‘Some Unimaginable Substratum’: A Contemporary Introduction to Freud’s Philosophy of Mind

Abstract

Sigmund Freud is a philosopher, but became one posthumously. This odd state of affairs came about because philosophy underwent a transformation during the late twentieth century, with the result that a good deal of what is considered the legitimate business of twenty-first-century philosophers was not considered their business a century before. Ever since the rise of Logical Empiricism in the early decades of the twentieth century, philosophy has moved into an ever more intimate embrace with science, and it has become increasingly difficult to draw a hard-and-fast line between them. This intellectual trajectory was hastened by the birth of cognitive science in the 1950s. The new cognitivists worked in the borderlands between philosophy and science and could be describe equally well as philosophical scientists or scientific philosophers. They investigated, and continue to investigate, issues such as the neural instantiation of mental functions, the relationship between language and consciousness, the nature of non-conscious information processing, the structure of cognitive architectures, and so on. These issues, and others like them, were also given careful consideration by a vibrant intellectual community of philosophically sophisticated scientists and scientifically sophisticated philosophers that flourished in Europe during late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a community that included, among many others, Sigmund Freud.