ABSTRACT
On the 15 February, 1923, the Société Française de Philosophie met to discuss Lévy-Bruhl's La mentalité primitive, published the previous year. The participants were there to do battle regarding a controversy that had arisen from Lévy-Bruhl's book. This revolved around the following questions: is the mind plastic or fixed? Is it universal or different in different societies? Are its faculties given once and for all or subject to change? His book challenged philosophy in at least two ways. First, it claimed the study of the mind—which traditionally was the domain of philosophy—for ethnology, which was still a discipline in the making. Second, it attacked the Cartesian conception of a universal mind.
