scholarly journals The Carnival of the Mad: Foucault’s Window into the Origin of Psychology

2021 ◽  
pp. 54-79
Author(s):  
Hannah Lyn Venable

Foucault’s participation in the 1954 carnival of the mad at an asylum in Switzerland marked the beginning of his critical reflections on the origins of psychology. The event revealed a paradox at the heart of psychology to Foucault, for here was an asylum known for its progressive method and groundbreaking scientific research that was somehow still exhibiting traces of a medieval conception of madness. Using the cultural expression of this carnival as a starting place, this paper goes beyond carnival costumes to uncover the historical structures underneath the discipline of modern psychology. Drawing on Foucault’s earliest works in psychology, his 1954 Mental Illness and Personality, his 1954 “Dream, Existence and Imagination,” his 1957 “Scientific Research and Psychology” and briefly his 1961 History of Madness, I will describe the discrepancy between the theory of modern psychology, which finds its heritage in the methods of modern science, and the practice of modern psychology, which finds its heritage in the classical age. I will argue that this division helps make sense of unexplained psychological phenomena, as seen in general practices related to artistic expression, and individual experiences, as seen in the presence of guilt and the resistance to medical diagnosis in patients.

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (12) ◽  
pp. 23
Author(s):  
Bortolo Valle

Este trabalho pretende apresentar aspectos do pensamento filosófico sobre a ciência desenvolvido pelo filósofo romeno Lucian Blaga. Tomando como base a história do desenvolvimento da pesquisa científica, o autor busca evidenciar o papel do experimento e sua singularidade na ciência de tipo galileo-newtoniano destacando a extensão metodológica e o lugar do supramétodo. Busca indicar de que maneira a presença da matemática, no âmbito da ciência moderna, conduziu a pesquisa científica para além dos horizontes da ciência grega.Abstract: The present study aims at introducing aspects of the philosophical thought on science developed by the Romanian philosopher Lucian Blaga. Based on the history of the development of scientific research the author aims at highlighting the role of experiments and their uniqueness in the Galileo-Newtonian science, emphasizing the methodological extension and the place of the super method. It aims to point out how the presence of mathematics in the context of modern science has led the scientific research beyond the horizons of Greek science. Keywords: Scientific experiment; method; Lucian Blaga.


2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 90-96
Author(s):  
Anatoliy V. Kharkhurin

AbstractIn this commentary, I raise an etiological question, which has been virtually excluded from the horizon of contemporary scholarship. In spite of a long history of philosophical, mystical, and religious approaches considering the transcendent and/or spiritual sources of human creativity, mainstream creativity researchers have become gradually reluctant to acknowledge the supernatural influences in this human endeavour. This account is either disregarded altogether or re-interpreted in a way that substitutes supernatural connections with observable and measurable processes. On the one hand, the latter approach appears to fall within the premises of modern science and thereby earns substantial attention the scientific community. On the other, this could be one of the reasons why creativity research has reached its epistemological cul-de-sac. I argue that by retaining the source of creativity within an individual, one annihilates the whole constellation of personality traits and processes, which have transcendent characteristics. It is important to integrate the study of transcendent experience into the study of cognitive, personality, and environmental underpinnings of creative faculties. A possible direction for this change is offered by transpersonal psychology, which makes an attempt to resurrect an investigation of spiritual reality and integrate it in the study of modern psychology. At the end of the commentary, I sketch a transcendental model of creativity developed along the lines of a transpersonal paradigm.


1991 ◽  
Vol 65 (05) ◽  
pp. 487-490 ◽  
Author(s):  
A E Thomas ◽  
F R Green ◽  
C H Kelleher ◽  
H C Wilkes ◽  
P J Brennan ◽  
...  

SummaryWe investigated the association between fibrinogen levels and a HaeIII restriction fragment length polymorphism located at −453 bp from the start of transcription of the β fibrinogen gene. 292 healthy men aged 45 to 69 years, recruited from general practices throughout Britain, were studied. None had a history of ischaemic heart disease. 41.1% (120) were smokers and fibrinogen levels were higher in this group. The frequency of the noncutting allele (designated H2) was 0.19 and was the same in smokers and non-smokers. The H2 allele was associated with elevated levels of fibrinogen in both smokers and non-smokers and the effect of genotype was similar in both groups. After smoking, HaeIII genotype was the strongest predictor of fibrinogen levels and explained 3.1% of the variance in fibrinogen levels. These results confirm earlier studies that variation at the fibrinogen locus contributes to the between-individual differences in plasma fibrinogen level.


2007 ◽  
Vol 62 (3) ◽  
pp. 407-420
Author(s):  
Magda Ritoókné Ádám ◽  
Olivér Nagybányai Nagy ◽  
Csaba Pléh ◽  
Attila Keresztes

VárinéSzilágyiIbolya: Építészprofilok, akik a 70-es, 80-as években indultak(Ritoókné Ádám Magda)      407RacsmányMihály(szerk.): Afejlődés zavarai és vizsgálómódszerei(Nagybányai Nagy Olivér)     409Új irányzatok és a bejárt út a pszichológiatörténet-írásban (Mandler, G.: Interesting times. An encounter with the 20th century; Hergenhahn, B. N.: An introduction to the history of psychology; Schultz, D. P.,Schultz, S. E.: A history of modern psychology; Greenwood, J. D.: The disappearance of the social in American social psychology;Bem, S.,LoorendeJong, H.: Theoretical issues in psychology. An introduction; Sternberg, R. J. (ed.)Unity in psychology: Possibility or pipedream?;Dalton, D. C.,Evans, R. B. (eds): __


2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (152) ◽  
pp. 92-99
Author(s):  
S. M. Geiko ◽  
◽  
O. D. Lauta

The article provides a philosophical analysis of the tropological theory of the history of H. White. The researcher claims that history is a specific kind of literature, and the historical works is the connection of a certain set of research and narrative operations. The first type of operation answers the question of why the event happened this way and not the other. The second operation is the social description, the narrative of events, the intellectual act of organizing the actual material. According to H. White, this is where the set of ideas and preferences of the researcher begin to work, mainly of a literary and historical nature. Explanations are the main mechanism that becomes the common thread of the narrative. The are implemented through using plot (romantic, satire, comic and tragic) and trope systems – the main stylistic forms of text organization (metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, irony). The latter decisively influenced for result of the work historians. Historiographical style follows the tropological model, the selection of which is determined by the historian’s individual language practice. When the choice is made, the imagination is ready to create a narrative. Therefore, the historical understanding, according to H. White, can only be tropological. H. White proposes a new methodology for historical research. During the discourse, adequate speech is created to analyze historical phenomena, which the philosopher defines as prefigurative tropological movement. This is how history is revealed through the art of anthropology. Thus, H. White’s tropical history theory offers modern science f meaningful and metatheoretically significant. The structure of concepts on which the classification of historiographical styles can be based and the predictive function of philosophy regarding historical knowledge can be refined.


Author(s):  
Barry Allen

Empiricisms reassesses the values of experience and experiment in European philosophy and comparatively. It traces the history of empirical philosophy from its birth in Greek medicine to its emergence as a philosophy of modern science. A richly detailed account in Part I of history’s empiricisms establishes a context in Part II for reconsidering the work of the so-called radical empiricists—William James, Henri Bergson, John Dewey, and Gilles Deleuze, each treated in a dedicated chapter. What is “radical” about their work is to return empiricism from epistemology to the ontology and natural philosophy where it began. Empiricisms also sets empirical philosophy in conversation with Chinese tradition, considering technological, scientific, medical, and alchemical sources, as well as selected Confucian, Daoist, and Mohist classics. The work shows how philosophical reflection on experience and a profound experimental practice coexist in traditional China with no interaction or even awareness of each other. Empiricism is more multi-textured than philosophers tend to assume when we explain it to ourselves and to students. One purpose of Empiricisms is to recover the neglected context. A complementary purpose is to elucidate the value of experience and arrive at some idea of what is living and dead in philosophical empiricism.


Author(s):  
Peter D. McDonald

The section introduces Part II, which spans the period 1946 to 2014, by tracing the history of the debates about culture within UNESCO from 1947 to 2009. It considers the central part print literacy played in the early decades, and the gradual emergence of what came to be called ‘intangible heritage’; the political divisions of the Cold War that had a bearing not just on questions of the state and its role as a guardian of culture but on the idea of cultural expression as a commodity; the slow shift away from an exclusively intellectualist definition of culture to a more broadly anthropological one; and the realpolitik surrounding the debates about cultural diversity since the 1990s. The section concludes by showing how at the turn of the new millennium UNESCO caught up with the radical ways in which Tagore and Joyce thought about linguistic and cultural diversity.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document