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The teaching and writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein were largely responsible for bringing the philosophy of mind into its central position in philosophy in the English-speaking countries in the 1950s and 1960s. But other works which were thought to derive from his ideas often exerted a more immediate and a more specific influence on the topics discussed and on the way the subject was pursued. Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of Mind [1] was perhaps predominant. It determined both the form and the content of most treatments of particular issues in the philosophy of mind in Oxford and therefore in Britain and in much of America for more than a decade after its appearance in 1949. What came to be called "Wittgensteinian" positions, like those of Norman Malcolm in his accounts of the problem of other minds [2] and of dreaming [3], were also widely discussed, if less widely believed. Chapter Three of P.F. Strawson's Individuals: an Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics [4] was also extremely influential throughout the 1960s in its emphasis on the primacy of the person over the body or the mind and on the special character of psychological predicates.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-009-6932-2_12

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