Maurice Pradines

Maurice Pradines (28 March 1874 – 26 March 1958) was a French philosopher. Although his thought was largely original, Pradines may be categorized among the interwar period philosophers of the mind. Also a professor, he developed a philosophy of knowledge in light of problems of sensation.

In the work of Pradines, the problem of sensation is brought back to that of the union of soul and body. A number of classic authors (including René Descartes and Nicolas Malebranche) considered their separation theoretically. Pradines posed the inverse thesis: that of the immanence of the mind to the body. Any primary or developed psychic phenomenon above all belongs to a living being. How could it be, then, that the body could proceed from the mind? Pradines endeavored to show that in order to explain this relationship, it is necessary to constitute a history or a genesis of the life of the mind.

If the mind is something living, then this question must be answered: what is life? Pradines distinguished two modalities of life: needy life and defensive life. They are characterized by their respective movements:

Initially, the person with an egoistic tendency likes himself. But, in order to perdure, he must find means of preserving himself. Consequently, he will have no other choice than to confront himself with the world. This contact with exteriority is capital: it is what will make possible the distinction between soul and mind.

As a tendency first to preservation, as a tension originating toward self and toward others as self, life is love, animation, soul. The soul is the first degree of spiritualization of the living thing, as a tendency towards something.

Consequently, how does the soul constitute mind?

Here sensation intervenes as an urgent point in Pradinesian thought and is distinguished into two categories:

According to Pradines, philosophy never correctly wondered about the problem of sensation. He takes aim at the empirists as those who missed the essential: they held sensation only as the starting point of knowledge. In reality, philosophy almost always sticks to the causes and never to the function. Sensation, in its function, is precisely of primary importance since someone who provokes it in a living body does so only if the provocation interests the body and acquires a meaning for its life. Sensation is the psychic phenomenon by which life gives itself something to understand the reality with which it is confronted. Nevertheless, if it proves to be paramount, it is not the first criterion of the mind.

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