About the author: W. M. Davies has doctorates from The Flinders University of South Australia and The University of Adelaide. He is the author of Experience and Content: Consequences of a Continuum Theory (Ashgate, 1996), and (with K. H. Sievers) The Nature of Knowing (Ibid Press, forthcoming). He has published papers and reviews in The Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Canadian Philosophical Review, Australian Quarterly, English Australia Journal and elsewhere. His interest in the work of Sir William Mitchell began in 1998. For his work on this important, but forgotten, figure, he was awarded an Australia Research Council grant, several ArtsSA grants and The H. J. Allen Prize in Philosophy from the University of Adelaide. He is currently a Lecturer in the Economics and Commerce Faculty at The University of Melbourne. He has been a Visiting Scholar in Philosophy at Flinders University since 1996.
2003 0-7734-6733-5 This study argues that Mitchell’s work is surprisingly relevant to current concerns among cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind. He wrote on issues that are only today being discussed by philosophers and psychologists under the auspices of ‘cognitive science.’ His major work Structure and Growth of the Mind (MacMillan, 1907) is a major treatise on philosophical psychology. Most worthy of note, Mitchell seems to have anticipated the claims of the ‘new mysterians’ and their emphasis on subjective experience. He also seemed to have prefigured themes associated with perceptual plasticity, developmental accounts of modularity, and connectionism.