Abstract
In discussions of the relation between cognition and brain, or of the ontological status of qualia, it has sometimes been imagined that there are phenomena that stand in stark contrast to the ‘physical’.
Conceived against the background of the Newtonian revolution, Priestley’s ideas and arguments relating to the mind-body problem can be enlightening in such discussions. Priestley recognized that, once the implications of an attractive force were fully grasped, it became clear that a mental-physical divide no longer made sense because the notion of ‘physical’ that the division was premised upon could not be sustained; indeed, it ceased to carry any useful meaning. Priestley’s is an early realization that Newton’s force was, in Kline’s phrase, an epitaph for physical explanation.
The essence of the soul of man and animals is, and always will be, as mysterious as the essence of matter and bodies (La Mettrie, Treatise on the Soul, 1745).
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Notes
- 1.
A point frequently made by Chomsky, e.g., 1995; indeed, much of the present paper is profoundly influenced by what has been called ‘Chomsky’s physicalism’.
- 2.
Wozniak 1992.
- 3.
Cottingham et al. 1985b, vol. 2, p. 253.
- 4.
Ibid., p. 253.
- 5.
North 1995, p. 360.
- 6.
Ibid., p. 364.
- 7.
Cottingham et al. 1985a.
- 8.
Priestley 1777, p. xi.
- 9.
Ibid., p. xii.
- 10.
Ibid., p. xii.
- 11.
Ibid., p. xiii/xiv.
- 12.
La Mettrie 1747/1996.
- 13.
Priestley 1777, p. 26.
- 14.
Ibid., p. 27.
- 15.
Ibid., p. 29.
- 16.
Ibid., p. 29.
- 17.
Ibid., p. 28.
- 18.
Priestley 1767.
- 19.
Priestley 1777, p. 17.
- 20.
Ibid., p. xxxviii.
- 21.
Ibid., pp. 4–5.
- 22.
Ibid., p. 12.
- 23.
Ibid., p. 5.
- 24.
Ibid., p. 5.
- 25.
Ibid., p. 6.
- 26.
Ibid., p. 6.
- 27.
Ibid., pp. 6–7.
- 28.
Ibid., p. 16.
- 29.
Ibid., pp. 17, 22.
- 30.
Ibid., p. 18.
- 31.
Ibid., pp. 24–25.
- 32.
Ibid., p. 26.
- 33.
Chomsky 2000, p. 84.
- 34.
Chomsky 1995, p. 5.
- 35.
Ibid.
- 36.
Kline 1980, pp. 55–56.
- 37.
Ibid., p. 57.
- 38.
Kline 1985, pp. 143–146.
- 39.
Ibid., p. 181.
- 40.
Feynman 1995, p. 119.
- 41.
Ibid., p. 119.
- 42.
Ibid., p. 10.
- 43.
Ibid., p. 82.
- 44.
Ibid., p. 78.
- 45.
Chalmers 1995.
- 46.
Ibid., p. 208.
- 47.
Ibid., p. 208.
- 48.
Ibid., p. 207.
- 49.
Dijksterhuis 1986.
- 50.
Chomsky 1995.
- 51.
Priestley 1777, p. 24.
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Beretta, A. (2014). Joseph Priestley: An Instructive Eighteenth Century Perspective on the Mind-Body Problem. In: Smith, C., Whitaker, H. (eds) Brain, Mind and Consciousness in the History of Neuroscience. History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences, vol 6. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-8774-1_5
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