The Self and its Brain: An Argument for Interactionism.

POPPER, Karl and John C. Eccles.

$2,800.00

Item Number: 101425

Berlin, New York, London: Springer-Verlag, 1977.

First edition of Popper and Eccles’ groundbreaking work. Octavo, original cloth. Association copy, warmly inscribed by Karl Popper in the year of publication on the front free endpaper, “To Lionel, with love from Karl 3rd November 1977.” The recipient, British economist Lionel Charles Robbins, was a prominent member of the economics department at the London School of Economics. He and Popper were colleagues for over twenty years and formed a strong inter-departmental alliance, fortified by their mutual friendship with Friedrich von Hayek. In a letter to Hayek on 20th October 1964, Popper wrote, “I should also mention that, through your closeness to Lionel Robbins, I got to know him; and he is now my stand-by in the School, outside my department. He has been very good to me, and has helped me immensely, in many difficult situations at the school” (Shearmur & Turner, 249f). They also had significant intellectual intersections, with Robbins playing a role in the development of two of Popper’s most important works, The Open Society and The Poverty of Historicism. Popper once referred to Robbins was “the uncrowned king of the LSE” (Dahrendorf, 422) and also once stated: “I loved and admired him, most of all for his moral and personal qualities – and as a teacher” (Howson,  7). Fine in a fine dust jacket. An exceptional association copy, connecting two stalwarts of the London School of Economics.

A groundbreaking collaboration between Karl Popper and Nobel prize-winning neurophysiologist Sir John Eccles, The Self and Its Brain revisits the question of Cartesian dualism in the context of modern advances in the field of neuroscience. Divided into three parts, the first being Popper's outline of the philosophical problem of dualist and even pluralist interactionism on the side side, and materialism and parallelism on the other, the second consisting of Eccles examination of the problem from a neurological perspective, offering radical insights into the interaction between mental events and neurological occurrences in the cerebral cortex, and the final part concluding with a dialogue between the two authors drawn from twelve recorded conservations regarding their respective differences.