John Hughlings Jackson is a major figure at the origins of neurology and neuroscience in Britain. Alongside his contributions to clinical medicine, he left a large corpus of writing on localisation of function in the nervous system and other theoretical topics. In this paper I focus on Jackson’s “doctrine of concomitance”—his parallelist theory of the mind-brain relationship. I argue that the doctrine can be given both an ontological and a causal interpretation, and that the causal aspect of the doctrine (...) is especially significant for Jackson and his contemporaries. I interpret Jackson’s engagement with the metaphysics of mind as an instance of what I call meta-science—the deployment by scientists of metaphysical positions and arguments which help streamline empirical investigations by bracketing off unanswerable questions and focussing attention on matters amenable to the current tools of experimental research. (shrink)

The mind cannot be an object. An object can be conceived only as that which may possibly become an object to something else. Now what can the mind become an object to? Not to me for I am it and not to something else. Not to something else without again being denuded of consciousness.And how could we descend into the depths of our nervous system to ascertain what is the nature of the psychical correlative of the physiological bottom? If we (...) could, we could only describe that correlative psychical in terms of object-consciousness, which would be a pseudo description of it.John Hughlings-Jackson.If Charles Scott Sherrington (1857-1952) was the most philosophically aware neurophysiologist of the late 19th to early 20th .. (shrink)

The idea that the brain is a representational organ has roots in the nineteenth century, when neurologists began drawing conclusions about what the brain represents from clinical and experimental studies. One of the earliest controversies surrounding representation in the brain was the “muscles versus movements” debate, which concerned whether the motor cortex represents complex movements or rather fractional components of movement. Prominent thinkers weighed in on each side: neurologists John Hughlings Jackson and F.M.R. Walshe in favor of complex movements, (...) neurophysiologist Charles Sherrington and neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield in favor of movement components. This essay examines these and other brain scientists’ evolving notions of representation during the first eighty years of the muscles versus movements debate (c. 1873–1954). Although participants agreed about many of the superficial features of representation, their inferences reveal deep-seated disagreements about its inferential role. Divergent epistemological commitments stoked conflicting conceptions of what representational attributions imply and what evidence supports them. (shrink)

According to a received doctrine, espoused, by Karl Popper and Harry Collins, and taken for granted by many others, poorly replicated evidence should be epistemically defective and incapable of persuading scientists to accept the views it is used to argue for. But John Hughlings Jackson used poorly replicated clinical and post-mortem evidence to mount rationally compelling and influential arguments for a highly progressive theory of the organization of the brain and its functions. This paper sets out a number of (...) Jackson's arguments from his evidence and argues that they constitute a counter example against the received doctrine. (shrink)

SummaryIn this synthetic exposition, devoted to the relations which exist between psľchic functions and anatomic structures, Dr Pontes first insists on the difficulties of the subject and of its scientific analysis. Soma, Psyche, and social Milieu form a kind of continuum which is artificiallľ dissociated by our one‐sided approaches. Experimentation cannot be fullľ practised on man, nor can its results on animal be extended to man without serious risks of error. Similar limitations appear if, resorting to the pathological method, we (...) try to apply to the normal conclusions arrived at through the Study of the abnormal. Special reference is made here to psychosurgery, a topic quite familiar to Dr Fontes, who is Dr Egas Moniz’ countryman.The author then summarises our present knowledge concerning the structure, connections and functions of encephalic centers, especially; the thalamus, the hypothalamus and the frontal lobes.Finally, he subscribes, though not without serious reservations, to the hierarchical conception of the Nervous Sľstem as well as of the human mind, first suggested by Jouffroy, after him developed by Baillarger, Janet, Wallon in France, by Hughlings Jackson in Great Britain, and recentlľ revived in Europe by von Mona‐kow and Mourgue, Eľ, and Delaľ. This view enables one to consider nervous or psľchic illnesses as various dissolutions, resulting on the one hand from the suppression of higher centers or powers, on the other hand from the liberation of lower ones. It agrees rather well with the informations gathered by the anatomy and the physiology of the nervous sľstem, and with the conclusions suggested by psychosurgical opérations. To the thalamus and hypothalamus correspond the lower and older manifestations of mind: emotion and instinct, to the cortex the higher and more recent adaptive and intellectual processes. The hypothalamus plays a most important role in the nervous machinery as a regulator of vegetative and instinctive life, of wake and sleep, of consciousness, and of the basic biological rhythms. At the cortical level the frontal lobe appears as the structural basis for such psychical functions as Ego‐control, Will, Personality, and succèssfull action on the milieu. (shrink)

Find out all about dreams and you will know all about insanity. —Hughlings Jackson.

Find out all about dreams and you will know all about insanity. ?Hughlings Jackson.

From Aristotle to Cognitive Neuroscience identifies the strong philosophical tradition that runs from Aristotle, through phenomenology, to the current analytical philosophy of mind and consciousness. In a fascinating account, the author integrates the history of philosophy of mind and phenomenology with recent discoveries on the neuroscience of conscious states. The reader can trace the development of a neuro-philosophical synthesis through the work of Aristotle, Kant, Wittgenstein, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Brentano and Hughlings-Jackson, among others, and so explore contemporary philosophical puzzles surrounding (...) consciousness and its relation to cerebral synchrony and connectedness. Of interest to students and scholars of neuroethics, neurophilosophy and philosophy of mind, as well as philosophy of psychiatry, From Aristotle to Neuroscience demonstrates the real essence of consciousness as it increasingly connects with philosophy, law, morality, aesthetics, and spirituality. (shrink)

The book presents an original synthesizing framework on the relations between ‘the biological’ and ‘the social’. Within these relations, the late nineteenth-century emergence of social sciences aspiring to be constituted as autonomous, as 'scientific' disciplines, is described, analyzed and explained. Through this framework, the author points to conceptual and constructive commonalities conjoining significant founding figures – Lamarck, Spencer, Hughlings Jackson, Ribot, Durkheim, Freud – who were not grouped nor analyzed in this manner before. Thus, the book offers a rather (...) unique synthesis of the interactions of the social, the mental, and the evolutionary biological – Spencerian Lamarckism and/or Neo-Lamarckism – crystallizing into novel fields. It adds substantially to the understanding of the complexities of evolutionary debates during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It will attract the attention of a wide spectrum of specialists, academics, and postgraduates in European history of the nineteenth century, history and philosophy of science, and history of biology and of the social sciences, including psychology. (shrink)

The human brain is divided into two hemispheres, right and left, that are joined by a thick ‘cable’ of neural fibres called the corpus callosum. It has long been observed that injury to the left hemisphere in the average adult damages speech, speech comprehension, and reading, and causes paralysis on the right side of the body. Injury to the right hemisphere, on the other hand, seems to leave linguistic capabilities intact, but causes paralysis on the left side of the body. (...) These observations have given rise to the twin concepts of contralaterality of hemispheric control and cognitive specialization of hemispheric function. As far back as the nineteenth century, it was recognized that the left hemisphere’s specialty was language. Pioneering British neurologist John Hughlings Jackson asserted in 1868 that the left hemisphere was the ‘leading side’ in most people, responsible for the control of speech and will. In the decade of the 1940s, French neurologist Henry Hecaen and British psychologist Oliver Zangwill demonstrated that the right hemisphere, far from being passive, controlled visuospatial processing. (shrink)

This article explores the relationship between automatic and involuntary language in the work of Samuel Beckett and late nineteenth-century neurological conceptions of language that emerged from aphasiology. Using the work of John Hughlings Jackson alongside contemporary neuroscientific research, we explore the significance of the lexical and affective symmetries between Beckett’s compulsive and profoundly embodied language and aphasic speech automatisms. The interdisciplinary work in this article explores the paradox of how and why Beckett was able to search out a longed-for (...) language of feeling that might disarticulate the classical bond between the language, intention, rationality and the human, in forms of expression that seem automatic and “readymade”. (shrink)