HISTORY AND THEORIES OF THE MIND

The history of cognitive science in combination with the history of psychology is essential to understand the nature of multisdiciplinarity approaches to human cognition. This collection of essays intends to provide the reader with a rich image to understand cognition both from a conceptual, a historical and a social point of view.Several unifying ideas characterize these efforts. First of all, the papers indicate that many of the present day issues of cognitive research have been articulated in late 19th Century, in the early days of psychology as an independent discipline. Papers on Helmholtz. Mach, Mill all raise this continuity issue. A second important unifying idea is the importance of classical and present day evolutionary ideas, and their relationships'. Essays on comparing Mach and Dennett, on Dawkins and Sperber, as well as on Karl Popper show the centrality of evolutionary ideas to understand recent cognitive research. A third central topic is the relevance of classical so