Fernando Vidal's trailblazing text on the origins of psychology traces the development of the discipline from its appearance in the late sixteenth century to its redefinition at the end of the seventeenth and its emergence as an institutionalized field in the eighteenth. Originally published in 2011, The Sciences of the Soul continues to be of wide importance in the history and philosophy of psychology, the history of the human sciences more generally, and in the social and intellectual history of eighteenth-century Europe.

Fernando Vidalis research professor at the ICREA (Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies) and professor at the Medical Anthropology Research Center at Rovira i Virgili University in Spain. His most recent book, co-authored with Francisco Ortega, is Being Brains: Making the Cerebral Subject. Saskia Brown has translated many books from French, including Homo Juridicus: On the Anthropological Function of the Law by Alain Supiot