ABSTRACT
This chapter catalogues literary-philosophical investigations into mind and brain in eighteenth-century studies. Beginning with philosophies of dualism, empiricism, and materialism, which presumed consciousness was in some way embodied, or tied to physical feeling, the chapter proceeds to a discussion of scholarship on sympathy, judgment, and modes of inter-relational thinking that influenced the advent of cognitive literary studies. It concludes with literary examples of socially distributed cognition that unsettle our standard association of “Enlightenment” with “empiricism.” In this, the essay calls for a broader, more diversified, approach to epistemology in eighteenth-century studies that accounts for how subjective difference impacts empirical observations.
