On Mind and Matter

Abstract

The meeting between philosophy and neurophysiology has an exactly localizable historical origin. It is with Descartes, who is often called the father of modern philosophy but who is also recognized as one of the great pioneers of Western mathematics and natural science. His vision of the human and animal body as a physiological machine, however, was almost completely speculative and it was only by slow degrees in the course of the centuries that it acquired the status of a scientific view of the living soma. The work of Galvani and Claude Bernard are milestones on this journey. But it was hardly before our century that serious dialogue between the findings of scientists and the reflections of philosophers in this area became possible and urgent. Before then the field belonged to philosophy. The concepts which philosophers had devised for talking about the subject are still so deeply entrenched in our language and thinking — also in that of scientists — that I find it appropriate here briefly to recall the philosophic load which we still carry with us.