Catherine Malabou Quotes on Mind
Catherine Malabou’s The Future of Hegel (L’Avenir de Hegel, 1996), What Should We Do with Our Brain? (2004), and the more recent Morphing Intelligence (2017) give contemporary continental philosophy one of its most distinctive engagements with the philosophical implications of contemporary neuroscience. The central concept of plasticity — drawn from the Hegelian dialectic and the parallel neuroscientific finding that the brain remains structurally modifiable throughout life — supplies the framework within which Malabou rethinks the relations between subjectivity, history, biology, and the philosophical analysis of mind. The framework, drawing on Hegel, Heidegger, Derrida (Malabou’s teacher), and the contemporary neuroscientific literature, shaped contemporary continental philosophy of mind and the broader engagement between Continental philosophy and the cognitive sciences.
Quotes
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Attributed to Catherine Malabou:
“Plasticity is the capacity to give and to receive form, and also to annihilate form.”
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Attributed to Catherine Malabou:
“There is no thinking that does not bear within it the possibility of its own destruction.”
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Attributed to Catherine Malabou:
“What should we do so that consciousness of the brain does not coincide with the spirit of capitalism?”
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Attributed to Catherine Malabou:
“Identity resists its own occurrence to the very extent that it forms it.”