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John Sutton
Department of Philosophy, Macquarie University, NSW 2109, Australia. Email me.

THIS WEEK: On All in the Mind on ABC Radio National - 'Animal Spirits: the mind in history'.
ABC Radio National (576AM in Sydney, other frequencies around Australia), Sunday 27 April 1.05pm, repeated
    Wednesday 30 April 2pm). Transcript available from Friday 2 May.
Once ‘animal spirits’ were fluid beasts, distilled from blood, that roamed our nervous system and rummaged the pores
of our brain. The patterns of their flow carried the contents of our thoughts and were the going explanation for vision, memory, imagination, belief, passion and desire. When animal spirits misbehaved or became polluted they could make us ill, in both
body and soul. For most of this millennium Westerners firmly believed in these lively and impish carriers of our identity
and they only disappeared after the nervous system was found to be electrical in nature. This week, philosopher John Sutton
sets a few animal spirits free to explore the mind in history.

Here's a brief introductory talk on animal spirits (1999).

John Sutton, Philosophy and Memory Traces: Descartes to connectionism
One strand in this book is the story of animal spirits from the Renaissance to the late Enlightenment. Chapter 2,
'Wriggle-work', surveys the vast range of discourses and practices (from magic to medicine, from theology to thinking)
in which Renaissance and early modern people involved the spirits. Later chapters describe the roles played by
animal spirits in the work of Descartes, Locke, and 17th-century natural philosophers, their presence in literary and
moral thinking, and sets out some hypotheses about the processes of their eventual disappearance. There are a few
extracts online. See especially:
    Preface
    Chapter One: Introduction - Traces, Brains, and History
    Introduction to Part I: Animal Spirits and Memory Traces
    Introduction to Part II: Inner Discipline

* - recommended introductory reading
# - reference not included in Philosophy and Memory Traces

* Mary A.B. Brazier, A History of Neurophysiology in the 17th and 18th Centuries (Raven Press, 1984).
Edwin Clarke, 'The Doctrine of the Hollow Nerve in the 17th and 18th Centuries', in L. Stevenson & R. Multhauf (eds),
    Medicine, Science, and Culture (Johns Hopkins UP, 1968).
Antonio Clericuzio, 'The Internal Laboratory: the chemcial reinterpretation of medical spirits in England (1660-1680)', in
    P. Rattansi & A. Clericuzio (eds), Alchemy and Chemistry in the 16th and 17th Centuries (Kluwer, 1994).
# William T. Clower, 'The Transition from Animal Spirits to Animal Electricity: A Neuroscience Paradigm
           Shift', Journal of the History of the Neurosciences 7 (1998), 201-218.
Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilisation: a history of insanity in the age of reason (Random House, 1965), pp.85-198.
*# Ian Glynn, 'Two millennia of animal spirits', Nature 402, 25 Nov 1999, p.353.
# Paul Ilie, The Age of Minerva: counter-rational reason in the 18th century (Pennsylvania UP, 2 vols, 1995)
L.S. Jacyna, 'Animal Spirits and 18th-Century British Medicine', in Y. Kawakita, S. Sakai, & Y. Otsuka (eds),
    The Comparison between Concepts of Life-Breath in East and West (Ishiyaku Euro-American, 1995).
* Simon Kemp, Medieval Psychology (Greenwood Publishing Co, 1990).
Simon Kemp, Cognitive Psychology in the Middle Ages (Greenwood Publishing Co, 1996).
Shigehisa Kuriyama, 'Pneuma, Qi, and the Problematic of Breath', in Y. Kawakita, S. Sakai, & Y. Otsuka (eds),
    The Comparison between Concepts of Life-Breath in East and West (Ishiyaku Euro-American, 1995).
# Alexandre Metraux, 'Impure Epistemology and the Search for the Nervous Agent: a case study in 17th- and 18th-century
    neurophysics', Science in Context 9 (1996), 57-78.
John M. Rist, 'On Greek Biology, Greek Cosmology, and some sources of Theological Pneuma', in D. Dockrill & G. Tanner
    (eds), The Concept of Spirit (Auckland UP, 1984).
G.S. Rousseau, 'Discourses of the Nerve', in F. Amrine (ed), Literature and Science as Modes of Expression (Kluwer, 1989).
Simon Schaffer, 'Godly Men and Mechanical Philosophers: souls and spirits in Restoration natural philosophy', Science in
    Context 1 (1987), 55-85.
Barbara Maria Stafford, Body Criticism: imaging the unseen in Enlightenment art and medicine (MIT Press, 1991).
Jean Starobinski, 'Note sur l'histoire des fluides imaginaires (des esprits animaux a la libido)', Gesnerus 23 (1976), 176-187.
D.P. Walker, Music, Spirit, and Language in the Renaissance (Variorum Reprints, 1985).
* John P. Wright, 'Hysteria and Mechanical Man', Journal of the History of Ideas 41 (1980), 233-247.
John W. Yolton, Thinking Matter: materialism in 18th-century Britain (Blackwell, 1984), chapter 8.

For John Maynard Keynes, see E.G. Winslow, 'Keynes and Freud: psychoanalysis and Keynes's account of the "Animal
    Spirits" of capitalism', Social Research 53 (1986), 549-578
And examples of the use of the concept in economic theory:
Peter Howitt and R. Preston McAfee, 'Animal Spirits', American Economic Review 82 (1992), 493-507.
Elliott Middleton,  'Animal Spirits and expectations in non-linear US recession forecasting' (2001).
Philippe Weil, 'Increasing Returns and Animal Spirits', American Economic Review 79 (1989), 889-894.

Related Bibliographical Resources
Link to general academic resources/ bibliography on body history, & on culture, cognition, and the body.
Resources on Descartes and the human body.
Resources on Dynamical Cognitive Science and the Extended Mind hypothesis.
Resources for the interdisciplinary study of memory.

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John Sutton
Department of Philosophy        Tel. (61) 2 9850 8817
Macquarie University               Fax (61) 2 9850 8892
NSW 2109, Australia

Last updated 26 April 2003