IsisCB Explore

Article ID: CBB415731194

Experimental Method and the Spiritualist Soul: The Case of Victor Cousin (2019)

Antoine-Mahut, Delphine (Author)

Perspectives on Science
Volume: 27
Issue: 5
Pages: 680-703

URI: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/736373

Outside Links

WorldCat

Google Scholar

JSTOR

Academia.edu

Spiritualism Consciousness Psychology Experimental method 19th century France Cousin, Victor Descartes, René

Spiritualism designates a philosophy that lays claim to the separation of mind and body and the ontological and epistemological primacy of the former. In France, it is associated with the names of Victor Cousin and René Descartes, or more precisely with what Cousin made of Descartes as the founding father of a brittle rational psychology, closed off from the positive sciences, and as a critic in respect to the empiricist legacy of the idéologues. Moreover, by considering merely the end result, severed from its polemical genesis, we are prevented from understanding how the category of experience constituted a crucial question for spiritualism itself. Through returning to the origin of these discussions in the 1826 preface to Cousin’s Fragments philosophiques, this essay pursues a threefold path: to show (1) that the public birth of Cousinian spiritualism coincides with the affirmation of applying the experimental method, issuing from Bacon, to the study of facts of consciousness; (2) that Cousin’s later evolution follows a process of radicalization—that is, in this context, of ontologization and of reduction; and (3) that by recovering this genesis, we can distinguish many forms of spiritualisms committed to the experimental method, both in alliance with the early Cousin and against the later Cousin. In this way, we can rediscover the interwoven philosophical links, lost in the process of institutionalization, between metaphysical demands and empiricist concerns, or between “French” philosophy and the legacy of Condillac.

...More

Citation URI

https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB415731194/

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Chapter Goldstein, Jan; (1998)
Eclectic subjectivity and the impossibility of female beauty (/isis/citation/CBB000082634/)

Article McGrath, Larry; (2015)
Confronting the Brain in the Classroom: Lycée Policy and Pedagogy in France, 1874--1902 (/isis/citation/CBB001551402/)

Article Denise Vincenti; (2019)
Experience and Experimentation: Medicine, Psychiatry and Experimental Psychology in Paul Janet (/isis/citation/CBB690744593/)

Article Pietro Terzi; (2021)
The synthesis of consciousness and the latent life of the mind: Philosophy, psychopathology, and ‘cryptopsychism’ in fin-de-siècle France (/isis/citation/CBB644527756/)

Article Foschi, Renato; Cicciola, Elisabetta; (2006)
The Notion of “Double Consciousness” in Alfred Binet's Psychological Experimentalism (/isis/citation/CBB001023632/)

Book Courtenay Raia Ph.D; (2019)
The New Prometheans: Faith, Science, and the Supernatural Mind in the Victorian Fin de Siècle (/isis/citation/CBB186449913/)

Article Jeremy Dunham; (2015)
From Habit to Monads: Félix Ravaisson's Theory of Substance (/isis/citation/CBB734477521/)

Book Seigel, Jerrold E.; (2005)
The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century (/isis/citation/CBB000930043/)

Article Giorgia Morgese; Giovanni Pietro Lombardo; Vilfredo De Pascalis; (2017)
Localizationism, Antilocalizationism, and the Emergence of the Unitary Construct of Consciousness in Luigi Luciani (1840–1919) (/isis/citation/CBB066562277/)

Article Sutton, Emma Kate; (2012)
Interpreting “Mind-Cure”: William James and the “Chief Task…of the Science of Human Nature” (/isis/citation/CBB001250203/)

Article Thomas Fuchs; (2022)
Die Entwicklung des Menschen: Wilhelm Wundts (1832–1920) voluntaristische Anthropologie (/isis/citation/CBB437342033/)

Chapter Hawkins, Stephanie L.; (2014)
William James and the “Theatre” of Consciousness (/isis/citation/CBB001214146/)

Article Whisker, Dan; (2013)
The Possibility of Shamanism: A Genealogy of Anthropological Appropriations (/isis/citation/CBB001212969/)

Thesis Gephart, Emily Willard; (2014)
A Dreamer and A Painter: Visualizing the Unconscious in the Work of Arthur B. Davies, 1890--1920 (/isis/citation/CBB001567610/)

Book Lachapelle, Sofie; (2011)
Investigating the Supernatural: From Spiritism and Occultism to Psychical Research and Metapsychics in France, 1853--1931 (/isis/citation/CBB001033411/)

Book Krister Dylan Knapp; (2017)
William James: Psychical Research and the Challenge of Modernity (/isis/citation/CBB628992095/)

Article Brancaccio, Maria Teresa; (2014)
Enrico Morselli's Psychology and “Spiritism”: Psychiatry, Psychology and Psychical Research in Italy in the Decades around 1900 (/isis/citation/CBB001421639/)

Article Graus, Andrea; (2015)
Los prodigios del hombre encarnado. Víctor Melcior y la redefinición de la mediumnidad (1901) (/isis/citation/CBB001552511/)

Article Novella, Enric J.; (2010)
La política del Yo: ciencia psicológica y subjetividad burguesa en la España del siglo XIX (/isis/citation/CBB001021991/)

Article Maléfan, Pascal Le; (2013)
Spiritist Delusions and Spiritism in the Nosography of French Psychiatry (1850--1950) (/isis/citation/CBB001214393/)

Comments

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}