Kaitaro, Timo (Author)
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences
Volume: 35
Pages: 627--645
So-called identity theories that postulate the identity of mental phenomena with brain states are usually associated with materialistic ontology. However, the historical picture of the actual attempts at spelling out the mind--brain identities is more complex. In the eighteenth century such identities were most enthusiastically proposed by dualists (for example by Charles Bonnet), whereas non-reductionistic materialists such as Diderot tried to get along without them. In the nineteenth century physiologists such as Broca, Charcot and Wernicke, who postulated discrete and localizable neural correlates for ideas and mental images, ended up, despite their professed materialism, defending theories that resembled Cartesian schemes and the theories of their eighteenth-century dualistic predecessors. Some problems resulting from the use of these theoretical models postulating local and discrete traces, images or representations in the brain in the context of materialist ontology are obviously related to their dualistic origins and to the fact that they are necessarily bound up with dualistic presuppositions. In the context of the criticism of the nineteenth-century memory trace paradigm it is, however, important to bear in mind that functional localization as such is not dependent on the notion of localizable representations. Nor are materialist theories of the mind necessarily dependent on postulating specific type--type identities between the mental and the physiological.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Article
Udo Thiel;
(2020)
Priestley and Kant on Materialism
(/isis/citation/CBB616453784/)
Article
Sobol, Valeria;
(2006)
Nerves, Brain, or Heart? The Physiology of Emotions and the Mind-Body Problem in Russian Sentimentalism
(/isis/citation/CBB000660083/)
Book
Wolfe, Charles T.;
(2005)
Monsters and Philosophy
(/isis/citation/CBB000772105/)
Article
Charles T. Wolfe;
Falk Wunderlich;
(2020)
Joseph Priestley: Materialism and the Science of the Mind. Foundations, Controversies, Reception
(/isis/citation/CBB161350544/)
Article
Slezak, Peter;
(2012)
Mario Bunge's Materialist Theory of Mind and Contemporary Cognitive Science
(/isis/citation/CBB001252230/)
Article
Gere, Cathy;
(2004)
The Brain in a Vat
(/isis/citation/CBB000501605/)
Article
Santucci, Antonio;
(2000)
Francesco de Sarlo e le lettere filosofiche di un “superato”
(/isis/citation/CBB000640753/)
Article
Kirkebøen, Geir;
(2001)
Descartes' Embodied Psychology: Descartes' or Damasio's Error?
(/isis/citation/CBB000300809/)
Article
Ash, Mitchell;
(2007)
Die Sichtbarmachung des Unsichtbaren. Bemerkungen über Visualisierungsdiskurse und -strategien in der Geschichte der Psychologie
(/isis/citation/CBB001023523/)
Article
Sha, Richard C.;
(2009)
Toward a Physiology of the Romantic Imagination
(/isis/citation/CBB001023598/)
Article
Paul Eling;
Stanley Finger;
(2020)
Franz Joseph Gall's Non-Cortical Faculties and Their Organs
(/isis/citation/CBB224301715/)
Article
Smith, C. U. M.;
(2012)
Philosophy's Loss, Neurology's Gain: The Endeavor of John Hughlings-Jackson
(/isis/citation/CBB001201292/)
Article
Paolo Pecere;
(2023)
Materialism, Lebenskraft and the limits of science: Metaphysical vitalism in post-Kantian scenarios
(/isis/citation/CBB196899682/)
Chapter
Thomson, Ann;
(2001)
Materialistic Theories of Mind and Brain
(/isis/citation/CBB000101474/)
Chapter
Charles T. Wolfe;
(2016)
Tres medici, duo athei? The Physician as Atheist and the Medicalization of the Soul
(/isis/citation/CBB544167591/)
Article
Charles T. Wolfe;
(2016)
Materialism and ‘the Soft Substance of the Brain’: Diderot and Plasticity
(/isis/citation/CBB037936869/)
Article
Collins, John;
(2007)
Meta-Scientific Eliminativism: A Reconsideration of Chomsky's Review of Skinner's Verbal Behavior
(/isis/citation/CBB000831447/)
Thesis
Booth, Kelvin Jay;
(2007)
Animal Mind, Human Mind: George H. Mead, Animality and the Evolution of Embodied Cognition
(/isis/citation/CBB001561432/)
Article
Sheehan, William;
(2013)
From the Transits of Venus to the Birth of Experimental Psychology
(/isis/citation/CBB001320405/)
Book
Seigel, Jerrold E.;
(2005)
The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century
(/isis/citation/CBB000930043/)
Be the first to comment!