著者

川名 雄一郎 KAWANA Yuichiro

出版者

名古屋大学大学院経済学研究科

雑誌

経済科学 (ISSN:00229725)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.67, no.3, pp.41-52, 2020-03

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The remarkable flourishing of phrenology, a morphological study of brain initially conceived by a German neuroanatomist, Franz Joseph Gall in the 1790s, became the subject of much scholarly attention in early nineteenth-century Britain, and especially in Edinburgh, where the dispute about phrenology commenced with Thomas Brown's attack on Gall which appeared as early as 1803, and was followed by a number of other criticisms, including John Gordon's severe critique of Johann Gaspar Spurzheim in 1815, Francis Jeffrey's scathing article on George Combe's work in 1826, and William Hamilton's series of criticisms in the 1820s levelled against anatomical knowledge on which phrenology was founded. This article examines the nature of these anti-phrenological arguments, pointing out the intellectual milieu of Edinburgh at the turn of the nineteenth century, in which two learning and teaching traditions, namely mental philosophy (common sense philosophy originated in the works of Thomas Reid and developed by Dugald Stewart and Thomas Brown) and anatomy (thanks to the Monro family and those involved in the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh), were established.