Modern philosophy in the West has been haunted since Descartes by his ontological dichotomy between extended unthinking substances and thinking unextended substances, which leads to the epistemological problem of whether perceptions by the mind can be judged as truly representing objects external to it. The typical solution has been to reduce one kind of substance to the other: to fashion some version of either idealism or materialism. Attempts at a solution that affirms real differences between physical bodies and conscious minds but allows for their interaction, for each to have an effect on the other, are a characteristic strategy of analytic philosophers. However, Professor Hedrick finds their proposed solutions inadequate, primarily because they continue to presuppose the mind-matter bifurcation they are attempting to overcome. She offers as a viable alternative the approach of Whitehead's process philosophy, which is based on understanding mind and matter as fundamental interdependent features of the...

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