Recent explorations into Sigmund Freud's intellectual development by Frank Sulloway and Lucille Ritvo have directed attention to the significance of evolutionary theory for psychoanalysis. In this paper I shall pursue the exploration by showing how Darwin was received by members of the so-called Helmholtz circle and certain of Freud's teachers in the University of Vienna medical school. I will make the point that the Leibniz–Kant background of these several scientists was important for this reception. I will argue that the Leibniz–Kant (...) tradition came forward to Freud by two roads, Helmholtz's unconscious inference as foundation for a physiology of the senses, and Arthur Schopenhauer's not unrelated uses of the principle of sufficient reason to explain the possibility of lawlikeness in a universe of lawless energies. Finally, I will suggest ways in which Freud received and used the tradition. (shrink)

Patterns in Twentieth-Century European Thought contains interpretive essays in the history of the century's Marxism, psychoanalysis, quantum physics, logic, language theory, philosophy, art, literature, and theology. A concluding essay argues that the philosophy and social theory - not to mention the physics and theology - constitute a twentieth-century Counter-Enlightenment that has replaced the Cartesian- and Newtonian-based Enlightenment of the eighteenth century.