ABOUT THIS BOOK

George Herbert Mead is widely considered one of the most influential American philosophers of the twentieth century, and his work remains vibrant and relevant to many areas of scholarly inquiry today. The Timeliness of George Herbert Mead brings together a range of scholars who provide detailed analyses of Mead’s importance to innovative fields of scholarship, including cognitive science, environmental studies, democratic epistemology, and social ethics, non-teleological historiography, and the history of the natural and social sciences.

Edited by well-respected Mead scholars Hans Joas and Daniel R. Huebner, the volume as a whole makes a coherent statement that places Mead in dialogue with current research, pushing these domains of scholarship forward while also revitalizing the growing literature on an author who has an ongoing and major influence on sociology, psychology, and philosophy.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Hans Joas is the Ernst Troeltsch Professor for the Sociology of Religion at the Humboldt University of Berlin and professor of sociology and social thought at the University of Chicago. He is the author of many books, including The Sacredness of the Person: A New Genealogy of Human Rights. Daniel R. Huebner is assistant professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He is the author of Becoming Mead: The Social Process of Academic Knowledge. Together, Joas and Huebner prepared Mind, Self, and Society: The Definitive Edition, published in 2015 by the University of Chicago Press.

REVIEWS

“A comprehensive and extremely useful collection of contemporary scholarship on the work of America’s most thoughtful and original social theorist.”

— Michael Tomasello, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

“This first-rate collection of essays by European and North American scholars showcases cutting edge research. It demonstrates Mead’s importance as a founding pragmatist and his relevance to current developments in historiography, sociology, environmental philosophy, neuroscience, and much more. It is surely a must-read for anyone interested in the roots and continuing development of American philosophy.”

— Larry H. Hickman, director emeritus, Center for Dewey Studies, Southern Illinois University Carbondale

“George Herbert Mead is an important figure in the development of both Chicago pragmatism and sociology, one whose work has finally begun to receive the careful attention it deserves. The thoughtful essays written by a variety of scholars for this volume do an outstanding job of explaining Mead's ideas and showing their continuing relevance for areas of contemporary scholarly concern. Joas and Huebner are to be congratulated for their excellent editorial work in bringing these essays to publication.”

— Gary A. Cook, author of George Herbert Mead: The Making of a Social Pragmatist

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction
Hans Joas and Daniel R. Huebner

Part One: History, Historiography, Historical Sociology

1. Changing “Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century”: Historical Text and Historical Context
Charles Camic
2. On Mead’s Long Lost History of Science
Daniel R. Huebner
3. Pragmatism and Historicism: Mead’s Philosophy of Temporality and the Logic of Historiography
Hans Joas
4. George Herbert Mead and the Promise of Pragmatist Democracy
Robert Westbrook
5. The Theory of Intersubjectivity as a Theory of the Human Being: George Herbert Mead and the German Tradition of Philosophical Anthropology
Karl-Siegbert Rehberg

Part Two: Nature, Environment, Process

6. Naturalism and Despair: George Herbert Mead and Evolution in the 1880s
Trevor Pearce
7. George Herbert Mead as a Socio-Environmental Thinker
Bradley H. Brewster and Antony J. Puddephatt
8. Social Worlds: The Legacy of Mead’s Social Ecology in Chicago Sociology
Daniel Cefaï
9. Mead, Whitehead, and the Sociality of Nature
Michael L. Thomas

Part Three: Cognition, Conscience, Language

10. Mead, the Theory of Mind, and the Problem of Others
Ryan McVeigh
11. Imitation and Taking the Attitude of the Other
Kelvin Jay Booth
12. Mead Meets Tomasello: Pragmatism, the Cognitive Sciences, and the Origins of Human Communication and Sociality
Frithjof Nungesser
13. Conscience as Ecological Participation and the Maintenance of Moral Perplexity
Joshua Daniel
14. Presentation and Re-Presentation: Language, Content, and the Reconstruction of Experience
Roman Madzia
15. G. H. Mead’s Understanding of the Nature of Speech in the Light of Contemporary Research
Timothy Gallagher
Contributors

REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE

If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you with an electronic file for alternative access.

Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.

It can take 2-3 weeks for requests to be filled.