Rick Rylance
- Published in print:
- 2000
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198122838
- eISBN:
- 9780191671555
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198122838.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
Part Two of this book turns attention from the general discursive configurations of Victorian psychology to the work of three individuals: Alexander Bain, Herbert Spencer, and G. H. Lewes. There are ...
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Part Two of this book turns attention from the general discursive configurations of Victorian psychology to the work of three individuals: Alexander Bain, Herbert Spencer, and G. H. Lewes. There are several reasons for this alteration in focus. This chapter focuses on Alexander Bain. The first section discusses his relationship with John Mill and the politics of psychological theory. The second section traces Bain's development of physiological associationism. The last section discusses his theory of will.Less
Part Two of this book turns attention from the general discursive configurations of Victorian psychology to the work of three individuals: Alexander Bain, Herbert Spencer, and G. H. Lewes. There are several reasons for this alteration in focus. This chapter focuses on Alexander Bain. The first section discusses his relationship with John Mill and the politics of psychological theory. The second section traces Bain's development of physiological associationism. The last section discusses his theory of will.
M. Gail Hamner
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- November 2003
- ISBN:
- 9780195155471
- eISBN:
- 9780199834266
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0195155475.003.0006
- Subject:
- Religion, Philosophy of Religion
The first concern of this chapter is to present the phenomenology of belief of the Scottish philosopher Alexander Bain in order to delineate the relations he asserts among belief, consciousness, and ...
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The first concern of this chapter is to present the phenomenology of belief of the Scottish philosopher Alexander Bain in order to delineate the relations he asserts among belief, consciousness, and action; these are the most direct ways in which Bain becomes an interlocutor of the pragmatists. Of special emphasis in this regard is action, which the American pragmatists mutate into concepts of behavior (Charles Sanders Peirce) and willed effects (William James). The relations of belief, consciousness, and action can be interpreted in many ways, some of which emphasize the importance of a person's character (developed dispositions) and others of which do not; the distinction displays itself in Bain's theory of causality, a term he divides into a psychological concept and a scientific concept. On the one hand, in insisting on the importance of character, Bain shares Peirce's desire to focus on conduct rather than on individual acts, but on the other hand, his confusing resolution of the complexities of causality into a dual scheme that separates psychology from science, foreshadows the way James attempts to secure a proper realm for scientific inquiry in The Principles of Psychology with a similar use of dualities. Thus, the second concern in the chapter is to expound on the relations of will, causality, and action as substantiated by Bain through his theories of psychological association and the law of relativity.Less
The first concern of this chapter is to present the phenomenology of belief of the Scottish philosopher Alexander Bain in order to delineate the relations he asserts among belief, consciousness, and action; these are the most direct ways in which Bain becomes an interlocutor of the pragmatists. Of special emphasis in this regard is action, which the American pragmatists mutate into concepts of behavior (Charles Sanders Peirce) and willed effects (William James). The relations of belief, consciousness, and action can be interpreted in many ways, some of which emphasize the importance of a person's character (developed dispositions) and others of which do not; the distinction displays itself in Bain's theory of causality, a term he divides into a psychological concept and a scientific concept. On the one hand, in insisting on the importance of character, Bain shares Peirce's desire to focus on conduct rather than on individual acts, but on the other hand, his confusing resolution of the complexities of causality into a dual scheme that separates psychology from science, foreshadows the way James attempts to secure a proper realm for scientific inquiry in The Principles of Psychology with a similar use of dualities. Thus, the second concern in the chapter is to expound on the relations of will, causality, and action as substantiated by Bain through his theories of psychological association and the law of relativity.
M. Gail Hamner
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- November 2003
- ISBN:
- 9780195155471
- eISBN:
- 9780199834266
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0195155475.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Philosophy of Religion
The development of pragmatism is the most important achievement in the history of American philosophy. M. Gail Hamner here examines the European roots of the movement in a search for what makes ...
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The development of pragmatism is the most important achievement in the history of American philosophy. M. Gail Hamner here examines the European roots of the movement in a search for what makes pragmatism uniquely American. She argues that the inextricably American character of the pragmatism of such figures as Charles Sanders Peirce and William James lies in its often‐understated affirmation of America as a uniquely religious country with a God‐given mission, and as populated by God‐fearing citizens. By looking at European and British thinkers whom the pragmatists read, Hamner examines how pragmatism's notions of self, nation, and morality were formed in reaction to the work of these thinkers. She finds that the pervasive religiosity of nineteenth‐century American public language underlies Peirce's and James's resistance to aspects of the philosophy and science of their non‐American colleagues. This religiosity, Hamner shows, is linked strongly to the continuing rhetorical power of American Puritanism. Claims made for and about Puritanism were advanced throughout the nineteenth century as rallying cries for specific political, social, and individual changes. It was in this religiously and politically charged environment that Peirce and James received and reinterpreted non‐American voices. Hamner traces the development of pragmatism by analyzing the concepts of consciousness, causality, will, and belief in two German thinkers (Hermann von Helmholtz and Wilhelm Wundt) and two Scottish thinkers (William Hamilton and Alexander Bain), and by examining how their ideas were appropriated by Peirce and James. The book is arranged in three main parts: Evolution of German psychology; Evolution of Scottish psychology; and Pragmatic reception of European psychology.Less
The development of pragmatism is the most important achievement in the history of American philosophy. M. Gail Hamner here examines the European roots of the movement in a search for what makes pragmatism uniquely American. She argues that the inextricably American character of the pragmatism of such figures as Charles Sanders Peirce and William James lies in its often‐understated affirmation of America as a uniquely religious country with a God‐given mission, and as populated by God‐fearing citizens. By looking at European and British thinkers whom the pragmatists read, Hamner examines how pragmatism's notions of self, nation, and morality were formed in reaction to the work of these thinkers. She finds that the pervasive religiosity of nineteenth‐century American public language underlies Peirce's and James's resistance to aspects of the philosophy and science of their non‐American colleagues. This religiosity, Hamner shows, is linked strongly to the continuing rhetorical power of American Puritanism. Claims made for and about Puritanism were advanced throughout the nineteenth century as rallying cries for specific political, social, and individual changes. It was in this religiously and politically charged environment that Peirce and James received and reinterpreted non‐American voices. Hamner traces the development of pragmatism by analyzing the concepts of consciousness, causality, will, and belief in two German thinkers (Hermann von Helmholtz and Wilhelm Wundt) and two Scottish thinkers (William Hamilton and Alexander Bain), and by examining how their ideas were appropriated by Peirce and James. The book is arranged in three main parts: Evolution of German psychology; Evolution of Scottish psychology; and Pragmatic reception of European psychology.
Cairns Craig
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- April 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780199560684
- eISBN:
- 9780191814419
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199560684.003.0005
- Subject:
- Philosophy, History of Philosophy
This chapter begins with the intellectual formation of John Stuart Mill, friend and mentor of Alexander Bain (1818–1903). It presents the case for thinking that, despite his lifelong residence in ...
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This chapter begins with the intellectual formation of John Stuart Mill, friend and mentor of Alexander Bain (1818–1903). It presents the case for thinking that, despite his lifelong residence in England, Mill is properly regarded as an inheritor of one important strand in the Scottish philosophical tradition, namely the positivistic naturalism of David Hume. Mill valued Bain’s comments on his System of Logic, and the high regard he placed on Bain’s early psychological work, led him to play a key part in Bain’s appointment to the Chair of Logic in the amalgamated University of Aberdeen (1860), despite strenuous opposition. This chapter explores Bain’s seminal contributions to the foundation of physiologically based psychology, as well as his founding of the subsequently internally acclaimed journal Mind. The chapter interprets Bain as the principal mature exponent of an alternative non-Reidian, non-metaphysical version of the ‘science of mind’.Less
This chapter begins with the intellectual formation of John Stuart Mill, friend and mentor of Alexander Bain (1818–1903). It presents the case for thinking that, despite his lifelong residence in England, Mill is properly regarded as an inheritor of one important strand in the Scottish philosophical tradition, namely the positivistic naturalism of David Hume. Mill valued Bain’s comments on his System of Logic, and the high regard he placed on Bain’s early psychological work, led him to play a key part in Bain’s appointment to the Chair of Logic in the amalgamated University of Aberdeen (1860), despite strenuous opposition. This chapter explores Bain’s seminal contributions to the foundation of physiologically based psychology, as well as his founding of the subsequently internally acclaimed journal Mind. The chapter interprets Bain as the principal mature exponent of an alternative non-Reidian, non-metaphysical version of the ‘science of mind’.
Benjamin Morgan
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780226442112
- eISBN:
- 9780226457468
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226457468.003.0003
- Subject:
- History, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
This chapter discusses how a physiological model of emotion created new avenues into time-worn narratives about aesthetic experience. Focusing on five thinkers who shared an interest in describing ...
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This chapter discusses how a physiological model of emotion created new avenues into time-worn narratives about aesthetic experience. Focusing on five thinkers who shared an interest in describing aesthetic experience as an embodied affect—Alexander Bain, Herbert Spencer, Grant Allen, Walter Pater, and Thomas Hardy—the chapter shows how physiological aesthetics challenged the notion that aesthetic judgment was necessarily a slow, reflective process of deliberation. Evolutionary theory and physiology provided tools for rescaling aesthetic response: for Grant Allen and Herbert Spencer, the experience of beauty was a reflex that had evolved slowly in evolutionary time; while for Alexander Bain, it was an immediate neurophysiological response to stimuli of form, color, or sound. This scientific discourse is manifested in later works such as Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native and Walter Pater’s The Renaissance, which experiment with the notion of aesthetic experience as involving discernible physical impressions on the nervous system.Less
This chapter discusses how a physiological model of emotion created new avenues into time-worn narratives about aesthetic experience. Focusing on five thinkers who shared an interest in describing aesthetic experience as an embodied affect—Alexander Bain, Herbert Spencer, Grant Allen, Walter Pater, and Thomas Hardy—the chapter shows how physiological aesthetics challenged the notion that aesthetic judgment was necessarily a slow, reflective process of deliberation. Evolutionary theory and physiology provided tools for rescaling aesthetic response: for Grant Allen and Herbert Spencer, the experience of beauty was a reflex that had evolved slowly in evolutionary time; while for Alexander Bain, it was an immediate neurophysiological response to stimuli of form, color, or sound. This scientific discourse is manifested in later works such as Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native and Walter Pater’s The Renaissance, which experiment with the notion of aesthetic experience as involving discernible physical impressions on the nervous system.
Brian P. McLaughlin
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- August 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780262026215
- eISBN:
- 9780262268011
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
- DOI:
- 10.7551/mitpress/9780262026215.003.0003
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
This chapter examines the special sciences found in the texts of a tradition known as “British Emergentism,” which is still evident in the works of current authors, including those of noted ...
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This chapter examines the special sciences found in the texts of a tradition known as “British Emergentism,” which is still evident in the works of current authors, including those of noted neurophysiologist Roger Sperry. British Emergentism’s roots can be found in the middle of the nineteenth century, where it flourished in the century’s first quarter. It can be seen in John Stuart Mill’s System of Logic (1843), where it began, and through works such as Alexander Bain’s Logic (1870), George Henry Lewes’s Problems of Life and Mind (1875), Samuel Alexander’s Space, Time, and Deity (1920), Lloyd Morgan’s Emergent Evolution (1923), and C. D. Broad’s The Mind and Its Place in Nature (1925). The chapter also discusses British Emergentism’s doctrine of “emergent laws,” and the rise and fall of British Emergentism as a doctrine.Less
This chapter examines the special sciences found in the texts of a tradition known as “British Emergentism,” which is still evident in the works of current authors, including those of noted neurophysiologist Roger Sperry. British Emergentism’s roots can be found in the middle of the nineteenth century, where it flourished in the century’s first quarter. It can be seen in John Stuart Mill’s System of Logic (1843), where it began, and through works such as Alexander Bain’s Logic (1870), George Henry Lewes’s Problems of Life and Mind (1875), Samuel Alexander’s Space, Time, and Deity (1920), Lloyd Morgan’s Emergent Evolution (1923), and C. D. Broad’s The Mind and Its Place in Nature (1925). The chapter also discusses British Emergentism’s doctrine of “emergent laws,” and the rise and fall of British Emergentism as a doctrine.
W. J. Mander
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- June 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780198809531
- eISBN:
- 9780191846878
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198809531.003.0007
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Metaphysics/Epistemology
This chapter highlights the empiricist school whose chief inspiration was John Stuart Mill, focusing on the once important but now neglected figures of Alexander Bain and George Croom Robertson. ...
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This chapter highlights the empiricist school whose chief inspiration was John Stuart Mill, focusing on the once important but now neglected figures of Alexander Bain and George Croom Robertson. After examining Bain’s debt to Mill’s empiricism and his physiologically grounded developments of associationist psychology, the chapter explores his views about time and space, external material reality, causation, force, the mind–body relation, and human free will. A final consideration of Bain’s assertions about thing-in-themselves shows his position to be more subtle than might be thought. The consideration of Croom Robertson focuses on his attempts to define philosophy and to distinguish it from psychology, before briefly conserving his own metaphysical positions.Less
This chapter highlights the empiricist school whose chief inspiration was John Stuart Mill, focusing on the once important but now neglected figures of Alexander Bain and George Croom Robertson. After examining Bain’s debt to Mill’s empiricism and his physiologically grounded developments of associationist psychology, the chapter explores his views about time and space, external material reality, causation, force, the mind–body relation, and human free will. A final consideration of Bain’s assertions about thing-in-themselves shows his position to be more subtle than might be thought. The consideration of Croom Robertson focuses on his attempts to define philosophy and to distinguish it from psychology, before briefly conserving his own metaphysical positions.
Alexander Broadie
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748616275
- eISBN:
- 9780748652471
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748616275.003.0010
- Subject:
- Philosophy, History of Philosophy
The Scottish Enlightenment was a stunning intellectual performance that set the intellectual agenda for many people inside and outside Scotland for many decades thereafter. George Davie argues that ...
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The Scottish Enlightenment was a stunning intellectual performance that set the intellectual agenda for many people inside and outside Scotland for many decades thereafter. George Davie argues that Sir William Hamilton's pupil and friend James Frederick Ferrier was in substantial measure responsible for the blackout of the Scottish Enlightenment in the 1850s. Ferrier's greatest work is perhaps An Introduction to the Philosophy of Consciousness, which originally appeared as a series of seven papers in Blackwood's Magazine. Consciousness implies an act of negation, for the self must distinguish itself from nature as a self in relation to not-self. The contributions of Alexander Bain and Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison are elaborated. Many of Scottish idealists wrote extensively on the practical implications, whether social or political, of their philosophy.Less
The Scottish Enlightenment was a stunning intellectual performance that set the intellectual agenda for many people inside and outside Scotland for many decades thereafter. George Davie argues that Sir William Hamilton's pupil and friend James Frederick Ferrier was in substantial measure responsible for the blackout of the Scottish Enlightenment in the 1850s. Ferrier's greatest work is perhaps An Introduction to the Philosophy of Consciousness, which originally appeared as a series of seven papers in Blackwood's Magazine. Consciousness implies an act of negation, for the self must distinguish itself from nature as a self in relation to not-self. The contributions of Alexander Bain and Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison are elaborated. Many of Scottish idealists wrote extensively on the practical implications, whether social or political, of their philosophy.
George Meredith
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- October 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780300173178
- eISBN:
- 9780300189100
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300173178.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter explores the role that the senses and the sensory experience play in the composition of poetry. The excerpts it shows note, for instance, note how Victorian scientists and physiologists ...
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This chapter explores the role that the senses and the sensory experience play in the composition of poetry. The excerpts it shows note, for instance, note how Victorian scientists and physiologists understood how the sensory experience directly influences poets—and the process of sensory experience proves to be fundamentally important in George Meredith's poetry. Through his poetry, Meredith invites readers to make use of their senses; to see, hear, touch, and smell. This focus on sensory detail even prompted efforts to theorize the relationship between intellectual understanding and the body. In fact, in the extracts compiled in the chapter, scientists insist that comprehending poetry is not just an intellectual activity but also an experiential one. Alexander Bain, for instance, maps and explains the cerebral activity that supports this statement, while Alexander Bryan Johnson shows a concern with the difficulty of relating a sensory experience through language.Less
This chapter explores the role that the senses and the sensory experience play in the composition of poetry. The excerpts it shows note, for instance, note how Victorian scientists and physiologists understood how the sensory experience directly influences poets—and the process of sensory experience proves to be fundamentally important in George Meredith's poetry. Through his poetry, Meredith invites readers to make use of their senses; to see, hear, touch, and smell. This focus on sensory detail even prompted efforts to theorize the relationship between intellectual understanding and the body. In fact, in the extracts compiled in the chapter, scientists insist that comprehending poetry is not just an intellectual activity but also an experiential one. Alexander Bain, for instance, maps and explains the cerebral activity that supports this statement, while Alexander Bryan Johnson shows a concern with the difficulty of relating a sensory experience through language.
Frank Christianson
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748625086
- eISBN:
- 9780748652068
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748625086.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This book shows that philanthropy became a favoured trope within literary realism because of its unique utility as a site for the working out of epistemological and aesthetic problems. Henry Mayhew's ...
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This book shows that philanthropy became a favoured trope within literary realism because of its unique utility as a site for the working out of epistemological and aesthetic problems. Henry Mayhew's work represents a new expressive mode uniquely suited to promoting the various aims of philanthropy. Mike Martin sees philanthropy as ‘all forms of voluntary, private giving for public purposes’. Alexander Bain's response represents one of many accounts of philanthropy and its sentimental underpinnings penned by economists, social scientists, public moralists and novelists that amounted to a rich and varied discursive tradition over the course of the century. A comparison of philanthropy and political economy as discrete, if closely interrelated discourses, sheds light on the process of middle-class cultural formation as it pertains to the historically changing form of the novel.Less
This book shows that philanthropy became a favoured trope within literary realism because of its unique utility as a site for the working out of epistemological and aesthetic problems. Henry Mayhew's work represents a new expressive mode uniquely suited to promoting the various aims of philanthropy. Mike Martin sees philanthropy as ‘all forms of voluntary, private giving for public purposes’. Alexander Bain's response represents one of many accounts of philanthropy and its sentimental underpinnings penned by economists, social scientists, public moralists and novelists that amounted to a rich and varied discursive tradition over the course of the century. A comparison of philanthropy and political economy as discrete, if closely interrelated discourses, sheds light on the process of middle-class cultural formation as it pertains to the historically changing form of the novel.
Benjamin Morgan
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780226442112
- eISBN:
- 9780226457468
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226457468.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
The Outward Mind argues that Victorian writers and scientists developed new and controversial accounts of aesthetic experience by returning attention to the human body and to the materiality of ...
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The Outward Mind argues that Victorian writers and scientists developed new and controversial accounts of aesthetic experience by returning attention to the human body and to the materiality of artworks. In contrast with accounts of the period that have understood aesthetic judgment as a mode of individual expression or self-cultivation, the book recovers a materialist science of aesthetics in which the experience of beauty was seen as a moment of unconscious contact between the human nervous system and the materiality of an art object. Analyzing archives related to literary figures such as John Ruskin, William Morris, and Walter Pater as well as biologists and psychologists such as Alexander Bain, Herbert Spencer, and Vernon Lee, the book shows that scientists and literary intellectuals shared a project of turning the mind “outward” into a surrounding world of objects and things. Returning to this cross-disciplinary tradition of physiological aesthetics suggests that contemporary engagements between the humanities and sciences would benefit from attending more closely to a history in which scientific approaches to aesthetics were embraced. The book is organized by five categories through which Victorian thought gains purchase on key terms in contemporary critical practice: form, response, materiality, practice, and empathy. At a moment when neuroaesthetics, affect theory, new materialisms, and quantitative cultural analysis are increasingly drawing on the scientific method, The Outward Mind offers a literary and cultural history that shows how science and aesthetics have long been intertwined.Less
The Outward Mind argues that Victorian writers and scientists developed new and controversial accounts of aesthetic experience by returning attention to the human body and to the materiality of artworks. In contrast with accounts of the period that have understood aesthetic judgment as a mode of individual expression or self-cultivation, the book recovers a materialist science of aesthetics in which the experience of beauty was seen as a moment of unconscious contact between the human nervous system and the materiality of an art object. Analyzing archives related to literary figures such as John Ruskin, William Morris, and Walter Pater as well as biologists and psychologists such as Alexander Bain, Herbert Spencer, and Vernon Lee, the book shows that scientists and literary intellectuals shared a project of turning the mind “outward” into a surrounding world of objects and things. Returning to this cross-disciplinary tradition of physiological aesthetics suggests that contemporary engagements between the humanities and sciences would benefit from attending more closely to a history in which scientific approaches to aesthetics were embraced. The book is organized by five categories through which Victorian thought gains purchase on key terms in contemporary critical practice: form, response, materiality, practice, and empathy. At a moment when neuroaesthetics, affect theory, new materialisms, and quantitative cultural analysis are increasingly drawing on the scientific method, The Outward Mind offers a literary and cultural history that shows how science and aesthetics have long been intertwined.
Brian P. McLaughlin
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- August 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780262026215
- eISBN:
- 9780262268011
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
- DOI:
- 10.7551/mitpress/9780262026215.003.0006
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
This chapter presents a short history of the modern emergentist tradition. It begins with John Stuart Mill’s System of Logic (1843), and traces through Alexander Bain’s Logic (1870), George Henry ...
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This chapter presents a short history of the modern emergentist tradition. It begins with John Stuart Mill’s System of Logic (1843), and traces through Alexander Bain’s Logic (1870), George Henry Lewes’s Problems of Life and Mind (1875), Samuel Alexander’s two-volume Space, Time, and Deity (1920), Lloyd Morgan’s Emergent Evolution (1923), and C. D. Broad’s The Mind and Its Place in Nature (1925). Presented together with these works are some twentieth-century results, both philosophical and scientific, that bear on the conclusions drawn by members of that tradition. James van Cleve’s definition of the notion of an emergent property by appeal to supervenience is also explained in detail, before an attempt by the author to present his own definition of the same.Less
This chapter presents a short history of the modern emergentist tradition. It begins with John Stuart Mill’s System of Logic (1843), and traces through Alexander Bain’s Logic (1870), George Henry Lewes’s Problems of Life and Mind (1875), Samuel Alexander’s two-volume Space, Time, and Deity (1920), Lloyd Morgan’s Emergent Evolution (1923), and C. D. Broad’s The Mind and Its Place in Nature (1925). Presented together with these works are some twentieth-century results, both philosophical and scientific, that bear on the conclusions drawn by members of that tradition. James van Cleve’s definition of the notion of an emergent property by appeal to supervenience is also explained in detail, before an attempt by the author to present his own definition of the same.
Aaron Z. Zimmerman
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780198809517
- eISBN:
- 9780191846854
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198809517.003.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Metaphysics/Epistemology
The author offers a pragmatist definition of belief. To believe something at a given time is to be so disposed that you would use that information to guide those relatively attentive and ...
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The author offers a pragmatist definition of belief. To believe something at a given time is to be so disposed that you would use that information to guide those relatively attentive and self-controlled activities you might engage in at that time, whether these activities involve bodily movement or not. This definition is then unpacked and applied to examples. The analysis is relatively straightforward when applied to assertions, but the pragmatists insisted that our beliefs are manifested in a wide variety of non-discursive behaviors, many of which involve the dissociation of attention from control within the execution of a task. Neuroscientist M. Jeannerod’s experiments reveal this complexity. The author argues that these experiments complicate matters, but they do not support “will scepticism.” Contemporary cognitive neuroscience is compatible with a number of different analyses of belief, but it meshes at least as nicely with Bain’s pragmatic conception as any other.Less
The author offers a pragmatist definition of belief. To believe something at a given time is to be so disposed that you would use that information to guide those relatively attentive and self-controlled activities you might engage in at that time, whether these activities involve bodily movement or not. This definition is then unpacked and applied to examples. The analysis is relatively straightforward when applied to assertions, but the pragmatists insisted that our beliefs are manifested in a wide variety of non-discursive behaviors, many of which involve the dissociation of attention from control within the execution of a task. Neuroscientist M. Jeannerod’s experiments reveal this complexity. The author argues that these experiments complicate matters, but they do not support “will scepticism.” Contemporary cognitive neuroscience is compatible with a number of different analyses of belief, but it meshes at least as nicely with Bain’s pragmatic conception as any other.
Aaron Z. Zimmerman
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780198809517
- eISBN:
- 9780191846854
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198809517.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Metaphysics/Epistemology
Have you ever called yourself a “pragmatist”? Have you ever wondered what that means? The author traces the origins of pragmatism to a theory of belief defended by the nineteenth-century Scottish ...
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Have you ever called yourself a “pragmatist”? Have you ever wondered what that means? The author traces the origins of pragmatism to a theory of belief defended by the nineteenth-century Scottish philosopher Alexander Bain, and defends it in light of contemporary cognitive neuroscience, social psychology, and evolutionary biology. Pragmatists define our beliefs in terms of information poised to guide our more attentive, controlled actions. The author describes the consequences of this definition for the reader’s thinking on the relation between psychology and philosophy, the mind and brain, the nature of delusion, faith, pretence, racism, and more. He employs research on animal cognition to argue against the propositional attitude analysis of belief now popular among Anglo-American philosophers, offers pragmatic diagnoses of Capgras syndrome and various forms of racial cognition, and defends William James’s famous doctrine of the “will to believe.” We have some wiggle room to believe what we want. Indeed, the adoption of a theory of belief is an instance of this very phenomenon.Less
Have you ever called yourself a “pragmatist”? Have you ever wondered what that means? The author traces the origins of pragmatism to a theory of belief defended by the nineteenth-century Scottish philosopher Alexander Bain, and defends it in light of contemporary cognitive neuroscience, social psychology, and evolutionary biology. Pragmatists define our beliefs in terms of information poised to guide our more attentive, controlled actions. The author describes the consequences of this definition for the reader’s thinking on the relation between psychology and philosophy, the mind and brain, the nature of delusion, faith, pretence, racism, and more. He employs research on animal cognition to argue against the propositional attitude analysis of belief now popular among Anglo-American philosophers, offers pragmatic diagnoses of Capgras syndrome and various forms of racial cognition, and defends William James’s famous doctrine of the “will to believe.” We have some wiggle room to believe what we want. Indeed, the adoption of a theory of belief is an instance of this very phenomenon.