Keele Research Repository

The problem of Scepticism has long haunted the Philosophy of Mind—a particularly noxious form of Scepticism is articulated by John Locke’s problem of Inversion. The problem of inversion acts to undermine two of the dominant theories of mind: Functionalism and Representationalism. In this thesis, the origin of the problem of inversion is examined alongside the damage it causes to both Functionalist and Representationalist theories of mind. Through this examination, the problem is demonstrated to be uniquely Cartesian in nature. After this has been demonstrated, attention is then turned to articulating a theory of perception that does not rely on the truth of the Cartesian system of mind. This alternative perceptual system draws upon the work of the Existential Phenomenologists, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger, in an effort to demonstrate the redundancy of the Cartesian paradigm. By doing such, a dissolution of the problem of inversion and a more realistic model of perception are both advanced. A number of objections to the alternative, phenomenologically sympathetic model of perception are then rebutted.