GEORGE MAKARI. Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind

دکتر آذرخش مکری

Extract

In Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind, George Makari attempts to explain how the early modern theological concept of the soul transformed into the modern secular notion of the mind. Makari, whose Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis (2008) examines the history of psychoanalysis in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, goes further back in time in this ambitious and thoroughly researched book to uncover the origins of modern psychiatry. He tries to demonstrate how the material and fallible mind gradually replaced the immaterial and immortal soul as the seat of reason during the long eighteenth century. Such a historical exploration allows him to shed light on the underlying tensions that have shaped contemporary conceptions of an autonomous yet embodied mind.

Covering the period from about 1640 to 1815, Makari’s story features a panoply of major figures, including René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Immanuel Kant,...

A brilliant and comprehensive history of the creation of the modern Western mind.

Soul Machine takes us back to the origins of modernity, a time when a crisis in religious authority and the scientific revolution led to searching questions about the nature of human inner life. This is the story of how a new concept - the mind - emerged as a potential solution, one that was part soul and part machine but fully neither.

In this groundbreaking work, award-winning historian George Makari shows how writers, philosophers, physicians, and anatomists worked to construct notions of the mind as not an ethereal thing but a natural one. From the ascent of Oliver Cromwell to the fall of Napoleon, seminal thinkers like Hobbes, Locke, Diderot, and Kant worked alongside often-forgotten brain specialists, physiologists, and alienists in the hopes of mapping the inner world. Conducted in a cauldron of political turmoil, these frequently shocking, always embattled efforts would give rise to psychiatry, mind sciences such as phrenology, and radically new visions of the self. Further, they would be crucial to the establishment of secular ethics and political liberalism.

Boldly original, wide ranging, and brilliantly synthetic, Soul Machine gives us a masterful, new account of the making of the modern Western mind.

GEORGE MAKARI. Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind