Empiricism is a claim about the contents of the mind: its classic slogan is nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu, ‘there is nothing in the mind (intellect, understanding) which is not first in the senses’. As such, it is not a claim about the fundamental nature of the world as material. I focus here on in an instance of what one might term the materialist appropriation of empiricism. One major component in the transition from a purely epistemological (...) claim about the mind and its contents, to an ontological claim about the nature of the world, is the new focus on brain-mind relations in the eighteenth century. Here I examine a Lockean trajectory as exemplified in Joseph Priestley’s 1777 Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit. But Locke explicitly ruled out that his inquiry into the logic of ideas amounted to a ‘physical consideration of the mind’. What does it mean, then, for Priestley to present himself as continuing a Lockean tradition, while presenting mental processes as tightly identified with ‘an organical structure such as that of the brain’ (although he was not making a strict identity claim as we might understand it, post-Smart and Armstrong)? One issue here is that of Priestley's source of ‘empirical data’ regarding the correlation and indeed identification of mental and cerebral processes. David Hartley’s theory in his 1749 Observations on Man was, as is well known, republished in abridged form by Priestley, but he discards Hartley's 'vibratory neurophysiology' while retaining the associationist framework, although not because he disagreed with the former. Yet Hartley was at the very least, strongly agnostic about metaphysical issues (and it is difficult to study these authors while bracketing off religious considerations). One could see Locke and Hartley as articulating programs for the study of the mind which were more or less naturalistic (more strongly so in Hartley’s case) while avoiding ‘materialism’ per se; in contrast, Priestley bit the (materialist) bullet. In this paper I examine Priestley’s appropriation and reconstruction of this ‘micro-tradition’, while emphasizing its problems. (shrink)

In 1765, Joseph Priestley created what may be the world's first modern timeline, A Chart of Biography. This paper offers the first study of the philosophy underlying Priestley's timeline. It argues that Priestley was pushed towards representing times as lines by his views on abstract ideas and time, and there is no reason to believe that Newtonian absolutism grounds his uniform depiction of time. Further, the Chart confirms, and even advances, Priestley's views on human progress. Finally, this study shows that (...) Priestley's conception of time as a line comprises a landmark contribution to the history of space-time parallelism. (shrink)

Describing the will and the extent of its causal power over human actions, Joseph Priestley famously compared the mind to a stone, as both are subject to deterministic laws: “Though an inclination...

En la segunda mitad del siglo XVIII tuvo lugar un debate entre Thomas Reid y Joseph Priestley acerca de la naturaleza de la mente y su interacción con el cuerpo. En el marco de la defensa de la religión cristiana y en nombre de principios metodológicos experimentalistas y newtonianos, los autores defienden propuestas radicalmente diferentes acerca de la relación entre la mente y la materia. Sus divergencias se vinculan con la interpretación del método newtoniano y su concepción de la materia, (...) lo que delineará dos actitudes: una dualista, de carácter más conservador por parte de Reid y una materialista, heterodoxa e innovadora por parte de Priestley. (shrink)