EMF: Brains, Souls, and Spirits: (Neuro)Plasticity between Early Modern and Contemporary Thought

Credit: Raphael, The School of Athens, commons.wikimedia.org

The thought of the contemporary French philosopher Catherine Malabou orbits the central concept of ‘plasticity’, exploring its many forms and contexts. Elaborating her concept of plasticity at the intersections of diverse fields (including continental philosophy, art, neuroscience, epigenetics, and more recently AI and robotics), Malabou sees plasticity as the capacity of different structures and lifeforms to take form, mutate, and transform. The ‘neuroplastic’ human brain, for instance, modulates and re-sculpts its own synaptic form throughout life in accordance with a person’s individual history and experience. Malabou’s philosophy at times stages encounters with the Early Modern, in particular with the thought of René Descartes. In Self and Emotional Life (2013), for instance, Malabou holds Descartes’s articulation of the ‘passions of the soul’ up to the challenge of contemporary neuroscience and to current research into the neuroplasticity of the brain.

This workshop traces the pre-history of this concept, asking how early moderns thought about thinking – about the waxy nature of the mind, shaped by impressions; about what Michel de Montaigne called the ‘doubleness’ of understanding and its tendency to shift and mutate in complex patterns of contradiction. The language of early modern discussions, drawing on images of wax and mercury, offers a new perspective on ‘plastic’ thinking and on our thinking about ‘plasticity’.

The workshop will centre on short, ten-minute interventions followed by a roundtable discussion. Benjamin Dalton will talk on Catherine Malabou’s own encounter with Early Modern thought, while Luke O’Sullivan will consider classical and early modern parallels from Aristotle to Descartes, by way of Montaigne. The roundtable will also include neuroscientists researching neuroplasticity in the brain.

Speakers: 

Benjamin Dalton is a research student in the Department of French working on plasticity in contemporary French thought. 

Luke O'Sullivan is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow working in the Department of French on doubtful truth-telling in the sixteenth century.