Soul Machine - by George Makari (Paperback)
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<p/><br></br><p><b> About the Book </b></p></br></br>A brilliant and comprehensive history of the creation of the modern Western mind.<p/><br></br><p><b> Book Synopsis </b></p></br></br><p> <em>Soul Machine</em> 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.</p><p>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, <em>Soul Machine</em> gives us a masterful, new account of the making of the modern Western mind.</p><p/><br></br><p><b> Review Quotes </b></p></br></br><br>An enlightening and gracefully written account of a vital aspect of our history that few of us are aware of--the replacement of the soul by the mind, and the struggle to understand its foundations in the brain.--Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and author of How the Mind Works and The Stuff of Thought<br><br>In this sweeping, authoritative, and lively account, George Makari chronicles the emergence of the modern mind as an appealing yet unstable object of scientific inquiry, and shows why the long-standing goal of establishing boundaries between it and the brain and even the soul has proven so elusive. Illuminating and highly engaging.--Elizabeth Lunbeck, author of The Americanization of Narcissism<br><br>An erudite exploration of the high-stakes struggle to make space in the modern world for that part of our being we call our minds.--Anne Harrington, Franklin L. Ford Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University and author of The Cure Within<br><br>George Makari has written an all-encompassing and invigorated account of how we have come to think about the acts of thinking and feeling. This is a book brimming with knowledge and lucid observations, one that helps us to understand the evolution of our contemporary sensibility.--Daphne Merkin, author of The Fame Lunches<br>
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