Trope Theory on the Mental/Physical Divide

In our everyday discourse, we distinguish without
fail between minds and bodies or between the mental and
the physical. Yet, in philosophy there is a tendency to get
rid of this divide. Roughly, the naturalist wants to reduce or
to identify the mental with the physical in order to provide a
unified basis for scientific research. The idealist, in
contrast, sticks to the mental as a precondition of grasping
the physical. The physical then tends to turn into mere
mental representations. These attempts to overcome the
divide, however, are not very promising. While the first
tries to assimilate the mental to the physical, the second
takes the opposite approach with the result that either the
mental or the physical goes by the board. Fortunately,
there is a third option: the realist maintains that the mental
exists along with the physical.