A brilliant and comprehensive history of the creation of the modern
Western mind.
Soul Machine takes us back to the origins of modernity, a time when a
crisis in religious authority and the scientific revolution led to
searching questions about the nature of human inner life. This is the
story of how a new concept - the mind - emerged as a potential solution,
one that was part soul and part machine but fully neither.
In this groundbreaking work, award-winning historian George Makari shows
how writers, philosophers, physicians, and anatomists worked to
construct notions of the mind as not an ethereal thing but a natural
one. From the ascent of Oliver Cromwell to the fall of Napoleon, seminal
thinkers like Hobbes, Locke, Diderot, and Kant worked alongside
often-forgotten brain specialists, physiologists, and alienists in the
hopes of mapping the inner world. Conducted in a cauldron of political
turmoil, these frequently shocking, always embattled efforts would give
rise to psychiatry, mind sciences such as phrenology, and radically new
visions of the self. Further, they would be crucial to the establishment
of secular ethics and political liberalism.
Boldly original, wide ranging, and brilliantly synthetic, Soul Machine
gives us a masterful, new account of the making of the modern Western
mind.
