THE MIND PROJECT

Intersections of Philosophy, Human Science, & Humanities in the Journal Mind, 1876-1920

An Interdisciplinary Seminar Series & Symposium

@ Virginia Tech

Introduction:

There are many ways to partition the intellectual terrain shared by the humanities and the sciences. Nonetheless, there is at least a common understanding today that the humanistic and scientific domains are distinct in identifiable ways. Perhaps the most famous articulation of this distinction was provided by C.P. Snow in his 1959 work, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. Therein, Snow describes and decries the division that has emerged between the two domains, focusing especially on his own experiences as a physicist and novelist. This division however, as Snow observes, is an historical artifact and one characteristic especially of recent Western civilization. We generalize and codify Snowís dichotomy at our own risk, especially in dealing with the past. Snow himself recognized a third emerging domain of the human sciences as straddling the cultural divide, but it is imperative also to note that former times need not have witnessed any such divide.

One area that brings this observation into clear relief is the study of the human mind. We are accustomed today to view this endeavor as primarily the exclusive domain of scientific psychology, but only a century ago this was not at all the case. Around 1900, modern psychology was just emerging as a professional discipline, and the context in which this took place displays few of the divisions that we now take for granted between the humanistic and scientific cultures. It is instructive to look back to this period to ascertain how a different cultural context treated a subject that remains central to the common endeavors of now often diverse pathsóthose of the humanities, the human sciences, and psychological studies, the last of which have become increasingly scientific in recent decades. Whether we choose to treat the mind as a rational, creative, social, or moral agent or as an emotive, reactive, communicative or evaluative structure, it retains a fundamental importance across many disciplines. It also forms powerful bridges to other areas of inquiryóconsider the role of the mind as a model in the computational sciences and as an object for instrumental enhancement in the engineering of novel sensory devices, to take only two examples.

This series of seminars and the associated focused symposium will investigate the subject of mind in intellectual circles at the turn of the twentieth century. Between roughly1875 and 1925, issues about the nature and function of the human mind were central to the emergence of many humanistic, scientific, and technological fields as formal professional disciplines. As Snow observed, two results of activity in this period were the increasing separation of the humanities from the sciences and the appearance of a new, and sometimes problematic, middle ground of social science. However, the story to be told is far richer than might be indicated by these simple conclusions, as this series will endeavor to demonstrate.