programmatic, and ways very similar to what I'm trying to do.

Host: Right, absolutely. The name of the book, "The Crisis", kind of saw some stuff.

Professor Charles: Yes, exactly. Horschel's idea was the mistake had been made to have a purely mathematical conception on the one side and a notion of matter defined independently of Mathematics on the other. That's exactly parallel to the kind of move I'm making, as to where to have a purely psychological realm with what Rebecca Goldstein was talking about and a purely physical realm to find independently of it in this case.

Host: All right.

Professor Charles: Let's look at what's in the broader context [inaudible].

Host: One of the reviews was mainly positive, but of course, they say they're concerned. One of them said that in terms of the psychic needing to refer to the body, the question was, what about rationality? For me a concrete example. You talk about Achilles. This is Sarpedon talking to Glaucus. He says, "If you and I could only get out of this war alive, and then be immortal and ageless all of our days, I would never again fight among the foremost or send you into battle. We're men when Glory." As it is, death is everywhere in more shapes than we can count. Since no mortal is immune or can escape, let's go forward either to give glory to another man or get glory from him. This is the sort of thing that we think about that is kind of like higher-level ideas. What am I doing in life? What should my values be, that I don't see immediately how it needs to involve a physical component? Yet, it clearly drives things like anger because it sets up our projects.

Professor Charles: That's a very interesting question. Clearly, there are ways of thinking about Aristotle, like the pure observer self, or the self that never sees itself but only sees other things, or the self you can think of as immortal in the Judeo Christian.

Host: Right.

Professor Charles: In Germany, [inaudible] equivalence in some way. Now ranged against that the following perspective. You ask yourself, what kind of being is it for whom friendship, for example, is valuable? What kind of entity is it, which is capable of acting in the way we do? Taking that and where acting involves also practical reasoning and reflection on action. What kind of being is it for those who think in that way, beginning with, I suppose, our commitments, loyalties, and our friendships? Thinking of those is where springing out of the kind of embodied creatures we are.

Host: Right.

Professor Charles: From that point of view, the idea of the immortals self is a brilliant abstraction from the self who talks and discusses, and shares enjoyment...

Host: That's right.

Professor Charles: ...shares discussion, in case of friendship, sees things together as they say. The question is and the Athenian pictures this. Certainly, Arthur Luther's notion of pure intellect, or the active intellect, as it were, which is in some way, like, in his work perspective, some way like the intellect of God or Angels or whatever. Oh God, I'm a little valise in theological terms but he's very careful. It seems to me actually to think that are active intellect is different from the kind of active intellect of an imagined pure intellect. That is based on perception, involves emotional response, and can't be made sense of without commitments and data phenomenon that come from that source. So even if thinking can be defined or some kind without reference to the body, there were all kinds of thinking that are essentially embodied thinking.

Host: Right. That makes sense. Yes. And I guess you've already covered your answer to the other clearly anger can be influenced by someone taking testosterone or someone that has a lesion in the brain or something. And those would seem to be not referring to the psychological at all. I guess though, your point would be, yeah, but it fits into the science, which is great, wonderful. In the Aristotelian view, it's an abstraction away from this psycho-physical foundational level.

Professor Charles: Yes. That's as far as I get in the book, that's exactly right. But I think when things move carefully and look at the scientific discussions of pain and particularly the kind of modern work on pain management involving discussions of placebo effects, our mindfulness as we interact with pain, for example, or acupuncture treatment, and also the different meanings of pain in different contexts. I think there's a kind of growing awareness of the pain that isn't just wearing something in the amygdala, but it involves memories, a sense of salients, and distance. And then we're into the discussion of how the neuron as we're going to go forward in this project. What is the language in which the neuron signal to one another? Invoking memories, effect, and importance or salience. How does mindfulness work if it works? In terms of giving you some psychological distance. How is that embedded in the circuitry? I think the picture, which we were brought up on that pains, the lesion, and the amygdala, and then there's where our awareness of it.

Host: Aware of someone.

Professor Charles: As to where is just that kind of loss of the implications?

Host: Yeah.

Professor Charles: I think it's fascinating when you read a book like the [inaudible] book, the brain, and pains. It was a brain spect in a great pain management specialist. You see how much more complicated. People come to see it in the last 10 or 15 years. They're thinking about pain management. As it were in thinking about what pain is because there are these interesting people who have articles asymbolic[?] where they're aware of pain, but it's not so bad for them. As where it's not that painful for it. And in mindfulness and Placebo a case where it was, the pain can apparently be managed or reduced by the context in which you see it.

Host: Yeah. And it's right on to mention the placebo effect. Just recently been seeing a psychiatrist who doesn't want to prescribe a drug if the patient doesn't think it's going to work.

Professor Charles: Absolutely.

Host: That's why.

Professor: Absolutely, I mean, I'm very interested in Clinical Psychology in general as I know you are. One thing that really encouraged me down this line was the observation that certain kinds of depression, cognitive behavioral therapy, interpersonal therapy, and drug treatment are more or less equally effective.

Host: Right.

Professor Charles: And you ask, I said well, what kind of phenomenon is it, which is open to these two or three different phenomena, assuming it's a unified phenomenon?

Host: That's interesting. And then there are also people who aren't in the studies who get over their depression by picking up golf.

Professor Charles: Yeah, exactly. Which is some kind of detachment or alternative activity. Get active stimulation.

Host: Right. So, one of the things I was surprised by in the thinking of politics, the human is by nature political animals, the policies prior to the individual. And anticipating that someone would say, well, the bees are much more social than humans. Aristotle says, "No, humans are more political even than bees because we had the faculty of language." I was just wondering if you could take these arguments, that the psychic should really be psychic-physical. I wasn't sure why you can't apply and can't use the same arguments to say, especially something like anger, which is so social or political that anger should be inextricably not only psychophysical but psychophysical-social.

Professor Charles: That's a very interesting question, which you raised. And I think that's a line of thought, well, worth pursuing [inaudible]. And I would see it like this, if you push the question beginning with a kind of obvious case the case of friendship, for example, and you know that the question, what is the subject in friendship? Should we think of ourselves as a unit? We, the team or the two individual players as were transacting with one another and transacts, were a quid pro quo way. And neither of those is an alternative though which says, well, the notion of the self-involved in friendship is something that is inextricably interpersonal. As we're such that, we have these capacities which are essentially other-directed.

Host: Right.

Professor Charles: Not as a further entity of the "we", as we're beyond the individuals, but you can't say what the individuals are, except by thinking of them as definitionally what it is to be a human person to be connected in certain ways to another human person.

Host: Right.

Professor Charles: Then, the question is, what is the requirement for that? What kind of connections are they? Which distinguishes us from highly social animals like bees, where presumably the notion of friendship doesn't seem to apply. How I would try to prosecute, try to develop that line.

Host: Okay.

Professor Charles: So there's a kind of individualism that permeates much but our thinking.

Host: Yeah.

Professor Charles: Well, to be a human person is to be defined, either in terms of just my own internal states or is limited to the extent of my body.

Host: Correct.

Professor: But after that, it's the transaction between me and others as it were for my own self-directed goals. I think you're right. To say that the Athenian[?] picture is different from that, in that, there's an extension, which involves as were the inextricably social.

Host: Right. The politics are prior to the individual right there, and the beginning of the politics.

Professor Charles: Although these priority claims have to be handled very carefully.

Host: Okay.

Professor Charles: Because I take it, that means something like politics is the basic definition of what a citizen of the other politics.

Host: I see, it doesn't mean more metaphysically, basically.

Professor Charles: I don't think you need me that, you're living on one side, there's a really interesting question as was thrown up by his tradition which is, how does a human have to be for interpersonal relations to be as important for us as they are?

Host: That's helpful. I wanted to just give the listeners a sense of the book overall. That's the last thing we're running out of time, but I wondered if you could give an overview of chapter 2, you're trying to take all of Aristotle's insights into psychology and the psychophysical nature of our lives and trace them back to Aristotle's metaphysics, as I understand it. We're talking about form, matter, and causation. And I think that this is one of the things that your reviewers were saying was controversial, exciting, or controversial. The idea of an impure form.

Professor Charles: Yes, absolutely. Okay, good. I'm thinking of anger physically involved desire for revenge. It's a desire for revenge in a physical form. Not two components. I think then the question is, how far does this extend to the notion of this is like a causal question? Two notions of physical form in general. One way to put this question, I think kind of intuitive way to try to put the question is, how do you have to think of form for it to be causally applications? To make a causal difference to the world? Guys, [inaudible] crack his head triangles don't cut things.

Host: Right.

Professor Charles: As where abstract entities or mathematics entered is not the kind of thing which heat or cut or divide except of course in geometrical shape.

Host: Can I interrupt just for one moment? So when we talk about form, I want the listeners to know, we're not talking about Plato's forms which we talk about or maybe we are. But we're talking about essence.

Professor Charles: Well, let's begin slightly further down the mountain right here.

Host: Fine.

Professor Charles: The thing is the way of the notion of shape. That's what we were thinking, it's form and shape [inaudible]. I think the question we should put it like this, why do round things roll? Take a really simple intuitive case.

Host: Right.

Professor Charles: Now, his line is not good as circular. Understood as a mathematical entity, as a mathematical property because such mathematical properties are not the kind of things to roll.

Host: Correct.

Professor Charles: Yep. What kind of circularity is it? This is where he explains why the tires were credible, and then the thought is...

Host: It's in mind.

Professor Charles: ...don't think that is just the circularity mathematical plus a bit of matter.

Host: Right.

Professor Charles: Rather it soak in and it mattered waste embodied kind of circularity...

Host: Understood.

Professor Charles: ...in some robust physical form. Some of his intent is in the physical body. So it's a rigid or elastic kind of thing. And those sticks out his tires[?]. So that's the intuition. How do you have to think of shapes for them to be causal applications? I think his notion of form is kind of built and try to capture that idea.

Host: That's very clear.

Professor Charles: In the psychological case, the form of anger is a desire for revenge of this hot kind, that's why our blood boils if we get angry and agitated, uncontrolled. The embodied circularity of the tire explains why it rolls in the way. That's why all the cricket was all the baseball cricket ball, which explains why they spin as they do. That's the notion it mattered for, rather than the platonist idea, which is very, which is what causally was opposing, which is the idea of mathematical form plus a matter defined independently of us all[?].

Host: Good.

Professor Charles: That does not the kind of intuitive way of putting it. There's a lot of scholarly debate in this area. But I want to give you the intuitions, behind a notion of form which explains why animals behave as they do criminals[?].

Host: Understood. And so, the idea is you're taking this impure form would mean it's essentially unmattered.

Professor Charles: Exactly.

Host: And you're taking that two cases of humans, something like anger.

Professor Charles: Yes, exactly. I mean, that's a very good way to put it. I'm thinking of forms as essentially unmattered, and our kind of cognition speaking very generally, as essentially embodied cognition. Where you can't say what the kind of cognition is, without thinking of it as a bodily form. There is an embodied form, not cognition plus the body, but cognition as it were bodily in this nature.

Host: Fascinating. Yeah, that's great. Okay. Well, thank you so much Professor for joining me. It was really enlightening and I think the book is great, and hopefully, listeners will know more about it and what it contains.

Professor Charles: I'd like to thank you all the students for some very interesting questions and also for pushing me on the social restroom.

Host: Okay.

Professor Charles: And also, on the connection took us all and also on the further project I haven't really gauged in and I'm not sure I have the ability to engage with, which is to say how its implications for this viewpoint, for understanding how informational systems in the brain, our best to be understood. Naturally, understand the component. We don't understand that is where a signaling system is.

Host: Yes, that's interesting. I know there are a lot of forthcoming books from you already, so I know you have a lot on your plate already. But anyway, I hope to talk to you about those in the future. Thank you very much for joining me.

Professor Charles: Thank you again. I appreciate it. Thank you very much.

Host: Okay.

[END]