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Project

The Untold History of Early Modern Psychology: Soul, Mind, and Body, Between the Fifth Lateran Council and Cartesian Dualism (1513-1662)

What is the mind and how does it relate to our body? These are central questions in today’s philosophy of mind, and they have a long history. The very concept of “mind”, as the item responsible for cognition, and the so-called “mind-body problem” are normally traced back to the philosophy of René Descartes (1597-1650) and his mindbody dualism. But were Descartes’ views solely the result of his ingenuity, or were they rather a synthesis of existing ideas? What were the main problems and views in psychology, in the years preceding Descartes’ work? Available narratives of psychology in the 16th and the 17th centuries mainly focus on two aspects. First, the debate that followed the Fifth Lateran Council (1513), which decreed that the soul’s immortality should be proven not only by faith, but also philosophically. Second, the works on psychology produced by the so-called Aristotelian scholastics, whose worldview Descartes promised to replace with his own. The scholarly focus on these aspects leaves many other important transformations in early modern psychology unstudied. This project will retrace the development of psychology between 1513 and the publication of Descartes’s De homine (1662), by considering novel yet hitherto neglected sources. Besides having intrinsic importance, these sources, which circulated within Cartesian circles, will supply a first account of what Descartes built on, in contrast to the available histories of the (scholastic) philosophy he reacted to.
 

Date:1 Oct 2020 →  Today
Keywords:Early modern philosophical psychology, The concepts of “soul”, “life”, “mind”, and “body” in the 16th and the 17th centuries, Late Aristotelianism and emergence of Cartesianism
Disciplines:Philosophical psychology, Early modern history