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Harmony, structure, and force in the Essai analytique sur les facultés de l'âcme of Charles Bonnet
Author(s) -
Grober Max
Publication year - 1995
Publication title -
journal of the history of the behavioral sciences
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.216
H-Index - 26
eISSN - 1520-6696
pISSN - 0022-5061
DOI - 10.1002/1520-6696(199501)31:1<35::aid-jhbs2300310103>3.0.co;2-7
Subject(s) - harmony (color) , soul , enlightenment , materialism , embodied cognition , philosophy , epistemology , humanities , sociology , environmental ethics , art , visual arts
The psychological works of Charles Bonnet of Geneva (1720–1793) have customarily been read as part of the mentalistic traditions of associationism or Leibnizianism. They are better understood as part of a campaign—directed against the radical Enlightenment —to reclaim the human body for religion by the paradoxical strategy of incorporating a materialist conception of the human mind into the framework of divine providence. Bonnet's embodied psychology treats the soul as an intrinsically indeterminate force, and attributes the capacity of the mind to organize experience to highly specialized fibers, providentially constructed to correspond to the created world.