Challenges from the Philosophers to the Neuroscientists

Abstract

A practical science of the brain scarcely existed before the 17th century except in terms of gross anatomy. In all countries vitalistic concepts held sway, yielding only slowly to more materialistic views. These developed at a different pace in different countries, due, in each case, to the dominant philosophies of the time: the English empiricists; the French Enlightenment; the Italian and German schools of experimental neurophysiology. The last to accept the materialists' viewpoints was Russia, whose scientists imported them from their training in Western Europe in the 19th century. A brief outline is given of how the history of brain science parallels the history of ideas in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.