scholarly journals [Review] Peter Godfrey-Smith. Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind. New York: Farar, Straus and Giroux, 2020. 336 pp.

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 290-297
Author(s):  
David Herman
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  

Animal Studies Journal 2021 10(1): [Review] Peter Godfrey-Smith. Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind. New York: Farar, Straus and Giroux, 2020. 336 pp.

Author(s):  
Gavin Miller

Existential-humanistic psychology recovers neglected philosophical and spiritual categories regarded as proper to human being, in contrast with animal life or inanimate systems. Existential-humanistic proto-discourses are important to Vincent McHugh’s I Am Thinking of My Darling (1943), in which an emerging ideal of personal authenticity queries the American Dream in 1940s’ New York. McHugh’s critical utopia contrasts with the ponderous extrapolations of Colin Wilson in The Mind Parasites (1967) and The Space Vampires (1976), and Doris Lessing in The Four-Gated City (1969). Both these authors – despite their widely differing positions in the literary canon – use science fiction as a didactic and futurological (even prophetic) medium in which existential psychology serves as the supposed rationale for spiritual apotheosis (including the cultivation of psi powers). A more fruitful post-war deployment of existential-humanistic psychology can be found in texts such as Theodore Sturgeon’s ‘And Now the News …’ (1956), Naomi Mitchison’s Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962) and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), which critique the instrumental tendencies of mainstream psychology.


2008 ◽  
Vol 63 (4) ◽  
pp. 769-770
Author(s):  
Csaba Pléh

Danziger, Kurt: Marking the mind. A history of memory . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2008Farkas, Katalin: The subject’s point of view. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008MosoninéFriedJudités TolnaiMárton(szerk.): Tudomány és politika. Typotex, Budapest, 2008Iacobini, Marco: Mirroring people. The new science of how we connect with others. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2008Changeux, Jean-Pierre. Du vrai, du beau, du bien.Une nouvelle approche neuronale. Odile Jacob, PárizsGazzaniga_n


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