From Descartes until our own time, a central problem of philosophy has been the relation between the mental and the physical, the soul and the body. One way of putting it is that we conceive of a human being both as a physical/physiological system, and as an acting, thinking, and moral/normative system, and that it is far from obvious how something can be both. The present project attempts to work out a new approach for how to think about these issues. In particular we want to address how mental phenomena can exhibit causal powers in the right sort of way; why physical systems like those we presumably are cannot at all exist without intentional phenomena; and also whether the intentional phenomena physical systems bring into the world can exhibit the right sort of subjectivity and normativity, namely the subjectivity and normativity subjects of thought and experience manifest.

Key themes for the group: (i) the relationship between common knowledge of mental phenomena and various special sciences involving or approaching the mind (psychology, biology, neurology, sociology, economics) and (ii) the relationship between philosophical theories of mind and agency, on the one hand, and scientific approaches to the mind on the other.