Reviews and Comments

I first discovered Steven Mithen’s The Prehistory of the Mind in 2007 when doing work on the philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. I found Mithen’s interdisciplinary approach as an archaeologist refreshing and new.

Revisiting the book after 15 years (and 26 years after it was originally published) I noticed that some of what we know about prehistoric humans has seen significant advancement and change in recent years and the new discoveries we have made in archaeology, psychology, and linguistics needs to be taken into account when reading this book decades later.

Additionally, Mithen himself has continued to evolve his thinking on this matter in such books as The Singing Neanderthals (where he emphasizes music as a fundamental component of human cognition).

All that being said, I think the book is still useful in its organization, writing, and large number of diagrams and illustrations that liven up and inform the ideas presented. This book is clearly a product of mid-90s thinking, but its interdisciplinary nature and the useful ideas and illustrations are still useful for the reader to ponder and re-evaluate when consulting more recent and modern sources. Even as my research on this continues to grow beyond what is presented in this book, I plan to continue to look back on this book simply due to its scope, imagination, and clearly presented concepts.

This book came out in 2006 and I picked it up in 2007 as I was completing my undergraduate work. This was one of the books that made me realize that when I entered graduate school to begin work in phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty (M-P) would have to be one of my main sources.

As an undergraduate, I had mostly been exposed to Analytic Philosophy, and thus I had a lot of catching up to do to acquire an understanding of phenomenology as a field and the basic ideas of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger’s philosophy (among others). This book provides a lot of background and as a result, nicely introduces these topics to the reader.

There is a chapter on perception (chapter 2) that provides a good overview of empiricism and intellectualism as two ways to analyze how we perceive the world. The contrast of these ideas gives you the grounding on this topic and the Merleau-Pontian critique of these positions.

The embodiment chapter (chapter 3) looks at the objective ‘view from nowhere’ approach that science and some philosophy have tried to take on how we can know something. M-P has a problem with this approach – or, perhaps better, finds there is a limitation to this perspective – and this chapter develops that idea.

The book goes on to pick apart different views on behavior (chapter 4), Heideggerian and Sartrean views on Being Human (chapter 5), the temporal aspect of existence – that is how we experience time (chapter 6), and finally bringing in society and culture (chapter 7), and art (chapter 8). When you have completed the book you should have a decent grounding of the philosophical and scientific ideas M-P was responding to and what he intended to achieve with his alternative approach.

The book helped me as an undergraduate transition to a new type of philosophical thinking (i.e. moving from the Analytic to Continental perspective, what differences and commonalities can be found between them, and how the conversation changes when you make that shift), as well as gain a new perspective on science and its approach to understanding the world. Of course, it also helps you understand M-P! Now, years after I completed my Ph.D. and having specialized in this area, I enjoyed reading through the clear explanation of these ideas which are now a part of my thinking and worldview. It is nice when you can find an author that can clearly present ideas to a broad audience, Eric Matthews has achieved this.

I recommend this book to those interested in M-P and phenomenology.