O pewnych aspektach Leibnizjańskiej filozofii umysłu

Abstract

While reading on the cover of the Polish edition of the book Goodbye, Descartes: the End of Logic and the Search for a New Cosmology of the mind, the words written by the well known American mathematician Keith Devlin, we discover that the reflection on language and human perception has played a major role in the history of philosophy and science. Nowadays in times of artificial intelligence research and the development of information technology, the role of psychologists, language philosophers, sociologists and linguists has gained significant weight. The answers to questions like: What is language? What is the human mind? How do we think?, are of key importance to resolving primary IT problems. The birth of a new discipline, cognitive science, which deals with the structure of the mind, thinking and consciousness became a challenge for the philosophical tradition like cartesianism, and at the same time became a pivotal factor of IT and communication techniques development. Devlin settles with tradition, which in his opinion is mainly defined by Descartes himself, however not only by his philosophy but also his methodology. Of course Descartes may be regarded as the symbol of the rationalist heritage albeit it seems that having a major impact on contemporary philosophy, it is not Descartes who should become the main character of the never ending goodbye, but Leibniz. The text is not an attempt at a polemic with Devlin’s opinions, but rather a supplementation of his standpoint. The problems of Leibnizian theory of the mind which were built on the language fundaments shall be elaborated on, as they can visualize Leibniz as the real pioneer of modern cognitive science.