Synthesis and the Unity of Mind: From Idealistic Philosophy to Psychology (and Back)

This chapter examines a number of discussions in the first decades of Mind that revolved around concepts and theories derived from the German idealist tradition in philosophy. It maintains that, in contrast with the picture of Mind as the ‘home of associationism’, dominated by a defence of empiricism against the views of transcendental idealism, the journal devoted a considerable space to the reception and reappraisal of Kantianism. §4.2 argues that this fact can be best understood in the light of the Kantian legacy in the nineteenth century. The following sections analyse attempts to experimentally examine the synthetic properties of consciousness in psychology and debates on the limits of neurophysiology (§4.3); debates about the unity and disunity of the self that were revived by psychopathological case studies (§4.4); the materialistic reframing of synthesis as a function of bodily organization and its critique (§4.5).