The Subject's Point of View - Tapa dura

[A] stimulating and provocative little book... a thought-provoking read (William Fish, Mind)

Farkas's account is elaborate and sophisticated (Uriah Kriegel, Times Literary Supplement)

Farkas' ambitious agenda is to advance a strongly internalist account of the mental. She makes impressive strides towards achieving this goal... Philosophers of mind will benefit from reading this book, as will epistemologists and philosophers of language. By providing rigorous arguments for its provocative conclusions, the book pointedly challenges the prevailing externalism. (Brie Gertler, The Philosophical Quarterly)

Katalin Farkas' The Subject's Point of View is a wonderful book... This book has a great many virtues... a wonderful addition to the literature on intentionality, and in particular on the internalism/externalism debate. (Sandly Goldberg, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews)

Descartes's philosophy has had a considerable influence on the modern conception of the mind, but many think that this influence has been largely negative. The main project of The Subject's Point of View is to argue that discarding certain elements of the Cartesian conception would be much more difficult than critics seem to allow, since it is tied to our understanding of basic notions, including the criteria for what makes someone a person, or one of us. The crucial feature of the Cartesian view defended here is not dualism - which is not adopted - but internalism. Internalism is opposed to the widely accepted externalist thesis, which states that some mental features constitutively depend on certain features of our physical and social environment. In contrast, this book defends the minority internalist view, which holds that the mind is autonomous, and though it is obviously affected by the environment, this influence is merely contingent and does not delimit what is thinkable in principle. Defenders of the externalist view often present their theory as the most thoroughgoing criticism of the Cartesian conception of the mind; Katalin Farkas offers a defence of an uncompromising internalist Cartesian conception.