Learning and Memory

This chapter addresses the process of learning and memory in the animal and human brain. Learning is central to the development of a child into an adult, but also to the progression of human culture over time. But the ability to learn is also bound up with the capacity to remember. Speculation about the nature of human memory stretches back at least 2,400 years to Plato's attempts to understand this process. However, the eighteenth century English philosopher David Hartley was the first to link memories to the nervous system. While changes to the synaptic structure of a neuron clearly play an important role in the initial formation of memories, there is increasing evidence that altered expression of genes underpins long-term memory formation. The chapter then considers the role of the hippocampus in memory. The dynamic interaction of the hippocampus and the cortex may be key to the ability of the brain to form new associations between people, places, and objects.

Radical Birdcalls: Avian Voices and the Politics of the Involuntary

This essay investigates Romantic-era treatments of bird calls as “unpremeditated”, spontaneous, and involuntary. Looking at parrots, starlings, mockingbirds, gamecocks, and skylarks in the work of writers including John Thelwall, Percy Shelley, Thomas Beddoes, and Helen Maria Williams, I explore the way in which talking and singing birds are often understood through reference to materialist philosophy and the associationism of David Hartley. Taking Thelwall’s King Chaunticlere and John Gilpin’s Ghost, and Shelley’s ‘To a Sky-Lark’ and A Defence of Poetry as my main focus, I argue that these writers use materialist metaphors of unconscious avian utterance to make nuanced claims about the seemingly ambiguous role of the will in political speech.

Philosophy

This chapter examines how the late seventeenth-century British philosophy of sensation, feeling, and selfhood responded to the challenges of mechanism with the idiom of the insensible. It shows how this idiom carries forward from John Locke and Robert Boyle to philosophers of the mid-eighteenth century, the age of sensibility, who use it to address a variety of problems. The consistent, Lockean element in these usages by David Hartley, Étienne Bonnet de Condillac and David Hume, Eliza Haywood and Adam Smith, is that they do not refer to mental contents. One does not hear of “insensible perceptions.” There are no “unconscious thoughts” or “unfelt sensations” in the British tradition surveyed here. Writers in this tradition rather describe insensible powers that affect the mind without themselves being mental. They are nonconscious, not unconscious. This is an implication carried by the idiom into articulations of quite a wide variety of other ideas. All of them indicate the persistent usefulness in philosophies of feeling of a stylistic gesture toward something beyond the reach of both feeling and philosophy.

PHILOSOPHY AND PSYCHOLOGY OF JAMES MILL (1773–1836) IN THE INTERPRETATION OF FEDOR ZELENOGORSKII (1839–1908)

In the article, a little-studied question of the critical interpretation of the philosophical and psychological position of the representative of Scotland tradition James Mill (1773–1836) in the university philosophy, especially in the work of Kharkiv Professor Fedor Zelenogorskii (1839–1908) is presented. At first, the main periods of scientific and creative career of Fedor Zelenogorskii, including his studying at the Kazan Clerical Academy (1862–1864) and the historical-philosophical faculty at the Kazan University (1864–1868) are considered. Then his scientific internship from 1871 till 1873 in Germany and Switzerland is emphasized. During that period, he attended lectures of such famous Professors as Moritz Drobisch (Leipzig), Eduard Zeller (Heidelberg), Friedrich Albert Lange (Zurich, and Marburg), who was the author of the work “Geschichte des Materialismus und Kritik seiner Bedeutung in der Gegenwart” (1866). Then the features of the teaching and the publications of Fedor Zelenogroskii in his “Kharkiv period” (1874–1908) are pointed out, during which he was, at first, private docent, then extraordinary and ordinary professor of philosophy. Fedor Zelenogorskii’s works at this time comprise three areas: 1) Antique philosophy (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Aristippus of Cyrene), 2) works in the history of philosophy, for instance, Kharkiv university philosophy and Ukrainian philosophy (J. B. Schad, A I. Dudrovich, M. N. Protopopov, G. S. Skovoroda, at al.), 3) logic, psychology and pedagogic. In the last group, his doctoral monograph “On mathematical, metaphysical, inductive and critical research and proof methods” (1877) was of great importance. Fedor Zelenogorskii’s very important work was his monograph “Essay of Development of Psychology from Descartes to our Time” (Kharkiv, 1885). The positions of well-known philosophers (Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Berkley, Leibniz, Locke, and John Stewart Mill) and less-known thinkers (Glisson, Bonnet, and James Mill) were here analyzed. Fedor Zelenogorskii’s critical interpretation of the psychological viewpoint of James Mill in his two volumes work “Analysis of the phenomena of the human mind” (1829, 1869) occupies an important place in this analysis. According to him, Chapter III. “The Association of Ideas” of James Mill's work played a key role. James Mill appears here as a representative of associative psychology (David Hartley, Thomas Brown, J. F. Herbart, John Stewart Mill). The Kharkiv philosopher gave credit to James Mill for his contribution to the development of the causal law in Chapter “XXIV. The Will” of this work. In turn, Fedor Zelenogorskii’s important achievement was the popularization of the ideas of the Scotland philosopher and psychologist James Mill, in particular, because of his translation of extracts from the work “Analysis of the phenomena of the human mind”.

Hartley, David (1705–1757)

David Hartley commands a distinctive place in Enlightenment thinking for his attempt to establish an empiricist epistemology upon a foundation of ontological materialism – in other words, a philosophy of mind that incorporates a physiology of the brain. He also set forth an optimistic vision of human progress which was nonetheless cast within the framework of a transcendental theology. Though his views might seem to be a singular fusion of disparate strands, they nevertheless epitomized much liberal and advanced English thinking of the time, and exercised considerable influence upon the philosophical radicalism of subsequent generations.

Worldly Realism

A preliminary discussion of Northanger Abbey and Jacob’s Room, foregrounds Austen’s and Woolf’s insistence upon non-heroic, unexceptional protagonists, the challenge their writing poses to existing genres and its disjunction from established, consensual interpretive systems. Jacques Ranciére’s concept of consensual and dissensual regimes of the perceptible, and recent accounts of the constitutive relationship of inanimate objects with self, provide a theoretical framework for discussing these experimental aspects of each writer’s work. The chapter maps an epistemological tradition linking these current perspectives to the Enlightenment empiricism of David Hume, Adam Smith, David Hartley, and Elizabeth Hamilton, Austen’s contemporary. The materialism of eighteenth-century thinkers constitutes the sceptical intellectual inheritance of Austen and Woolf. It underpins their development of worldly realism, an experimental writing practice, utilising innovative focalisation techniques to foreground relations of equality across the worlds of people, things and natural universe. Hence it constitutes a radical undermining of the idealist ideology of individualism.