Sem VALE général: 06/02/2024, Michael Jonik, « Instinctive Faculties: Impulse, sensation and intuition in Benjamin Rush »

Abstract: Benjamin Rush (1746-1813), perhaps best known as a Philadelphia physician, psychiatrist and statesman, develops an idiosyncratic psychology based on how physical causes affect the mental faculties. In this paper, I situate Rush’s emergent science of the mind within the early US Republic’s philosophical community and its broader milieu of transatlantic thinkers: Franklin and Jefferson, David Hartley, and Joseph Priestley, Thomas Reid and Scottish Common Sense Philosophy, or Erasmus Darwin, but also to lesser known figures such as Thomas Cooper or Benjamin Smith Barton, and French physicians such as François-Joseph-Victor Broussais and Xavier Bichat.  My focus, however, is on how Rush modifies associationist psychology (metaphysically closest to Hartley and Priestley) to understand what he calls the “instinctive faculties” of impulse, sensation and intuition in terms of both human and animal psychologies. I will explore this primarily in terms of his Lectures on the Mind, but also in his Three Lectures Upon Animal Life and Diseases of the Mind. I will historically reconstruct how Rush’s philosophy of medicine, psychiatry, and the mind responded to Scottish Common Sense philosophy (including exchanges with figures at the University of Edinburgh), and use this reconstruction as a basis for specific conceptual interventions around, for example, questions of instinct and sensation. This research will be based on archival work at the American Philosophical Society in relation to Rush’s place in medical history; Smith Barton’s work on animal cognition; material on Darwin, Priestley and Wister; and the Native American and Indigenous Collections.