In this incisive commentary, Mitchell Aboulafia examines the relevance of the American pragmatist philosopher George Herbert Mead to current debates on pluralism, universalism, and the fostering of a democratic temper. Addressing the relationship between Mead's notions of self and society and those of important continental thinkers, The Cosmopolitan Self demonstrates that Mead's ideas not only speak to resolving the tension between universalism and pluralism, they do so in a manner that challenges and advances the positions of these continental theoreticians.
Aboulafia examines how Mead's insights illuminate Hannah Arendt's reading of Immanual Kant's third Critique and Jürgen Habermas's understanding of the relationship among communicative action, universality, and individuation. Teasing out strands of agreement and disagreement among Mead and these theorists on topics such as impartiality and good judgment, Aboulafia develops a conception of universalism that is compatible with contemporary notions of pluralism. He also addresses the serious challenge presented to Mead's approach to pluralism by Emmanuel Levinas, who holds that true pluralism, presupposing an irreducible individualism, is fundamentally irreconcilable with universalism.
The Cosmopolitan Self offers a model of the democratically inclined individual who embodies both a capacity to establish common ground with others and a sensitivity to their uniqueness. This important volume appreciably advances the dialogue between continental thought and classical American philosophy.
If philosophy has any business in the world, it is the clarification of our thinking and the clearing away of ideas that cloud the mind. In this book, one of the world's preeminent philosophers takes issue with an idea that has found an all-too-prominent place in popular culture and philosophical thought: the idea that while factual claims can be rationally established or refuted, claims about value are wholly subjective, not capable of being rationally argued for or against. Although it is on occasion important and useful to distinguish between factual claims and value judgments, the distinction becomes, Hilary Putnam argues, positively harmful when identified with a dichotomy between the objective and the purely "subjective."
Putnam explores the arguments that led so much of the analytic philosophy of language, metaphysics, and epistemology to become openly hostile to the idea that talk of value and human flourishing can be right or wrong, rational or irrational; and by which, following philosophy, social sciences such as economics have fallen victim to the bankrupt metaphysics of Logical Positivism. Tracing the problem back to Hume's conception of a "matter of fact" as well as to Kant's distinction between "analytic" and "synthetic" judgments, Putnam identifies a path forward in the work of Amartya Sen. Lively, concise, and wise, his book prepares the way for a renewed mutual fruition of philosophy and the social sciences.
The philosopher and novelist Ayn Rand (1905–1982) is a cultural phenomenon. Her books have sold more than twenty-eight million copies, and countless individuals speak of her writings as having significantly influenced their lives. Despite her popularity, Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism has received little serious attention from academic philosophers.
Concepts and Their Role in Knowledge offers scholarly analysis of key elements of Ayn Rand’s radically new approach to epistemology. The four essays, by contributors intimately familiar with this area of her work, discuss Rand’s theory of concepts—including its new account of abstraction and essence—and its central role in her epistemology; how that view leads to a distinctive conception of the justification of knowledge; her realist account of perceptual awareness and its role in the acquisition of knowledge; and finally, the implications of that theory for understanding the growth of scientific knowledge. The volume concludes with critical commentary on the essays by distinguished philosophers with differing philosophical viewpoints and the author’s responses to those commentaries.
This is the second book published in Ayn Rand Society Philosophical Studies, which was developed in conjunction with the Ayn Rand Society to offer a fuller scholarly understanding of this highly original and influential thinker. The Ayn Rand Society, an affiliated group of the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division, seeks to foster scholarly study by philosophers of the philosophical thought and writings of Ayn Rand.
Between the years 1643 and 1649, Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia (1618–80) and René Descartes (1596–1650) exchanged fifty-eight letters—thirty-two from Descartes and twenty-six from Elisabeth. Their correspondence contains the only known extant philosophical writings by Elisabeth, revealing her mastery of metaphysics, analytic geometry, and moral philosophy, as well as her keen interest in natural philosophy. The letters are essential reading for anyone interested in Descartes’s philosophy, in particular his account of the human being as a union of mind and body, as well as his ethics. They also provide a unique insight into the character of their authors and the way ideas develop through intellectual collaboration.
Philosophers have long been familiar with Descartes’s side of the correspondence. Now Elisabeth’s letters—never before available in translation in their entirety—emerge this volume, adding much-needed context and depth both to Descartes’s ideas and the legacy of the princess. Lisa Shapiro’s annotated edition—which also includes Elisabeth’s correspondence with the Quakers William Penn and Robert Barclay—will be heralded by students of philosophy, feminist theorists, and historians of the early modern period.
From romanticism through postmodernism, the imagination has become an indispensable reference point for thinking about the self, culture, philosophy, and politics. How has imagination so thoroughly influenced our understanding of experience and its possibilities? In a bold reinterpretation of a crucial development in modern European intellectual history, Matthew W. Maguire uncovers a history of French thought that casts the imagination as a dominant faculty in our experience of the world.
Pascal, turning Augustinianism inside out, radically expanded the powers of imagination implicit in the work of Montaigne and Descartes, and made imagination the determinative faculty of everything from meaning and beauty to political legitimacy and happiness. Maguire traces the ways that others, including Montesquieu and Voltaire, developed and assigned limits to this exalted imagination. But it is above all Rousseau's diverse writings that engage with an expansive imagination. And in the writings of Rousseau's careful readers, particularly Alexis de Tocqueville, imagination is increasingly understood as the medium for an ineffable human freedom against the constrictive power of a new order in politics and culture.
Original and thought-provoking, The Conversion of Imagination will interest a range of readers across intellectual history, political theory, literary and cultural studies, and the history of religious thought.
The correspondence between Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, which appears here for the first time in its entirety in English translation, must rank among the most significant to have come down to us from that notable age of barbarism, the twentieth century. Benjamin and Adorno formed a uniquely powerful pair. Benjamin, riddle-like in his personality and given to tactical evasion, and Adorno, full of his own importance, alternately support and compete with each other throughout the correspondence, until its imminent tragic end becomes apparent to both writers. Each had met his match, and happily, in the other. This book is the story of an elective affinity. Adorno was the only person who managed to sustain an intimate intellectual relationship with Benjamin for nearly twenty years. No one else, not even Gershom Scholem, coaxed so much out of Benjamin.
The more than one hundred letters in this book will allow readers to trace the developing character of Benjamin's and Adorno's attitudes toward each other and toward their many friends. When this book appeared in German, it caused a sensation because it includes passages previously excised from other German editions of the letters--passages in which the two friends celebrate their own intimacy with frank remarks about other people. Ideas presented elliptically in the theoretical writings are set forth here with much greater clarity. Not least, the letters provide material crucial for understanding the genesis of Benjamin's Arcades Project.
Martin Buber’s work suggests that real life begins with two individuals engaged in dialogue, not just taking care of one’s own needs as described in social Darwinism.
Arnett argues that the end of the age of abundance demands that we give up the communicative strategies of the past and seek to work together in the midst of limited resources and an uncertain future. Today’s situation calls for an unwavering commitment to Buber’s “narrow ridge” concern for both self and community.
Arnett illustrates the narrow ridge definition of interpersonal communication with rich examples. His vignettes demonstrate effective and ineffective approaches to human community. An effective approach, he makes clear, incorporates not only openness to others’ points of view but also a willingness to be persuaded.
The publication of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s magnum opus Truth and Method in 1960 marked the arrival of philosophical hermeneutics as a dominant force in philosophy and the humanities as a whole. Consequences of Hermeneutics celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of one of the most important philosophical works of the twentieth century with essays by most of the leading figures in contemporary hermeneutic theory, including Gianni Vattimo and Jean Grondin.
These essays examine the achievements of hermeneutics as well as its current status and prospects for the future. Gadamer’s text provides an important focus, but the ambition of these critical reappraisals extends to hermeneutics more broadly and to a range of other thinkers, such as Heidegger, Ricoeur, Derrida, and Rorty. Forcefully demonstrating the continuing relevance and power of hermeneutics, Consequences of Hermeneutics is a fitting tribute to Gadamer and the legacy of his thought.
In the spring of 1929, Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer met for a public conversation in Davos, Switzerland. They were arguably the most important thinkers in Europe, and their exchange touched upon the most urgent questions in the history of philosophy: What is human finitude? What is objectivity? What is culture? What is truth?
Over the last eighty years the Davos encounter has acquired an allegorical significance, as if it marked an ultimate and irreparable rupture in twentieth-century Continental thought. Here, in a reconstruction at once historical and philosophical, Peter Gordon reexamines the conversation, its origins and its aftermath, resuscitating an event that has become entombed in its own mythology. Through a close and painstaking analysis, Gordon dissects the exchange itself to reveal that it was at core a philosophical disagreement over what it means to be human.
But Gordon also shows how the life and work of these two philosophers remained closely intertwined. Their disagreement can be understood only if we appreciate their common point of departure as thinkers of the German interwar crisis, an era of rebellion that touched all of the major philosophical movements of the day—life-philosophy, philosophical anthropology, neo-Kantianism, phenomenology, and existentialism. As Gordon explains, the Davos debate would continue to both inspire and provoke well after the two men had gone their separate ways. It remains, even today, a touchstone of philosophical memory.
This clear, riveting book will be of great interest not only to philosophers and to historians of philosophy but also to anyone interested in the great intellectual ferment of Europe’s interwar years.
In The Crisis of Meaning and the Life-World, Ľubica Učník examines the existential conflict that formed the focus of Edmund Husserl’s final work, which she argues is very much with us today: how to reconcile scientific rationality with the meaning of human existence. To investigate this conundrum, she places Husserl in dialogue with three of his most important successors: Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, and Jan Patočka.
For Husserl, 1930s Europe was characterized by a growing irrationalism that threatened to undermine its legacy of rational inquiry. Technological advancement in the sciences, Husserl argued, had led science to forget its own foundations in the primary “life-world”: the world of lived experience. Renewing Husserl’s concerns in today’s context, Učník first provides an original and compelling reading of his oeuvre through the lens of the formalization of the sciences, then traces the unfolding of this problem through the work of Heidegger, Arendt, and Patočka.
Although many scholars have written on Arendt, none until now has connected her philosophical thought with that of Czech phenomenologist Jan Patočka. Učník provides invaluable access to the work of the latter, who remains understudied in the English language. She shows that together, these four thinkers offer new challenges to the way we approach key issues confronting us today, providing us with ways to reconsider truth, freedom, and human responsibility in the face of the postmodern critique of metanarratives and a growing philosophical interest in new forms of materialism.
A dual biography crafted around the famous encounter between the French philosopher who wrote about power and the Russian empress who wielded it with great aplomb.
In October 1773, after a grueling trek from Paris, the aged and ailing Denis Diderot stumbled from a carriage in wintery St. Petersburg. The century’s most subversive thinker, Diderot arrived as the guest of its most ambitious and admired ruler, Empress Catherine of Russia. What followed was unprecedented: more than forty private meetings, stretching over nearly four months, between these two extraordinary figures. Diderot had come from Paris in order to guide—or so he thought—the woman who had become the continent’s last great hope for an enlightened ruler. But as it soon became clear, Catherine had a very different understanding not just of her role but of his as well. Philosophers, she claimed, had the luxury of writing on unfeeling paper. Rulers had the task of writing on human skin, sensitive to the slightest touch.
Diderot and Catherine’s series of meetings, held in her private chambers at the Hermitage, captured the imagination of their contemporaries. While heads of state like Frederick of Prussia feared the consequences of these conversations, intellectuals like Voltaire hoped they would further the goals of the Enlightenment.
In Catherine & Diderot, Robert Zaretsky traces the lives of these two remarkable figures, inviting us to reflect on the fraught relationship between politics and philosophy, and between a man of thought and a woman of action.
N. G. Chernyshevskii (1828-1889), a pivotal figure in the protest movement that developed in Russia after the Crimean War, was esteemed by both Marx and Lenin. Alienated from Russia's traditional values, institutions, and power structure, he nevertheless rejected the economic doctrines and political goals of the more advanced nations of his day, seeing in the operation of laissez-faire economics a form of exploitation as vicious as serfdom, and in political liberalism a hypocritical attempt to divorce the concept of legal rights from the more basic issue of material security, without which freedom is meaningless.
He adopted instead an admixture of liberal and socialist theory, which could be roughly characterized as utopian socialist, but which simultaneously was part of a larger populist tradition. His radicalism attached itself to no particular political form, but was sustained by a belief that the inadequacies of society could be corrected only by its complete overhaul, which in turn could be accomplished only by the destruction of traditional autocratic power. This blend of ideas ultimately provided the basis for those radicals seeking to take advantage of Russia's economic backwardness by eliminating the phase of capitalism and proceeding directly to a socialist form of organization.
By contributing to the radical orientation of the protest movement, Chernyshevskii encouraged a polarization of views in Russian public opinion, which led to the abandonment of moderate reforms, to governmental reaction, and to his own tragic imprisonment and exile to Siberia. But through his diverse writings he had succeeded as no other writer before him in popularizing the idea of revolution.
This first thorough treatment of Chernyshevskii in English constitutes both a biography and a presentation of his views on philosophy, aesthetics and literary criticism, economics and social relations, politics and revolution.
“A history of philosophy in twelve thinkers…The whole performance combines polyglot philological rigor with supple intellectual sympathy, and it is all presented…in a spirit of fun…This bracing and approachable book [shows] that there is life in philosophy yet.”
—Times Literary Supplement
“Exceptionally engaging…Geuss has a remarkable knack for putting even familiar thinkers in a new light.”
—Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
“Geuss is something like the consummate teacher, his analyses navigable and crystal, his guidance on point.”
—Doug Phillips, Key Reporter
Raymond Geuss explores the ideas of twelve philosophers who broke dramatically with prevailing wisdom, from Socrates and Plato in the ancient world to Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Adorno. The result is a striking account of some of the most innovative thinkers in Western history and an indirect manifesto for how to pursue philosophy today. Geuss cautions that philosophers’ attempts to break from convention do not necessarily make the world a better place. Montaigne’s ideas may have been benign, but the fate of those of Hobbes, Hegel, and Nietzsche has been more varied. Yet in the act of provoking people to think differently, philosophers remind us that we are not fated to live within the systems of thought we inherit.
This novel approach to epistemological discourse explains the complex but crucial role that systematization plays-not just for the organization of what we know, but also for its validation. Cognitive Harmony argues for a new conception of the process philosophers generally call induction.
Relying on the root definition of harmony, a coherent unification of component parts (systemic integrity) in such a way that the final object can successfully accomplish what it was meant to do (evaluative positivity), Rescher discusses the role of harmony in cognitive contexts, the history of cognitive harmony, and the various features it has in producing human knowledge. The book ends on the issue of philosophy and the sort of harmony required of philosophical systems.
Nicholas Rescher tackles the major questions of philosophical inquiry, pondering the nature of truth and existence. In the authoritative voice and calculated manner that we’ve come to expect from this distinguished philosopher, Rescher argues that the development of knowledge is a practice, pursued by humans because we have a need for its products. This pragmatic approach satisfies our innate urge as humans to make sense of our surroundings.
Taking his discussion down to the level of particular details, and addressing such topics as inductive validation, hypostatization fallacies, and counterfactual reasoning, Rescher abandons abstract generalities in favor of concrete specifics. For example, philosophers usually insist that to reason logically from a counterfactual, we must imagine a possible world in which the statement is fact. But Rescher argues that there’s no need to attempt to accept the facts of a world outside our cognition in order to reason from them. He shows us how we can use our own natural system of prioritizing, our own understanding of the fundamental, to resolve the inconsistencies in such statements as, “If the Eiffel Tower were in Manhattan, then it would be in New York State.”
In using dozens of real-world examples such as these, and in arguing in his characteristically succinct style, Rescher casts light on a wide variety of concrete issues in the classical theory of knowledge, and reassures us along the way that the inherent limitations on our knowledge are no cause for distress. In pragmatic theory and inquiry, we must accept that the best we can do is good enough, because we only have a certain (albeit large) set of tools and conceptualizations available to us.
A unique synthesis, this endeavor into pragmatic epistemology will be of interest to scholars and students of philosophy and cognitive science.
Max Scheler’s Cognition and Work (Erkenntnis und Arbeit) first appeared in German in 1926, just two years before his death. The first part of the book offers one of the earliest critical analyses of American pragmatism, an analysis that would come to have a significant impact on the reception of pragmatism in Germany and western Europe. The second part of the work contains Scheler’s phenomenological account of perception and the experience of reality, an account that is as original as both Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenologies of perception. Scheler aims to show that the modern mechanistic view of nature fails to account for the dynamic relation that not only the human being but all living beings have to the environment they inhabit.
Available in English translation for the first time, Cognition and Work pushes the boundaries of phenomenology as it is traditionally understood and offers insight into Scheler’s distinct metaphysics. This book is essential reading for those interested in phenomenology, pragmatism, perception, and living beings in their relation to the natural world.
Everyone has mistaken one thing for another, such as a stranger for an acquaintance. A person who has mistaken two things, Joseph L. Camp argues, even on a massive scale, is still capable of logical thought. In order to make that idea precise, one needs a logic of confused thought that is blind to the distinction between the objects that have been confused. Confused thought and language cannot be characterized as true or false even though reasoning conducted in such language can be classified as valid or invalid.
To the extent that philosophers have addressed this issue at all, they take it for granted that confusion is a kind of ambiguity. Camp rejects this notion; his fundamental claim is that confusion is not a mental state. To attribute confusion to someone is to take up a paternalistic stance in evaluating his reasoning. Camp proposes a novel characterization of confusion, and then demonstrates its fruitfulness with several applications in the history of philosophy and the history of science.
Certainty was first published in 1981. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
Philosophers have traditionally used two strategies to refute the sceptical that empirical knowledge is not possible because our beliefs cannot be adequately justified. One strategy rejects the sceptics' position because it conflicts with the supposedly obvious claim that we do have knowledge. The other defends an analysis of knowledge limited to a weak set of necessary and sufficient conditions of knowledge or limited to a set of conditions specifically designed to be immune to sceptical attack.
In Certainty: A Refutation of Scepticism, Peter D. Klein uses a third strategy. He argues that scepticism can be refuted even if it is granted to the sceptics that knowledge entails absolute certainty. The argument for his thesis has two parts. He identifies the various types of scepticism and shows that the arguments for them depend upon epistemic principles which, when examined carefully, are unable to support the sceptical conclusions. Klein then argues — contrary to the views of most nonsceptics—that knowledge entails certainty and that some empirical beliefs are absolutely certain. In the course of his argument Klein develops and defends an account of justification, knowledge, and certainty. The result is a theory of knowledge based upon a model of justification designed to be acceptable to sceptics, nonsceptics, foundationalists, and coherentists.This study takes up the challenge presented to philosophy in a dramatic and urgent way by contemporary medicine: the phenomenon of human life. Initiated by a critical appreciation of the work of Hans Jonas, who poses that issue as well, the inquiry is brought to focus on the phenomenon of embodiment, using relevant medical writing to help elicit its concrete dimensions.
The explication of embodiment, aided by critical studies and inquiries into medical phenomena (autism, brain injury, terminal illness) make possible the development of the author’s original phenomenological theory of self, and its concrete relationships with the other self. This study attempts not only to show connections among the works of a number of thinkers in terms of central problems, but to demonstrate the mutual relevance of medicine and philosophy through concrete illustrations and analysis.
Alexandre Kojève (1902–1968) is most widely known in America for his provocative assertion that history is at its end, that is, its completion. In the “practical” sense, this means that the process of historical development can at last be seen (if from a distance) as the realization of the Marxist “universal and homogeneous state.” However, Kojève claimed as well that the history of philosophical thinking had also reached its goal in the transformation of philosophy, as the “love of wisdom” (or the unsatisfied quest for comprehensive knowledge), into that very Wisdom itself and had done so in the most essential respects in the philosophy of Hegel.
The Concept, Time, and Discourse is the first volume of Kojève’s magnum opus, which was to have given an exposition of the (Hegelian) System of Knowledge and of which five volumes were written before his death. It contains, along with a preliminary discussion of the need for an updating of the Hegelian system, the first two of three introductions to the exposition of that system: a First Introduction of the Concept (the integrated totality of what is comprehensible, which is the final object of philosophic inquiry) and a Second Introduction concerning Time, both introductions leading to the (Hegelian) identification of the Concept with Time, an identification which alone takes adequate account of the fact that Philosophy is necessarily discursive (that it must actualize the requirements and essential structure of Discourse).
The present volume offers Kojève’s fullest statement of his Ontology. It includes a critical discussion of the traditional oppositions of the “general” to the “particular” and of the “abstract” to the “concrete” and an analysis of the act of “generalizing abstraction,” which detaches Essence from the Existence of Things. Kojève then discusses the three great figures in the three-stage development of philosophy into wisdom: Parmenides, Plato, and Hegel. Parmenides’ monadic account of Being (= Eternity) rendered it ineffable, thereby reducing philosophy to (non-philosophic) silence; Plato’s dyadic account of Being (as eternal) was intended to make Being a possible subject of discourse but failed to reflect adequately the triadic (and temporally developing) structure which Plato himself discerned in Discourse. Finally, Hegel’s triadic account of Being as itself “dialectical” achieved the final identification of the Concept with Time.
This is a first-time, meticulous translation of Kojève’s late, unfinished magnum opus, the “updating” of the Hegelian System of Knowledge, meaning its modification so as to make it comprehensible to the author himself and to his contemporaries. It is, however, much more than an exposition of its central terms, The Concept and Time and their identity. It is an acute, original review of the major themes of the West’s philosophical tradition; it is, in fact, a philosophical education in itself. Robert Williamson has done this tradition a great service by making Kojève’s work accessible to Americans. – Eva Brann, Dean Emerita and Senior Faculty, St. John’s College, Annapolis, Maryland
We now recognize Alexandre Kojève as one of the central figures of 20th century European philosophy. A translation of his The Concept, Time, and Discourse will enable English speaking readers to have a fuller understanding of his remarkably ambitious intellectual project. – Michael S. Roth, President, Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut.
Robert B. Williamson is Tutor Emeritus at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, where he continues to teach. He is co-author, with Alfred Mollin, of An Introduction to Ancient Greek (University Press of America) and the author of articles on Plato’s philosophy and Einstein’s early work on relativity theory.
James H. Nichols, Jr. is Professor of Government and Dr. Jules L. Whitehill Professor of Humanism and Ethics at Claremont McKenna College, where he teaches political philosophy. Among his publications are Epicurean Political Philosophy: The De rerum natura of Lucretius, translations with interpretations of Plato’s Gorgias and Phaedrus, and most recently Alexandre Kojève: Wisdom at the End of History.
The psychology of thinking has traditionally been in the business of making comparisons between different groups of people. On the whole, these comparisons have rendered a substantial body of knowledge; but all too often, they have suffered the pitfalls of faulty organizational logic and unfounded or invidious conclusions. In this extraordinarily clear and critical introduction, Michael Cole and Barbara Means out the problems involved in comparing how people think. They show, for example, how variables confounded with the constitution of two groups can lead to the wrong interpretation of group differences. More subtly, they demonstrate how cognitive differences between groups can destroy the equivalence of the tests used to make comparisons. They also discuss the unfortunate way that observed differences between groups have led to prejudicial interpretations in which mental differences are transformed into mental deficits.
Cole and Means illustrate all these problems with a rich variety of examples drawn from the research literature in comparative cognition. Because they use real examples. Cole and Means offer much more than the usual banal remedies for improving research design. Instead of merely telling the student to run the right control groups, for example, they show how theory enters into the selection of appropriate controls and how atheoretic comparative work can easily run amok.
It is a rare event when seasoned researchers take time to tell the novice how to avoid the problems of previous research. Comparative Studies of How People Think provides just such an event.
In addition to his mainstream research, Cattell had also authored a series of publications that posited evolutionary progress as the ultimate goal of human existence and argued that scientifically measurable criteria should be used to distinguish "successful" from "failing" racial groups so that the latter might be gradually "phased out" by non-violent methods such as regulation of birth control. Derived from science, Cattell's evolutionary philosophy was intended to be the basis of a full-blown religion. Although the earliest of these works had been published in the 1930s, near the end of an era in which eugenically based policies for human improvement were much more acceptable, Cattell promoted similar ideas well into the 1980s and '90s.
The Cattell Controversy describes Cattell's socio-religious beliefs in detail and analyzes their relationship to his scientific contributions. William H. Tucker discusses the controversy that arose within the field in response to the award's postponement, after which Cattell withdrew his name from consideration for the award but insisted that his position had been distorted by taking statements out of context. Reflecting on these events, Tucker concludes with a discussion of the complex question of whether and how a scientist's ideological views should ever be a relevant factor in determining the value of his or her contributions to the field.
The young psychiatrist from Budapest had studied medicine in Vienna, he had read The Interpretation of Dreams, and now he was about to meet its author. Seventeen years Sigmund Freud's junior, Sándor Ferenczi (1873-1933) sent off a note anticipating the pleasure of the older man's acquaintance--thus beginning a correspondence that would flourish over the next twenty-five years, and that today provides a living record of some of the most important insights and developments of psychoanalysis, worked out through the course of a deep and profoundly complicated friendship.
This volume opens in January of 1908 and closes on the eve of World War I. Letter by letter, a "fellowship of life, thoughts, and interests" as Freud came to describe it, unfolds here as a passionate exchange of ideas and theories. Ferenczi's contribution to psychoanalysis was, Freud said, "pure gold," and many of the younger man's notions and concepts, proposed in these letters, later made their way into Freud's works on homosexuality, paranoia, trauma, transference, and other topics. To the two men's mutual scientific interests others were soon added, and their correspondence expanded in richness and complexity as Ferenczi attempted to work out his personal and professional conflicts under the direction of his devoted and sometimes critical elder colleague.
Here is Ferenczi's love for Elma, his analysand and the daughter of his mistress, his anguish over his matrimonial intentions, his soliciting of Freud's help in sorting out this emotional tangle--a situation that would eventually lead to Ferenczi's own analysis with Freud. Here is Freud's unraveling relationship with Jung, documented through a heated discussion of the events leading up to the final break. Amid these weighty matters of heart and mind, among the psychoanalytic theorizing and playful speculation, we also find the lighter stuff of life, the talk of travel plans and antiquities, gossip about friends and family. Unparalleled in their wealth of personal and scientific detail, these letters give us an intimate picture of psychoanalytic theory being made in the midst of an extraordinary friendship.
Volume I of the three-volume Freud-Ferenczi correspondence closes with Freud's letter from Vienna, dated June 28, 1914, to his younger colleague in Budapest: "I am writing under the impression of the surprising murder in Sarajevo, the consequences of which cannot be foreseen!' "Now," he continues in a more familiar vein, "to our affairs!" The nation-shattering events of World War I form a somber canvas for "our affairs" and the exchanges of the two correspondents in volume 2 (July 1914 through December 1919). Uncertainty pervades these letters: Will Ferenczi be called up? Will food and fuel-and cigar-shortages continue? Will Freud's three enlisted sons and son-in-law come through the war intact? And will Freud's "problem-child," psychoanalysis, survive?At the same time, a more intimate drama is unfolding: Freud's three-part analysis of Ferenczi in 1914 and 1916 ("finished but not terminated"); Ferenczi's concomitant turmoil over whether to marry his mistress, Gizella Pálos, or her daughter, Elma; and the refraction of all these relationships in constantly shifting triads and dyads. In these, as in other matters, both men display characteristic contradictions and inconsistencies, Freud restrained, Ferenczi more effusive and revealing. Freud, for example, unswervingly favors Ferenczi's marriage to Gizella and views his indecision as "resistance"; yet several years later, commenting on Otto Rank's wife, Freud remarks, "One certainly can't judge in these matters...on behalf of another." Ferenczi, for his part, reacts to the paternal authority of the "father of psychoanalysis" as an alternately obedient and rebellious son.
The letters vividly record the use--and misuse--of analysis and self-analysis and the close interweaving of personal and professional matters in the early history of psychoanalysis. Ferenczi's eventual disagreement with Freud about "head and heart," objective detachment versus subjective involvement and engagement in the analytic relationship--an issue that would emerge more clearly in the ensuing years--is hinted at here. As the decade and the volume end, the correspondents continue their literary conversation, unaware of the painful and heartrending events ahead.
"The goal of my teaching has always been, and remains, to train analysts."
--Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI, 209
Arguably the most profound psychoanalytic thinker since Freud, and deeply influential in many fields, Jacques Lacan often seems opaque to those he most wanted to reach. These are the readers Bruce Fink addresses in this clear and practical account of Lacan's highly original approach to therapy. Written by a clinician for clinicians, Fink's Introduction is an invaluable guide to Lacanian psychoanalysis, how it's done, and how it differs from other forms of therapy. While elucidating many of Lacan's theoretical notions, the book does so from the perspective of the practitioner faced with the pressing questions of diagnosis, what therapeutic stance to adopt, how to involve the patient, and how to bring about change.
Fink provides a comprehensive overview of Lacanian analysis, explaining the analyst's aims and interventions at each point in the treatment. He uses four case studies to elucidate Lacan's unique structural approach to diagnosis. These cases, taking up both theoretical and clinical issues in Lacan's views of psychosis, perversion, and neurosis, highlight the very different approaches to treatment that different situations demand.
Contributors. Miran Bozovic, Mladen Dolar, Alain Grosrichard, Marc de Kessel, Robert Pfaller, Renata Salecl, Slavoj Žižek, Alenka Zupancic
Sánchez-Pardo argues that the troubled political atmosphere leading to both world wars created a melancholia fueled by “cultures of the death drive” and the related specters of object loss—loss of coherent and autonomous selves, of social orders where stability reigned, of metaphysical guarantees, and, in some cases, loss and fragmentation of empire. This melancholia permeated, and even propelled, modernist artistic discourses. Sánchez-Pardo shows how the work of Melanie Klein, the theorist of melancholia par excellence, uniquely illuminates modernist texts, particularly their representations of gender and sexualities. She offers a number of readings—of works by Virginia Woolf, René Magritte, Lytton Strachey, Djuna Barnes, and Countee Cullen—that reveal the problems melancholia posed for verbal and visual communication and the narrative and rhetorical strategies modernist artists derived to either express or overcome them. In her afterword, Sánchez-Pardo explicates the connections between modernist and contemporary melancholia.
A valuable contribution to psychoanalytic theory, gender and sexuality studies, and the study of representation in literature and the visual arts, Cultures of the Death Drive is a necessary resource for those interested in the work of Melanie Klein.
Robert Provine boldly goes where other scientists seldom tread—in search of hiccups, coughs, yawns, sneezes, and other lowly, undignified human behaviors. Upon investigation, these instinctive acts bear the imprint of our evolutionary origins and can be uniquely valuable tools for understanding how the human brain works and what makes us different from other species.
Many activities showcased in Curious Behavior are contagious, but none surpasses yawning in this regard—just reading the word can make one succumb. Though we often take it as a sign of sleepiness or boredom, yawning holds clues to the development of our sociality and ability to empathize with others. Its inescapable transmission reminds us that we are sometimes unaware, neurologically programmed beasts of the herd. Other neglected behaviors yield similar revelations. Tickling, we learn, may be the key to programming personhood into robots. Coughing comes in musical, medical, and social varieties. Farting and belching have import for the evolution of human speech. And prenatal behavior is offered as the strangest exhibit of all, defying postnatal logic in every way. Our earthiest acts define Homo sapiens as much as language, bipedalism, tool use, and other more studied characteristics.
As Provine guides us through peculiarities right under our noses, he beckons us to follow with self-experiments: tickling our own feet, keeping a log of when we laugh, and attempting to suppress yawns and sneezes. Such humble investigations provide fodder for grade school science projects as well as doctoral dissertations. Small Science can yield big rewards.
“This is an important book and likely the most thoughtful of the year in the social sciences… Highly recommended, it is likely to prove one of the most thought-provoking books of the year.”—Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution
How did human minds become so different from those of other animals? What accounts for our capacity to understand the way the physical world works, to think ourselves into the minds of others, to gossip, read, tell stories about the past, and imagine the future? These questions are not new: they have been debated by philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, evolutionists, and neurobiologists over the course of centuries. One explanation widely accepted today is that humans have special cognitive instincts. Unlike other living animal species, we are born with complicated mechanisms for reasoning about causation, reading the minds of others, copying behaviors, and using language.
Cecilia Heyes agrees that adult humans have impressive pieces of cognitive equipment. In her framing, however, these cognitive gadgets are not instincts programmed in the genes but are constructed in the course of childhood through social interaction. Cognitive gadgets are products of cultural evolution, rather than genetic evolution. At birth, the minds of human babies are only subtly different from the minds of newborn chimpanzees. We are friendlier, our attention is drawn to different things, and we have a capacity to learn and remember that outstrips the abilities of newborn chimpanzees. Yet when these subtle differences are exposed to culture-soaked human environments, they have enormous effects. They enable us to upload distinctively human ways of thinking from the social world around us.
As Cognitive Gadgets makes clear, from birth our malleable human minds can learn through culture not only what to think but how to think it.
In a field choked with seemingly impenetrable jargon, Philip N. Johnson-Laird has done the impossible: written a book about how the mind works that requires no advance knowledge of artificial intelligence, neurophysiology, or psychology. The mind, he says, depends on the brain in the same way as the execution of a program of symbolic instructions depends on a computer, and can thus be understood by anyone willing to start with basic principles of computation and follow his step-by-step explanations.
The author begins with a brief account of the history of psychology and the birth of cognitive science after World War II. He then describes clearly and simply the nature of symbols and the theory of computation, and follows with sections devoted to current computational models of how the mind carries out all its major tasks, including visual perception, learning, memory, the planning and control of actions, deductive and inductive reasoning, and the formation of new concepts and new ideas. Other sections discuss human communication, meaning, the progress that has been made in enabling computers to understand natural language, and finally the difficult problems of the conscious and unconscious mind, free will, needs and emotions, and self-awareness. In an envoi, the author responds to the critics of cognitive science and defends the computational view of the mind as an alternative to traditional dualism: cognitive science integrates mind and matter within the same explanatory framework.
This first single-authored introduction to cognitive science will command the attention of students of cognitive science at all levels including psychologists, linguists, computer scientists, philosophers, and neuroscientists--as well as all readers curious about recent knowledge on how the mind works.
Alexander Romanovich Luria, one of the most influential psychologists of the twentieth century, is best known for his pioneering work on the development of language and thought, mental retardation, and the cortical organization of higher mental processes. Virtually unnoticed has been his major contribution to the understanding of cultural differences in thinking.
In the early 1930s young Luria set out with a group of Russian psychologists for the steppes of central Asia. Their mission: to study the impact of the socialist revolution on an ancient Islamic cotton-growing culture and, no less, to establish guidelines for a viable Marxist psychology. Lev Vygotsky, Luria's great teacher and friend, was convinced that variations in the mental development of children must be understood as a process including historically determined cultural factors. Guided by this conviction, Luria and his colleagues studied perception, abstraction, reasoning, and imagination among several remote groups of Uzbeks and Kirghiz—from cloistered illiterate women to slightly educated new friends of the central government.
The original hypothesis was abundantly supported by the data: the very structure of the human cognitive process differs according to the ways in which social groups live out their various realities. People whose lives are dominated by concrete, practical activities have a different method of thinking from people whose lives require abstract, verbal, and theoretical approaches to reality.
For Luria the legitimacy of treating human consciousness as a product of social history legitimized the Marxian dialectic of social development. For psychology in general, the research in Uzbekistan, its rich collection of data and the penetrating observations Luria drew from it, have cast new light on the workings of cognitive activity. The parallels between individual and social development are still being explored by researchers today. Beyond its historical and theoretical significance, this book represents a revolution in method. Much as Piaget introduced the clinical method into the study of children's mental activities, Luria pioneered his own version of the clinical technique for use in cross-cultural work. Had this text been available, the recent history of cognitive psychology and of anthropological study might well have been very different. As it is, we are only now catching up with Luria's procedures.
Ambitious and elegant, this book builds a bridge between evolutionary theory and cultural psychology. Michael Tomasello is one of the very few people to have done systematic research on the cognitive capacities of both nonhuman primates and human children. The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition identifies what the differences are, and suggests where they might have come from.
Tomasello argues that the roots of the human capacity for symbol-based culture, and the kind of psychological development that takes place within it, are based in a cluster of uniquely human cognitive capacities that emerge early in human ontogeny. These include capacities for sharing attention with other persons; for understanding that others have intentions of their own; and for imitating, not just what someone else does, but what someone else has intended to do. In his discussions of language, symbolic representation, and cognitive development, Tomasello describes with authority and ingenuity the "ratchet effect" of these capacities working over evolutionary and historical time to create the kind of cultural artifacts and settings within which each new generation of children develops. He also proposes a novel hypothesis, based on processes of social cognition and cultural evolution, about what makes the cognitive representations of humans different from those of other primates.
Lucid, erudite, and passionate, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition will be essential reading for developmental psychology, animal behavior, and cultural psychology.
The first English-language collection to establish curiosity studies as a unique field
From science and technology to business and education, curiosity is often taken for granted as an unquestioned good. And yet, few people can define curiosity. Curiosity Studies marshals scholars from more than a dozen fields not only to define curiosity but also to grapple with its ethics as well as its role in technological advancement and global citizenship. While intriguing research on curiosity has occurred in numerous disciplines for decades, no rigorously cross-disciplinary study has existed—until now.
Curiosity Studies stages an interdisciplinary conversation about what curiosity is and what resources it holds for human and ecological flourishing. These engaging essays are integrated into four clusters: scientific inquiry, educational practice, social relations, and transformative power. By exploring curiosity through the practice of scientific inquiry, the contours of human learning, the stakes of social difference, and the potential of radical imagination, these clusters focus and reinvigorate the study of this universal but slippery phenomenon: the desire to know.
Against the assumption that curiosity is neutral, this volume insists that curiosity has a history and a political import and requires precision to define and operationalize. As various fields deepen its analysis, a new ecosystem for knowledge production can flourish, driven by real-world problems and a commitment to solve them in collaboration. By paying particular attention to pedagogy throughout, Curiosity Studies equips us to live critically and creatively in what might be called our new Age of Curiosity.
Contributors: Danielle S. Bassett, U of Pennsylvania; Barbara M. Benedict, Trinity College; Susan Engel, Williams College; Ellen K. Feder, American U; Kristina T. Johnson, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Narendra Keval; Christina León, Princeton U; Tyson Lewis, U of North Texas; Amy Marvin, U of Oregon; Hilary M. Schor, U of Southern California; Seeta Sistla, Hampshire College; Heather Anne Swanson, Aarhus U.
Drawing on trauma and memory studies and theories of authorship and readership, Contesting Childhood offers commentary on the triumphs, trials, and tribulations that have shaped this genre. Douglas examines the content of the narratives and the limits of their representations, as well as some of the ways in which autobiographies of youth have become politically important and influential. This study enables readers to discover how stories configure childhood within cultural memory and the public sphere.
Gerald M. Phillips draws on his twenty-five-year, five-thousand-client experience with the Pennsylvania State University Reticence Program to present a new theory of modification of “inept” communication behavior.
That experience has convinced Phillips that communication is arbitrary and rulebound rather than a process of inspiration. He demonstrates that communication problems can be described as errors that can be detected and classified in order to fit a remediation pattern. Regardless of the source of error, the remedy is to train the individual to avoid or eliminate errors—thus, orderly procedure will result in competent performance.
Inept communicators must be made aware of the obligations and constraints imposed by deep structures that require us to achieve a degree of formal order in our language, without which our discourse becomes incomprehensible.
When it comes to the end of a relationship, the loss of a loved one, or even a national tragedy, we are often told we need “closure.” But while some people do find closure for their pain and grief, many more feel closure does not exist and believe the notion only promises false hopes. Sociologist Nancy Berns explores these ideas and their ramifications in her timely book, Closure.
Berns uncovers the various interpretations and contradictory meanings of closure. She identifies six types of “closure talk,” revealing closure as a socially constructed concept—a “new emotion.” Berns also explores how closure has been applied widely in popular media and how the idea has been appropriated as a political tool and to sell products and services.
This book explains how the push for closure—whether we find it helpful, engaging, or enraging—is changing our society.
Originally released in 1980, Lucia Capacchione’s The Creative Journal has become a classic in the fields of art therapy, memoir and creative writing, art journaling, and creativity development. Using more than fifty prompts and vibrantly illustrated examples, Capacchione guides readers through drawing and writing exercises to release feelings, explore dreams, and solve problems creatively. Topics include emotional expression, healing the past, exploring relationships, self-inventory, health, life goals, and more. The Creative Journal introduced the world to Capacchione’s groundbreaking technique of writing with the nondominant hand for brain balancing, finding innate wisdom, and developing creative potential.
This thirty-fifth anniversary edition includes a new introduction and an appendix listing the many venues that have adopted Capacchione’s methods, including public schools, recovery programs, illness support groups, spiritual retreats, and prisons. The Creative Journal has become a mainstay text for college courses in psychology, art therapy, and creative writing. It has proven useful for journal keepers, counselors, and teachers. Through doodles, scribbles, written inner dialogues, and letters, people of all ages have discovered vast inner resources.
A provocative and unconventional call to dispossess the self of itself
Challenging the contemporary notion of “self-care” and the Western mania for “self-possession,” The Comic Self deploys philosophical discourse and literary expression to propose an alternate and less toxic model for human aspiration: a comic self. Timothy Campbell and Grant Farred argue that the problem with the “care of the self,” from Foucault onward, is that it reinforces identity, strengthening the relation between I and mine. This assertion of self-possession raises a question vital for understanding how we are to live with each other and ourselves: How can you care for something that is truly not yours?
The answer lies in the unrepresentable comic self. Campbell and Farred range across philosophy, literature, and contemporary comedy—engaging with Socrates, Burke, Hume, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze, and Levinas; Shakespeare, Cervantes, Woolf, Kafka, and Pasolini; and Stephen Colbert, David Chappelle, and the cast of Saturday Night Live. They uncover spaces where the dispossession of self and, with it, the dismantling of the regime of self-care are possible. Arguing that the comic self always keeps a precarious closeness to the tragic self, while opposing the machinations of capital endemic to the logic of self-possession, they provide a powerful and provocative antidote to the tragic self that so dominates the tenor of our times.
How malleable is human nature? Can an individual really change in meaningful ways? Or, are there immutable limits on the possibilities of human growth set in place by the genes and by the early experiences of childhood? These are questions which touch our deepest political and personal concerns; and they have long been a matter of fierce debate in the behavioral sciences.
Constancy and Change in Human Development takes a thorough inventory of the growing body of research which now bears upon these questions. Editors Brim and Kagan have assembled an outstanding group of specialists in human growth and commissioned them to assess questions of change and continuity in physical, mental, and emotional development throughout the life span. Beginning with three general chapters which place the ideas of continuity and discontinuity in historical and philosophical perspective, the book moves across a broad spectrum of developmental issues, ranging from the basic adaptability of the human central nervous system to the effects of social institutions which seek to promote individual change. There are chapters on physical growth, health, cognitive development, personality, social attitudes and beliefs, occupational careers, psychosis, and criminal behavior. Throughout these chapters, the recurring question is whether development can be seen as a continuous process in which early stages reliably predict subsequent events, or whether instead there are sharp discontinuities which render individual development essentially unpredictable. The variety and richness of the answers to this question provide a summary of human development which is unparalleled in any other single volume.
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