The discovery of the mind

What Hacker News says

1. begemotzDec 2025
   if you are interested in such theories, you might also enjoy Bruno Snell's The Discovery of the Mind.
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2. TelemakhosAug 2026
   Jaynes relies on some earlier work that's been invalidated, like Bruno Snell's idea of archaic Greeks lacking a concept of an integrated body because they painted what appear to be individual limbs on vases from the geometric period. Snell wrote _The Discovery of the Mind_ in 1946. Since then archaeology has found amazing art like the Pylos Combat Agate from before the geometric period, demonstrating lifelike, realistic bodies rather than assemblages of limbs: the aesthetic of the geometric period was a choice, not evidence of a different kind of consciousness lacking a sense of self.
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3. xhevahirOct 2023
   Part of why a lot of readers have found this literature to be inexhaustible is, I think, its surprising combination of familiarity (since it's had so much influence on subsequent Western culture) and foreignness. For example, consider the career of the term "hero," which seems to have meant something like a warrior-aristocrat in Homer, and later, in Greek tragedy, takes on the moral grandeur that we meet with in characters like Oedipus, but somehow also is used to describe the boxer Kleomedes, who massacred dozens of kids because he was upset over losing a match.

   When I first started reading classical literature I was struck by an idea I found in Bruno Snell's The Discovery of the Mind, that Homer, apart from having no words corresponding to our "mind" or "soul," didn't even refer to the body as a single whole--more as a collection of limbs. The article here talks about this: https://intertheory.org/torrente.htm .

   None of this makes ancient literature easier to read, though, unfortunately.

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4. nemoApr 2015
   I wonder if he read Bruno Snell's "The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought." A lot of what's described in the article about the Greeks and the Iliad/Odyssey is akin to Snell's approach. Though Snell didn't use the idea of the bicameral mind he traced the origins of conscious thought through the Greeks very similarly.
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