Please go to LinkedIn link to comment/respond and see the von Domarus dissertation with McCullock intro

A key piece of cybernetics pre-history from the early 1930s.

“I know of no other text that so clearly sets forth the notions needed for an understanding of psychology, psychiatry and finite automata.” – McCulloch

A decade before writing the first artificial neural network paper with Walter Pitts (“A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity”, 1943), Warren McCulloch helped his friend and colleague finish and translate a dissertation in 1932 which McCulloch later noted, “… without which I would never have come to a definition of thinking that fits cybernetics.”

Eilhard von Domarus’ thesis, “The Logical Structure of Mind: An Inquiry into the Philosophical Foundation of Psychology & Psychiatry” (1934) doesn’t get the attention many other early manuscripts do wrt influencing machine intelligence. I’ve seen it only occasionally mentioned and not really covered in detail over the last several years as I have been diving into this history.

Having recently found gotten this republication of it with “belated introduction” by McCulloch (entitled “Lekton” which refers to “sense of meaning” in syllogistic logic), I think it should be read and shared more widely with those interested in these topics. It is a fun read.

Enjoy!

(h/t to the Duquesne library staff member who tracked this down for me on the NASA Technical Reports Server)

I’ll be touching on this and much more history (and future) in my upcoming talk, “Cybernetics, Phenomenology & Teleology” on Dec 4th at Duquesne University’s Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center, 4-6pm.