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Consciousness and Life

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Gareth B. Matthews
Gareth B. Matthews
Affiliation:
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
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Extract

In L. Frank Baum's story, Ozma of Oz, which is a sequel to Baum's much more famous story, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Dorothy and her companion come upon a wound-down mechanical man bearing a label on which are printed the following words:

Smith and Tinker's

Patent Double-Action, Extra-Responsive, Thought-Creating

Perfect-Talking

MECHANICAL MAN

Fitted with our Special Clock-Work Attachment Thinks, Speaks, Acts, and Does Everything but Live

(Ozma of Oz, Chicago, 1907, p. 43)

As Dorothy and her companion are made to discover when they wind up this man (‘Tik-Tok’ is his name), he is indeed capable of doing all the things of which his label boasts—acting, speaking and even thinking. But as Tik-Tok himself insists, and no one in the story casts doubt on the matter, he is not alive.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 52 , Issue 199 , January 1977 , pp. 13 - 26
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1977

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References

1 ‘Robots: Machines or Artificially Created Life?’, Journal of Philosophy 61 (1964), 685–686Google Scholar; reprinted in Putnam, Hilary, Philosophical Papers (Cambridge, 1975) Vol. 2, 402.Google Scholar

2 For helpful discussions of this question and the whole issue of how Aristotle's philosophy of mind bears on Cartesian ways of thinking see Kahn, Charles, ‘Sensation and Consciousness hi Aristotle's Psychology’, Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 48 (1966), 43–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and especially Sorabji, Richard, ‘Body and Soul in Aristotle’, Philosophy 49 (1974), 63–89.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

3 Descartes, , The Philosophical Works, Haldane, and Ross, (trans.), (Cambridge, 1931), Vol. 2, 210.Google Scholar

4 Letter to Buitendijck, (1643), Philosophical Letters, Kenny, A. (trans.), (Oxford, 1970), 146.Google Scholar

5 Descartes, , Treatise of Man, Hall, T. S. (trans.), (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), 112–113.Google Scholar

6 What Descanes actually says in the last passage quoted is that the human body is exactly like a machine of a certain sort. Elsewhere (e.g. in the passage from his Description of the Body quoted by Hall, T. S. on pp. 114–115Google Scholar of his edition of the Treatise of Man) he simply says it is a machine.

7 See previous footnote.

8 I am indebted to Professor G. E. M. Anscombe for making clear to me how explicit Descartes' concern with the traditional concept of soul is in Meditation II.

9 All translations from Meditation II are taken from The Philosophical Works, Haldane, and Ross, (trans.), (Cambridge, 1931), Vol. 1.Google Scholar

10 403a6–10, W. S. Hett Translation, Loeb edition.

11 Very helpful on these matters is Anscombe, G. E. M., ‘The First Person’, in Mind and Language, Guttenplan, S. (ed.), (Oxford, 1975), 45–65.Google Scholar

12 Except for minor alterations the text of this article constitutes the third in a series of eight lectures given under the title, ‘The Concept of Soul’, in the Divinity School of Cambridge University in the Lent Term, 1976. I am indebted to Professor D.M. MacKinnon, to the other administrators of the Burney Fund and to the members of my wonderfully interdisciplinary audience for the opportunity to develop my ideas on the relevance of the traditional concept of soul to issues of contemporary concern.