In his work, Michael Ruse underscores the significance of metaphors in science, with a particular focus on the “abyss” between mechanistic and organicist metaphors in the history and practice of biology. Ruse posits that the Darwinian revolution involved a radical “metaphor shift” in biology, transitioning from organicism to mechanism. In this article, I set out several objectives (i) to assess whether the neuronist revolution, pivotal in the inception of neuroscience, involved a shift from an organicist metaphor to a (...) mechanistic one; (ii) to highlight the indispensable influences of organicist metaphors in Cajal’s neuron doctrine; and, consequently, (iii) to challenge the idea of an abyss between mechanistic and organicist metaphors, at least, in neuroscience. (shrink)

This chapter explores some of the ways that mechanisms are invoked in neuroscience and looks at a selection of the philosophical problems that arise when trying to understand mechanistic explanations. It introduces a series of historical case studies that illustrate how neuroscientists have depended on mechanistic metaphors in their efforts to understand the mind and brain, and how their mechanistic explanations have developed over time. The chapter highlights what contemporary philosophers have identified as the fundamental features of mechanisms and mechanistic (...) explanation. It considers some of the methodological issues that arise in neuroscience including how to integrate psychological with neural models, how to generalize findings in model organisms like the sea slug Aplysia to human learning and memory, and whether to favor top-down or bottom-up methods. Constructing multi-level mechanistic explanations involves intensive collaboration across different branches of science, and involves many challenges, both pragmatic and methodological. (shrink)

The article presents preliminary results of the conceptual analysis of the mechanistic profile of the computer metaphor. Mechanic reductionism is a special direction of computer metaphor rooted in various historical forms of word usage. Here we trace the stages of formation of the principles of transferring the properties of a mechanical computer to the properties of the human body and mind. We are also trying to identify the basic principles of semantic transfer, which have survived to this day (...) in the discourse of modern computationalism. The reasons are analyzed due to which the metaphor «Human (body) is machine», traditional for the Modern Age, was transformed into a more complex version of «Mind is machine». What happened to the concepts of «mind» and «machine»? How have ideas about the properties of computational procedures changed? What keeps the counterintuitive computer metaphor viable today? The answers to this series of questions and theoretical ways of solving these problems are contained in this paper. (shrink)

Cognitive terms such as “understanding" or “reasoning" are increasingly applied to large language models, even by technically informed researchers. This paper argues that such applications are best understood neither as literal attributions nor as mere loose talk, but as instances of metaphor as conceptual adaptation: the creative extension of concepts beyond their original domain under pressure of what I call conceptual needs. Drawing on the Strawson–Kant tradition on imagination and concept-application, inferentialist semantics, Bermúdez's theory of rational framing, and Gentner's (...) structure-mapping account of analogy, I develop a framework with four interlocking components. First, I argue that metaphorical extension selectively transfers inferential connections – not reference – from a source domain to a target domain. Second, I show that this transfer is guided by conceptual needs: mismatches between our conceptual repertoire and our circumstances that possess a distinctive aptic normativity (a normativity of fit). Third, I argue that whether the transferred connections hold in the target domain is empirically evaluable, and that mechanistic interpretability now furnishes the tools for this evaluation. Fourth, drawing on Bowdle and Gentner's "career of metaphor" model and Müller's sleeping/waking framework, I propose that cognitive terms applied to AI are undergoing a career – a dynamic trajectory from novel comparison through inferential negotiation towards potential conventionalisation. This framework makes headway beyond the debate over the literal applicability of cognitive terms to AI by replacing it with graduated, empirically tractable questions about the aptness of specific inferential transfers, and it reveals why the choice of cognitive vocabulary for AI is not merely terminological, but evaluatively and practically consequential. (shrink)

The same mechanism operates from quarks to consciousness. We call it Universal Constraint Parsing (UCP)—constraints at each level evaluate entities against possibility spaces, accepting configurations that fit, rejecting those that don't. Quarks are parsed by QCD field constraints. Molecules are parsed by thermodynamic constraints. Organisms are parsed by ecological constraints. Beliefs are parsed by evidential constraints. Memes are parsed by cultural constraints. Self-models are parsed by architectural constraints. This isn’t metaphor or loose analogy—across domains, selection dynamics belong to the (...) same formal equivalence class of constraint-satisfaction processes under scale-appropriate coarse-graining. While state variables and effective free-energy functionals differ by level, the underlying variational structure and selection dynamics are preserved. Crucially, UCP operates without agency—no designer, no purpose, no teleology required at any level. Agency itself emerges as a functional property when systems begin recursively parsing their own parsing at the consciousness threshold. We demonstrate UCP across all levels, show what emerges at complexity thresholds (replication, learning, consciousness), explain how existing frameworks (Universal Darwinism, memetics, Free Energy Principle) relate to UCP, and derive empirically constraining expectations. The framework is falsifiable and unifies phenomena previously treated as separate. It's physics all the way—mechanistic constraint satisfaction at every level. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that computationalism is a progressive research tradition. Its metaphysical assumptions are that nervous systems are computational, and that information processing is necessary for cognition to occur. First, the primary reasons why information processing should explain cognition are reviewed. Then I argue that early formulations of these reasons are outdated. However, by relying on the mechanistic account of physical computation, they can be recast in a compelling way. Next, I contrast two computational models of working memory (...) to show how modeling has progressed over the years. The methodological assumptions of new modeling work are best understood in the mechanistic framework, which is evidenced by the way in which models are empirically validated. Moreover, the methodological and theoretical progress in computational neuroscience vindicates the new mechanistic approach to explanation, which, at the same time, justifies the best practices of computational modeling. Overall, computational modeling is deservedly successful in cognitive science. Its successes are related to deep conceptual connections between cognition and computation. Computationalism is not only here to stay, it becomes stronger every year. (shrink)

This paper examines how metaphors shape our thinking about and conceptualizing of artificial intelligence (AI), noting that their inherent imprecision leads to discrepancies in our understanding and objectives for AI. By exploring the concept of ‘bad metaphors’ that equate artificial intelligence with human intelligence, paper argues that these metaphors often carry additional, unintended meanings that distort our understanding and expectations of AI. The terms “artificial” and “intelligence” themselves are ambiguous and ideologically loaded, contributing to the complexity. The paper critiques the (...) anthropocentric and mechanistic metaphors, like “AI as human” and “brain-computer,” which perpetuate unrealistic expectations. By deconstructing these metaphors within broader cultural and historical contexts, the paper calls for a more nuanced and precise understanding of AI, moving beyond simplistic and potentially misleading analogies. (shrink)

Within biology and in society, living creatures have long been described using metaphors of machinery and computation: ‘bioengineering’, ‘genes as code’ or ‘biological chassis’. This paper builds on Lakoff and Johnson’s argument that such language mechanisms shape how we understand the world. I argue that the living machines metaphor builds upon a certain perception of life entailing an idea of radical human control of the living world, looking back at the historical preconditions for this metaphor. I discuss how (...) design is perceived to enable us to shape natural beings to our will, and consider ethical, epistemological and ontological implications of the prevalence of this metaphor, focusing on its use within synthetic biology. I argue that we urgently need counter-images to the dominant metaphor of living machines and its implied control and propose that artworks can provide such counter-images through upsetting the perception of life as controllable. This is argued through discussion of artworks by Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, by Tarsh Bates and by Ai Hasegawa, which in different ways challenge mechanistic assumptions through open-ended engagement with the strangeness and messiness of life. (shrink)

There is a persistent tension in psychiatry between explicit endorsement of pluralistic approaches and an implicit tendency toward eliminative reductionism. I argue that machine metaphors shape concepts of mechanism and mechanistic explanation in ways that promote this tendency. Even minimal mechanism notions - designed to avoid problematic metaphysical assumptions - create an explanatory vacuum that machine-metaphorical defaults readily fill: practitioners need answers that minimal mechanism deliberately leaves open, and entrenched machine associations provide cognitively available defaults. Features of psychiatry exacerbate this (...) dynamic, including clinical decision-making pressures and psychiatry's interdisciplinary status. This vulnerability has implications for mechanistic concepts and explanations beyond psychiatry. (shrink)

Michael Polanyi’s conceptions of tacit knowing and emergent being are used to correct a reductionism that developed from, or reacted against, the excesses of several Cartesian assumptions: (a) the method of universal doubt; (b) the emphasis on reductive analysis to unshakeable foundations, via connections between clear and distinct ideas; (c) the notion that what is real are the basic atomic substances out of which all else is composed; (d) a sharp body-mind substance dualism; and (e) the notion that the seat (...) of consciousness can be traced to a point in the human body. The reductivist project in biology began with the emphasis Descartes put on the body as a machine. Polanyi reappropriates the machine metaphor to demonstrate how mechanistic explanations are not fully reductive. He shows how an eliminative materialism that would reduce mind to brain is unwarranted if either an interlevel mechanistic reduction or an intralevel successional reduction is posited. (shrink)

his article will focus on the mechanistic origins of the computer metaphor, which forms the conceptual framework for the methodology of the cognitive sciences, some areas of artificial intelligence and the philosophy of mind. The connection between the history of computing technology, epistemology and the philosophy of mind is expressed through the metaphorical dictionaries of the philosophical discourse of a particular era. The conceptual clarification of this connection and the substantiation of the mechanistic components of the computer metaphor (...) is the main goal of this article. The statement is substantiated that the invention of mechanical computing devices, having a long history in the European engineering tradition, formed the prerequisites for the emergence of machine functionalism in the modern philosophy of mind. The idea of multiple implementation stems from the principle that a formal symbol system prescribes rules for the use of rational abstractions through the physical architecture of a computational engine. The article considers the reasons for the conceptual shift and reveals the semantic foundations for the metaphorical transfer of the properties of abstract objects from the theory of automata to the field of modern philosophy of mind. The criticism and ways of protecting the philosophical program of machine functionalism are analyzed by changing the content of the metaphor “Mind as machine”. The reasons for the stability of the information-computer approach in cognitive sciences are also disclosed and explained. (shrink)

Analysing race as the metaphor of life - by means of which Thomas Hobbes describes the passions in The Elements of Law, natural and politic - seems to be the right occasion to underline the relationship between the mechanistic idea of human being and sports activity. This approach makes a paradigm come to the surface - where factors such as extreme competition, the pursuit of success at any cost, ineliminable fear of defeat confirm the relevance of the Malmesbury born (...) philosopher's thought, even within the so popular but little investigated field of sport. (shrink)

ArgumentEvery new level achieved by technology attracted the attention of physiologists and turned their thoughts in a new direction; they often unwittingly modeled life processes in the image of contemporary engineering achievements.–This article reinterprets the debate between orthodox followers of the Pavlovian reflex theory and Soviet “cybernetic physiologists” in the 1950s and 60s as a clash of opposing man-machine metaphors. While both sides accused each other of “mechanistic,” reductionist methodology, they did not see anything “mechanistic” about their own central metaphors: (...) the telephone switchboard metaphor for nervous activity, and the analogies between the human body and a servomechanism and between the human brain and a computer. I argue that the scientific utility of machine analogies was closely intertwined with their philosophical and political meanings and that new interpretations of these metaphors emerged as a result of political conflicts and a realignment of forces within the scientific community and in society at large. I suggest that the constant travel of man-machine analogies back and forth between physiology and technology has blurred the traditional categories of the “mechanistic” and the “organic” in Soviet neurophysiology, as perhaps in the history of physiology in general. (shrink)

Philosophers of social science have emphasized mechanistic approaches to causal inquiry for some time now, showing why focusing on the mechanisms behind correlations is preferable to focusing on correlations alone (cf. Johnson 2006, Little 1991, Reiss 2007, 2009, Steel 2004, see also King, Keohane, and Verba 1994 for an example of purely correlational research). In Process Tracing: from Metaphor to Analytic Tool, political scientists Andrew Bennett and Jeffrey Checkel present a concrete method for finding evidence of causal mechanisms, process (...) tracing. Process tracers give evidence for causal relations in terms of the observable implications of the underlying causal mechanisms through which a putative cause affects some effect of interest. Such observable implications often take the form of a chain of events, or process, which connects cause and effect. Though Process Tracing contains applications of mechanistic reasoning unfamiliar to philosophers, and as such will be of interest to those working in the mechanist tradition, Bennett and Checkel’s own discussion of the philosophical foundations of process tracing is limited. The reader will have to delve deep into the volume’s contributed chapters for links between the literature on causation and this new method. (shrink)

Despite explicit warnings from Shannon to tread carefully when applying Information Theory to fields for which it was not designed, contemporary neuroscientists adopting the framework of Information Theory have fallen right into the traps Shannon and others cautioned against. What makes the neuroscientist more than anyone prone to fall prey to confusion is that neuroscience looks back on a tradition—which long predates Shannon—in which information and related semantic communication notions (message, codes) are invoked as central explanatory posits. In the first (...) part of this paper, I shall give a selective historical overview of this tradition, which runs via Aristotle over Descartes to the groundbreaking work of the early nerve physiologists. At the same time, I will show how the history of explaining brain activity in semantic communication terms is characterised by a process of de-metaphorisation. Next, I will show how semantic notions, including semantic information, are still routinely relied upon within contemporary information theoretic approaches to the brain, despite the fact that Shannon deemed meaning irrelevant for his theory. There are, then, two very different notions of information at work within one and the same scientific discipline. I will demonstrate how these two notions get as a rule tangled up here. Next, I will show how invoking semantic-intentional information at the level of the brain raises two specific problems: first, notions that aim to explain by invoking semantic content or meaning, like the pre-theoretical notion of information, in principle resist integration within causal-mechanistic explanations; second, such notions are part of a mode of explanation which logically presupposes a cognitive agent. As I will also show, however, we indeed find that the neuroscientist has embraced the habit of treating neurons as cognitive agents, attributing to them capacities we would normally only attribute to persons. (shrink)

Evolutionary transitions in individuality (ETIs) involve the formation of Darwinian collectives from Darwinian particles. The transition from cells to multicellular life is a prime example. During an ETI, collectives become units of selection in their own right. However, the underlying processes are poorly understood. One observation used to identify the completion of an ETI is an increase in collective-level performance accompanied by a decrease in particle-level performance, for example measured by growth rate. This seemingly counterintuitive dynamic has been referred to (...) as fitness decoupling and has been used to interpret both models and experimental data. Extending and unifying results from the literature, we show that fitness of particles and collectives can never decouple because calculations of fitness performed over appropriate and equivalent time intervals are necessarily the same provided the population reaches a stable collective size distribution. By way of solution, we draw attention to the value of mechanistic approaches that emphasise traits, and tradeoffs among traits, as opposed to fitness. This trait-based approach is sufficient to capture dynamics that underpin evolutionary transitions. In addition, drawing upon both experimental and theoretical studies, we show that while early stages of transitions might often involve tradeoffs among particle traits, later—and critical—stages are likely to involve the rupture of such tradeoffs. Thus, when observed in the context of ETIs, tradeoff-breaking events stand as a useful marker of these transitions. (shrink)

In the aftermath of 9/11, world leaders addressed the nation as a body under threat and hastened in new policies to bolster border protection and ‘securitize’ immigration. While the terrorist attacks cast new forms of public attention on the risks posed by mobile agents, the link between national security and regulating migration has always been at the forefront of the constitution of the nation state. Despite this persistent anxiety towards the social impact of migration and the status of people on (...) the move, a more general understanding of mobility is not only missing in public debates, but has been a lacunae in the social sciences. What is mobility — a state, a force, a set of shifting co-ordinates? How does the definition of mobility shape social attitudes and personal experiences? This article examines the use of organic and mechanistic metaphors that have underpinned the classical paradigm for understanding of mobility in the social sciences. It argues that the global patterns of migration and the contemporary forms of hybrid subjectivity do not fit well with this paradigm. The limits and kinetophobic associations generated by the classical paradigm are examined through Harald Kleinschmidt’s theory of residentialism. The final part of this article outlines an alternative conceptual frame that is based on key terms from complexity theory. (shrink)

The first half of this article offers two possibilities of how the argument Kojonen makes might be vulnerable to other new developments in evolutionary science and psychology—potential broadsides that might threaten to sink the salvaged ship of design once again. Work on the development of life suggests that life is a simplification of surrounding environmental information, and therefore life does not generate new information. Second, the psychology of pareidolia suggests we find design as a bias of our information processing, rather (...) than observing something that exists. The second half of the article offers a critique of how the metaphors we use to describe God and the world shape our approaches to solving theological and philosophical questions (particularly theodicy). I offer some organic metaphors in place of the usual mechanistic metaphors to think about how the design argument could be reformulated. (shrink)

This article uses the Confucian and Neo-Confucian slogan that we should strive to “form one body with all things” as a starting point for asking whether the organismic metaphors so central to their ontology might be compatible with and of service to contemporary thinkers in cognitive science and philosophy of mind who are actively pursuing a fully embodied theory of mind. In this article I draw upon lines of inquiry exemplified in the work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson and (...) Andy Clark who take different routes to important conclusions that I argue would be even more convincing where they to be seen from within the context of an ontology that draws upon organismic rather than mechanistic metaphors. In short, this article draws attention to the largely unnoticed fact that a fully embodied understanding of mind, one that treats knowledge as a kind of active engagement with the world rather than as a purely cognitive state, points away from mechanistic metaphors and toward organismic ones. (shrink)

Synthetic biology is a new biotechnology that is developing at an impressive pace and attracting a considerable amount of attention from outside the scientific community as well. In this article, two main philosophically and ethically relevant characteristics of this field of research will be laid bare, namely its reliance on mechanistic metaphors to denominate simple forms of life and its appeal to the semantic field of creativity. It is argued that given these characteristics synthetic biology can be understood as a (...) prime example of a kind of human interference with reality that German philosopher Hannah Arendt called “fabrication.” This kind of self-world-relation contrasts to “action,” a relation that introduces, among other things, the idea of an inherent value of the object acted upon. Taking up this latter perspective, one scientific and two ethical challenges to synthetic biology’s take on the realm of life are identified. (shrink)

The magical number three has provided the template for this comparative study of Freudian psycho-analysis and Husserlian phenomenology. "Three" should be considered the number of dialectics; the method in the study to let three distinct thematisations succeed each other should find its legitimation in dialectics. The relationship between psycho-analysis and phenomenology as that between two dialectic theories might well call for a dialectic interpretation. It should be difficult from a straightforward and unambiguous interpretation to give full credit to the rich (...) and equivocal meaning of psycho-analysis and phenomenology. I hope to have shown in the presentation above, that it is possible by accentuating different sides of the two scientific disciplines to reach different conclusions regarding their relationship. For a full account of this relationship these different conclusions should be placed together and viewed in their internal coherence as a dialectical unity. Thus none of the three sections of the text should be considered apart from the others. In the first section of the paper, the first thematisation, I tried to spell out the discrepancies between Freud and Husserl as clearly as possible. The point of departure here was the Freudian notion of the "psychical apparatus," and Husserl's doctrine of "intentional consciousness." The models built around these central notions can be shown to have a paradigmatic meaning for the development of Freud's and Husserl's psychological projects. Conceiving the subject as psychical apparatus, Freud thought it possible to make psychology a natural science. The subject could be treated like a mechanical apparatus, that is a machine admitting the general laws of motion. - In contrast, Husserl thought psychology should depart from natural science in its scientific selfunderstanding, and join the humanities instead. Psychology's departure from natural science, Husserl found legitimized in the subject's essential character of intentional consciousness. According to Husserl, man as a conscious being could not be reduced to a thing in the natural world. On the contrary, the aprioric basis for the world should be found in intentional consciousness, which constitutes the "world" as a meaningful coherence related to the subject. Freud's and Husserl's conceptions of psychology were traced to historical roots in respectively positivism, naturalism and mechanical materialism on the one hand, and rationalism, humanism and idealism on the other. In this first interpretation the relationship between psycho-analysis and phenomenology seemed to be antithetical, the two theoretical projects representing opposite poles with regard to cartesian dualism. Although in some ways caricaturing the theories in this one-sided interpretation, I tried to show, that such interpretation is possible with bases in the texts of Freud and Husserl. The decided one-sidedness of the first thematisation should, however, be balanced by the competing interpretation in the second section of the paper. In the second thematisation, I tried to show, that both psycho-analysis and phenomenology in their concrete psychological projects went beyond their points of departure. Although Freud as a scientist of the 19th century naturally found his theoretical language in the successful natural sciences, from which his scientific career started, he decisively broke with this frame of reference in his descriptions of the pathological problems from his clinical praxis. In contrast to the abstract metapsychology of the psychical apparatus, Freud in his clinical psychology departed from mechanism in his attempts to interpret the meaning of the patient's neurotic symptom. The clinical attitude of Freud might resemble phenomenologists' openness towards the meaning of the phenomena, and the case-histories of Freud often read like clinical analyses stemming from existential- phenomenological psychiatrists. - Correspondingly, although Husserl started from the tradition of German philosophy of consciousness, also he can be seen to go beyond the premises of his wellsprings. Starting with a notion of intentionality as consciousness's active positing meaningful objects, Husserl later was led to consider a deeper level of intentionality, a "functioning intentionality," that would situate the subject in a "world" prior to any thematic perceptual act. With the notion of functional intentionality and its further development in Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of the "body-subject," phenomenology seems to have come close to the Freudian doctrine of the unconscious. From this second interpretation it seemed to follow, that a meeting between psycho-analysis and phenomenology should be possible, by cutting off the mechanistic parts from psychoanalysis and the idealistic parts from phenomenology. The hindrance for such meeting should apparently be found in the divergent theoretical prejudices stemming from the ideological climates in which the theories were hatched. None of these two apparently contradictory interpretations, that of the first and second thematisation, should, however, rule out the other. To the question which interpretation is the right one, we should answer "both... and," or perhaps better "Neither... nor." Freud and Husserl in fact held contradictory views in their explicit scientific self-understanding. On the other hand, much of the controversy was caused by theoretical prejudices not essential to the central enterprise of psycho-analysis and phenomenology. And yet, the theoretical work of Freud and Husserl should be considered in its entirety, not omitting parts that do not fit the interpretative context. Freud's mechanistic theories must be read in connection with his clinical/phenomenological psychology, Husserl's doctrine of transcendental consciousness together with his concrete analyses of the world and the body. Freud sticked to his mechanistic metaphors throughout his life, not just because mechanic materialism was his scientific point of departure, but also because he found the models of the psychical apparatus useful to picture the subject-matter of psycho-analysis, the unconscious as it is discovered by the analytic method. Correspondingly, Husserl found in transcendental idealism a metaphysical horizon apparently suited for his main theoretical project, to un-cover by phenomenological reflexion man in his free and conscious being. In this way Freud's materialism and Husserl's idealism might find their limited justification, not in the absolutistic sense set forth in the first section, but in relation to their weighting different aspects of the subject/object dialectic of man. This point of view I tried to explicate in the third section of this paper. In the subject/object dialectic Freud seems to underline man's existence as object, his being ruled by the mechanic, the irrational, the infantile, the unconscious. In contrast, Husserl underlines man's existence as subject, his free and conscious openness towards the world and the future. This difference I characterized with the notions of Ricoeur as respectively an "archeology" and a "teleology" of the subject. And yet the difference between Freud and Husserl is that of a weighting different sides of the subject/object dialectic, not of an exclusive thematisation of man as either subject or object. Freudian archaeology is supplemented by an implicit teleology, Husserlian teleology by an implicit archeology. On the background of such interpretation the relationship between psycho-analysis and phenomenology should be seen neither as the polarity of the first thematisation, nor as the synthesis of the second. Psycho-analysis and phenomenology both contradict and imply each other in a relationship that should be termed dialectical. With this third interpretation the paper ended. At last I noted that the problems raised by the controversy on the subject/object dialectic of man should not easily be solved. Instead, the question "what is man" should have to be answered continuously in a concrete historical reflextion or dialogue. Yet I think it safe to conclude, that any psychological consideration has to take into consideration, both man's archeological and his teleological features, thus not allowing the one perspective completely to rule out the other. (shrink)

ABSTRACTBecause of their reliance on mechanistic metaphors and analogies referring to machines, the eighteenth-century materialists La Mettrie and Diderot have sometimes been described as ‘mechanistic materialists’. However, if one pays close attention to the ways in which mechanical analogies and metaphors were used in eighteenth-century French materialism, one sees that the recourse to these metaphors and comparisons in no way implies mechanism in the sense of physicalist reductionism. Instead, early instances of these comparisons appear in arguments pointing out that technological (...) artefacts have functional properties which are not reducible to their physical properties. When La Mettrie compares man to a machine in his L'homme machine, he insists at the same time on the fact that, just like a machine, man is a cultural artefact. According to La Mettrie, man's very existence depends on language and culture, and it is precisely this dependence on culture which distinguishes him from other animals. However... (shrink)

This article examines the use of organic and mechanistic metaphors that have underpinned the modeling of national governance in the social sciences and also framed the representation of the social impact of migration. It argues that the global patterns of migration and the contemporary forms of hybrid subjectivity do not fit well with these conceptual frameworks. The limits of this framework are examined through Harald Kleinschmidt's theory of residentialism, and the outlines of an alternative conceptual frame is proposed by drawing (...) on key terms that have been developed in complexity theory. (shrink)

Reviews the book, The disorder of things: Metaphysical foundations of the disunity of science by John Dupré . The book is carefully woven around two central and interrelated theses. First is the denial that "science constitutes, or could ever come to constitute, a single, unified project," and the second is an "assertion of the extreme diversity of the contents of the world." Ultimately, Dupré wishes to contend that the second of his theses "shows the inevitability of the first." Overall, Dupré (...) seeks to refute "one particularly notorious founding metaphor of modern science, the idea that the universe should be considered as a gigantic machine." In order to accomplish such a daunting task, he engages the reader in a lengthy and critical examination of three of the philosophical theses most closely associated with the mechanistic metaphor: Essentialism, Reductionism, and Determinism. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

The usual metaphor for time is a flow. Edmund Husserl, in describing experience of our inner temporality, uses the term often: Fluss. In the final three decades of his life (1900s to 1930s), he gives us a well-articulated theory of time, especially the experience of its ongoingness and of our- selves in the processing of time. He refers to this latter, our immanent temporality, as a "flux" or flow and thus calls up the image of the river moving along (...) with its contents comprised in that flowing, gaining their fluent qualities from it. Yet Husserl's theory is not limited to a mechanistic understanding of flow as pure series, but in fact incorporates both a serial- ized aspect and a decentering, highly complex aspect of inner time-con- sciousness. The theory, then, requires a new metaphor, a re-mapping from serialistic diagrams to more dynamic ones. The challenge lies not only in achieving this re-mapping, but in showing the relation of dynamic diagrams to the serialistic ones that are still vital to the full descriptions of inner time- consciousness. (shrink)

Metaphors involve immense explanatory power and positive impact predominantly in the scientific education and popularization. Still the use of metaphors in science might be a double-edged sword. Introduction of the computer metaphor to many scientific fields in the last century resulted in reductionist approaches, oversimplifications and mechanistic explanations in science as well as in humanities. In this short commentary we developed further the computer metaphor by prof. Noble and the illusions this metaphor led to in genetics, linguistics (...) and consequently DNA linguistics. (shrink)

Is organicism inherently Christian-friendly, and for that matter, is mechanism inherently religion nonfriendly? They have tended to be, but the story is much more complicated. The long history of the intertwined metaphors of nature taken as an organism, versus that of nature as a machine, reveals that both metaphors have flourished in the endeavors of philosophers, scientists, and persons of faith alike. Different kinds of Christians have been receptive to both organicist and mechanistic models, just as various kinds of nonreligious (...) scientists have been receptive to both holistic and machine metaphors. Although, it is true, organicism has been generally more attractive to persons of faith than mechanism, an overview of the rich and varied history of allegiances to these metaphors—religious and nonreligious alike—shows that debate is much more interesting and complex. A brief inspection of conversation surrounding recent scientific discoveries shows that this debate between metaphors is still very much alive today. (shrink)

Ongoing empirical discoveries in molecular biology have generated novel conceptual challenges and perspectives. Philosophers of biology have reacted to these trends when investigating the practice of molecular biology and contributed to scientific debates on methodological and conceptual matters. This article reviews some major philosophical issues in molecular biology. First, philosophical accounts of mechanistic explanation yield a notion of explanation in the context of molecular biology that does not have to rely on laws of nature and comports well with molecular discovery. (...) Second, reductionism continues to be debated and increasingly be rejected by scientists. Philosophers have likewise moved away from reduction toward integration across fields or integrative explanations covering several levels of organization. Third, although the gene concept has undergone substantial transformation and even fragmentation, it still enjoys widespread use by molecular biologists, which has prompted philosophers to understand the empirical reasons for this. At the same time, it has been argued the notion of ‘genetic information’ is largely an empty metaphor, which generates the illusion of explanatory understanding without offering an adequate explanation of molecular and developmental mechanisms. (shrink)

Organic metaphors appear as early as §2 of the Phenomenology and throughout Hegel’s major works. The culmination of the dialectic is the moment where Life understands itself. Hegel even identifies the Notion with the “principle of all life”. Yet despite Hegel’s emphasis on the notion of Life, there is no general agreement about the significance of his notion of organism. Some commentators emphasize Hegel’s organicism only in connection with the notion of organic unities in Hegel’s social philosophy. Still others acknowledge (...) its basic position in Hegel’s metaphysics, but regard it as refuted by the development of mechanistic science. Some even regard Hegel’s organicism as broadly consistent with non-organic science, leaving the status of Hegel’s notion of organism in conceptual limbo. (shrink)

Psychological construction represents an important new approach to psychological phenomena, one that has the promise to help us reconceptualize the mind both as a behavioral and as a biological system. It has so far been developed in the greatest detail for emotion, but it has important implications for how researchers approach other mental phenomena such as reasoning, memory, and language use. Its key contention is that phenomena that are characterized in (folk) psychological vocabulary are not themselves basic features of the (...) mind, but are constructed from more basic psychological operations. The framework of mechanistic explanation, currently under development in philosophy of science, can provide a useful perspective on the psychological construction approach. A central insight of the mechanistic account of explanation is that biological and psychological phenomena result from mechanisms in which component parts and operations do not individually exhibit the phenomena of interest but function together in an orchestrated and sometimes in a complex dynamical manner to generate it. While at times acknowledging the compatibility of the mechanist approach with constructionist approach (Lindquist, Wager, Kober, Bliss-Moreau, & Barrett, 2012), proponents of the constructionist approach have at other times pitched their approach as anti-mechanist. For example, Barrett (2009) claims that the psychological constructionist approach rejects machines as the primary metaphor for understanding the mind, instead favoring a recipe metaphor; constructionism also purportedly rejects the “mechanistic” picture of causation, which it portrays as linear or sequential in nature (see also Barrett, Wilson-Mendenhall, & Barsalou, in press). While some mechanistic accounts do fit this description, we will see that the mechanisms generating phenomena can be complex and dynamic, producing phenomena far less stereotypic and more adaptive than people often associate with machines. Our goal, however, is not just to render constructionism and mechanism compatible. Philosophers of science have been examining the nature of mechanistic explanation in biology with the goal of gaining new insights into the operation of science. We will identify some of the places where the mechanistic account can shed new light on the constructionist project. (shrink)

Because the land ethic is erected on scientific foundations it falls afoul of the Is/Ought Dichotomy devolving from a single paragraph in Hume’s _Treatise_ and elevated to the status of a “law” of ethics in 20 th -century moral philosophy. “Hume’s Law” is based on a misunderstanding of Hume’s intentions and Kant regarded ought-from-is “problematic hypothetical imperatives of skill” to be analytic—which should give deployers of “Hume’s Guillotine” pause. While the land ethic is grounded in the biotic-community paradigm in ecology, (...) one also finds Leopold invoking the ecosystem paradigm (though not by name), the superorganism paradigm, and mechanistic metaphors. This mix of paradigms and metaphors does not bespeak confusion; rather, Leopold anticipates hierarchy theory expressly developed in late-20th-century ecology. The land ethic can be adapted to the currently prevailing neo-Gleasonian “flux-of-nature” paradigm in ecology, requiring a reformulation of its summary moral maxim in terms of directionless succession and disturbance regimes. (shrink)

The phenomenon of ‘materialism’ in the late Ottoman Empire has long been explained as the vehicle of fully-fledged modernization (i.e., Westernization and secularization) in allegedly essential opposition to tradition and religion. Amid growing intellectual interest in aspects of the individual such as mind, soul, brain, and emotions in the late Ottoman period, this paper shifts the explanatory focus from religious vs. nationalist ideologies to the discourse of ‘productivity’. It argues that before the discourse of national homogenization came to dominate intellectual (...) writings in the late Ottoman Empire, a new language about the regulation of body and emotion was formulated with the aim of increasing labour productivity and rational conduct. The debate between materialism and spiritualism was embedded in this new language. The first section of the paper reviews relevant secondary literature to question what we know about the phenomenon of Ottoman materialism. The second moves on to the over-abundance of machine metaphors in materialist writings with particular focus on Abdullah Cevdet’s books on brain physiology, and in light of the spread of mechanistic views of human nature in the late nineteenth century. The final section presents Baha Tevfik’s problematization of sensibility (hassasiyet) as an obstacle to greater social harmony based on rational conduct as a case study of the regulation of emotion in the early 1910s, when interest in scientific and philosophical literature on human nature and the soul reached its zenith. This paper shows the ways in which Ottoman materialism became an important tool to imagine the individual as a unit of production, whose soul was rendered idle and whose emotions were subjected to regulation. (shrink)

The natural philosophy of Diderot is built from the experience of the fundamental Description des Arts in the Encyclopedia, or from the «great and beautiful collection of machines» which the work provides a very rich representation. Models and metaphors that Diderot constructs to describe the world of organic beings, from the Pensées sur l'Interpretation de la nature , are inspired by the world of the mechanical arts and crafts. The manouvriers d’expériences, the experimental philosophers, are the great inventors and discoverers (...) of the secrets of nature and living being: to them Diderot inspire itself and his work as a philosopher of nature and arts. From the loom to weave socks, to the fire pump, the description of the machine proceeds through a complex network of metaphors that combine the operation of the instrument to that of organic life. The machine energises itself and the organism, in turn, is mechanized in a maze of functional architectures, according to new models and artistic metaphors of living beings, other than cartesian one. Diderot does not cease to be mechanistic still in his last vitalistic works, from Le Rêve de D’Alembert, to the Éléments de Physiologie. The new world of handicraft and artisans remains the key reference point in the philosophical work of the encyclopaedist-naturalist: weaving loom socks and sensible harpsichord are the two tools / metaphors that describe the man and his rational and specific nature. (shrink)

The article tackles the relationship between genius and analogy in Descartes’s early writings and the programmatic writings of the Encyclopédie. For Descartes, ingenious analogies between phenomena that are not obviously related belong more properly to poetic truth discourse, whereas philosophy must be content with the more easily observable and methodical mechanistic comparisons. In the encyclopedic ordering of Diderot and d’Alembert, on the other hand, ingenious analogies are not specific to any particular field of knowledge, since genius consists precisely in connecting (...) even the most remote branches of the whole tree of knowledge. I argue that the theoretical core of both approaches can be traced back to Aristotle’s theory of metaphor insofar as it relies on the analogy of genera rather than species. (shrink)

Translational medicine emerged in the early 2000s. Its main focus (T1) is “bench to bedside and back” research. This chapter argues that the focus on evidence-based medicine in the 1990s obscured the need for different methods in the context of discovery. Translational medicine recommends trial-and-error methods, along with mechanistic (pathophysiological) reasoning, to develop interventions which can then be tested in evidence-based medicine. Translational medicine also recommends changes in the social structure of research. Although Martin Wehling argues that we need more (...) methodological rigor in translational medicine, this chapter is skeptical about whether such rigor is possible. With the metaphor of translation, translational medicine also offers hope that early failures in genetic technology and stem cell research can be surmounted. A subsidiary focus of translational medicine is T2, consisting of dissemination of research from “bedside to community.” T2 continues the work of medical consensus conferences. (shrink)

Scientists have used models for hundreds of years as a means of describing phenomena and as a basis for further analogy. In _Scientific Models in Philosophy of Science, _Daniela Bailer-Jones assembles an original and comprehensive philosophical analysis of how models have been used and interpreted in both historical and contemporary contexts. Bailer-Jones delineates the many forms models can take (ranging from equations to animals; from physical objects to theoretical constructs), and how they are put to use. She examines early mechanical (...) models employed by nineteenth-century physicists such as Kelvin and Maxwell, describes their roots in the mathematical principles of Newton and others, and compares them to contemporary mechanistic approaches. Bailer-Jones then views the use of analogy in the late nineteenth century as a means of understanding models and to link different branches of science. She reveals how analogies can also be models themselves, or can help to create them. The first half of the twentieth century saw little mention of models in the literature of logical empiricism. Focusing primarily on theory, logical empiricists believed that models were of temporary importance, flawed, and awaiting correction. The later contesting of logical empiricism, particularly the hypothetico-deductive account of theories, by philosophers such as Mary Hesse, sparked a renewed interest in the importance of models during the 1950s that continues to this day. Bailer-Jones analyzes subsequent propositions of: models as metaphors; Kuhn's concept of a paradigm; the Semantic View of theories; and the case study approaches of Cartwright and Morrison, among others. She then engages current debates on topics such as phenomena versus data, the distinctions between models and theories, the concepts of representation and realism, and the discerning of falsities in models. (shrink)

This is the second of two articles in which I reflect on “generalized Darwinism” as currently discussed in evolutionary economics. In the companion article (Callebaut, Biol Theory 6. doi:10.1007/s13752-013-0086-2, 2011, this issue) I approached evolutionary economics from the naturalistic perspectives of evolutionary epistemology and the philosophy of biology, contrasted evolutionary economists’ cautious generalizations of Darwinism with “imperialistic” proposals to unify the behavioral sciences, and discussed the continued resistance to biological ideas in the social sciences. Here I assess Generalized Darwinism as (...) propounded by Geoffrey Hodgson, Thorbjørn Knudsen, and others, concentrating on the roles of theory and model building in science (and the roles of analogy and metaphor therein), generative replication, and the relation between selection and self-organization. I then point to advances in current biology that promise to be more fruitful as sources of inspiration for evolutionary economics than the project to generalize Darwinism in its current, “hardened Modern Synthesis” form; and I draw some conclusions. (shrink)

Available from UMI in association with The British Library. Requires signed TDF. ;Metaphor and analogy are the scaffolding of science. Kepler's theory of the retinal picture could not have been built without the analogy between an eye and a camera obscura, and, two hundred and fifty years later, Charles Darwin devoted most of the first chapter of The origin of Species to discussion of pigeon fanciers. Unlike Darwin, Kepler was bewitched by his own imagination and was led to wonder (...) "how this image or picture is joined to the visual faculty, which is situated in the retina and in the nerve, and whether it is placed within the hollows of the brain, before the soul or tribunal of the visual faculty, or whether the visual faculty, like a magistrate sent by the soul from the administrative chamber of the brain, descends into the optic nerve or retina to meet this image, as though to a lower court" . ;The theory of the retinal image answered the crucial question of medieval optics: the scaffolding had served its purpose and should have been dismantled. Instead, Kepler mistook it for a part of the building: what he construed as a scientific problem was nothing more than the extension of a metaphor. As a result, and in spite of his remarkable achievement, he left the theory of vision in a state of confusion. ;I intend to show that Descartes revolutionized visual theory by manipulating the pair of analogies which had dominated visual theory since its inception and by advancing a theory of depiction which has since become orthodox. Advocates of the first analogy suggest that seeing the world is rather like seeing pictures of it; Kepler's analogy between the eye and a camera obscura, which was anticipated by Leonardo de Vinci, was a variation on this theme. Advocates of the second analogy compare vision to the use of a walking-stick: the air transmits an impression of a visible object to the eye rather as a walking-stick enables us to find our way around in the dark by transmitting pressures to the hand. As I shall show, Descartes' rejection of the pictorial analogy in favour of the walking-stick analogy and his theory of depiction were designed to salvage Kepler's theory of the retinal picture, a pearl of great price, from its murky setting. ;Descartes aimed to show that whilst Kepler's theory of the retinal picture correctly described the optics of the eye, the pictorial analogy was misleading and stood in the way of a mechanistic theory of perception. ;Current visual theory is Cartesian in some respects and un-Cartesian in others. The walking-stick analogy is no longer used, but the explanatory pattern that it served to illustrate is adhered to closely where the perception of brightness and colour are concerned, and the causal theory of depiction commands widespread support. At the same time, the pictorial analogy has not lost its appeal. (shrink)

On a few occasions F.A. Hayek made reference to the famous Gödel theorems in mathematical logic in the context of expounding his cognitive and social theory. The exact meaning of the supposed relationship between Gödel's theorems and the essential proposition of Hayek's theory of mind remains subject to interpretation, however. The author of this article argues that the relationship between Hayek's thesis that the human brain can never fully explain itself and the essential insight provided by Gödel's theorems in mathematical (...) logic has the character of an analogy, or a metaphor. Furthermore the anti-mechanistic interpretation of Hayek's theory of mind is revealed as highly questionable. Implications for the Socialist Calculation Debate are highlighted. It is in particular concluded that Hayek's arguments for methodological dualism, when compared with those of Ludwig von Mises, actually amount to a strengthening of the case for methodological dualism. -/- Keywords:. (shrink)

There are many different kinds of model and scientists do all kind of things with them. This diversity of model type and model use is a good thing for science. Indeed, it is crucial especially for the biological and cognitive sciences, which have to solve many different problems at many different scales, ranging from the most concrete of the structural details of a DNA molecule to the most abstract and generic principles of self-organization in networks. Getting a grip (or more (...) likely many separate grips) on this range of topics calls for a teeming forest of techniques, including many different modeling techniques. Barbara Webb’s target article strikes us as a proposal for clear-cutting the forest. We think clear-cutting here would be as good for science as it is for non-metaphorical forests. Our argument for this is primarily a recitation of a few of the ways that diversity has been useful. Recently, looking at the actual practice of artificial life modelers, one of us distinguished four uses of simulation models classified in terms of the position the models take up between theory and data (see Figure 1). The classification is not exhaustive, and the barriers between kinds are not absolute. Rather, the purpose of the taxonomy is to open up the view for an epistemic ecology of modeling practices. First, and closest to the empirical domain, there are mechanistic models, in which there is an almost one-to-one correspondence between variables in the model and observables in the target system and its environment. Webb’s.. (shrink)

Since the seventeenth century, our understanding of the natural world has been one of phenomena that behave in accordance with natural laws. While other elements of the early modern scientific worldview may be rejected or at least held in question—the metaphor of the world as a great machine, the narrowly mechanist assumption that all physical interactions must be contact interactions, the idea that matter might actually be obeying rules laid down by its Divine Author – the notion of (...) natural law has continued to play a pivotal role in actual scientific practice, in our philosophical interpretations of science, and in their its metaphysical implications. (shrink)

Theories concerning the structure, or format, of mental representation should (1) be formulated in mechanistic, rather than metaphorical terms; (2) do justice to several philosophical intuitions about mental representation; and (3) explain the human capacity to predict the consequences of worldly alterations (i.e., to think before we act). The hypothesis that thinking involves the application of syntax-sensitive inference rules to syntactically structured mental representations has been said to satisfy all three conditions. An alternative hypothesis is that thinking requires the construction (...) and manipulation of the cognitive equivalent of scale models. A reading of this hypothesis is provided that satisfies condition (1) and which, even though it may not fully satisfy condition (2), turns out (in light of the frame problem) to be the only known way to satisfy condition (3). (shrink)

In a (2016) paper in this journal, I defuse allegations that theoretical ecological research is problematic because it relies on teleological metaphysical assumptions. Mark Sagoff offers a formal reply. In it, he concedes that I succeeded in establishing that ecologists abandoned robust teleological views long ago and that they use teleological characterizations as metaphors that aid in developing mechanistic explanations of ecological phenomena. Yet, he contends that I did not give enduring criticisms of theoretical ecology a fair shake in my (...) paper. He says this is because enduring criticisms center on concerns about the nature of ecological networks and forces, the instrumentality of ecological laws and theoretical models, and the relation between theoretical and empirical methods in ecology that that paper does not broach. Below I set apart the distinct criticisms Sagoff presents in his commentary and respond to each in turn. (shrink)

The analysis of narrative processes and metaphorical language are the topics generally focused on by business ethics researchers interested in the work of Paul Ricœur. Yet his work on political questions also applies to the ethical issues associated with organizations. Ricœur’s ethical enterprise can be expressed as a triad composed of teleological, deontological, and sapiential levels, associating ostensibly opposing positions of Aristotelian and Kantian origin. In this study, I examine politics, economics, and ethics in their dialectic relation as established by (...) Ricœur. Against a vertical, mechanistic, and axiologically neutral vision of management, he opposes the two conceptual pairs of conviction/imagination and ideology/utopia as well as a superior definition of justice associating reciprocal indebtedness and mutual disinterestedness. Through this analysis, it becomes clear that the vertical, hierarchical nature of politics tends to undermine the horizontal interactions necessary to procure just institutions in society. And any business ethic that does not acknowledge political tensions will be mute. What is needed instead is practical wisdom that is developed through interaction, and often through conflict, involving all the different players. (shrink)

This paper explores the ontological and epistemological implications of consciousness through an interdisciplinary synthesis of analytic idealism, quantum panprotopsychism, and the clinical model of Dissociative Identity Disorder. Drawing on Bernardo Kastrup’s analytic idealism, it argues that reality is fundamentally mental, constituted by a universal field of consciousness whose apparent multiplicity emerges from self-differentiation rather than physical fragmentation. Quantum ontology, particularly the principles of wave–particle duality and entanglement, serves as a heuristic metaphor for this dynamic interplay between unity and plurality (...) within consciousness. The study examines the parallels between quantum models of cognition and psychodynamic structures of the self, proposing that the coexistence of “wave-state” (holistic) and “particle-state” (localized) consciousness reflects the dual nature of human awareness. Clinically, Dissociative Identity Disorder provides an empirically grounded analogy for understanding how one conscious system can host multiple, semi-autonomous centers of experience while maintaining overarching functional unity. Neuroimaging and trauma-theory data are discussed as evidence of structural dissociation, which, when reinterpreted philosophically, mirrors the idealist view of differentiated consciousness within a unified ontological field. However, the paper emphasizes that such analogies remain metaphorical rather than mechanistic, preserving the scientific and ethical integrity of psychiatric phenomena. Ultimately, this synthesis proposes a conceptual bridge between metaphysics and clinical science, situating consciousness as both a neurobiological and cosmological principle. While speculative, the framework provides a philosophically coherent and phenomenologically informed model for re-examining the nature of mind, matter, and identity in a post-materialist paradigm. (shrink)

Biosemiotics has often been charged with the use of metaphorical language, redundancy with respect to existing biology, weak falsifiability, and lack of specific methods (see, e.g., Barbieri (Biological Theory, 9(2), 239–249, 2014); Deacon (Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, 19(3), 293–311, 2015); Sherman (Chinese Semiotic Studies, 20(2), 231–253, 2024); Vehkavaara (Sign Systems Studies, 30(1), 293–313, 2002). This article examines the epistemological and methodological status of biosemiotics in the light of current philosophy of science and methodological pluralism in life sciences. Rather than (...) asking whether biosemiotics has a single unifying hypothesis or methodology, we want to see whether it can function as a progressive research programme in a broadly Lakatosian sense, while remaining compatible with methodological diversity (Lakatos, 1970; Giere, 2006; Kellert et al, 2006; Chang, 2012; Ruphy, 2016). Our analysis proceeds in four steps. First, we outline evaluation standards appropriate for fields organised around midlevel frameworks that coordinate models, instruments, and standards of evidence rather than for universal ‘methods’. In doing so, we stress model construction, contrasts, and the ability to generate new testable hypotheses, that is, heuristic fertility. Second, we address worries about metaphoricity and conceptual incoherence by tracing how key semiotic concepts (semiosis, code, umwelt, interpretation) can be unified and linked to operational distinctions. Third, we respond to the objections regarding its redundancy and epistemic status by treating biosemiotics as a complementary interpretive layer that functions on top of mechanistic explanations and is useful especially in areas where context-sensitivity, normativity, and agency are central. Fourth, we survey zoosemiotic, ecosemiotic, and biosemiotic studies to identify four recurrent empirical patterns (namely, context-sensitive responses, conventional sign use, norm-guided correction, and remapping under controlled change) related to situations where semiotic and non-semiotic models produce different predictions based on the same data. We conclude that under modest but non-trivial programme-level standards, biosemiotics can be developed as a testable and integrative approach within life sciences and identify domains and methodological practices where its claims remain underspecified and invite further work. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:More About Hume's Debt to Spinoza Wim Klever In a recent contribution to the question of Hume's relationship to SpinozaIadvocatedamoreorlessSpinozisticinterpretationofthefirst bookofA Treatise ofHumanNature.1 Ofthe Understanding, sowasmy claim, is not only very close to De natura et origine mentis (Ethica, second part) as far as its main affirmations are concerned; the convergence ofexternal and internal evidence makes it also probable that there is a remarkable influence from the one's work (...) on the other and, accordingly, that Hume's defamation of Spinoza's system might well have been disingenuous. This last point was previously also suggested by Richard Popkin in an article in which he compared Hume's philosophy ofreligion with Spinoza's.2 What motivated me to continue my research in this field? To say itinone word: the unintendeddiscoveryofmanystrikingresemblances betweenHume's secondbook, OfthePassions,andSpinoza'sthirdpart, De origine et natura affectuum. I happened to become a member of a group ofinterested people who concentrate on reading Hume, and, on the other hand, I had acquired some expertise as a Spinoza scholar for quite a number of years, so that I could not avoid seeing the commonaUties between the two philosophers. It seems to be fully impossible to explain the resemblances—which I, ofcourse, will show below—by referring to the Spinoza-article in Bayle's Dictionaire historique et critique (a source once mentioned by Hume in a letter to a London friend), since Bayle does not spend a word to the human passions. It is further a hard fact that there do not exist other written sourcesfrom which Humemighthave drawnhisSpinozisticinspiration in his French period apart from the Ethics; all available literature of the time turned around the questions theism versus atheism and free will versus determinism, without entering into the details ofhuman emotions.3 Only one conclusion was possible for me: Hume musthave been familiar with Spinoza's own text. Either the Chevaher Ramsay, whose intimate he was for some time,4 or anotherintermediaryfigure5 must have raised his interest. The best entrance into the material is constituted by Hume's closing remark in his A Dissertation on the Passions (1757), in which he elucidates what he in fact has been doing in hie analysis of the passions: Volume XDI Number 1 55 WIM KLEVER I pretend not to have here exhausted this subject. It is sufficient formy purpose, ifI have made it appear, that, in the production and conduct of the passions, there is a certain regular mechanism, which is susceptible of as accurate a disquisition, as the laws ofmotion, optics, hydrostatics, or any part ofnatural philosophy.6 In spite ofthe words "a certain," this fragment maynot be interpreted as a metaphorical assessment. The origin and the processes ofhuman passions are purely mechanical. If this is not what Hume intends to declare, he never could have added the phrase that passions are susceptible of exactly the same kind of accurate descriptions as other natural phenomena. This theory of the mechanism of the passions is certainly not Cartesian. Although Descartes, as a physical scientist, was a great promoter of the explanation of things by means of mechanical causality, he in fact did not extend this method to the life ofthe passions. In his dualistic philosophy he ascribes to the human mind (with its free will) the capability to interfere with the passions and even to dominate them.7 In this field it is Spinoza who paves the way for Hume by sharply criticizing Descartes' non-mechanistic explanation ofthe passions. His far-fetched solution ofthe mind-body interactivity by means of the pineal gland and the animal spirits pushing against it, is called "a hypothesis more occult than any occult quality." 8 Spinoza acknowledged that Descartes had good intentions in trying to explain the human affections by their direct causes, but he was inconsistent insofar as he at the same time attempted to demonstrate man's absolute dominion over them. He, Spinoza, on the contrary, "will consider human actions and appetites just as ifit were a question ofUnes, planes and bodies." 9 The analysis of passions is a piece of natural science comparable with geometry, optics10 and hydrostatics, to mention some other fields of Spinoza's research. Hume's statement... (shrink)

Freud uses paradoxical and conflictual rhetoric to create an unstable and conflictual picture of the mind. Thus he diverges from both dominant traditions of thought in the West: the Judeo-Christian way of filling all gaps in meaning by putting a single omnipotent divinity in charge of them, and the Enlightenment quest for a final, causal language to describe reality. By both suggesting and displacing a plurality of perspectives on the unconscious, Freud's text mirrors what it claims happens in our minds, (...) in which unconscious impulses undermine the pretense of total rational self-control. Though Freud suggests that a mechanistic description of the mind may bring us nearer to the reality of the unconscious, he also explains that this reality will remain dark. He not only develops an ostensibly mechanistic vocabulary for unconscious mental processes, but also clarifies that his terminology is most fictional precisely when it seems most scientific. Hence, Freud's science of the unconscious cannot be assimilated to an empiricist position; its philosophical underpinnings are both Kantian and Nietzschean, with metaphors and analogies playing a crucial role. Two dramatic images, in which the mind appears as a domain of warring gods and a realm of political conflict, demonstrate that Freud did not regard the unconscious as some kind of true inner self. He depicts the mind in general and the unconscious in particular as a pagan, conflictual universe over which no god or goddess can gain exclusive control and where no rigid dictatorship is possible. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ideas in the Brain: The Localization of Memory Traces in the Eighteenth CenturyTimo KaitaroPlato suggests in the Theaetetus that we imagine a piece of wax in our soul, a gift from the goddess of Memory. We are able to remember things when our perceptions or thoughts imprint a trace upon this piece of wax, in the same manner as a seal is stamped on wax. Plato uses this (...) class='Hi'>metaphor to explain the errors which arise when we mistake something for something else: we connect the perception of an object with the trace belonging to another. The metaphor can also be used in explaining differences in people’s mnestic capacities: rapid learning and forgetting correspond to soft wax, impure wax results in muddled traces, etc.1 If we locate the traces in the brain instead of in the soul, Plato’s metaphor gains consistency and turns into a testable hypothesis. This move was already made by Quintilian.2So, the metaphor of memory as traces in the brain is evidently not a modern invention. This is easy to understand. To frame the hypothesis one needs only to reflect on how we use objects outside our brains for mnemonic purposes. We conserve ideas by tracing or printing letters and words on paper. We are also able to conserve images in drawings, paintings and prints. What could be more natural than to think of memory as the formation of traces in the brain? The development of even better information storage techniques in the form of pictures, symbols, and signs provides the metaphor extra plausibility. Plato’s seal allows us to imagine the imprint of a person’s likeness, but modern techniques of information storage and retrieval make it even easier to imagine memory in general as the formation of material traces.Explaining memory in terms of material traces could, of course, be taken [End Page 301] to mean that the formation of material traces in the brain is merely a necessary condition of memory. But one could also take a more reductionistic stance which identifies memory with the formation of material traces. Furthermore, one could identify specific mental items (sensations, ideas, memories) with specific physiological events or anatomical entities in the brain. This seems especially plausible if we imagine that the traces in the brain are as discrete and separate as ideas or memories are in our minds. Since the traces we form or print on paper consist of discrete letters and words, the thought that the traces in the brain are equally discrete and separate comes easily. Plato, in fact, made separateness a condition for the memory to work properly: it is not easy to read signs printed on one another.3 Of course, no traces are actually visible in the brain. But they are easy to imagine, as it is to imagine explanations of psychological phenomena, such as association, based on these traces.At the end of the seventeenth century, explanations of mental phenomena referring to material traces in the brain were used by writers, from Platonists to materialists, who supported widely different theories about the nature of the human mind.4 In fact, as I will show later in this paper, the question of the possible identity of mental entities, like ideas or sensations, with material entities or traces in the brain is relatively independent of the question of the existence of an immaterial soul. Or rather, if there is a systematic connection between the answers proposed to these two questions in the eighteenth century, it is not the connection one would expect. Nowadays we often tend to think of a prototypical materialist as someone who makes radical reductionistic claims about the identity of mental phenomena with brain states. We also tend to think of the eighteenth-century French materialists as “mechanistic.”5 In view of this reputation, it may come as a surprise to find that some eighteenth-century materialists, notably Denis Diderot, were in fact consistent anti-reductionists and opposed to mechanical or mechanistic explanations of the mental.6 In fact, the epithet “mechanistic” is misleading even when applied to the philosopher who is traditionally presented as the paradigmatic example of a “mechanistic materialist,” Julien Offray... (shrink)