A good poem is, to borrow from Wallace Stevens, a “poem of the mind in the act of finding / What will suffice” (“Of Modern Poetry”), a poem of the mind that both thinks and feels
 
Acts of Mind grew out of interviews conducted by the author for Poetry Miscellany. The aim of which was to help develop a method for talking about the work of contemporary poets.
 
The poets whose views appear in this volume represent a fair cross-section of the more important tendencies and impulses to be found in contemporary poetry and poetics.
 

Art has the power to affect our thinking, changing not only the way we view and interact with the world but also how we create it. In Art in Mind, Ernst van Alphen probes this idea of art as a commanding force with the capacity to shape our intellect and intervene in our lives. Rather than interpreting art as merely a reflection of our social experience or a product of history, van Alphen here argues that art is a historical agent, or a cultural creator, that propels thought and experience forward.

Examining a broad range of works, van Alphen—a renowned art historian and cultural theorist—demonstrates how art serves a socially constructive function by actually experimenting with the parameters of thought. Employing work from artists as diverse as Picasso, Watteau, Francis Bacon, Marlene Dumas, and Matthew Barney, he shows how art confronts its viewers with the "pain points" of cultural experience-genocide, sexuality, diaspora, and transcultural identity-and thereby transforms the ways in which human existence is conceived. Van Alphen analyzes how art visually "thinks" about these difficult cultural issues, tapping into an understudied interpretation of art as the realm where ideas and values are actively created, given form, and mobilized. In this way, van Alphen's book is a work of art in itself as it educates us in a new mode of thought that will forge equally new approaches and responses to the world.

This volume offers an unusual variety of topics presented during the sixth annual Oberlin Colloquium in Philosophy.  The subjects covered include: refuting J. L. Austin's attempt to destroy philosophers' assumptions on the nature and purpose of a “statement;” false premises found in “St. Anselm's Four Ontological Arguments;” pain in connection with brain-state and functional-state theories; aesthetics in light of questions of fraudulence in modern art and music, and an analytical deconstruction of mystical experience.

"There are books—few and far between—which carefully, delightfully, and genuinely turn your head inside out. This is one of them. It ranges over some central issues in Western philosophy and begins the long overdue job of giving us a radically new account of meaning, rationality, and objectivity."—Yaakov Garb, San Francisco Chronicle

 The antagonism between urbanist and writer Jane Jacobs and master builder Robert Moses may frame debates over urban form, but in "Building Like Moses with Jacobs in Mind," Scott Larson aims to use the Moses-Jacobs rivalry as a means for examining and understanding the New York City administration's redevelopment strategies and actions. By showing how the Bloomberg administration's plans borrow selectively from Moses' and Jacobs' writing, Larson lays bare the contradictions buried in such rhetoric and argues that there can be no equitable solution to the social and economic goals for redevelopment in New York City with such a strategy. 

"Building Like Moses with Jacobs in Mind" offers a lively critique that shows how the legacies of these two planners have been interpreted—and reinterpreted—over time and with the evolution of urban space. Ultimately, he makes the case that neither figure offers a meaningful model for addressing stubborn problems—poverty, lack of affordable housing, and segregation along class and racial lines—that continue to vex today's cities.

Cognitive science is transforming our understanding of the mind. New discoveries are changing how we comprehend not just language, but thought itself. Yet, surprisingly little of the new learning has penetrated discussions and analysis of the most important social institution affecting our lives-the law.

Drawing on work in philosophy, psychology, anthropology, linguistics, and literary theory, Steven L. Winter has created nothing less than a tour de force of interdisciplinary analysis. A Clearing in the Forest rests on the simple notion that the better we understand the workings of the mind, the better we will understand all its products-especially law. Legal studies today focus on analytic skills and grand normative theories. But, to understand how real-world, legal actors reason and decide, we need a different set of tools. Cognitive science provides those tools, opening a window on the imaginative, yet orderly mental processes that animate thinking and decisionmaking among lawyers, judges, and lay persons alike. Recent findings about how humans actually categorize and reason make it possible to explain legal reasoning in new, more cogent, more productive ways.

A Clearing in the Forest is a compelling meditation on both how the law works and what it all means. In uncovering the irrepressibly imaginative, creative quality of human reason, Winter shows how what we are learning about the mind changes not only our understanding of law, but ultimately of ourselves. He charts a unique course to understanding the world we inhabit, showing us the way to the clearing in the forest.

American students vary in educational achievement, but white students in general typically have better test scores and grades than black students. Why is this the case, and what can school leaders do about it? In The Color of Mind, Derrick Darby and John L. Rury answer these pressing questions and show that we cannot make further progress in closing the achievement gap until we understand its racist origins.

Telling the story of what they call the Color of Mind—the idea that there are racial differences in intelligence, character, and behavior—they show how philosophers, such as David Hume and Immanuel Kant, and American statesman Thomas Jefferson, contributed to the construction of this pernicious idea, how it influenced the nature of schooling and student achievement, and how voices of dissent such as Frederick Douglass, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and W. E. B. Du Bois debunked the Color of Mind and worked to undo its adverse impacts.

Rejecting the view that racial differences in educational achievement are a product of innate or cultural differences, Darby and Rury uncover the historical interplay between ideas about race and American schooling, to show clearly that the racial achievement gap has been socially and institutionally constructed. School leaders striving to bring justice and dignity to American schools today must work to root out the systemic manifestations of these ideas within schools, while still doing what they can to mitigate the negative effects of poverty, segregation, inequality, and other external factors that adversely affect student achievement. While we cannot expect schools alone to solve these vexing social problems, we must demand that they address the dignitary injustices associated with how we track, discipline, and deal with special education that reinforce long-standing racist ideas. That is the only way to expel the Color of Mind from schools, close the racial achievement gap, and afford all children the dignity they deserve.

How should we speak of bodies and souls? In Coming to Mind, Lenn E. Goodman and D. Gregory Caramenico pick their way through the minefields of materialist reductionism to present the soul not as the brain’s rival but as its partner. What acts, they argue, is what is real. The soul is not an ethereal wisp but a lively subject, emergent from the body but inadequately described in its terms.

Rooted in some of the richest philosophical and intellectual traditions of Western and Eastern philosophy, psychology, literature, and the arts and the latest findings of cognitive psychology and brain science—Coming to Mind is a subtle manifesto of a new humanism and an outstanding contribution to our understanding of the human person. Drawing on new and classical understandings of perception, consciousness, memory, agency, and creativity, Goodman and Caramenico frame a convincing argument for a dynamic and integrated self capable of language, thought, discovery, caring, and love.

This now-classic work challenges what Ryle calls philosophy's "official theory," the Cartesians "myth" of the separation of mind and matter. Ryle's linguistic analysis remaps the conceptual geography of mind, not so much solving traditional philosophical problems as dissolving them into the mere consequences of misguided language. His plain language and esstentially simple purpose place him in the traditioin of Locke, Berkeley, Mill, and Russell.

Conrad's Models of Mind was first published in 1971. 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.

In a new approach to understanding the psychological assumptions that lie behind the creation of a work of fiction, Professor Johnson analyzes a number of Joseph Conrad's novels and short stories, identifying and explaining Conrad's changing conceptions or models of mind. As he points out in his introduction: "Every writer makes assumptions about the nature of the mind, whether they may be elaborate theories, metaphors that seem simple but imply a great deal, downright beliefs, or vague gestalten. And such assumptions color his whole creation, the way his characters think and feel and react, possibly even his choice of subject matter."

The author traces Conrad's steady progression away from deductive psychology, involving such entities as will, passion, ego, or sympathy, toward a flexible, and, for the period, new psychology that had implications for his entire development as a writer.

Professor Johnson finds certain affinities between Conrad's models of mind and those of a number of other writers, among them, Schopenhauer, Sartre, and Pascal. He shows that one aspect of Conrad's psychology was closely allied to the Schopenhauerian concept of will but that when he wrote Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness, and Nostromo Conrad moved toward an existential concept of self-image and self-creation similar to Sartre's psychology in Being and Nothingness. Finally, Professor Johnson examines Conrad's novel The Rescue and shows how hopeless it was for Conrad to return to earlier conceptions of mind after he had explored the new existential models.

Is it in our nature to be altruistic, or evil, to make art, use tools, or create language? Is it in our nature to think in any particular way? For Daniel L. Everett, the answer is a resounding no: it isn’t in our nature to do any of these things because human nature does not exist—at least not as we usually think of it. Flying in the face of major trends in Evolutionary Psychology and related fields, he offers a provocative and compelling argument in this book that the only thing humans are hardwired for is freedom: freedom from evolutionary instinct and freedom to adapt to a variety of environmental and cultural contexts.
           
Everett sketches a blank-slate picture of human cognition that focuses not on what is in the mind but, rather, what the mind is in—namely, culture. He draws on years of field research among the Amazonian people of the Pirahã in order to carefully scrutinize various theories of cognitive instinct, including Noam Chomsky’s foundational concept of universal grammar, Freud’s notions of unconscious forces, Adolf Bastian’s psychic unity of mankind, and works on massive modularity by evolutionary psychologists such as Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, Jerry Fodor, and Steven Pinker. Illuminating unique characteristics of the Pirahã language, he demonstrates just how differently various cultures can make us think and how vital culture is to our cognitive flexibility. Outlining the ways culture and individual psychology operate symbiotically, he posits a Buddhist-like conception of the cultural self as a set of experiences united by various apperceptions, episodic memories, ranked values, knowledge structures, and social roles—and not, in any shape or form, biological instinct.

The result is fascinating portrait of the “dark matter of the mind,” one that shows that our greatest evolutionary adaptation is adaptability itself.
 

One is a science, the other an art; one useful, the other seemingly decorative, but mathematics and music share common origins in cult and mystery and have been linked throughout history. Emblems of Mind is Edward Rothstein’s classic exploration of their profound similarities, a journey into their “inner life.” Along the way, Rothstein explains how mathematics makes sense of space, how music tells a story, how theories are constructed, how melody is shaped. He invokes the poetry of Wordsworth, the anthropology of Lévi-Strauss, the imagery of Plato, and the philosophy of Kant. Math and music, Rothstein shows, apply comparable methods as they create their abstractions, display similar concerns with ratio and proportion, and depend on metaphors and analogies to create their meanings. Ultimately, Rothstein argues, they reveal the ways in which we come to understand the world. They are images of the mind at work and play; indeed, they are emblems of Mind itself. 

Jacques Barzun called this book “splendid.” Martin Gardner said it was “beautifully written, marvelous and entertaining.” It will provoke all serious readers to think in new ways about the grand patterns in art and life. 

“Lovely, wistful. . . . Rothstein is a wonderful guide to the architecture of musical space, its tensions and relations, its resonances and proportions. . . . His account of what is going on in the music is unfailingly felicitous.”—New Yorker

“Provocative and exciting. . . . Rothstein writes this book as a foreign correspondent, sending dispatches from a remote and mysterious locale as a guide for the intellectually adventurous. The remarkable fact about his work is not that it is profound, as much of the writing is, but that it is so accessible.”—Christian Science Monitor

     For more than a decade, The Graying of America has helped thousands of middle-aged and senior citizens find their way through the thickets and thorns of growing old. Now greatly revised and expanded to include information gleaned from studies of the past five years, this third edition has been retitled to stress its ongoing purpose: conveying a wealth of commonsense information for general readers in nontechnical language.

            The book is a storehouse of concise, useful information on the effects of aging on health, the mind, and behavior. Its 588 entries (including 172 new and 150 substantially revised) cover a broad spectrum of topics—from adjusting to retirement to grandparenting, sleep disorders to Alzheimer’s disease. All are directed to the average reader; all stress successful aging and how to accomplish it.

New entries cover such topics as the incidence and causes of frailty, the cognitive benefits of diversified activity, and findings of the Women’s Health Initiative. There is new information on matters like the effects of untreated hearing impairment on spouses and the impact of insufficient exposure to sunlight on sleep, plus new insight into what to look for in searching for a quality nursing home for a loved one.

Also included are results of recent studies on interventions that help to reduce age-related declines in mental and physical health, among them revelations that reports on age-related declines in memory have been skewed by testing errors. And with memory a concern for seniors fearful of declining mental agility, the book tells how to bypass memory problems—such as how to remember where you parked your car—and how physical exercise and challenging mental games can help reduce the risk of dementia. Other “how to avoid” entries offer ways to protect against eye fatigue in computer use, hip fractures when falling, and back injuries while lifting heavy objects.

No other book is so specifically geared to the challenges of how to reduce or even eliminate many of the problems associated with growing old. Aging in the Twenty-First Century can help seniors come to grips with their own aging process—and help younger adults understand what is happening to older family members.

Now a classic, this book was hailed upon its original publication in 1959 as "An event to be acclaimed . . . a book of genuine brilliance on Freud's cultural importance . . . a permanently valuable contribution to the human sciences."—Alastair MacIntyre, Manchester Guardian

"This remarkably subtle and substantial book, with its nicely ordered sequences of skilled dissections and refined appraisals, is one of those rare products of profound analytic thought. . . . The author weighs each major article of the psychoanalytic canon in the scales of his sensitive understanding, then gives a superbly balanced judgement."—Henry A. Murray, American Sociological Review

"Rieff's tremendous scholarship and rich reflections fill his pages with memorable treasures."—Robert W. White, Scientific American

"Philip Rieff's book is a brilliant and beautifully reasoned example of what Freud's influence has really been: an increasing intellectual vigilance about human nature. . . . What the analyst does for the patient—present the terms for his new choices as a human being—Mr. Rieff does in respect to the cultural significance of Freudianism. His style has the same closeness, the same undertone of hypertense alertness. Again and again he makes brilliant points."—Alfred Kazin, The Reporter

The German polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is often seen as the quintessential eighteenth-century tourist, though with the exception of a trip to Italy he hardly left his homeland. Compared to several of his peripatetic contemporaries, he took few actual journeys, and the list of European cities in which he never set foot is quite long. He never saw Vienna, Paris, or London, for example, and he only once visited Berlin. During the last thirty years of his life he was essentially a homebound writer, but his intensive mental journeys countered this sedentary lifestyle, and the misconception of Goethe as a traveler springs from the uniquely international influence of his writing.
​
While Goethe’s Italian Journey is a classic piece of travel writing, it was the product of his only extended physical journey. The majority, rather, were of the mind, taken amid the pages of books by others. In his reading, Goethe was the prototypical eighteenth-century armchair traveler, developing knowledge of places both near and far through the words and eyewitness accounts of others. In Goethe: Journeys of the Mind, Nancy Boerner and Gabrielle Bersier explore what it was that made the great writer distinct from his peers and offer insight into the ways that Goethe was able to explore the cultures and environments of places he never saw with his own eyes.

The Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School has won worldwide recognition for its treatment of emotionally disturbed children. The school and its continuing work at the University of Chicago have been chronicled in Bruno Bettelheim's now classic books Love Is Not Enough (1950), Truants from Life (1955), The Empty Fortress (1967), and A Home for the Heart (1972).
A Greenhouse for the Mind continues the story of the school, focusing on how its teachers and counselors create an educational environment in which children will want and be able to learn. Jacquelyn Seevak Sanders worked closely with Bettelheim for thirteen years as a counselor and assistant principal and since 1973 has been director of the Orthogenic School. She offers her interpretation of Bettelheim's vision of a healing world for children, as well as her own ideas and new perspectives from the last decade.

In a warm and anecdotal style, Sanders relates the experiences and overarching theoretical principles that have shaped the school and its curriculum. She describes how the staff, schedules, and physical appearance of the school have been developed to create a stable and safe place to learn; how teachers confront their own emotional vulnerability; how the staff accepts the children themselves while disciplining unacceptable behavior; and how the attention of the inattentive can be gained. She chronicles the successes and setbacks of the staff in developing a curriculum that includes reading, science, and physical education, and she exemplifies the school's principles and practices through a story of an imaginary student's educational development.

In addition to her experience at the Orthogenic School, Sanders has worked with teachers at all levels from nursery schools to universities, and in A Greenhouse for the Mind she passes on what she has learned about educating difficult children—principles that have been helpful to both disturbed children in a unique setting and more typical children in ordinary settings. Her attention to the role of emotions in the learning process adds an often neglected dimension to traditional cognitive and instructional approaches.

Using data from more than ten years of research, David McNeill shows that gestures do not simply form a part of what is said and meant but have an impact on thought itself. Hand and Mind persuasively argues that because gestures directly transfer mental images to visible forms, conveying ideas that language cannot always express, we must examine language and gesture together to unveil the operations of the mind.

At the core of Swedenborg’s thought is the understanding that our purpose in this life is to progress spiritually—to learn, to grow, to do good works, and, ultimately, to allow as much of God’s love as possible to enter into us and manifest through us.

Scattered throughout his works are descriptions of our mind and how it relates to both the physical and spiritual worlds. In this book, Taylor pulls these loose threads together and weaves them into a simple, coherent whole, presenting Swedenborg’s teachings as a system that anyone can follow. Taylor describes the external or natural mind as primarily concerned with material things, and the inner mind, in its essence, as love. As we elevate our thoughts toward higher and higher types of love and wisdom, we draw closer to God and begin the process of regeneration, or rebirth as spiritual beings.

This is the first time in many decades that a book has been published on Swedenborg’s philosophy of the mind. Taylor’s straightforward commentary gives readers a rare insight into this crucial aspect of Swedenborg’s theology.

As one of the world’s most eminent living philosophers, John Perry has covered a remarkable breadth of subjects in his published work, including semantics, indexicality, self-knowledge, personal identity, and consciousness. Looking particularly at the way in which he deals with issues of self, communication, and reality, this volume is organized in seven chapters that highlight a different aspect of Perry’s work on the intersection of these subjects. A fundamental work for students and scholars, Identity, Language, and Mind explores questions that are not only essential in understanding Perry’s writings, but also contemporary philosophy as a whole.

This brilliant and insightful contribution to cultural studies investigates the role of literature—particularly the novel—and visual arts in the development of institutions. Arguing the attitudes expressed in narrative literature and art between 1719 and 1779 helped bring about the change from traditional prisons to penitentiaries, John Bender offers studies of Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, The Beggar's Opera, Hogarth's Progresses, Jonathan Wild, and Amelia as well as illustrations from prison literature, art, and architecture in support of his thesis.

Language, Culture, and Mind is a stimulating collection exploring the ways that cognitive, social, and cultural categories are revealed through language. Contributors use methods such as psycholinguistic experiments and observations of natural discourse to probe how such categories are organized, with grammatical and semantic analyses—in modern cognitive frameworks—augmenting these approaches. Some of the phenomena studied include the linguistic expression of space and causality; aspect, classifiers, negation, and complement constructions; and metaphor, metonymy, and conceptual blending across different domains of human experience. The result is a fresh perspective on the way language relates to thought and culture.

Language, Mind, and Knowledge was first published in 1975. 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.

This is Volume VII of the Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, a series published in cooperation with the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Minnesota and edited by Herbert Feigl and Grover Maxwell. Professor Maxwell is the present director of the Center. Some of the papers in this volume were presented at or grew out of a conference on the philosophy of language which was held at the Center under the direction of Professor Gunderson. Others were written independently.

The aim of the book, like that of the conference, is to assemble a wide variety of approaches to issues in the philosophy of language with emphasis on the ways in which the issues involved have bearing on other matters such as linguistic theory, cognitive psychology, the philosophy of mind, and epistemology.

There are twelve papers by eleven contributors: "Languages and Language" by David Lewis; "Logic and Language: An Examination of Recent Criticisms of Internationalism" by Jerrold J. Katz; "The Meaning of 'Meaning'" by Hilary Putnam; "Reference and Context" by Charles Chastain; "Language, Thought, and Communication" by Gilbert Harman; "Knowledge of Language" by Noam Chomsky; "Language, Rules, and Complex Behavior" by Michael D. Root; "A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts" by John R. Searle; "On What We Know" by Zeno Vendler; "Vendler on Knowledge and Belief" by Bruce Aune; "Reply to Professor Aune" by Zeno Vendler; "Brain Writing and Mind Reading" by D.C. Dennett.

Phrenology was the most popular mental science of the Victorian age. From American senators to Indian social reformers, this new mental science found supporters around the globe. Materials of the Mind tells the story of how phrenology changed the world—and how the world changed phrenology.
 
This is a story of skulls from the Arctic, plaster casts from Haiti, books from Bengal, and letters from the Pacific. Drawing on far-flung museum and archival collections, and addressing sources in six different languages, Materials of the Mind is an impressively innovative account of science in the nineteenth century as part of global history. It shows how the circulation of material culture underpinned the emergence of a new materialist philosophy of the mind, while also demonstrating how a global approach to history can help us reassess issues such as race, technology, and politics today.

This volume comprises a lively and thorough discussion between philosophers and Tyler Burge about Burge's recent, and already widely accepted, position in the theory of meaning, mind, and knowledge. This position is embodied by an externalist theory of meaning and an anti-individualist theory of mind and approach to self-knowledge.

The authors of the eleven papers here expound their versions of this position and go on to critique Burge's version. Together with Burge's replies, this volume offers a major contribution to contemporary philosophy.

Across Victorian Britain, apparently reasonable people twisted into bizarre postures, called out in unknown languages, and placidly bore assaults that should have caused unbearable pain all while they were mesmerized. Alison Winter's fascinating cultural history traces the history of mesmerism in Victorian society. Mesmerized is both a social history of the age and a lively exploration of the contested territory between science and pseudo-science.

"Dazzling. . . . This splendid book . . . gives us a new form of historical understanding and a model for open and imaginative reading."—James R. Kinkaid, Boston Globe

"A landmark in the history of science scholarship."—John Sutherland, The Independent

"It is difficult to imagine the documentary side of the story being better done than by Winter's well-researched and generously illustrated study. . . . She is a lively and keen observer; and her book is a pleasure to read purely for its range of material and wealth of detail. . . . Fruitful and suggestive."—Daniel Karlin, Times Literary Supplement

"An ambitious, sweeping and fascinating historical study. . . . Beautifully written, thoroughly researched, and well-illustrated."—Bernard Lightman, Washington Times

First published in 1974 as a companion volume to Darwin on Man by Howard E. Gruber, Paul Barrett’s transcriptions of Darwin’s M and N notebooks served to shed new light on the evolutionist’s methods and motivation.

According to Stephen Jay Gould in the New York Times Book Review, “Darwin kept [these notebooks] primarily in 1838, when he was 29 years old. In them, he recorded his early conviction of evolutionary continuity between humans and all other animals. . . . These notebooks display all the features of humanistic intellect that his detractors denied. We find erudition in his comments on Plato, Locke, Hume, Adam Smith, Whewell, Burke, Montaigne, Lessing and Spencer. . . . We appreciate an artistic bent in his delight with nature and her prophet Wordsworth. . . . We grasp the breadth of his bold attempt to clothe all human thought and behaviour in a new evolutionary garb. . . . Charles Darwin was reconstructing the world and he knew exactly what he was doing.” 

The Mind and Art of Victorian England was first published in 1976. 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.

In a series of ten essays and a generous selection of illustrations, many in color, this volume depicts and assesses the mind and art of Victorian England. Multidisciplinary in approach, the essays deal with a variety of aspects in the history of the Victorian age.

Professor Altholz, the volume editor, writes: "It was an age not of revolution but of reform; political reform which admitted first the middle and then the working classes to the dominant share of the suffrage; economic and social reforms which proclaimed the triumph of laissez-faire while laying the foundations of the welfare state; moral reforms attempted if not achieved through education and religious revival; aesthetic reforms proposed if not achieved and, even in their failure, adding to the richness and diversity of Victorian England. It was an age whose problems cried out for reform; and, despite the prevailing complacency, virtually all the great Victorians were critics of their age. Their criticisms were diverse and often mutually incompatible, with each other -- and their public -- but they shared a high seriousness which gave character and substance to the flowering of their culture. Such was the Victorian age: the high-water mark of English history, the maturation of British culture, and the seedbed of our problems and our discontents."

The illustrations include color reproductions of some of the works discussed by Melvin Waldfogel in his essay "Narrative Painting," and a selection of architectural engravings and photographs.

Mind, Matter, and Method was first published in 1966. 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.

This volume of twenty-six essays by as many contributors is published in honor of Herbert Feigl, professor of philosophy at the University of Minnesota and director of the Minnesota Center for the Philosophy of Science. Though the majority of the contributors are philosophers, there are also -- as benefits Mr. Feigl's varied intellectual interests -- representatives of psychology, psychoanalysis, and physics.

The first group of ten essays deals with the philosophy of mind, particularly with the mind-body problem, to which Mr. Feigl has devoted much attention. The eleven essays in the second part are concerned with problems of philosophical method, especially with induction and confirmation. The third part is comprised of five essays on the philosophy of the physical sciences. A biographical sketch of Mr. Feigl and a bibliography of his writings are also provided.

A Mind of Her Own:  Helen Connor Laird and Family 1888–1982 captures the public achievement and private pain of a remarkable Wisconsin woman and her family, whose interests and influence extended well beyond the borders of the state. Spanning almost a century, the history speaks to the way we were and are: a stridently materialistic nation with a deep and persistent spiritual component.

"This is the third edition of a near standard survey of the intellectual life of the age of faith. Artz on the arts, as on philosophy, politics and other aspects of culture, makes lively and informative reading."—The Washington Post

How and why do trout think? How do they decide where to eat and which food to eat? Why do they refuse to behave as predicted, stumping anglers by rejecting a larger fly for a smaller one or not responding at all to anything in an angler’s box? How do trout know to bolt to one particular covered area after being hooked or flushed? Why can trout smell better than humans but not remember as well? Citing the most recent scientific findings in a readily understandable form, Thomas C. Grubb, Jr. addresses these questions and more in The Mind of the Trout. It is the first book to bring together many varied concepts of cognitive ecology as applied to trout and their salmonid relatives: char, salmon, grayling, and whitefish.

Bevis addresses the most puzzling and least studied aspect of Wallace Stevens’ poetry: detachment. Stevens’ detachment, often associated by readers with asceticism, bareness, or withdrawal, is one of the distinguishing and pervasive characteristics of Stevens’ poetic work. Bevis agues that this detachment is meditative and therefore experiential in origin. Moreover, the meditative Stevens of spare syntax and clear image is in constant tension with the romantic, imaginative Stevens of dazzling metaphors and exuberant flight. Indeed, for Bevis, Stevens is a poet not of imagination and reality, but of imagination and reality, but of imagination and meditation in relation to reality.

Written from the standpoint of the social behaviorist, this treatise contains the heart of Mead's position on social psychology. The analysis of language is of major interest, as it supplied for the first time an adequate treatment of the language mechanism in relation to scientific and philosophical issues.

"If philosophical eminence be measured by the extent to which a man's writings anticipate the focal problems of a later day and contain a point of view which suggests persuasive solutions to many of them, then George Herbert Mead has justly earned the high praise bestowed upon him by Dewey and Whitehead as a 'seminal mind of the very first order.'"—Sidney Hook, The Nation

George Herbert Mead is widely recognized as one of the most brilliantly original American pragmatists. Although he had a profound influence on the development of social philosophy, he published no books in his lifetime. This makes the lectures collected in Mind, Self, and Society all the more remarkable, as they offer a rare synthesis of his ideas.

This collection gets to the heart of Mead’s meditations on social psychology and social philosophy. Its penetrating, conversational tone transports the reader directly into Mead’s classroom as he teases out the genesis of the self and the nature of the mind. The book captures his wry humor and shrewd reasoning, showing a man comfortable quoting Aristotle alongside Alice in Wonderland.

Included in this edition are an insightful foreword from leading Mead scholar Hans Joas, a revealing set of textual notes by Dan Huebner that detail the text’s origins, and a comprehensive bibliography of Mead’s other published writings. While Mead’s lectures inspired hundreds of students, much of his brilliance has been lost to time. This new edition ensures that Mead’s ideas will carry on, inspiring a new generation of thinkers.

John Hay has been acclaimed as one of the most significant contemporary nature writers and environmentalists. In Mind the Gap, an autobiographic memoir and a passionate commentary on our place in the natural world, he retraces the paths that led to his career and explores the literary and environmental influences that shaped his interest in nature. Born into a respected old New York family, Hay grew up in upper-class Manhattan and rural New Hampshire, between the rigid proprieties of society and the delicious freedoms he discovered during his outdoor adventures. Travel, education, and his own sensitivity and curiosity helped to open the world to him. Shortly after World War II, he moved to a desolate, sandy lot on Cape Cod. Much of the book deals with his life in a small rural community on the Cape, addressing such subjects as the annual herring spawn, resident and migratory birds, local wildlife, his human neighbors, and the complex rhythms of life in this region of wind and sea. Hay’s closely observed descriptions of his surroundings support his insightful comments on nature and our relationship to it. He warns us that “in setting ourselves apart from the rest of living creatures, we fall victim to our own ice-bound conceit. It is only in sharing that we know anything at all.” Hay shares his knowledge generously, and as readers we are thereby enriched. Available in Hardcover and Paperback. 

What is mind? Still harder, what is consciousness? In this radical new book, eminent philosopher Ted Honderich tackles this great mystery in philosophy, psychology, neuroscience—and the rest of life. He proposes to replace all competing theories of consciousness with actualism that rests on data you share yourself.

Unlike other theories, actualism differentiates among the three sides of consciousness—consciousness that is seeing, consciousness that is thinking, and consciousness that is wanting. Consciousness in seeing is not an image or picture in your head, but the existence out there of a real but subjective thing, dependent on both the objective physical world out there and on you as a person. In its attention to the concrete, actualism is becoming increasingly popular among philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists who had previously declared an urgent need for a new theory.

Honderich’s readable, understandable, and unpretentious writing lays out these bold concepts and complex thoughts with clarity and verve. He reinvents our understanding of ourselves, our consciousness, and our mind.

Leading scholars in the fields of philosophy and the sciences of the mind have contributed to this newest volume in the prestigious Pittsburgh-Konstanz series.  Among the problem areas discussed are folk psychology, meanings as conceptual structures, functional and qualitative properties of colors, the role of conscious mental states, representation and mental content, the impact of connectionism on the philosophy of the mind, and supervenience, emergence, and realization.  Most of the essays are followed by commentaries that reflect ongoing debates in the philosophy of the mind and often develop a counterpoint to the claims of the essayists.

In an effort to expand the clinical theory of psychoanalysis, John E. Gedo and Arnold Goldberg delineate and order the various generally accepted systems of psychological functioning, considered here as "models of the mind." The authors provide a historical review of four major models of the mind: the topographic model, the reflex arc model, the tripartite model, and an object relations model. They then investigate the possible hierarchical interrelationships of such models. Each model is shown to represent a different facet of mental functioning and is thus employable on an ad hoc basis. The models are shown not to cancel on another out but to allow for theoretical complementarity.

Gedo and Goldberg apply their theory to four classic psychoanalytic case studies to demonstrate its effectiveness: Freud's Rat Man, his Wolf Man, the case of Daniel Paul Schreber, and a case of arrested development. For each of these cases the authors show how it would have been both possible and advantageous to apply a variety of different theories as facts about each continued to accumulate.

In A New Writing Classroom, Patrick Sullivan provides a new generation of teachers a means and a rationale to reconceive their approach to teaching writing, calling into question the discipline's dependence on argument.

Including secondary writing teachers within his purview, Sullivan advocates a more diverse, exploratory, and flexible approach to writing activities in grades six through thirteen. A New Writing Classroom encourages teachers to pay more attention to research in learning theory, transfer of learning, international models for nurturing excellence in the classroom, and recent work in listening to teach students the sort of dialogic stance that leads to higher-order thinking and more sophisticated communication.

The conventional argumentative essay is often a simplistic form of argument, widely believed to be the most appropriate type of writing in English classes, but other kinds of writing may be more valuable to students and offer more important kinds of cognitive challenges. Focusing on listening and dispositions or "habits of mind” as central elements of this new composition pedagogy, A New Writing Classroom draws not just on composition studies but also on cognitive psychology, philosophy, learning theory, literature, and history, making an exciting and significant contribution to the field. 

To illustrate these ideas, this volume is designed as a "morphing book," a collection of linked nodes that can be read in innumerable different ways. Doing nothing less fundamental than

challenging the default medium of the linear book and page and all that they entail, Oral Tradition and the Internet shows readers that there are large, complex, wholly viable, alternative

worlds of media-technology out there--if only they are willing to explore, to think outside the usual, culturally constructed categories. This "brick-and-mortar" book exists as an extension of

The Pathways Project (http://pathwaysproject.org), an open-access online suite of chapter-nodes, linked websites, and multimedia all dedicated to exploring and demonstrating the

dynamic relationship between oral tradition and Internet technology

In many societies and for many people, religiosity is only incidentally connected with texts or theologies, church or mosque, temple or monastery. Drawing on a lifetime of ethnographic work among people for whom religion is not principally a matter of faith, doctrine, or definition, Michael Jackson turns his attention to those situations in life where we come up against the limits of language, our strength, and our knowledge, yet are sometimes thrown open to new ways of understanding our being-in-the-world, to new ways of connecting with others.

Through sixty-one beautifully crafted essays based on sojourns in Europe, West Africa, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, and taking his cue from Wallace Stevens’s late poem, “Of Mere Being,” Jackson explores a range of experiences where “the palm at the end of the mind” stands “beyond thought,” on “the edge of space,” “a foreign song.” Moments of crisis as well as everyday experiences in cafés, airports, and offices disclose the subtle ways in which a single life shades into others, the boundaries between cultures become blurred, fate unfolds through genealogical time, elective affinities make their appearance, and different values contend.

Postures of the Mind was first published in 1985. 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.

Annette Baier develops, in these essays, a posture in philosophy of mind and in ethics that grows out of her reading of Hume and the later Wittgenstein, and that challenges several Kantian or analytic articles of faith. She questions the assumption that intellect has authority over all human feelings and traditions; that to recognize order we must recognize universal laws—descriptive or prescriptive; that the essential mental activity is representing; and that mental acts can be analyzed into discrete basic elements, combined according to statable rules of synthesis.

In the first group of essays—"Varieties of Mental Postures"—Baier evaluates the positions taken by philosophers ranging from Descartes to Dennett and Davidson. Among her topics are remembering, intending, realizing, caring, representing, changing one's mind, justifying one's actions and feelings, and having conflicting reasons for them. The second group of essays—"Varieties of Moral Postures" - explores the sort of morality we get when all of these capacities become reflective and self-corrective. Some deal with particular moral issues—our treatment of animals, our policies regarding risk to human life, our contractual obligations; others, with more general questions on the role of moral philosophers and the place of moral theory. These essays respond to the theories of Hobbes, Kant, Rawls, and MacIntyre, but Baier's most positive reaction is to David Hume; Postures of the Mind affirms and cultivates his version of a moral reflection that employs feeling and tradition as well as reason.

In Regimens of the Mind, Sorana Corneanu proposes a new approach to the epistemological and methodological doctrines of the leading experimental philosophers of seventeenth-century England, an approach that considers their often overlooked moral, psychological, and theological elements. Corneanu focuses on the views about the pursuit of knowledge in the writings of Robert Boyle and John Locke, as well as in those of several of their influences, including Francis Bacon and the early Royal Society virtuosi. She argues that their experimental programs of inquiry fulfill the role of regimens for curing, ordering, and educating the mind toward an ethical purpose, an idea she tracks back to the ancient tradition of cultura animi. Corneanu traces this idea through its early modern revival and illustrates how it organizes the experimental philosophers’ reflections on the discipline of judgment, the study of nature, and the study of Scripture.  

It is through this lens, the author suggests, that the core features of the early modern English experimental philosophy—including its defense of experience, its epistemic modesty, its communal nature, and its pursuit of “objectivity”—are best understood.

This book contains a collection of John Templeton's favorite inspirational passages.

                 

“From the Bible, from philosophers and poets, and from other writers, we begin to form a clear understanding of the spiritual and ethical laws of life. The world's literature teaches us valuable lessons that no amount of money can buy. Those lessonsare there for everyone. They are free and they are priceless.”—John Marks Templeton

 

Ideas about human sexuality and sexual development changed dramatically across the first half of the 20th century. As scholars such as Magnus Hirschfeld, Iwan Bloch, Albert Moll, and Karen Horney in Berlin and Sigmund Freud, Wilhelm Stekel, and Helene Deutsch in Vienna were recognized as leaders in their fields, the German-speaking world quickly became the international center of medical-scientific sex research—and the birthplace of two new and distinct professional disciplines, sexology and psychoanalysis.
 
This is the first book to closely examine vital encounters among this era’s German-speaking researchers across their emerging professional and disciplinary boundaries. Although psychoanalysis was often considered part of a broader “sexual science,” sexologists increasingly distanced themselves from its mysterious concepts and clinical methods. Instead, they turned to more pragmatic, interventionist therapies—in particular, to the burgeoning field of hormone research, which they saw as crucial to establishing their own professional relevance. As sexology and psychoanalysis diverged, heated debates arose around concerns such as the sexual life of the child, the origins and treatment of homosexuality and transgender phenomena, and female frigidity. This new story of the emergence of two separate approaches to the study of sex demonstrates that the distinctions between them were always part of a dialogic and competitive process. It fundamentally revises our understanding of the production of modern sexual subjects.
 

Staging Consciousness argues that theater is a living invalidation of the Western dualism of mind and body, activating human consciousness through its embodiment of thought in performance. While consciousness theory has begun to find ways to bridge dualist gaps, Staging Consciousness suggests that theater has anticipated these advances, given the ways in which the physical theater promotes nonphysical thought, connecting the two realms in unique and ingenious ways.

William W. Demastes makes use of the writings of such varied theater practitioners as Antonin Artaud, Jerzy Grotowski, Samuel Beckett, Tony Kushner, Sam Shepard, Spalding Gray, Peter Shaffer, and others, illuminating theater as proof that mind is an extension of body. The living stage incubates and materializes thought in a way that highlights the processes of daily existence outside the theater. This book offers a new way for theater practitioners to look at the unique value of the theater and an invitation for philosophers and scientists to search for new paradigms in theater, the oldest of art forms.

William W. Demastes is Professor of English, Louisiana State University. His previous books include Theatre of Chaos: Beyond Absurdism, into Disorderly Order.

Gregory Bateson was a philosopher, anthropologist, photographer, naturalist, and poet, as well as the husband and collaborator of Margaret Mead. With a new foreword by his daughter Mary Katherine Bateson, this classic anthology of his major work will continue to delight and inform generations of readers.

"This collection amounts to a retrospective exhibition of a working life. . . . Bateson has come to this position during a career that carried him not only into anthropology, for which he was first trained, but into psychiatry, genetics, and communication theory. . . . He . . . examines the nature of the mind, seeing it not as a nebulous something, somehow lodged somewhere in the body of each man, but as a network of interactions relating the individual with his society and his species and with the universe at large."—D. W. Harding, New York Review of Books

"[Bateson's] view of the world, of science, of culture, and of man is vast and challenging. His efforts at synthesis are tantalizingly and cryptically suggestive. . . .This is a book we should all read and ponder."—Roger Keesing, American Anthropologist

 

This seminal work in several fields—person-centered anthropology, comparative psychology, and social history—documents the inner life of the Tahitians with sensitivity and insight. At the same time Levy reveals the ways in which private and public worlds interact. Tahitians is an ethnography focused on private but culturally organized behavior resulting in a wealth of material for the understanding of the interaction among historical, cultural, and personal spheres.

"This is a unique addition to anthropological literature. . . . No review could substitute for reading it."—Margaret Mead, American Anthropologist

For generations, fans and critics have characterized classic American radio drama as a “theater of the mind.” This book unpacks that characterization by recasting the radio play as an aesthetic object within its unique historical context. In Theater of the Mind, Neil Verma applies an array of critical methods to more than six thousand recordings to produce a vivid new account of radio drama from the Depression to the Cold War.

In this sweeping exploration of dramatic conventions, Verma investigates legendary dramas by the likes of Norman Corwin, Lucille Fletcher, and Wyllis Cooper on key programs ranging from The Columbia Workshop, The Mercury Theater on the Air, and Cavalcade of America to Lights Out!, Suspense, and Dragnet to reveal how these programs promoted and evolved a series of models of the imagination.

With close readings of individual sound effects and charts of broad trends among formats, Verma not only gives us a new account of the most flourishing form of genre fiction in the mid-twentieth century but also presents a powerful case for the central place of the aesthetics of sound in the history of modern experience.

One of the major questions of cultural psychology is how to take diversity seriously while acknowledging our shared humanity. This collection, edited by Julia L. Cassaniti and Usha Menon, brings together leading scholars in the field to reconsider that question and explore the complex mechanisms that connect culture and the human mind.
 
The contributors to Universalism without Uniformity offer tools for bridging silos that have historically separated anthropology’s attention to culture and psychology’s interest in universal mental processes. Throughout, they seek to answer intricate yet fundamental questions about why we are motivated to find meaning in everything around us and, in turn, how we constitute the cultural worlds we inhabit through our intentional involvement in them. Laying bare entrenched disciplinary blind spots, this book offers a trove of insights on issues such as morality, emotional functioning, and conceptions of the self across cultures. Filled with impeccable empirical research coupled with broadly applicable theoretical reflections on taking psychological diversity seriously, Universalism without Uniformity breaks new ground in the study of mind and culture. 

It is an unenviable task, but one that all state governments face: finding a final “resting place” for low-level nuclear waste from power plants, hospitals, university laboratories, and other industries. John Weingart was the official in New Jersey who for many years led this onerous charge. This book is the story of how he and a commission appointed by the governor, instead of imposing a top-down solution, designed an approach that would confront public fears by seeking a community that would volunteer to host a disposal facility. Initially, this novel approach was surprisingly successful, as leaders in a dozen municipalities stepped forward to say they might be interested. Once their interest became known, however, the process in each town derailed. Residents demanded assurances of zero-percent risk and expressed profound distrust of government assertions and promises.

Waste Is a Terrible Thing to Mind is a compelling, suspenseful, and amusing insider’s account of New Jersey policy and politics, but it is also a larger saga of the challenges facing society in the post–9/11 era when the public’s distrust of government is increasing at the same time that its sensitivity to health and safety threats is heightened.

For more information, see: http://wasteisaterriblethingtomind.com/

"Written with a wry sense of humor, it is a pleasure to read and could provide the blueprint for future efforts to find locations for controversial land uses."
- Marie Curtis, Executive Director, New Jersey Environmental Lobby

"A penetrating look at one state's struggle with radioactive waste ... offering some tantalizing reflections on the public understanding of science and how we, in a democratic society, deal with complexity and uncertainty."
- Jay Kaufman, State Senator, Massachusetts State Legislature

"A provocative story, laced with humor, demonstrates how public distrust of government can make it impotent. It should be read by anyone working on public policy issues, especially planning, growth, and the environment."
- Harriet Keyserling, Former Energy Committee Chair, South Carolina State Legislature

"Readers interested in environmental policy, land use and how governments make decisions will learn much from this fine reflective insider's account. It's also a primer on how to survive and thrive in state government."
- David N. Kinsey, Visiting Professor, Woodrow Wilson School Princeton University

"... a fascinating case study of how a government agency creatively tried to solve an intractable public issue. Although the agency failed in its quest to recruit a town to host a low-level radioactive waste site, Weingart's detailed and often humorous narrative of the agency's efforts is a clear winner."
- Jack Sabatino, Judge, New Jersey Superior Court

"... a very engaging and sometimes discouraging case study about the pitfalls and perils of trying to site a controversial facility the right way."
- Gregg Larson, Administrator, Center for Biometric Research, University of Minnesota

Who Am I? is the bittersweet memoir of a Chinese American who came to this country as a twenty-year-old graduate student and stayed to become one of America’s most innovative intellectuals, whose work has explored the aesthetic and moral dimensions of human relations with landscape, nature, and environment. This unusually introspective autobiography mixes Yi-Fu Tuan’s reflections on a life filled with recognition, accolades, and affection with what he deems moral failings, his lack of courage—including the courage to be open about his homosexuality.