How Herbert Feigl tried to solve the mystery of the mind-body problem

Ideas & Philosophy · Published 3 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: Herbert Feigl was a pivotal figure in logical positivism who fled Nazi-era Europe to reshape American philosophy. He famously challenged how we understand consciousness, introducing the concept of nomological danglers to explain why mental states often seem to defy the strict laws of physical science.

Born in Bohemia in 1902, Herbert Feigl became a key participant in the Vienna Circle, a collective of thinkers dedicated to the idea that meaningful statements must be grounded in scientific verification. After emigrating to the United States in 1930 to escape the rise of Nazism, Feigl spent decades at the University of Minnesota, where he founded the nation's first center dedicated to the philosophy of science in 1953.

Feigl’s most enduring contribution to the philosophy of mind was his push for central-state materialism. He argued that mental states are essentially physical processes, a stance that sought to unify our understanding of the brain and the mind. He was particularly concerned with the problem of qualitative states—the subjective experiences that seem to exist outside the neat, predictable network of scientific laws. He labeled these problematic, unexplained mental phenomena as nomological danglers, suggesting that they were the primary obstacles to a complete materialist worldview.

By advocating for this perspective, Feigl pushed his contemporaries to treat materialism as a rigorous, serious theory rather than a mere philosophical preference. His work, including his influential 1967 essay on the mental and the physical, remains a cornerstone for those attempting to reconcile human consciousness with the physical sciences. Through his teaching, his founding of the journal Philosophical Studies, and his collaborative work with Wilfrid Sellars, Feigl ensured that the empirical rigor of the Vienna Circle would leave a lasting mark on the American intellectual landscape until his death in 1988.

While Feigl was a staunch defender of empiricism, his approach was always tempered by the practical mindset of a scientist. He believed that philosophy should serve as a tool for clarifying the foundations of experimental knowledge. His legacy is not just in the theories he proposed, but in the institutional structures he built, which continue to foster the intersection of rigorous logic and scientific inquiry.

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