Recovering the Mind: The Origins and Consequences of Materialism in the Human Sciences

It is difficult to speak about human affairs without invoking the human mind. If the human/social sciences aim to study human beings in and out of society, it might be thought that this would be commonly accepted. But it is otherwise. The third-person perspective dominates, and when impersonal social or demographic forces are not appealed to, evolutionary and biological forces are invoked.;My aim in this dissertation is threefold. First, I attempt to make a case for the irreducibility of the mind to matter, demonstrating thereby that the reductionism of the human/social sciences is untenable. Second, I detail certain paradigmatic mental processes – rationality and magical thinking – in order to show how these sciences fail to engage with them. Finally, I critique evolutionary theory and decision theory, the foundational props of the human/social sciences.;Tracking this outline, chapters 1 and 2 make the case for irreducibility by examining the phenomenology of mental experience and refuting widespread arguments against mind-brain irreducibility. The guiding thread will be a reading of Plato's Parmenides, with its lesson that cognition falls into two modes (primary and secondary ontology) intimately related to the experiential need for a sense of meaningful being, and bounded by forms or essences as markers of intelligibility.;Chapters 3 and 4 expand upon the phenomenon of magical thinking. Its primary mechanism, participation, underlies many processes now assumed to be neurobiological in nature. Indeed, the origins of materialist thinking are participation-based. What has been put forth as a case for biological reductionism turns out to be explicable in terms of the mind's effort to secure meaningful being in the historically novel conditions of modern life.;Chapters 5 and 6 concern evolutionary theory and decision theory, respectively. Evolutionary theory, I argue, is self-negating, inasmuch as it presupposes a cognitive reliability that it undermines, while decision theory illicitly reduces reason to desire and commodifies decision-making.;The mind remains unreduced, and the human/social sciences will, I hope, be pressured to defend what they have thus far only assumed.