From Plato to Wittgenstein : The Historical Foundations of Mind: The historical foundations of mind - Softcover

I. PLATO. The Sun, the Divided Line, and the Cave. Phaedo. II. ARISTOTLE. Metaphysics III. RENE DESCARTES. Rules for the Direction of the Mind (complete). 6. Meditations on the First Philosophy (complete). IV. THOMAS HOBBES. Objections to Descartes' Meditations (complete). Leviathan. V. JOHN LOCKE. Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II. (complete) VI. GEORGE BERKELEY. 11. A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge. VII. DAVID HUME. A Treatise of Human Nature: Of the Understanding VIII. GOTTFRIED LEIBNIZ. John Dewey, "Leibniz and the Origin of the Modern Mind." The Monadology (complete). IX. IMMANUEL KANT. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. X. WILLIAM JAMES. Essays in Philosophical Psychology. XI. BERTRAND RUSSELL. Mathematics and the Logic of Mind. XII. LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

That what we are directly in contact with is not the objective mind-independent world out there but our own mind is the most difficult insight for philosophy students to grasp. The representational nature of perception, the interpretive elements in our experience, the functional of the relationship between concepts and percepts, the inner workings of the mind, are so close and ever-present to us that we hardly notice them. The gradual awakening to the presence and workings of our own minds, the contributions our own thoughts and concepts make to the world we experience, required many centuries of gradual development. Giving just the philosophical results outside of their context, without working through their historical development, tends to remove the philosophical power of the very realizations about mind that have been involved in the progress of philosophy over the last twenty-five centuries. Currently there is no other book on the market that fills this historical gap. This is a volume of original sources organized chronologically to give students a sense of the evolution of the concept of mind over the last twenty-five hundred years.