Mind and society

Bart Landheer

pp. 181-199

in: Mario Bunge, Matter and mind, Berlin, Springer, 2010

Abstract

Immanuel Kant and the Baron Thiry d"Holbach were born in Germany just one year apart at the start of the Enlightenment. If Kant had lived in sparkling Paris rather than in Königsberg, and d"Holbach had stayed in dark Edsheim, his native town, they might have exchanged philosophies: Kant might have become the great materialist and realist philosopher of the century, and d"Holbach his idealist counterpart. Of course, the previous sentence is a counterfactual, and as such untestable, and therefore neither true nor false. But it is not a ludicrous fantasy, because we know that nurture and opportunity are just as important as nature.