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20 books match the query 'Intellect'

cover of A Privilege of Intellect: Conscience and Wisdom in Newman’s Narrative

A Privilege of Intellect

Conscience and Wisdom in Newman’s Narrative

D. A. Drennen

University of Scranton Press, 2010

Based on decades of research, A Privilege of Intellect is D. A. Drennen’s portrait of the English cardinal John Henry Newman (1801–90), whose conversion to the Roman Catholic Church in 1845 significantly boosted the presence of the Catholic Church in England and caused many Anglicans to follow his example. Newman—who will be beatified this fall—devoted his life both to the Church and to the university, demonstrating that religious faith and intellectual pursuits could exist in harmony. Drennen’s biography combines theology with psychology and philosophy and will appeal to anyone interested in the history of the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church.

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cover of An Artificial History of Natural Intelligence: Thinking with Machines from Descartes to the Digital Age

An Artificial History of Natural Intelligence

Thinking with Machines from Descartes to the Digital Age

David W. Bates

University of Chicago Press, 2024

A new history of human intelligence that argues that humans know themselves by knowing their machines.

We imagine that we are both in control of and controlled by our bodies—autonomous and yet automatic. This entanglement, according to David W. Bates, emerged in the seventeenth century when humans first built and compared themselves with machines. Reading varied thinkers from Descartes to Kant to Turing, Bates reveals how time and time again technological developments offered new ways to imagine how the body’s automaticity worked alongside the mind’s autonomy. Tracing these evolving lines of thought, An Artificial History of Natural Intelligence offers a new theorization of the human as a being that is dependent on technology and produces itself as an artificial automaton without a natural, outside origin.
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cover of Art and Intellect in the Philosophy of Étienne Gilson

Art and Intellect in the Philosophy of Étienne Gilson

Francesca Aran Murphy

University of Missouri Press, 2004

In Art and Intellect in the Philosophy of Étienne Gilson, Francesca Aran Murphy tells the story of this French philosopher’s struggle to reconcile faith and reason. In his lifetime, Gilson often stood alone in presenting Saint Thomas Aquinas as a theologian, one whose philosophy came from his faith. Today, Gilson’s view is becoming the prevalent one. Murphy provides us with an intellectual biography of this Thomist leader throughout the stages of his scholarly development.
 
Murphy covers more than a half century of Gilson’s life while reminding readers of the political and social realities that confronted intellectuals of the early twentieth century. She shows the effects inner-church politics had on Gilson and his contemporaries such as Alfred Loisy, Lucien Lévy Bruhl, Charles Maurras, Henri de Lubac, Marie-Dominique Chenu, and Jacques Maritain, while also contextualizing Gilson’s own life and thoughts in relation to these philosophers and theologians. 
 
            These great thinkers, along with Gilson, continue to be sources of important intellectual debate among scholars, as do the political periods through which Gilson’s story threads—World Wars I and II, the rise and fall of Fascism, and the political upheavals of Europe. By placing Gilson’s twentieth-century Catholic life against a dramatic background of opposed political allegiances, clashing spiritualities, and warring ideas of philosophy, this book shows how rival factions each used their own interpretations of Thomas Aquinas to legitimate their conceptions of the Catholic Church.        In Art and Intellect in the Philosophy of Étienne Gilson, Murphy shows Gilson’s early openness to the artistic revolution of the Cubist and the Expressionist movements and how his love of art inspired his existential theology. She demonstrates the influence that Henri Bergson continued to have on Gilson and how Gilson tried to bring together the intellectual, Dominican side of Christianity with the charismatic, experiential Franciscan side.
 
Murphy concludes with a chapter on issues inspired by the Gilsonist tradition as developed by recent thinkers. This volume makes an original contribution to the study of Gilson, for the first time providing an organic and synthetic treatment of this major spiritual philosopher of modern times.           
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cover of Art, Intellect and the State: Cultural Histories of Late Pahlavi Iran

Art, Intellect and the State

Cultural Histories of Late Pahlavi Iran

Edited by Bianca Devos and Robert Steele

Gingko, 2026

A cross-disciplinary volume on the intersections of—and tensions between—culture and government in Iran's late Pahlavi period. 

In recent years, scholarly interest in Iran's late Pahlavi period (1941–1979) has grown significantly and historians are increasingly approaching the era not merely as a prelude to the Iranian Revolution, but as a period worthy of study in its own right. New generations of scholars have uncovered fresh sources and offered original perspectives on the cultural and social life of this era. Yet opportunities for cross-disciplinary engagement among scholars from different fields who are exploring similar questions remain limited. This volume, the product of two international workshops at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna and the University of Marburg, respectively, is a collection of the work of scholars at various stages of their careers from various disciplines investigating the cultural history of late Pahlavi Iran from a multiplicity of perspectives, including: archaeology, architecture, scholarship, media, art, film, literature, politics, religion, museums, music, philosophy, education, and theater.

Chapters explore the interactions between state ideology and the sociocultural sphere, exploring ideas such as: the influence of the press and literature on social discourses; the culturally strategic and identity-forming role of the performing arts; the relationship between state education policy and culture; the employment of foreign artists, architects, scholars, and musicians in the context of Iran’s cultural diplomacy; and the dynamics of (state) religion, spirituality, nationalism, and psychology in modern media or through their dissemination in the media. The volume explores not only the Pahlavi state’s direct participation in facilitating cultural activity or scholarly endeavors, but also how artists, writers, historians, and other cultural actors flourished independent of (sometimes in spite of) the state apparatus.

The volume does not seek to provide an encyclopaedic collection detailing every aspect of culture in the Pahlavi period, but the case studies explored demonstrate the breadth and complexities of this field in the historiography. Moreover, by shedding light on the various features of culture in the late Pahlavi era and encouraging multidisciplinary discussions, the volume aims to contribute to a greater understanding of the vibrant cultural life in Iran during this period.

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cover of Commentary on the Book of Causes (Thomas Aquinas in Translation)

Commentary on the Book of Causes (Thomas Aquinas in Translation)

Saint Thomas Aquinas

Catholic University of America Press, 1996

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cover of Conversations with Jean Piaget

Conversations with Jean Piaget

Jean-Claude Bringuier

University of Chicago Press, 1989

"What is most impressive about this book is its intelligence, its sophistication, and its charm. . . . This book presents Piaget's work and his person better than anything else that I know about."—David Elkind, Tufts University

"The tone is one of constant movement from the most ordinary to the most abstruse. There are 14 conversations with 'le Patron,' some in 1969, some in 1975, and several more with co-workers in various fields. . . . In Mr. Bringuier's book, in a pleasant informal way, we see a sophisticated non-scientist exploring Piaget's domain with the master. Some of Piaget's best-known findings about children as explained along the way, but Mr. Bringuier has ways of bringing out the relation of this psychological work to the whole of Piaget's enterprise, and we get a good sense of the man and his work."—Howard E. Gruber, New York Times Book Review
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cover of Deprived of Sense and Intellect: Insanity, Possession, and Diagnosis in Medieval Europe

Deprived of Sense and Intellect

Insanity, Possession, and Diagnosis in Medieval Europe

Leigh Ann Craig

University of Michigan Press, 2026

Medieval saints were thought to be able to provide miraculous cures for a wide variety of illnesses, and about one tenth of their miracles involved the restoration of sanity to those who had lost their minds. Deprived of Sense and Intellect explores 460 of these stories written across Latin Christendom between 1240 and 1500. The study uses the lens of critical disability studies to bridge the gap between discussions of demonic possession and naturally arising somatic conditions, treating all these narratives about disability and miraculous healing not as documentation of changes to the function of an individual person, but instead as evidence of substantial and intrusive interpersonal tensions in medieval communities.

While medieval communities assigned these tensions to a malfunction of consciousness in a single person, medieval miracle texts also reveal how the function and malfunction of consciousness was named and classified. In studying these texts, Leigh Ann Craig explores the terminology and rhetoric used to diagnose a loss of mind as either from natural causes or as an effect of demonic predation, tracing the use of Latin vocabulary in medical compendia, law, and theology. Deprived of Sense and Intellect finds that since diagnoses were difficult and frequently subject to doubt, they varied based on regional cultures of disability in northern and southern Europe, the influences on the development of community consensus in Latin Europe in the Middle Ages, and assumptions based on gender, material evidence, and self-diagnosis.
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cover of Faith and Intellect: The Lives and Contributions of Latter-day Saint Thinkers

Faith and Intellect

The Lives and Contributions of Latter-day Saint Thinkers

Leonard J Arrington

Signature Books, 2019

Joseph Smith was not the first to found a Christian denomination, but his addition of a new book of scripture on par with the Bible set him and his movement apart. Even before 1830, Smith was both dismissed and admired, embraced and rejected. But most observers agree that he has rightfully earned a significant place in American religious history. Many of the followers he attracted in his day and after have also helped to shape LDS thought. This volume highlights the lives and contributions of Smith, his successor Brigham Young, and eleven others, including Lowell Bennion, Claudia L. Bushman, Hugh Nibley, Chieko Okazaki, B. H. Roberts, James E. Talmage, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, and Emmeline B. Wells. All together, the women and men profiled here span the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and illuminate what the LDS Church has meant, and continues to mean, to its most thoughtful members. 
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cover of Harry Huntt Ransom: Intellect in Motion

Harry Huntt Ransom

Intellect in Motion

By Alan Gribben

University of Texas Press, 2008

Both a life story and a portrait of public higher education during the twentieth century, Harry Huntt Ransom captures the spirit of a dynamic individual who dedicated his talents to nurturing intellectual life in Texas and beyond. Tracing the details of Ransom's youth in Galveston and Tennessee and his education at Yale, where he earned a doctorate, Alan Gribben provides new insight into the factors that shaped Ransom's future as a renowned administrator and defender of the humanities.

Ransom's career at the University of Texas began in 1935, when he was hired as an instructor of English. He rose through the ranks to become chancellor, stepping down in 1971 during a volatile period when debates about the University's central mission raged—particularly over the question of commercializing higher education. The development of Ransom's lasting legacy, the Humanities Research Center bearing his name, is explored in depth as well. Bringing to life a legendary figure, Harry Huntt Ransom is a colorful testament to a singular man of letters who had the audacity to propose "that there be established somewhere in Texas—let's say in the capital city—a center of our cultural compass, a research center to be the Bibliothèque Nationale of the only state that started out as an independent nation."

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cover of Law, Intellect, and Education

Law, Intellect, and Education

Francis A. Allen

University of Michigan Press, 1979

In Law, Intellect, and Education, Francis A. Allen presents a compelling collection of essays that argue for an education system grounded in intellectual rigor and humanistic motivation. Spanning nearly thirty years, these essays collectively defend the importance of a liberal and professional education that is under threat in the modern world. Allen, drawing from his extensive involvement with the Association of American Law Schools, underscores the need to advocate for this education, asserting its critical role in developing thoughtful and rational legal minds. The book delves into key themes in essays like "Mr. Justice Holmes and 'The Life of the Mind'," which critiques the separation of legal theory from moral considerations, and "On Winning and Losing," which examines the cultural fixation on success within the legal profession. Allen also reflects on past legal thought, such as Jerome Frank's "Law and the Modern Mind," to address the continuing relevance of recognizing human limitations in judicial processes. Throughout, Allen calls for a renewed commitment to cultivating intellectual discipline, emphasizing its necessity in achieving justice and fulfilling the demands of a complex legal system.
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cover of Mentality and Machines

Mentality and Machines

Keith Gunderson

University of Minnesota Press, 1985

Mentality and Machines was first published in 1985. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Mentality and Machines — with a new preface and an extended postscript—is a general essay on the philosophy of mind, oriented to philosophical and psychological questions about real as well as imagined, robots and machines. The second edition retains all of the essays from the original book, including Gunderson's influential critique ("The Imitation Game") of A.M. Turing's treatment of the question "Can machines think?" and his controversial distinction between program-receptive and program-resistant aspects of the mind. This edition's postscript includes further reflections on these themes and others, and relates them to recent writings of other philosophers and computer scientists.

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cover of Metaphysical Community: The Interplay of the Senses and the Intellect

Metaphysical Community

The Interplay of the Senses and the Intellect

By Greg Urban

University of Texas Press, 1996

Winner, Senior Book Prize, American Ethnological Society

Starting with the post-structuralist idea that truth systems are lodged in discourse, and that discourse varies from society to society, Greg Urban seeks to discover the nature and extent of that variation. His journey to an Amerindian society in which dreams are more prominent than everyday aspects of the sensible world leads him to radically reformulate one of the main problematics of Western thought: the relationship between our sensations of the world and the understandings we form of them.

Metaphysical Community proposes that this dichotomy comes from the interplay between two sides of discourse-its intelligible side as a carrier of meanings, and its sensible side as thing-in-the-world that must be replicated. This insight leads to the heart of the book-the exploration of the uneasy tension that binds experience and understanding, phenomena and noumena.

Urban challenges basic assumptions that underlie social and cultural anthropology and much of the social sciences and humanities. His provocative insights will be of interest to all those concerned with anthropology, cultural studies, literary criticism, the sociology and politics of culture, and philosophy.

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cover of Postures of the Mind: Essays on Mind and Morals

Postures of the Mind

Essays on Mind and Morals

Annette Baier

University of Minnesota Press, 1975

Postures of the Mind was first published in 1985. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Annette Baier develops, in these essays, a posture in philosophy of mind and in ethics that grows out of her reading of Hume and the later Wittgenstein, and that challenges several Kantian or analytic articles of faith. She questions the assumption that intellect has authority over all human feelings and traditions; that to recognize order we must recognize universal laws—descriptive or prescriptive; that the essential mental activity is representing; and that mental acts can be analyzed into discrete basic elements, combined according to statable rules of synthesis.

In the first group of essays—"Varieties of Mental Postures"—Baier evaluates the positions taken by philosophers ranging from Descartes to Dennett and Davidson. Among her topics are remembering, intending, realizing, caring, representing, changing one's mind, justifying one's actions and feelings, and having conflicting reasons for them. The second group of essays—"Varieties of Moral Postures" - explores the sort of morality we get when all of these capacities become reflective and self-corrective. Some deal with particular moral issues—our treatment of animals, our policies regarding risk to human life, our contractual obligations; others, with more general questions on the role of moral philosophers and the place of moral theory. These essays respond to the theories of Hobbes, Kant, Rawls, and MacIntyre, but Baier's most positive reaction is to David Hume; Postures of the Mind affirms and cultivates his version of a moral reflection that employs feeling and tradition as well as reason.

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cover of Prophecy in Islam: Philosophy and Orthodoxy

Prophecy in Islam

Philosophy and Orthodoxy

Fazlur Rahman

University of Chicago Press, 2011

This longstanding and highly regarded volume is the first to explore the doctrine of prophetic revelation, a critical and definitive area of Islamic religious and political thought. In it, the esteemed Islamic scholar Fazlur Rahman traces the inception of this doctrine from ancient Greek texts, its interpretation and elaboration by Muslim philosophers in order to suit their vision of the Prophet, and, finally, the varying degrees of acceptance of these convergent ideas by the Muslim orthodoxy.

The latest edition of this classic text includes a new foreword by Islamic studies expert Michael Sells, confirming Prophecy in Islam as the best source on its subject after more than half a century. This longstanding and highly regarded volume is the first to explore the doctrine of prophetic revelation, a critical and definitive area of Islamic religious and political thought. In it, the esteemed Islamic scholar Fazlur Rahman traces the inception of this doctrine from ancient Greek texts, its interpretation and elaboration by Muslim philosophers in order to suit their vision of the Prophet, and, finally, the varying degrees of acceptance of these convergent ideas by the Muslim orthodoxy.

The latest edition of this classic text includes a new foreword by Islamic studies expert Michael Sells, confirming Prophecy in Islam as the best source on its subject after more than half a century.

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cover of Tell Me a Story: Narrative and Intelligence

Tell Me a Story

Narrative and Intelligence

Roger C. Schank

Northwestern University Press, 1995

How are our memories, our narratives, and our intelligence interrelated? What can artificial intelligence and narratology say to each other? In this pathbreaking study by an expert on learning and computers, Roger C. Schank argues that artificial intelligence must be based on real human intelligence, which consists largely of applying old situations, and our narratives of them, to new situations in less than obvious ways.
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cover of The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Poetry of the Pound Tradition

The Dance of the Intellect

Studies in the Poetry of the Pound Tradition

Marjorie Perloff

Northwestern University Press, 1996

Must poetic form be, as Yeats demanded, "full, sphere-like, single," or can it accommodate the impurities Yeats and his Modernist generation found so problematic? Sixty years later, these are still open questions, questions Marjorie Perloff addresses in these essays.
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cover of Thinking Across the American Grain: Ideology, Intellect, and the New Pragmatism

Thinking Across the American Grain

Ideology, Intellect, and the New Pragmatism

Giles Gunn

University of Chicago Press, 1992

In Thinking Across the American Grain Giles Gunn makes a
major contribution to the current revival of pragmatism in
America by showing how it provides the most critically
resilient and constructive response to the intellectual
challenges of postmodernism.

Gunn reclaims and refurbishes elements of the pragmatic
tradition that either have been lost or have undergone
important changes and shows how newer critical approaches
have strong roots in the pragmatic tradition. For Gunn,
pragmatism is no longer concerned solely with the nature of
knowledge and the meaning of truth. Because of its
insistence on critical self-awareness, its opposition to
closed systems of thought, and its concern with the ethical,
political, and practical contexts of ideas, pragmatism offers
a blueprint for performing intellectual work in a world
without absolutes. The world Gunn's pragmatism recognizes is
one of multiple truths, unstable interpretations, and
competing interests.

After critically reexamining the nature and scope of the
pragmatic legacy, Gunn explores the way pragmatism
successfully responds to conceptual and methodological
controversies, from the rebirth of ideology, the spread of
interdisciplinarity, and the development of the new
historicism, to the revolt against theory, the erosion of
public discourse, and the problematics of American civil
religion. Drawing throughout on the work of William James,
Henry James, Sr., John Dewey, Kenneth Burke, W. E. B. Du
Bois, Richard Poirier, Stanley Cavell, Clifford Geertz, Frank
Lentricchia, Richard Rorty, Richard J. Bernstein, and
others, Gunn shows that pragmatism, because it offers a way
of thinking across the categories of modern intellectual
specializations, is located at the intersection of these
critical, and often competitive, discourses. The postmodern
challenge for the pragmatist thinker is not only how to
render these different discourses conversible with one
another, but how to turn the salient insights of each into
elements of a new democratic and critical public culture, one
able to counter the twin threats of ideology and solipsism.

Giles Gunn is one of our most acclaimed contemporary critics,
and this broad and ambitious book is certain to become one of
the central works in the current revival of critical
pragmatism and cultural studies.
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cover of Thomas Aquinas on the Immateriality of the Human Intellect

Thomas Aquinas on the Immateriality of the Human Intellect

Adam Wood

Catholic University of America Press, 2020

The chief aims of Thomas Aquinas on the Immateriality of the Human Intellect are to provide a comprehensive interpretation of Aquinas's oft-repeated claim that the human intellect is immaterial, and to assess his arguments on behalf of this claim. Adam Wood argues that Aquinas's claim refers primarily to the mode in which the human intellect has its act of being. That the human intellect has an immaterial mode of being, however, crucially underwrites Aquinas's additional views that the human soul is subsistent and incorruptible. To show how it does so, Wood argues that the human intellect's immateriality can also be put in terms of the impossibility of explaining its operations in terms of coordination between bodily parts, states and processes. Aquinas's arguments for the human intellect's immateriality, therefore, can be understood as attempts to show why intellectual operations cannot be explained in bodily terms. The book argues that not all of them succeed in this aim and also proposes, however, a novel interpretation of Aquinas's argument based on human intellect's universal mode of cognition that may indeed be sound. Wood concludes by considering the ramifications of Aquinas's position on matters pertaining to the afterlife. Thomas Aquinas on the Immateriality of the Human Intellect represents the first book-length examination of Aquinas's claim that the human intellect is immaterial, and so — given the centrality of this claim to his thought — should interest any scholars interested in understanding Thomas. While it focuses throughout on careful attention to Aquinas's texts along with the relevant secondary literature, it also positions Thomas's thought alongside recent developments in metaphysics and philosophy of mind. Hence it should also interest historically-minded metaphysicians interested in understanding how Thomas's hylomorphism intersects with recent work in hylomorphic metaphysics, philosophers of mind interested in understanding how Thomas's philosophical psychology relates to contemporary forms of dualism, physicalism and emergentism, and philosophers of religion interested in the possibility of the resurrection.
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cover of Useful Knowledge: The Victorians, Morality, and the March of Intellect

Useful Knowledge

The Victorians, Morality, and the March of Intellect

Alan Rauch

Duke University Press, 2001

Nineteenth-century England witnessed an unprecedented increase in the number of publications and institutions devoted to the creation and the dissemination of knowledge: encyclopedias, scientific periodicals, instruction manuals, scientific societies, children’s literature, mechanics’ institutes, museums of natural history, and lending libraries. In Useful Knowledge Alan Rauch presents a social, cultural, and literary history of this new knowledge industry and traces its relationships within nineteenth-century literature, ending with its eventual confrontation with Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species.
Rauch discusses both the influence and the ideology of knowledge in terms of how it affected nineteenth-century anxieties about moral responsibility and religious beliefs. Drawing on a wide array of literary, scientific, and popular works of the period, the book focusses on the growing importance of scientific knowledge and its impact on Victorian culture. From discussions of Jane Webb Loudon’s The Mummy! and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, to Charlotte Brontë’s The Professor, Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke, and George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss, Rauch paints a fascinating picture of nineteenth-century culture and addresses issues related to the proliferation of knowledge and the moral issues of this time period. Useful Knowledge touches on social and cultural anxieties that offer both historical and contemporary insights on our ongoing preoccupation with knowledge.
Useful Knowledge will appeal to readers interested in nineteenth century history, literature, culture, the mediation of knowledge, and the history of science.
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cover of William Lawrence and the Organ of Mind: The Theology, Medicine and Politics of the Brain

William Lawrence and the Organ of Mind

The Theology, Medicine and Politics of the Brain

Elfed Huw Price

University College London, 2025

The untold story of how a nineteenth-century medical controversy laid the groundwork for modern neuroscience and the science of the mind.

Elfed Huw Price studies the radical history behind the idea that thought and consciousness are rooted in the brain, tracing its emergence in early nineteenth-century Britain. Centered on the controversy surrounding Lawrence’s Lectures on Physiology, Zoology, and the Natural History of Man, this book reveals how his arguments on the sentient brain challenged both medical tradition and religious orthodoxy, provoking backlash from the establishment.

Drawing on archival sources including unpublished material from Bethlem Hospital, Price situates Lawrence’s work within the rise of Christian mortalist thought and the broader shift toward Victorian naturalism. Despite Lawrence’s silencing, his ideas endured, shaping a transformation that redefined human exceptionality through biology rather than theology.

Bridging science, medicine, philosophy, and religion, William Lawrence and the Organ of Mind illuminates a pivotal yet overlooked moment in the history of mind and brain studies, offering fresh insights into the intellectual struggles that helped reshape modern thought.
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