Plant "intelligence" and "sensation" are controversial notions in contemporary botany. While some scientists argue that sensory awareness, learning, memory, communication, and possibly a kind of consciousness should be ascribed to plants, a substantial part of the scientific community dismisses such claims because of insufficient evidence and the lack of neural systems in plants. In this paper,...
Abstract 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...
In this paper I present an interpretation of du Bois-Reymond's thesis on the impossibility of a scientific explanation of consciousness and of its present importance. I reconsider du Bois-Reymond's speech "On the limits of natural science" (1872) in the context of nineteenth-century German philosophy and neurophysiology, pointing out connections and analogies with contemporary arguments on the...
In this paper I offer an interpretation of du Bois-Reymond's thesis on the impossibility of a scientific explanation of consciousness and of its present importance. I argue first that late 19th C. Germany is the neglected context of the emergence of what David Chalmers has called the «hard problem of consciousness», and I show that many contemporary thought experiments and arguments find their...