Naturalization of the Soul

Naturalization of the Soul charts the development of the concepts of soul and self in Western thought, from Plato to the present. It fills an important gap in intellectual history by being the first book to emphasize the enormous intellectual transformation in the eighteenth century, when the religious soul was replaced first by a philosophical self and then by a scientific mind. The authors show that many supposedly contemporary theories of the self were actually discussed in the eighteenth century, and recognize the status of William Hazlitt as one of the most important theorists of the British Enlightenment.