The Victorian Extended Mind: George Eliot, Psychology and the Bounds of Cognition

The modern identification of the mind with the brain has its roots in the intellectual traditions of the nineteenth century. Isolating the brain as the seat of mental experience, and as the organ of the mind, emerged in the empirical work of Franz Joseph Gall and Johann Spurzheim and became a central, normative assumption of Romantic and Victorian culture, cutting across literary and psychological discourses. Less understood, however, is the extent to which novelists and critics thought seriously about the mind as a distributed phenomenon – or what might be described as Victorian extended cognition. Focusing on George Eliot, and exploring relevant aspects of nineteenth-century psychology, this chapter seeks to recover just that. At issue is the idea that mid-Victorian writing and culture did not always think of the mind as sealed hermetically in the head, a point developed through readings of such texts as The Lifted Veil and Middlemarch which show how Eliot’s fiction intuitively probes some defining claims in 4E cognitive theories.

Contribution of Franz Joseph Gall in the establishment of criminal anthropology. Part I. Teaching on Localization of Brain Function

This article represents a brief overview of the teaching of Austrian medical scholar and natural scientist Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828) on human anthropology and psychology. Soviet science viewed Gall as a creator of pseudoscience of phrenology, although in prerevolutionary period, he received mostly complimentary assessment. For example, the prominent Russian criminalist D. A. Dril called Gall a “father of criminal anthropology”. In order to determine the objectivity of such assessments, the author attempted to distill the essence of Gall’s doctrine and assess his conclusions regarding the formation of such branch of criminology as criminal anthropology. The research methodology is based on the analysis of monograph works of F. J. Gall and subsequent summarization of the key theses of psychophysiological doctrine of Austrian scholar. In his works, Gall substantiated the ides that the moral qualities and intellectual abilities are innate, and their manifestation depends on the organization of the brain, which is the organ of all propensities and aptitudes. In his opinion, different parts of brain are responsible for completely different functions. The author concludes that the widespread in Soviet science interpretation of the role of Gall in the area of phrenology is inadequate to reality. Firstly, Gall never attributed any special merits to himself pertaining to studying connection between the form of human skull and peculiarities of his psyche and intellect; and secondly, not disputing the existence of such connection, he however, did not establish any strong patterns.