ФУНКЦИОНАЛИЗМ

Abstract

For several thousand years, philosophers and theologians have discussed about the nature of the human mind. Many fascinating theories have been proposed to give an explanation of the essence of mental states. Throughout most of that history, the dominant views have assumed that the mind is something quite mysterious and fundamentally unlike anything else in the natural world. On that assumption, the mind would not be the kind of thing that could be studied with the methods of science.
In this article, we have examined of functionalism, which is one of the influential theories in philosophy of mind. Although, functionalism is used in multiple areas of studies including sociology, psychology, architecture and linguistics, we have focused on the functionalist theory in philosophy of mind. We can find the root of functionalism in Aristotle's theory of the soul. In contrast to Plato's claim that the soul can exist apart from the body, Aristotle argued that the (human) soul is the form of a natural, organized human body that is the set of powers or capacities that enable it to express its ''essence''.
In definition, functionalism in the philosophy of mind is the doctrine that what makes something a mental state of a particular type does not depend on its internal constitution, but rather on the way it functions, or the role it plays, in the system of which it is a part. In addition, functionalism is considered that it has successfully resolved the problems, which the both of behaviorism and identity theory have encountered with.