scholarly journals Modern ideas about the psyche: changing of the paradigm

2020 ◽  
Vol LII (1) ◽  
pp. 72-81
Author(s):  
Mikhail М. Reshetnikov
Keyword(s):  
Rene Descartes ◽  
The Body ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
Mental Processes ◽  
Biological Interface ◽  
Material Theory ◽  
René Descartes ◽  
Human Psyche ◽  
The Brain

The problem of the psyche and consciousness has been the most mysterious one for a few thousand years and is still unresolved. It has been almost forgotten that Aristotle considered human psyche a structure that is not bound to the body. This idea did not persist, though. It was Hippocrates who ruined it and declared a different concept, which prevailed for many centuries, that the brain is a repository of all mental processes. Even such a genius as Rene Descartes took Hippocratess idea for granted and spent many months in attempts to find memory and emotions in gyrus and ventricles of the brain. This path the search of material structures of the psyche was followed by I.M. Sechenov, I.P. Pavlov and many others. Later, many other mistaken ideas were born, declared new and revolutionary ones and died prematurely. However, not only ideas died, but also patients, who were treated by methods developed on the basis of these hypotheses. The author formulates the idea of the brain as the biological interface and proves a non-material theory of the psyche, which is a discovery that requires a change in basic paradigms of human sciences.

scholarly journals IDEAS HAVE THEIR OWN LIFE

2019 ◽  
Vol LI (1) ◽  
pp. 61-65
Author(s):  
Mikhail M Reshetnikov
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
Mental Processes ◽  
Biological Interface ◽  
Material Theory ◽  
Human Psyche ◽  
The Brain

The problem of the psyche and consciousness has been the most mysterious one for a few thousand years and is still unresolved. It has been almost forgotten that Aristotle considered human psyche a structure that is not bound to the body. This idea did not persist, though. It was Hippocrates who ruined it and declared a different concept, which prevailed for many centuries, that the brain is a repository of all mental processes. The author formulates the idea of the brain as the biological interface and proves a non-material theory of the psyche, which is a discovery that requires a change in basic paradigms of human sciences.

scholarly journals O PAPEL DO CORPO EM DUAS CONCEPÇÕES DE SUJEITO: O COGITO CARTESIANO E O EXPERIENCIALISMO / The role of the body in two conceptions of subject: the cartesian cogito and the experientialism

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrícia Oliveira de Freitas
Keyword(s):  
Rene Descartes ◽  
The Body ◽  
René Descartes ◽  
Cartesian Cogito

Este artigo de natureza qualitativa tem como objetivo delinear a concepção de sujeito proposta pela Linguística Cognitiva, tendo em vista que a noção de subjetividade, para o constructo teórico em questão, nem sempre é explícita. Para levar a cabo tal empreitada, este estudo fundamenta-se no pressuposto de que, para se estudar a mente humana, não se deve excluir o corpo do processo analítico (LAKOFF; JOHNSON, 1980; LAKOFF, 1987; JOHNSON, 1987). Assim sendo, acredita-se que a inserção da encarnação física humana no quadro teórico da razão, isto é, a teorização da promoção do corpo ao mesmo patamar ocupado pela mente, sem a possibilidade de dissociação entre eles, seja o fator crucial para se alcançar uma definição possível do que se trata o sujeito para a Linguística Cognitiva. Com o intuito de suscitar tal discussão, resgatam-se, inicialmente, as questões relacionadas ao sujeito engendrado no século XVII, influenciado por René Descartes com a intuição intelectual do cogito, no advento da Filosofia Moderna: o sujeito gerido pela substancialidade, universalidade e consciência. Como contraponto ao sujeito cartesiano, discute-se o paradigma filosófico da Hipótese da Corporificação, tornando possível o debate sobre o inconsciente cognitivo, a mente corporificada e o pensamento metafórico. Desse modo, pretende-se lançar mão do conceito de consciência, bem como os dualismos sobre mente/corpo, interioridade/exterioridade, racionalismo/empirismo e universalismo/relativismo.

The Physical Basis of Mental Disease

1912 ◽  
Vol 58 (242) ◽  
pp. 465-475 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivy Mackenzie
Keyword(s):  
Mental Disease ◽  
Brain Activity ◽  
Pathological Process ◽  
The Body ◽  
Normal Brain ◽  
Mental Processes ◽  
Nervous Disease ◽  
Perfect Adaptation ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Brain

In bringing forward some evidence which would point to the biological course followed by some forms of nervous disease to be considered, I would first of all accept as a working hypothesis two generalisations which apply to all forms of disease. The first of these generalisations is that there is essentially no difference in kind between a physiological and a pathological process. The distinction is an arbitrary one; the course of disease is distinguished from that of health only in so far as it tends to compromise the continuation of a more or less perfect adaptation between the organism and its surroundings. There is no tendency in Nature either to kill or to cure; she is absolutely impartial as to the result of a conflict between organisms and a host; and it is a matter of complete indifference to her as to whether toxins are eliminated or not. In the same way diseases of the mind are the manifestation of a perfectly natural relation of the organism, such as it is, to the environment. If the mental processes are abnormal, it goes without saying that the brain must be acting abnormally whether the stimuli to abnormal action originate in the brain itself or in some other part of the body. For example, if a child with pneumonia be suffering from delirium and hallucinations, as is not infrequently the case, this must be considered a perfectly natural outcome of the relation of the brain to its environmental stimuli outside and inside the organism. The actual stimuli may originate in the intestine from masses of undigested food and the stimuli may play on the brain rendered hypersensitive by the toxins from the lungs; the process and its manifestations, as well as the final outcome, are matters in which nature plays an impartial part. It cannot be admitted that there is any form of nervous disease which does not come under this generalisation. It has been argued by some authorities that because insidious forms of insanity are marked only by the slightest variation from the normal course of mental life, and that because the mental abnormalities are only modifications, and often easily explainable modifications, of normal mental processes, that the so-called insanity originates in these processes, and not in the material substratum of the organism. The fallacy of such an interpretation is obvious; it is tantamount to saying that slight albuminuria is the cause underlying early disease of the kidneys, or that a slight ódema may have something to do with the origin of circulatory disease. It is only natural that in the milder forms of mental disease the abnormal manifestations of brain activity should resemble normal mental processes; and even in the most advanced forms of mental disease there must be a close resemblance between abnormal ideation and conduct and perfectly normal ideation and behaviour. Even in advanced cases of Bright's disease the urinary elimination is more normal than abnormal; the abnormal constituents do not differ so much in kind as in degree from those of urine from healthy kidneys. It is not to be expected that in kidney disease bile or some other substance foreign to the organ would be the chief constituent of the eliminated fluid. The signs of insanity in any given case are the natural products of normal brain action mingled with the products of abnormal action. This does not, of course, preclude the possibility that under certain circumstances these abnormal products, such as delusions, hallucinations and perverted conduct, may not themselves be the direct stimuli to further abnormalities. The suicidal character of pathological processes is well seen in other organs of the body. A diseased heart, for example, is its own worst enemy; it not only fails to supply sufficient nutrition to the rest of the organism, but it starves itself by its inability to contract and expand properly, thereby increasing its own weakness. In the same way, certain phenomena of abnormal brain processes are in all probability due to the recoil on the brain of its own abnormal products in the matter of ideation and conduct.

The Body of Light in Renaissance England

2021 ◽  
pp. 35-62
Author(s):  
Simon Cox
Keyword(s):  
Rene Descartes ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
The Body ◽  
Subtle Body ◽  
Mechanical Philosophy ◽  
Renaissance England ◽  
René Descartes ◽  
Body Concept ◽  
New Form ◽  
Cambridge Platonists

This chapter engages with the first Anglophone attestations of the term “subtle body.” It appears first in the contentious correspondence between Thomas Hobbes and Rene Descartes between whom there was some disagreement over who plagiarized the idea from whom. Most of the chapter is taken up with the Cambridge Platonists who came in their wake, who formulated complex philosophical and mythological views of the Neoplatonic vehicles of the soul, now under the English name “subtle body.” It ends with Lady Anne Conway, who fuses the Platonism of the Cambridge group with Kabbalah to create a new form of spiritual monism. This chapter is significantly about how the subtle body concept was employed by Renaissance Platonists arguing against the reductive materialism of Cartesian mechanical philosophy.

scholarly journals ENSAIO PARA O ACIDENTAL: A LOUCURA E A QUEDA EM RANCIÈRE, BAS JAN ADER E DOM QUIXOTE / Essay for the accidental: loucura and fall in Rancière, Bas Jan Ader and Dom Quixote

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (41) ◽  
pp. 233-250
Author(s):  
Daniela Cunha Blanco
Keyword(s):  
Rene Descartes ◽  
Causal Chain ◽  
Don Quixote ◽  
The Body ◽  
Jacques Ranciere ◽  
Jacques Rancière ◽  
The Status ◽  
René Descartes ◽  
Contemporary Artist ◽  
Modes Of Thought

A partir de duas figuras que marcam a modernidade – René Descartes e dom Quixote – pensamos como configuram modos de pensamento diversos e opostos. Entre o método que busca o encadeamento causal das coisas e a errância do corpo entregue às aventuras da imaginação, o filósofo e o cavaleiro instauram um embate que não é aquele entre a razão e o sensível, mas sim, entre dois modos da razão. Nosso intuito é pensar, especialmente a partir de Jacques Rancière, como o cavaleiro errante teria aberto um novo campo da experiência sensível que denominamos acidental, cujo gesto é a recusa da lógica do encadeamento causal cartesiano. Damos a ver, ainda, o modo como o gesto inaugurado por dom Quixote será reverberado nos gestos do artista contemporâneo Bas Jan Ader, com seu empenho em buscar a queda tal qual dom Quixote buscara a loucura. O que surgiria com a recusa da causalidade no cavaleiro e no artista, em nossa hipótese, é uma mudança de estatuto da própria noção de acidente ou acidental que, deixando de ser considerado erro a ser evitado, passará a ser experienciado como a única possibilidade para um mundo pautado na contingência da vida.Palavras-chave: Heterogêneo sensível; Experiência acidental; Jacques Rancière; Errância; Modos de pensamento. AbstractBased on two figures that marks the modernity − René Descartes and Don Quixote − we think about how they configure different and opposite modes of thought. Between the method that seeks the causal chain of things and the wandering of the body given over to the adventures of the imagination, the philosopher and the knight establish a clash that is not that between reason and sensible, but between two modes of reason. We think, especialy from Jacques Rancière, how the errant knight would have opened up a new field of the sensible experience that we call accidental, whose gesture is the refusal of the logic of the Cartesian causal chain. We also show how the gesture inaugurated by Don Quixote will be reflected in the gestures of the contemporary artist Bas Jan Ader, with his efforts to seek the fall just as Don Quixote sought madness. What would arise with the refusal of causality in the rider and in the artist, in our hypothesis, is a change in the status of the very notion of accident or accidental that, no longer being considered as an error to be avoided, will now be experienced as the only possibility for a world based on the contingency of life.Keywords: Heterogeneous sensible; Accidental experience; Jacques Rancière; Wandering; Forms of thinking.

Mind

2019 ◽  
pp. 25-57
Author(s):  
Paul Thagard
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Social Mechanisms ◽  
Mental Processes ◽  
Abstract Thought ◽  
The World ◽  
Sensory Motor ◽  
The Brain

Multilevel materialism contends that all mental processes are brain processes while allowing the importance of molecular, mental, and social mechanisms that complement neural ones. The Semantic Pointer Architecture provides a good candidate for explaining how the brain has thoughts and conscious feeling. Representation by patterns of firing in groups of neurons, binding of representations into more complex ones by convolution, and competition among semantic pointers serve to produce perception, inference, and consciousness. The conceivability of minds without brains and of mental processes without semantic pointers is of no relevance to how minds actually operate in this world. Because of their sensory-motor operations, semantic pointers naturally incorporate important aspects of embodiment and action embedded in the world, while also enabling minds to transcend the body in order to engage in abstract thought.

The brain of René Descartes (1650): A neuro-anatomical analysis

2017 ◽  
Vol 378 ◽  
pp. 12-18
Author(s):  
Charlier Philippe ◽  
Huynh-Charlier Isabelle ◽  
Froesch Philippe ◽  
Shorto Russell ◽  
Benmoussa Nadia ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Rene Descartes ◽  
Anatomical Analysis ◽  
René Descartes ◽  
The Brain

scholarly journals The Body, the morality, and the passions in Descartes’ philosophy

2021 ◽  
pp. 76-92
Author(s):  
ONGAGNA Serge Roland
Keyword(s):  
Rene Descartes ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Theoretical Aspect ◽  
Decisive Role ◽  
Practical Aspect ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Real ◽  
René Descartes ◽  
True Knowledge

This article attempts a discussion of the philosophy of Rene Descartes, about the relationship between the human body and its passions, in the process of learning the morality of virtues. Descartes has repeatedly mentioned the decisive role that the true knowledge of the good must play and trouble by regulating our passions, but without ever providing us with the answer satisfying the following question: where does and what exactly does this awareness? Even if do not find a complete answer to our question in the last great work of Descartes, we still see several elements emerging from it important in some articles of the Passions of the Soul. Thus we learn in article 143 that desire "is always good when it follows a true knowledge”, but this true knowledge only seems to be reduced to a distinction fundamental that takes place inside the soul of things "which depend entirely on us, of those which do not depend on it”. But if true knowledge, that is true, does not seem to have any other criterion apart from what it depends entirely on us, here we are in full philosophical modernity. To what Descartes immediately adds that if one succeeds in one's life in distinguishing fatality from posture, "one easily gets used to regulating his desires in such a way that, especially as their fulfillment depends on us, they can always give us complete satisfaction ” (article 146). Theoretical aspect, practical aspect, thus reconciled and harmonized with each other, it remains for us to ask one more question: why the true joy, which makes the greatest happiness of human life (felt, for example, by the husband mourning his wife in section 147) can only be a "joy secret ”? René Descartes frequently mentioned the importance of the real knowledge of good and evil, supposed to rule our lives. However he never clearly explained what this knowledge really meant to him. If there's no full answer to that to be found in his work, at least it seems that the real knowledge, meaning the truth, is totally dependent on us. Quite a modern vision of Philosophy was suggested by Descartes but also, in this article, an unusual point of view of the philosopher's work.

scholarly journals Solutions to the Problems Concerning Descartes’ Interactionism

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 23
Author(s):  
Md. Ezazul Karim
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Rene Descartes ◽  
The Body ◽  
René Descartes ◽  
The Mind

Philosophy of mind in its essence philosophizes about the mind. And among many questions that it raises, the question regarding the relation between the body and the mind is of paramount importance. Among various theories considering the relation between the body and the mind, interactionism shines brightly. Advocated by the philosopher Rene Descartes it is one of the oldest and the most talked about theories. The aim of this paper is to propose some solutions to the problems concerning Rene Descartes’ interactionism. In order to do that at first interactionism is going to be discussed. Then the main points concerning Descartes’ interactionism along with the initial problems will be discussed. And finally, the solution to these problems will be proposed.

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