Alma máquina

Many of the unresolved questions of our day, such as the distinction between mind and brain or the mystery of consciousness, have their roots in centuries of history and debate. In Soul Machine, George Makari tells us how at the dawn of modernity the concept of the soul was little by little replaced by that of the mind, and how it was detaching itself from the divine to become natural, biological. The mind seemed to be somewhere between the soul and the body, between the ethereal and the mechanistic, without being either. The birth of the modern mind was accompanied by harsh religious, philosophical and scientific struggles, it was a path full of advances and setbacks, many times closely linked to the historical, political and social ups and downs of the moment, as happened, for example, with the Enlightenment or French Revolution. Through this monumental work, figures such as Hobbes, Locke and Spinoza -crucial thinkers for the transition from the religious conception of the sinful soul to the notion of a sick mind that requires specific care- or Rousseau and the German idealist philosophers -whose counterattack in favor of the spirit and its hidden depths updated a confrontation whose echoes still reverberate today- until it ends in the psychoanalysis and neuroscience of our time. A debate, Makari shows us in a scholarly and entertaining way, that it is not only settled in the field of the sciences of the mind, but also has consequences in our current conceptions of being, society, politics and even ethics.