["The mind-body problem". The relation of psychical to physical in 19th century German psychology]

During the 19th century, the question of the relation between the soul and the body was deeply renewed by German psychological studies. The new elaborated conception of the relationship between the psychical and the physical coincides with the appearance of a cognitivist paradigm, in which mental phenomena are considered as entities that may be individualised, isolated, and then correlated with the activity of specific neural substrates. German psychologists were confronted with the problem of the correlation between psychical life and the nervous system (localisation of mental phenomena and nature of this correlative relationship), and propose an extensive analysis on the neural conditions and the emergence of psychical processes.