Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: The Strange Case of Professor Gray and Other Provocations
- 1 Science and Scientism
- 2 Consequences
- 3 Neuromania: A Castle Built on Sand
- 4 From Darwinism to Darwinitis
- 5 Bewitched by Language
- 6 The Sighted Watchmaker
- 7 Reaffirming our Humanity
- 8 Defending the Humanities
- 9 Back to the Drawing Board
- References
- Index
9 - Back to the Drawing Board
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: The Strange Case of Professor Gray and Other Provocations
- 1 Science and Scientism
- 2 Consequences
- 3 Neuromania: A Castle Built on Sand
- 4 From Darwinism to Darwinitis
- 5 Bewitched by Language
- 6 The Sighted Watchmaker
- 7 Reaffirming our Humanity
- 8 Defending the Humanities
- 9 Back to the Drawing Board
- References
- Index
Summary
REFLECTIONS ON THE BRAIN OF ULLIN PLACE
When I was Visiting Professor in Medicine at the Royal Adelaide Hospital in 2003, I was invited by the Professor of Anatomy, with whom I shared an interest in the human hand, to take a look at something in the pathology museum. He thought it might intrigue me. It most certainly did. In a glass cabinet, there was a brain – with a slightly squashed left hemisphere -in formalin. Below the brain was a photo-portrait of a handsome, large-headed man, with floppy grey hair, 21” screen bi-focal glasses, and a wry smile. He was smartly dressed in an un-Australian jacket and tie. This was the erstwhile owner of the brain, Dr Ullin T. Place, whose name the retentive reader may recall from Chapter 1. Beneath the photograph was a brass plaque with the following wording:
DID THIS BRAIN CONTAIN THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF U.T. PLACE?
Ullin T. Place (1924–2000) was a lecturer in philosophy and psychology at the University of Adelaide from 1951–1954. Together with his Adelaide professor J. J. C. Smart, he was responsible for a revolutionary change in how philosophers view the nature of mind and consciousness. Place's famous 1956 British Journal of Psychology paper “Is Consciousness a Brain Process?” argued against the major theories of the time, behaviourism and dualism, and contended that consciousness should be seen as a brain process and nothing more.[…]
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- Aping MankindNeuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity, pp. 337 - 362Publisher: Acumen PublishingPrint publication year: 2011