Dr Kevin Magill - Kind of Minds?

Lecture abstract:

Apparently the earliest surviving evidence of self-consciousness thought or feeling in the ancient world is in the small surviving collection of fragments composed by the poet Sappho, over the seventh and eighth Centuries BCE. The likely reason why no earlier expressions or evidence of self-consciousness have been discovered before Sappho’s, according to one startling explanation, is that until shortly before that time no human beings were self-conscious, or ever had been. Before the First Millennia BCE, according to this view, people would not have thought, or experienced the world or understood themselves in anything like the self-conscious ways we do.

Regardless of whether this claim is ever proved right, the suggestion that, until comparatively recently, human beings, as such, may have had a very different kind of mind from our own, does offer a new take: a fresh framework or picture for trying to think about what mind is: what minds are for, as you might say. I will try to illustrate this with some examples, and if time, hopefully we can finish with a discussion about whether it makes sense or serves any purpose to speculate about whether there might be further radical changes in human mentality in the future, and some suggestions about ways of thinking about that.

About the speaker:

Dr Kevin Magill is a philosopher, currently researching the implications for our understanding of mind, of the many reported experiences of hearing inner voices. He was Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and subsequently Associate Dean and Head of Research and postgraduates in the School of Law, Social Sciences and Communication (SLSSC). Since retiring, Kevin has been an Honorary Research Fellow in Philosophy with the University of Wolverhampton, Faculty of Arts. He has the author of an innovative and challenging book on free will – Freedom and Experience: Self Determination Without Illusions (MacMillan 1997. 2nd Edition) - and has published and taught on a range of philosophical subjects, including, recently, whether it is possible to imagine yourself to be in two places at one time and also the idea of machine desires. He is a past member of the Editorial Collective of Radical Philosophy and is a trustee and Executive Committee member of the Royal Institute of Philosophy.