Doubts about other minds and the science of physiognomics

Abstract

Most ancient philosophers found access to the mental states of people other than the perceiver less problematic than the moderns did. But there is evidence, however scarce, that some groups of ancient sceptics raised questions which I shall call, for brevity's sake, doubts about other minds.

Dream Interpretation, Physiognomy, Body Divination

“…Elizabeth Evans has devoted many articles to this art, and her main synthesis (Evans 1969) is a general presentation of physiognomic sources and methods. Philosophical studies of these methods have been proposed by Armstrong 1958, Manetti 1993, Tsouna 1998, and Boys-Stones 2007 Corporeal divination was long neglected by scholars as a degenerated subgroup of physiognomy (Bouché-Leclerq 1879). A new interest developed since a decade.…”

Blockheads, roundheads, pointy heads: Intellectual disability and the brain before modern medicine

“…In the sixteenth century, it was an archetype of "useful" humanist knowledge, a practical ethical skill for civic leaders that also provided social integration and advancement for the intellectuals who taught it. Countless physiognomic manuals, often printed in tabular form (the equivalent of a modern manager's bullet points), supplied "short-cuts to certainty" about people in public life (Tsounas, 1998). This "pure" physiognomics drew inferences from head size and shape to human character, morals, and behavior, though unlike its medical variant, it did not discuss events inside the brain, nor did it describe causes in the modern biological sense.…”

“…In Renaissance texts, mental or behavioral phenomena and bodily ones such as head shape belong on the same side of the signifier/signified divide: they signify, alike, an underlying constitutional (im)balance. Physiognomists did not necessarily take the sign to be something physical and the signified something mental, or vice versa (Tsounas, 1998).…”