/lit/ - Literature

if he's hyper-cartesian, then everything that's in opposition to it. is he though? perhaps he just wanna sell ai to potential clients with every persuasive method available desu

whyte's overview of pre-freud thinkers who anticipated him in various ways, with some less obvious suggestions like home-kames, carus.

>>21399767
he stood on shoulders of philosophical giants whether he wanted or not
>Freud explained that he avoided reading Shopenhauer and Nietzsche until late in life, "i was less concerned with priority than with preserving my impartiality." In a letter to Fliess, written on august 31 1898, freud shows some disappointment at discovering that Theodor Lipps had expressed some of his own basic assumptions in a work pulished in 1883. this shows that when Freud was forty-two he was unaware that at least fifty writers (probably many more) had been developing similar assumptions for over two hundred years. finally in 1925, at the age of sixty-nine, Freud wrote: "the overwhelming majority of philosophers regard as mental only the phenomena of consciousness. for them the world of consciousness coincides with the sphere of what is mental." this curious mistake shows how narrow his reading had been, and how wrong a conception he must then have had of his own originality.
t. lancelot whyte

>>19677382
and the last one

whyte's main point:
>prior to descartes and his sharp definition of the dualism there was no cause to contemplate the possible existence of unconscious mentality as part of a separate realm of mind. many religious and speculative thinkers had taken for granted factors lying outside but influencing immediate awareness; augustine's remarks on memory are a famous example. until an attempt had been made (with apparent success) to choose AWARENESS as the defining characteristic of an independent mode of being called mind, there was no occasion to invent the idea of UNCONSCIOUS mind as a provisional correction of that choice. it is only after Descartes that we find, first the idea and then the term, "unconscious mind" entering european thought.

>for those loyal to descartes, all that was not conscious in man was material and physiological, and therefore not mental. this problem did not arise with materialism (scientific physiological monists) or idealism, unconsciousness could be interpreted as a natural consequence of restricted awareness of processes in our bodies or the result of individual mind only being a part of the universal mind.

>the two schools which were readiest to recognize the unconscious mind, and did in fact do so, could not contribute greatly to the advance, because their monisms were both relatively impotent: the idealists could not link their universal mind with physical phenomena, and physiologists were too ignorant (as they stilly are today) to know how to build the bridge from the other side by showing how their electrically pulsating cerebral tissues simulate mentality.

>>19677378
>freud's influence has been greatest in the prostestant english-speaking world, and it was here that the (cartesian) dualism penetrated furthest.
t. whyte