Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gvvz8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T07:01:10.427Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

1 - Thinking as action: James Frederick Ferrier's Philosophy of Consciousness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2010

Adela Pinch
Affiliation:
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Get access

Summary

In nineteenth-century Britain, the story of thinking about other people was inseparable from the story of the struggle between the different intellectual disciplines that took thinking about other people as their proper business. The tension between psychology and philosophy – overlapping, but increasingly discrete, disciplines – forms a crucial context for this chapter and the next. This chapter explores how the Scottish philosopher James Frederick Ferrier (1808–1864) forged out of this tension an engaging understanding of thinking as a form of action.

The history of psychology in nineteenth-century Britain generally goes like this. Before the nineteenth century, the study of the human mind did not draw clear distinctions between philosophical and psychological speculation, nor did some aspects of human life – the emotions, or perception, for example – belong clearly to one or the other. The dominant intellectual traditions in England and Scotland – empiricism, associationism, and “Common Sense” realism – made the identity of psychology and philosophy particularly durable, well into the nineteenth century. Because, since Locke, anglophone philosophical speculation had largely concerned the origins of ideas in experience, and the laws by which the mind exercised its powers, philosophy was always in essence psychological in orientation: it focused on how the mind is shaped by its environment, and was at least in theory hospitable to empirical testing.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×