Girolamo Cardano makes a number of surprising, even shocking claims about the soul in his De subtilitate, one of the most widely read works of natural philosophy in the sixteenth century. When he was finally investigated by the Roman Inquisition and the Index, these claims did not go unnoticed. This study will narrow in on three passages marked as heretical by the first Holy Office censor of De subtilitate. It will consider the Inquisition’s priorities and ask about materialism, determinism, and (...) conceptual inconsistency in Cardano’s views on the soul. The study will give special attention to the claim made by Cardano that souls can be reduced to celestial heat. In addition to De subtilitate, several of Cardano’s other works will be considered for added perspective, especially Contradicentium medicorum libri duodecim. (shrink)

This paper serves to introduce the papers from the symposium by the same title, by describing the sort of work done in philosophy of psychology conceived as a branch of the philosophy of science, distinguishing it from other discussions of psychology in philosophy, and criticizing the claims to set limits on scientific psychology in the largely psychologically uninformed literatures concerning "folk psychology' and "wide" and "narrow" content. Philosophy of psychology as philosophy of science takes seriously and analyzes the explanatory structures, (...) conceptual problems, and evidentiary practices of extant scientific psychology. (shrink)

This chapter examines the use of vegetal analogy in late Renaissance physiology through the case of the German physician Daniel Sennert. It is centered on Sennert’s explanation of generation, in particular the transmission of life through the vegetative soul within the seed, as developed in his early works on medicine and alchemy, the _Institutionum medicinae libri V_ and _De chymicorum…liber_. This chapter first summarizes Sennert’s account of generation and the seed’s “formative force” according to Aristotle and Galen, as well as (...) his appraisal of the medical debates on the origin of the seed’s soul and form. Then, the next part explores Sennert’s own interpretation of the origin of forms, for which plant physiology served as a common denominator of his medical, alchemical and theological inclinations. Finally, this chapter considers how Sennert attempted to harmonize his reasoning with the Paracelsian account of generation, seed and life. (shrink)

This article critically examines the views that psychology first came into existence as a discipline ca. 1879, that philosophy and psychology were estranged in the ensuing decades, that psychology finally became scientific through the influence of logical empiricism, and that it should now disappear in favor of cognitive science and neuroscience. It argues that psychology had a natural philosophical phase (from antiquity) that waxed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that this psychology transformed into experimental psychology ca. 1900, that philosophers (...) and psychologists collaboratively discussed the subject matter and methods of psychology in the first two decades of the twentieth century, that the neobehaviorists were not substantively influenced by the Vienna Circle, that the study of perception and cognition in psychology did not disappear in the behaviorist period and so did not reemerge as a result of artificial intelligence, linguistics, and the computer analogy, that although some psychologists adopted the language-of-thought approach of traditional cognitive science, many did not, and that psychology will not go away because it contributes independently of cognitive science and neuroscience. (shrink)

Distributed cognition is an umbrella term for the overlapping, competing, and sometimes conflicting theories in current philosophy and cognitive science which claim that cognition is distributed across brain, body, and world. 4E cognition is another name used for this framework, with the 4Es representing embodied, enactive, embedded, and extended cognition (for a more comprehensive overview, see Anderson et al. 2018). This framework can help bring to the fore neglected ideas of the mind and the cognitive roles of bodies and environments (...) (along with related resources, tools, practices, and institutions) in other historical periods. The early modern period inherited and developed concepts of the mind from classical antiquity and medieval traditions that accorded a cognitive role to the body and world. Furthermore, it underwent transformative sociocultural, scientific, and technological shifts, which led to a heightened awareness of, and at times anxiety about, the distributed nature of the mind. This entry focuses on early modern notions and practices of distributed cognition in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, alongside an exploration of the nature and origins of Cartesian substance dualism. In the early modern period, the humors, passions, spirits, and faculties of the soul were believed to interconnect human minds with each other and with the surrounding world. In addition, gestures; spoken, written, and printed language; clothes and other objects; living things (particularly other people); and practices and institutions were understood as diversely expressing, enabling, and constitutive of human minds. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-20791-9_586-2. (shrink)

Introduction: Transformations of the Soul. Aristotelian Psychology 1250-1650.