Making Spirit Matter: Neurology, Psychology, and Selfhood in Modern France

The connection between mind and brain has been one of the most persistent problems in modern Western thought; even recent advances in neuroscience haven't been able to solve it satisfactorily. Historian Larry Sommer McGrath's Making Spirit Matter studies how a particularly productive and influential group of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French thinkers attempted to answer this puzzle by showing the mutual dependence of spirit and matter. The scientific revolution taking place during this moment in history across disciplines, from biology to psychology and neurology, located our spiritual powers in the brain and offered a radical reformulation of the meaning of society, spirit, and the self. Tracing connections among thinkers such as Henri Bergson, Alfred Fouillee, Jean-Marie Guyau, and others, McGrath plots alternative intellectual movements that revived themes of agency, time, and experience by applying the very sciences that seemed to undermine metaphysics and theology. In so doing, Making Spirit Matter lays out the long legacy of this moment in the history of ideas and how it might renew our understanding of the relationship between mind and brain today. See more