First Issued:  May 2003 (rev. January 2007)
Reissued:  19 August 2012
Revised (substantive):  n/a

Editor’s Introduction to Time, Soul, Memory monograph

HIS is an electronic monograph (formatted as a PDF), which includes a complete transcription of Robert Hooke’s Lecture explicating the Memory, and how we come by the notion of Time (read at meetings of the Royal Society, May–June 1682).

Hooke’s early exploration of phylogenic memory includes the first scientific description of attention, and as such, deserves to be better known as a classic work in cognitive neuroscience.

Like our own 21st-century neuroscientists, Robert Hooke studied attention and memory as sub-fields of vision, analyzing both in terms of how the brain interprets and assigns meaning to what the eyes see. While there is a tendency among historians to indiscriminately categorize 17th-century researchers in optics, light, and vision as “Cartesian dualists,” this was not true of Hooke (nor, indeed, of many other scientists during the baroque period).

To better make this point, I have written a critical essay for Hooke’s text that contextualizes his lecture and introduces a broad range of historical actors and influences — Albertus Magnus, Aristotle, John Aubrey, Francis Bacon, Roger Bacon, Robert Boyle, Giovanni Domenica Campanella, Hieronymous Cardanus, Margaret and William Cavendish, René Descartes, John Evelyn, Joseph Glanvill, Thomas Hobbes, Juan de Dios Huarte, Elizabeth Joceline, Henry More, Mary More, Katherine Philips, William Shakespeare, Bernardino Telesio, Leonardo da Vinci, Richard Waller, and John Wilkins. The PDF is one of a planned series of 10 documents of this sort (the other 9 of which are in various states of completion).

I have designed the PDF for multimedia reading, so that it can be easily printed and/or read onscreen (with Acrobat bookmarks added in January 2007). Because of my use of hyperlinks within the text, the Acrobat 5 (or later) reader is required.

Time, Soul, Memory (2003; rev. 2007)
64 pages
available as PDF download (sized to fit on either US Letter or A4 paper)

download PDF file (724KB)

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