I’ll Learn About The Unconscious Mind in Philosophy, Right? A few different things drew me to want to study the philosophy of mind. One of them was learning about language (see here, for why) and another was a fascination with the mind in general. But to me, a prime reason the mind was so interesting was because of the effects of the unconscious mind. I arrived to the philosophy of mind, naive, and at the graduate level, assuming I’d be delving into such topics. But what I found — and of course, I can only speak to the tradition in which I was trained, analytic philosophy — was virtually no discussion of it. Everything I was introduced to in the philosophy of mind was the philosophy of the conscious mind. Intuitively, every human being knows that overwhelmingly, their mind is operating below conscious awareness. Presumably, this is for a number of reasons. When I am tired, for example, it’s much harder for me to articulate my thoughts. I figure — and I have not read the research on this — that makes sense. It takes the brain a lot of energy to articulate my thoughts, why do this when energy is scarce and needed for more important functions? When we introspect on our thoughts for any period of time, we will notice too, the shear volume of thoughts that can come to mind. It happens so quickly. When you’re distracted and/or don’t want to listen to all of those thoughts, why would your brain tell you what they are? I could go on. But it nevertheless felt strange to me that the analytic tradition so systematically discarded the unconscious mind. It made no sense, given how much of the mind it made up. But, as with most things, there are reasons—-historical ones. The Cartesian Myth We learn virtually nothing about the unconscious mind in the philosophy of mind due to what I’ll call the Cartesian myth. This is the pervasive — and frankly incredulous hypothesis —that our mind is infallibly and transparently known to us. Now, this doesn’t mean that our judgements about the...