Philosophical Pictures and the Birth of ‘the Mind’

Abstract

In his Big Typescript and contemporaneous sources, Wittgenstein moots the ideas that
philosophical reflection is decisively shaped by analogies within language ‘at work
in the unconscious’ and that philosophical perplexities can be resolved by tracing
them back to such ‘false pictures’. This paper develops and vindicates these ideas
with the help of recent findings from cognitive linguistics and cognitive psychology,
and a case-study on the early modern concept of the mind as a realm of inner
perception, which gave rise to classical mind-body problems.