THE MENTAL LIFE OF THE CHILD

1949 ◽  
Vol 2 (24) ◽  
pp. 861-861
Keyword(s):  
2012 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 320-325 ◽  
Author(s):  
Serge Nicolas ◽  
Zachary Levine

Though Alfred Binet was a prolific writer, many of his 1893–1903 works are not well known. This is partly due to a lack of English translations of the many important papers and books that he and his collaborators created during this period. Binet’s insights into intelligence testing are widely celebrated, but the centennial of his death provides an occasion to reexamine his other psychological examinations. His studies included many diverse aspects of mental life, including memory research and the science of testimony. Indeed, Binet was a pioneer of psychology and produced important research on cognitive and experimental psychology, developmental psychology, social psychology, and applied psychology. This paper seeks to elucidate these aspects of his work.


This survey of research on psychology in five volumes is a part of a series undertaken by the ICSSR since 1969, which covers various disciplines under social science. Volume Five of this survey, Explorations into Psyche and Psychology: Some Emerging Perspectives, examines the future of psychology in India. For a very long time, intellectual investments in understanding mental life have led to varied formulations about mind and its functions across the word. However, a critical reflection of the state of the disciplinary affairs indicates the dominance of Euro-American theories and methods, which offer an understanding coloured by a Western world view, which fails to do justice with many non-Western cultural settings. The chapters in this volume expand the scope of psychology to encompass indigenous knowledge available in the Indian tradition and invite engaging with emancipatory concerns as well as broadening the disciplinary base. The contributors situate the difference between the Eastern and Western conceptions of the mind in the practice of psychology. They look at this discipline as shaped by and shaping between systems like yoga. They also analyse animal behaviour through the lens of psychology and bring out insights about evolution of individual and social behaviour. This volume offers critique the contemporary psychological practices in India and offers a new perspective called ‘public psychology’ to construe and analyse the relationship between psychologists and their objects of study. Finally, some paradigmatic, pedagogical, and substantive issues are highlighted to restructure the practice of psychology in the Indian setting.


Author(s):  
Mark Textor

When we are aware of our perceiving, we cannot attend to (observe) our perceiving, only the object which we (seem to) perceive. The perceiving is therefore the secondary, the object perceived the primary object. The chapter develops and evaluates Brentano’s grounds for the distinction between the primary and the secondary object. This project is of independent philosophical interest because Brentano’s view promises to shed light on the distinctive character of awareness. Awareness cannot become observation, because mere awareness of a mental phenomenon cannot contrast it with others. I argue further that Brentano’s account of noticing and observation has room for an ‘anatomy of the soul’ that proceeds by noticing the elements of our mental life.


Slavic Review ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 79 (4) ◽  
pp. 709-730
Author(s):  
Matthew Mangold

In light of the historical circumstances surrounding Anton Chekhov's early writing career and his own statements about the importance of medicine to it, there is surprisingly little scholarship on how medicine shaped his prose. What ideas was he introduced to in medical school and how did he apply them? Which of these drew his attention as he strove to articulate a new artistic vision? How did Chekhov draw on his experience with medicine to experiment with new themes and forms in his literary writing? This article addresses these questions by focusing on the aspects of medicine that had the most discernable influence on Chekhov as he developed his literary writing: hygiene, clinical medicine, and psychiatry. It argues that Chekhov engaged with core issues of medicine not only as a medical student who wrote case histories of his patients, but also as a groundbreaking writer. As he transcodes insights from the clinic into his prose, he creates a new conception of details that disclose relationships between settings and characters and an environmental psychology emerges across his medical writing and fiction. His stories envision relationships between physical and mental life with such originality that he becomes a new literary force not long after completing his medical education.


Erkenntnis ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giulia Felappi

AbstractAs the label suggests, according to propositionalism, each intentional mental state, attitude or event is or involves a relation to a proposition. In this paper, I will discuss a case that seems prima facie not to be accountable for by propositionalism. After having presented the case, I will show why it is different from others that have been discussed in the literature as able to show that propositionalism cannot be correct. I will then consider what the propositionalist can say to fix the problem and I will show that no strategy that is genuinely propositionalist seems promising. I will not conclude that propositionalism is doomed. But I will show that if propositionalism can account for our case at all, it can only do so by losing its main appeal, i.e. its elegance and simplicity. But then propositionalism seems to have lost its advantage with respect to its obvious alternative, i.e. a pluralist account according to which mental states, attitudes and events are not all homogeneously relations to propositions, but rather our mental life should be accounted for in terms of a plurality of kinds of relata.


2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-228 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stijn Vanheule

In 1966, in a paper on those who have influenced his work, Jacques Lacan suggested that his concept of ‘paranoid knowledge’ and his structural approach to psychoanalysis were closely linked to the work of Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault. This article examines both of these points. Starting with an introduction to de Clérambault, focusing on his concept ‘mental automatism,’ the link between ‘mental automatism’ and ‘paranoid knowledge’ is discussed. Loyalty to Henri Claude and conflicts around theoretical and clinical issues seem to lie at the basis of Lacan's initial neglect of his conceptual indebtedness to de Clérambault. Second, the author discusses the presumed connection between mental automatism and Lacan's structural psychoanalytic theory, which Lacan did not elaborate. It is argued that from a structural perspective, mental automatism comes down to a rupture in the continuity of the signifying chain, which provokes the disappearance of the subject. Furthermore, Lacan's theory implies the hypothesis that manifestations of mental automatism are determined by a foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father, where questions related to existence cannot be addressed in a stable way. Lacanian theory thus retained de Clérambault's notion of a rupture in mental life that lies at the basis of psychosis, but replaced his biological framework with the dimension of the subject as produced through speech.


2015 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 293-305
Author(s):  
RICHARD SWINBURNE

AbstractHumans are pure mental substances, that is essentially souls, who have a rich mental life of sensations, thoughts, intentions, and other pure mental events, largely caused by and sometimes causing events in their brains and so in their bodies. God has reason to create humans because humans have a kind of goodness, the ability to choose between good and evil, which God himself does not have. The existence of these causal connections between mental events and brain events requires an enormous number of separate psychophysical laws. It is most improbable that there would be such laws if God had not made them. Each soul has a thisness; it is the particular soul it is quite independently of its mental properties and bodily connections. So no scientific law, concerned only with relations between substances in virtue of their universal properties, could explain why God created this soul rather than that possible soul, and connected it to this body. Yet a rational person often has to choose between equally good alternatives on non-rational grounds; and so there is nothing puzzling about God choosing to create this soul rather than that possible soul. Hence the existence of souls provides a good argument for the existence of God.


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