The connection between mind and brain has been one of the most persistent problems in modern Western thought; even recent advances in neuroscience haven’t been able to explain it satisfactorily. Historian Larry Sommer McGrath’s Making Spirit Matter studies how a particularly productive and influential group of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French thinkers attempted to solve this puzzle by showing the mutual dependence of spirit and matter. The scientific revolution taking place at this point in history across disciplines, from biology to psychology and neurology, located our mental powers in the brain and offered a radical reformulation of the meaning of society, spirit, and the self. Tracing connections among thinkers such as Henri Bergson, Alfred Fouillée, Jean-Marie Guyau, and others, McGrath plots alternative intellectual movements that revived themes of creativity, time, and experience by applying the very sciences that seemed to undermine metaphysics and religion. Making Spirit Matter lays out the long legacy of this moment in the history of ideas and how it might renew our understanding of the relationship between mind and brain today.

This narrative shows how the contours of moral and political philosophy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were shaped by Kant's two distinct philosophical responses to the results of modern science. This history of early modern Western philosophy takes its inspiration from Kant's claim that the battle between the metaphysics of matter and that of spirit is the principal axis around which modern philosophy up to his time, in all its aspects, has revolved. The empiricist-materialist trend that dominates in England is first examined in the progressively unfolding works of Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Adam Smith. A contrasting and competing dialectic develops in the rationalist/spiritualist trend in the continental philosophy of Descartes, Leibniz, and Rousseau. Framing this history is the background context of the philosophy and science of Aristotle and the challenges to the traditional paradigm presented by the revolutionary sciences of Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton. James Lawler is Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

In an anthroposophic approach to counseling and psychotherapy, we integrate the whole paradigm of spiritual science into the contemporary forms of psychology, thereby re-formulating a psychology inclusive of body, soul, and spirit. —Dr. William Bento, Executive Director of Anthroposophic Psychology Associates of North America (APANA) The art of counseling is practiced in many settings. An uncle counsels a troubled niece. A licensed professional clinical counselor (LPCC) works in a treatment center for drug addicts. A counselor can also be everything in between the two. If you consider everyone who mentors another—from life-coaches to police officers to wedding planners to lawyers to intimate friends—counseling includes all of us. Whereas mainstream counseling psychology has been moving increasingly toward cognitive and pharmacological approaches, this book brings us back to a psychology of soul and spirit. Through the guidance of Anthroposophy, the becoming human being, and Sophia, and divine wisdom, counselors will rediscover here an approach to people that has the heart of soul, and the light of spirit.