Death of the Soul: From Descartes to the Computer

'''Barrett, William. Death of the Soul: From Descartes to the Computer.''' Garden City, NY: Anchor-Doubleday, 1986.

The author of Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (1958) traces "the origins of modernism's persistent dualisms" back to R. Descartes's "vision of nature as a soulless machine and the human mind as a transcendent entity empowered to subjugate it."[ WB opposes "physicalism, behaviorism, and the more immodest claims" for AI, rejecting the computer as a "metaphor for the mind." Discussed by Rob Latham in his editorial in FR #97, 9.11 (Dec. 1986): 29, our source for this citation and whom we quote.