The present book is a result of gestalt switch. In my earlier research on the history of philosophy and the history of neurosciences, I had studied the use of various technological and semiotic metaphors and models in attempts to naturalise the mental and to propose reductionist explanations of mental phenomena. I was interested in the ways in which one introduced representations in the brain or presented man or his brain as a machine.1 Writing on La Mettrie, I had usually defended him by claiming that despite his use of the machine analogy, he was not a mechanist.2 Gradually, I came to realise that comparing the human mind to the function of a mechanism, such as a clockwork, was more ambiguous than I had thought.3 When I later returned to La Mettrie, I came to realise that I might, in fact, as well claim that he was not a reductionist because he compared man with a machine. Since a machine is a cultural artefact, the claim that man is a machine can also be taken to mean that man is a cultural artefact.4 And this was exactly what La Mettrie emphasised in his L’homme machine and elsewhere.
Eventually, I became interested in early modern and modern theories that link explicitly the origin, development and functions of the human mind to language and culture. These theories, which emphasise the artificial aspects of human cognition, obliged me to have second thoughts concerning my earlier view that theories which postulate images or representations in the brain, or model the brain as a machine, were based on misleading or even illegitimate
Timo Kaitaro, ‘Biological and epistemological models of localization in the nineteenth century: From Gall to Charcot’, Journal of the History of Neurosciences 10, no. 3 (2001), pp. 262–276, and Timo Kaitaro, ‘Brain-mind identities in dualism and materialism – A historical perspective’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biology and Biomedical Sciences 35, no. 4 (2004), pp.627–645.
Timo Kaitaro, ‘“ Man is an admirable machine” – A dangerous idea?’, La Lettre de la Maison française d’Oxford, no. 14 (Michaelmas Term 2001), pp. 105–120, and Timo Kaitaro, ‘Diderot and La Mettrie: The unacknowledgeable debt’, in Julien Offray de La Mettrie. Ansichten und Einsichten, ed. Hartmut Hecht (Berlin: Berliner Wissenshafts-Verlag, 2004), pp. 63–73.
Timo Kaitaro, ‘Eighteenth-Century French Materialism Clockwise and Anticlockwise’, British Journal of the History of Philosophy 24, no. 5 (2016), pp. 1022–1034.
Vincent Sullerot, in Mots Clés de la Culture, ed. Alain Rey (Paris: Dictionnaires le Robert, 2013, contains articles from the Dictionnaire culturel en langue française), s.v. ‘machine’, Adobe Digital Editions epub.