Abstract

The mind-body problem arises from the apparently obvious fact that consciousness is not physical on the one hand, and the well-attested evidence that the physical world is causally closed on the other. We might hope that idealism, the view that everything is mental, will solve the mind-body problem. For idealism has no trouble accommodating consciousness. And there is a sense in which idealism posits no physical world to be causally closed in the first place. This chapter argues that in fact, idealism has no advantage over dualism and physicalism in the face of the mind-body problem.