Philosophy of Psychology Books - Page 4

The Constitution of Selves

Marya Schechtman

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An amnesia victim asking "Who am I?" means something different from a confused adolescent asking the same question. Marya Schechtman takes issue with analytic philosophy's emphasis on the first sort of question to the exclusion of the second. The problem of personal identity, she suggests, is usually understood to be a question about historical life. What she calls the "reidentification question" is taken to be the real metaphysical question of personal identity, whereas questions about beliefs or values and the actions they prompt, the "characterization question," are often presented as merely metaphorical.

Failure to recognize the philosophical importance of both these questions, Schechtman argues, has undermined analytic philosophy's attempts at offering a satisfying account of personal identity. Considerations related to the characterization question creep unrecognized into discussions of reidentification, with the result that neither question is adequately addressed. Schechtman shows how separating the two questions allows for a more fruitful approach to the reidentification question, and she develops her own narrative account of characterization. She suggests that persons constitute their identities by developing autobiographical narratives that bear the right relation to facts about the environment, the general concept of a person, and other people's concepts of who they are.

New Maladies of the Soul

Julia Kristeva

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Julia Kristeva's best work on Psychoanalysis 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 5 people found this review helpful.

One of the most renowned researchers in the field of Social Studies, Kristeva has gone deeply in the facts of the soul in our modern world, exercising her acute views on the disturbs that affect the human soul. The two halves of the book: The clinic and History lead us through a path full of novelties regarding the presence of man/woman in this world and how this very world causes so many new diseases...not only in the body, but mainly in the soul of them. Lacan and Freud would be surprised to see how their works were so consitently revisited

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-- International Journal of Psycho-Analysis

Seeing Double: Shared Identities in Physics, Philosophy, and Literature

Peter Pesic

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Editorial Review:

CHOICE Outstanding Academic Book for 2002

The separateness and connection of individuals is perhaps the central question of human life: What, exactly, is my individuality? To what degree is it unique? To what degree can it be shared, and how? To the many philosophical and literary speculations about these topics over time, modern science has added the curious twist of quantum theory, which requires that the elementary particles of which everything consists have no individuality at all. All aspects of chemistry depend on this lack of individuality, as do many branches of physics. From where, then, does our individuality come?

In Seeing Double, Peter Pesic invites readers to explore this intriguing set of questions. He draws on literary and historical examples that open the mind (from Homer to Martin Guerre to Kafka), philosophical analyses that have helped to make our thinking and speech more precise, and scientific work that has enabled us to characterize the phenomena of nature. Though he does not try to be all-inclusive, Pesic presents a broad range of ideas, building toward a specific point of view: that the crux of modern quantum theory is its clash with our ordinary concept of individuality. This represents a departure from the usual understanding of quantum theory. Pesic argues that what is bizarre about quantum theory becomes more intelligible as we reconsider what we mean by individuality and identity in ordinary experience. In turn, quantum identity opens a new perspective on us.

Naming the Mind: How Psychology Found Its Language

Kurt Danziger

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Editorial Review:

Intelligence, motivation, personality, learning, stimulation, behaviour and attitude are just some of the categories that map the terrain of `psychological reality'. These are the concepts which, among others, underpin theoretical and empirical work in modern psychology - and yet these concepts have only recently taken on their contemporary meanings.

In this fascinating work, Kurt Danziger goes beyond the taken-for-granted quality of psychological language to offer a profound and broad-ranging analysis of the recent evolution of the concepts and categories on which it depends. He explores this process and shows how its consequences depend on cultural contexts and the history of an emergent discipline.

Danziger's internationally acclaimed Constructing the Subject examined the historical dependence of modern psychology on the social practices of psychological investigation. In Naming the Mind, he develops a complementary account that looks at the historically changing structure of psychological discourse.

Naming the Mind is an elegant and persuasive explanation of how modern psychology found its language. It will be invaluable reading for students and academics throughout psychology, and for anyone with an interest in the history of the human sciences.

Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (International Library of Philosophy)

Franz Brentano

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If you want to get smart in phenomenology, starts from this book 4 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

If you want to see the beginning of the phenomenological movement you should read this book. In this book is where Brentano re takes the concept of intentional content of the consciousness, that Aristotle, and scholastics used before, and in a way prepare the way to Husserl for his logical investigations (specially Investigation 5 - 6).

Editorial Review:

Franz Brentano's classic study Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint was the most important of Brentano's works to be published in his lifetime. Unlike the first English translation in 1974, this edition simply contains the text corresponding to Brentano's original 1874 edition. A new introduction by Peter Simons places Brentano's work in the context of current philosophical thought, and is able to show how Brentano has emerged since the Seventies as a key figure in both contemporary European and Anglo-American traditions and crucial to any understanding the history of philosophy and psychology.

Archetypes & Strange Attractors: The Chaotic World of Symbols (Studies in Jungian Psychology By Jungian Analysts)

John R. Van Eenwyk, John R. Van Eenwyk

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A fine example of a psychology-physics bridge 5 out of 5 stars.
21 of 24 people found this review helpful.

Bridging inquiry and speculation into the inner details of the psyche is seductive work. As with any seduction, it can lead to wonderful acts of creation and enjoyment, but also to messy thinking - fallacies of misplaced concreteness (Whitehead), in which the poetic pleasure of expressing parallels between psyche and cosmos can obscure both careful thinking and genuine insight into difficult realities. I find this to be a special danger in the world of Jungian concepts, primarily because the old wizard himself set the stage for exploring links between the science of mind and the mysteries that are not yet in the reach of a given science.

The math and physics of quantum and complexity theories, and of dynamic systems, are both extraordinarily demanding and extraordinarily revealing in their relevance to anything in the world that partakes of interaction, and owes and contributes its nature to other complex interactions. That is to say, anything in the world, seen out of isolation, without any excess of empirical or conceptual filtration. I've read Eenwyk's book twice now, and found it illuminating in both its intelligent and accessible handling of the physics and math involved, and of the fragile but necessary connections of the infinite dynamic of the mind and the world. Highly recommended.

The Reluctant Alliance: Behaviorism and Humanism

Bobby Newman

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Brilliant 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Irony: People are conditioned to reject conditioning. Our culture continues to criticize behavioral psychology because the conclusions are the opposite of what people learn to accept without question. Thank you Bobby Newman for providing a book that will expose people to the importance of this technology in a user friendly way. Behavioral technology and understanding human behavior is needed to not only improve the world and provide hope for the human race, but to also give people a true scientific perspective and understanding of how we fit in with the evolutionary process. We aren't magical autonomous freaks. We are beautiful animals that live in a world that selects our genetics as well as our behavior. Our society is starting to recognize the men of science, but their ignorance is obvious and sad. To understand the evolutionary chain you must understand human behavior and they just have no clue. Human behavior is based on consequences, selected for just like genetic material. Just like evolution the process isn't always obvious and can go against common sense, but the reality is obvious to anyone that gains understanding. Stop reading criticisms that show complete misunderstandings of behaviorism and read About Behaviorism by B.F. Skinner and then read this book. Hopefully one day the ignorance of people like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker, Christopher Hitchens, etc... won't be reinforced and the Bobby Newman's of this world that actually exhibit intelligent, compassionate, caring behavior will. Stop reading the criticisms. Read the sources. Great book!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Editorial Review:

Humanistic psychology and behaviour analysis have long been viewed as staunch opponents in the practice of psychology. Newman's careful research into the theories, positions, and approaches of both camps dispels the myths of behaviourists as cold "manipulators" and of humanistic psychologists as weak-willed "armchair philosophers". After examining both systems, he outlines their shared philosophical and historical roots. Newman explores such questions as: How should psychotherapy be conducted? How is moral behaviour created and maintained? Is behaviourism unethical? and What forms of education are most effective at imparting information and improving self-concepts?

The Organism

Kurt Goldstein

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Editorial Review:

with an introduction by Oliver Sacks


Kurt Goldstein (1878-1965) was already an established neuropsychologist when he emigrated from Germany to the United States in the 1930s. This book, his magnum opus and widely regarded as a modern classic in psychology and biology, grew out of his dissatisfaction with traditional natural science techniques for analyzing living beings. It offers a broad introduction to the sources and range of application of the "holistic" or "organismic" research program that has since become a standard part of biological thought.

In the course of his studies of brain-damaged soldiers during World War I, Goldstein became aware of the inability of contemporary biology and medicine to explain both the impact of such injuries and the astonishing adjustments that patients made to them. He began to challenge atomistic approaches that dealt with "localized" symptoms, insisting instead that an organism must be analyzed in terms of the totality of its behavior and interaction with its surrounding milieu.

Goldstein was especially concerned with the breakdown of organization and the failure of central controls that take place in catastrophic responses to situations such as physical or mental illness. But he was equally attuned to the amazing powers of the organism to readjust to such catastrophic losses, if only by withdrawal to a more limited range which it could manage by a redistribution of its reduced energies, thus reclaiming as much wholeness as new circumstances allowed.

Goldstein's theses in The Organism have had an important impact on philosophical and psychological thought throughout this century, as can be seen in the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Georges Canguilhem, Ernst Cassirer, and Ludwig Binswanger. In the words of Oliver Sacks: "All that Goldstein observed and brooded over—levels of organization of the nervous system, health, disease, adaptation, reconstruction—has once again come to the fore, with the advent of new conceptual and technical tools to approach these. The global theory that Goldstein and Lashley and the Gestaltists sought may now have emerged in Edelman's theory of neural Darwinism and his concept of the brain as a sort of society, in which every part is dynamically connected with every other."

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Nietzsche and Depth Psychology

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Exploring the connections between Nietzsche's thought and depth psychology, this book sheds new light on the relation between psychology and philosophy. It examines the status and function of Nietzsche's psychological insights within the framework of his thought; explores the formative impact of Nietzsche's "new psychology" on Freud, Adler, Jung, and other major psychoanalysts; and adopts Nietzsche's original psychological insights on the figure and biography of Nietzsche himself.

Explanation and Cognition (Bradford Books)

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Explanations seem to be a large and natural part of our cognitive lives. As Frank Keil and Robert Wilson write, "When a cognitive activity is so ubiquitous that it is expressed both in a preschooler's idle questions and in work that is the culmination of decades of scholarly effort, one has to ask whether we really have one and the same phenomenon or merely different cognitively based phenomena that are loosely, or even metaphorically, related."

This book is unusual in its interdisciplinary approach to that ubiquitous activity. The essays address five basic questions about explanation: How do explanatory capacities develop? Are there kinds of explanation? Do explanations correspond to domains of knowledge? Why do we seek explanations, and what do they accomplish? How central are causes to explanation? The essays draw on work in the history and philosophy of science, the philosophy of mind and language, the development of concepts in children, conceptual change in adults, and reasoning in human and artificial systems. They also introduce emerging perspectives on explanation from computer science, linguistics, and anthropology.

Contributors:
Woo-kyoung Ahn, William F. Brewer, Patricia W. Cheng, Clark A. Chinn, Andy Clark, Robert Cummins, Clark Glymour, Alison Gopnik, Christine Johnson, Charles W. Kalish, Frank C. Keil, Robert N. McCauley, Gregory L. Murphy, Ala Samarapungavan, Herbert A. Simon, Paul Thagard, Robert A. Wilson.