Charles Wolfe: Body, Soul and Brain in Diderot's Materialism

Lecture by Charles Wolfe (Gent), organized by the Department of the History of Philosophy

Materialism is the view that everything that is real, is material or is the product of material processes. This tends to take either of two forms: a more ‘cosmological’ claim about the ultimate nature of the world, and a more specific claim about how what is mental is really in fact cerebral – how mental processes are brain processes. In the twentieth century, the predominant science in this context was physics: materialism became synonymous with ‘physicalism’; the entities that were considered to be real were those described in the physics of the time. Here I shall not be concerned with the relations between materialism and physics, but instead with...(continue...)