What is it about?
A discussion of the 19th-century controversy incited by the leading German neuroscientist after he proposed that there were absolute limits to human knowledge.
Featured Image
Why is it important?
Contemporary philosophers of mind tend to forget that much of their subject was anticipated in the Victorian era.
Perspectives
The late nineteenth-century controversy over the limits of knowledge has generally been described as a crisis from which science has never escaped. My research supports the opposite interpretation. The initiator of the controversy, Emil du Bois-Reymond, was a physiologist who worked his whole life against the forces of obscurantism, whether they came from the Catholic and Conservative Right or from the scientistic and millenarian Left. Du Bois-Reymond’s agnosticism toward the ultimate nature of mind and matter must therefore be seen as an endorsement, and not a rejection, of his faith in reason.
Dr Gabriel Finkelstein
University of Colorado Denver
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Emil du Bois-Reymond’s Reflections on Consciousness, January 2014, Springer Science + Business Media,
DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-8774-1_10.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
