Philosophy of Mind

The Analysis of Mind

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Bertrand Russell

1921

In this ambitious work Russell attempts to dissolve the apparent gulf between matter and mind by arguing that both can be analysed into "neutral stuff" — elements that are neither mental nor physical in themselves but become one or the other depending on how they are arranged. Drawing on behaviourism and William James's radical empiricism, he examines belief, desire, sensation, memory, and imagination in turn, treating mental phenomena as susceptible to the same kind of logical analysis he applied to mathematics. The result is a physicalism avant la lettre that anticipates much of twentieth-century philosophy of mind.