David Chalmers noticed that in the December 2002 edition of Ratio there is an article by Michael Brearley on psychoanalysis and the mind-body problem. It’s all rather Wittgensteinian, and there isn’t a lot that is philosophically new, but two things about the article standout.

Nowadays, Brearley is a psychoanalyst, and he has some interesting comments comparing symptoms of patients to views of philosophers. The main message is that the philosophers are not as crazy as you might think. Philosophers have philosophical beliefs that mimic all sorts of conditions that psychologists have to treat, but philosophers don’t let that take over their daily lives. So here is an example of F. H. Bradley being mentally healthy.

In this lecture I have proved that Space does not exist. In next week’s lecture I will show that Time does not exist. Next week’s lecture will be in room 6 at 10 o’clock.

The other point to note is that Michael Brearley the psychoanalyst who writes for Ratio is the same Michael Brearley who was not so long ago captain of the English cricket team, most famously during the 1981 Ashes series, site of possibly the least notorious instance of professional sportsmen openly betting against their own team. And the paper has a few cricketing references, particularly an interesting dream involving Geoff Boycott (and a rather nuanced depiction of Boycott for a dream, I thought) that’s all a symbol for, well I don’t know what it is a symbol for and I suspect Brearley doesn’t either, but it’s all good clean fun.

An earlier draft of the paper was presented at this conference in Brisbane in 2001, and that draft of the paper is available here. Unfortunately that version leaves out some of the most philosophically juicy bits, so if you can track down the version in Ratio, you should.

Thanks again to David Chalmers for spotting this piece.