Larry S. McGrath
HISTORY. USER RESEARCH. ANTHROPOLOGY.
Making Spirit Matter is my book with University of Chicago Press.
I trace the brain sciences' history, focusing on the vexed relations between mind and body in French society over the past 200 years.
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Why France? The country's not only home to basic discoveries about the nervous system. France is also where the relations of spirit (esprit) and matter (matière) have remained a persistent philosophical problem; even recent advances in neuroscience haven’t been able to explain it satisfactorily.
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At the center of the book is an influential group of nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinkers who tackled the puzzle by showing the points of contact between spirit and matter. Drawing connections among Henri Bergson, Alfred Fouillée, Jean-Marie Guyau, and others, I tell the story of a wide-reaching movement in France, which invented concepts of creativity, time, and experience by drawing on the very sciences that seemed to undermine metaphysics and religion.
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The book 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.
