Books — Philosophy of Psychology

Philosophy of Psychology

A History of Psychology: Ideas and Context (4th Edition)

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Author: Brett D. King

A History of Psychology: Ideas and Context, Fourth Edition, is a comprehensive history of psychology tracing psychological thought from antiquity through early twenty-first century developments.The opening chapters present the reader with a dynamic framework for exploring psychology in the context of historiography and philosophical issues. The text provides in-depth coverage to the intellectual trends that preceded the formal founding of psychology in the late 1870s, coupled with an analysis of the major systems of thought and the key developments in the history of basic and applied psychology. The final chapter focuses on major trends in psychology from the latter half of the twentieth century to the early twentieth-first century.

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Man's Search for Himself

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Author: Rollo May

"Analyzes life as we are living it, and the analysis is truthful and profound."--New York Times

Loneliness, boredom, emptiness: These are the complaints that Rollo May encountered over and over from his patients. In response, he probes the hidden layers of personality to reveal the core of man's integration--a basic and inborn sense of value. Man's Search for Himself is an illuminating view of our predicament in an age of overwhelming anxieties and gives guidance on how to choose, judge, and act during such times.

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The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection

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Author: Judith Butler

As a form of power, subjection is paradoxical. To be dominated by a power external to oneself is a familiar and agonizing form power takes. To find, however, that what "one" is, one's very formation as a subject, is dependent upon that very power is quite another. If, following Foucault, we understand power as forming the subject as well, it provides the very condition of its existence and the trajectory of its desire. Power is not simply what we depend on for our existence but that which forms reflexivity as well. Drawing upon Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Foucault, and Althusser, this challenging and lucid work offers a theory of subject formation that illuminates as ambivalent the psychic effects of social power.

If we take Hegel and Nietzsche seriously, then the "inner life" of consciousness and, indeed, of conscience, not only is fabricated by power, but becomes one of the ways in which power is anchored in subjectivity. The author considers the way in which psychic life is generated by the social operation of power, and how that social operation of power is concealed and fortified by the psyche that it produces. Power is no longer understood to be "internalized" by an existing subject, but the subject is spawned as an ambivalent effect of power, one that is staged through the operation of conscience.

To claim that power fabricates the psyche is also to claim that there is a fictional and fabricated quality to the psyche. The figure of a psyche that "turns against itself" is crucial to this study, and offers an alternative to describing power as "internalized." Although most readers of Foucault eschew psychoanalytic theory, and most thinkers of the psyche eschew Foucault, the author seeks to theorize this ambivalent relation between the social and the psychic as one of the most dynamic and difficult effects of power.

This work combines social theory, philosophy, and psychoanalysis in novel ways, offering a more sustained analysis of the theory of subject formation implicit in such other works of the author as Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" and Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.

Judith Butler's writing has become a cornerstone of queer theory. In Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, she drew upon Freud, Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan to explore the connections between sex, politics, and identity, and The Psychic Life of Power continues her inquiry into these ideas. While she revisits, and revises, some of her earlier thoughts--such as her theory of gender as performance--she breaks much new ground here. Using Hegel and Nietzsche (as well as a critique of psychoanalysis) for theoretical support, Butler probes how the idea of "subjection"--to become a subject, to have a consciousness--interfaces with having a gay or lesbian identity. Discussing such topics as drag, gays-in-the-military, and AIDS to illustrate her ideas, Butler manages to locate her philosophical theories in a concrete world, and although her earlier work could sometimes be as dense as it was rewarding, The Psychic Life of Power is lucid and highly readable. --Michael Bronski

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Readings in the History and Systems of Psychology (2nd Edition)

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Author: James F. Brennan

Designed for use on its own or in conjunction with any main book on the history/systems of psychology (including Brennan's History and Systems of Psychology). This anthology provides a representative sampling of primary sources — from Plato to Descartes to Freud to Watson — that provides a coherent exposure to the evolution of ideas within psychology. It is written for those students without an advanced academic background in history, philosophy, or biology.

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Beyond Human Nature: How Culture and Experience Shape the Human Mind

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Author: Jesse J. Prinz

A timely and uniquely compelling plea for the importance of nurture in the ongoing nature-nurture debate.

In this era of genome projects and brain scans, it is all too easy to overestimate the role of biology in human psychology. But in this passionate corrective to the idea that DNA is destiny, Jesse Prinz focuses on the most extraordinary aspect of human nature: that nurture can supplement and supplant nature, allowing our minds to be profoundly influenced by experience and culture. Drawing on cutting-edge research in neuroscience, psychology, and anthropology, Prinz shatters the myth of human uniformity and reveals how our differing cultures and life experiences make each of us unique. Along the way he shows that we can’t blame mental illness or addiction on our genes, and that societal factors shape gender differences in cognitive ability and sexual behavior. A much-needed contribution to the nature-nurture debate, Beyond Human Nature shows us that it is only through the lens of nurture that the spectrum of human diversity becomes fully and brilliantly visible. 10 black-and-white illustrations

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Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness

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Author: Alva Noë

Alva Noë is one of a new breed—part philosopher, part cognitive scientist, part neuroscientist—who are radically altering the study of consciousness by asking difficult questions and pointing out obvious flaws in the current science. In Out of Our Heads, he restates and reexamines the problem of consciousness, and then proposes a startling solution: do away with the two-hundred-year-old paradigm that places consciousness within the confines of the brain.

Our culture is obsessed with the brain—how it perceives; how it remembers; how it determines our intelligence, our morality, our likes and our dislikes. It’s widely believed that consciousness itself, that Holy Grail of science and philosophy, will soon be given a neural explanation. And yet, after decades of research, only one proposition about how the brain makes us conscious—how it gives rise to sensation, feeling, and subjectivity—has emerged unchallenged: we don’t have a clue.

In this inventive work, Noë suggests that rather than being something that happens inside us, consciousness is something we do. Debunking an outmoded philosophy that holds the scientific study of consciousness captive, Out of Our Heads is a fresh attempt at understanding our minds and how we interact with the world around us.

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What's Behind the Research?: Discovering Hidden Assumptions in the Behavioral Sciences

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Author: Brent D. (Donald) Slife

This volume encourages students to engage in critical thinking by exploring the main assumptions upon which behavioral science theories are based and offering some alternatives to these assumptions. The text begins with a review and critique of the major theoretical approaches: psychoanalysis, behaviorism, humanism, cognitivism, eclecticism, structuralism and postmodernism. The authors then discuss the key assumptions underlying these theories - knowing, determinism, reductionism and science. They trace the intellectual history of these assumptions and offer contrasting options. The book concludes by examining ways of coming to terms with some of the inadequacies in the assumptions of the behavioral sciences.

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Psychology as Religion: The Cult of Self-Worship

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Author: Paul C. Vitz

A trenchant analysis of modern psychology -- an enterprise that Paul Vitz maintains has become a religion, a secular cult of self, now part of the problem of modern life rather than part of its resolution. Virtually rewritten, this second edition of the original 1977 text takes into account much of what has happened in the field of psychology during the past seventeen years. Two completely new chapters are also included -- one on education and "values clarification" and the other on New Age religion.

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An Intellectual History of Psychology

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Author: Daniel N. Robinson

     An Intellectual History of Psychology, already a classic in its field, is now available in a concise new third edition. It presents psychological ideas as part of a greater web of thinking throughout history about the essentials of human nature, interwoven with ideas from philosophy, science, religion, art, literature, and politics.
     Daniel N. Robinson demonstrates that from the dawn of rigorous and self-critical inquiry in ancient Greece, reflections about human nature have been inextricably linked to the cultures from which they arose, and each definable historical age has added its own character and tone to this long tradition. An Intellectual History of Psychology not only explores the most significant ideas about human nature from ancient to modern times, but also examines the broader social and scientific contexts in which these concepts were articulated and defended. Robinson treats each epoch, whether ancient Greece or Renaissance Florence or Enlightenment France, in its own terms, revealing the problems that dominated the age and engaged the energies of leading thinkers.
     Robinson also explores the abiding tension between humanistic and scientific perspectives, assessing the most convincing positions on each side of the debate. Invaluable as a text for students and as a stimulating and insightful overview for scholars and practicing psychologists, this volume can be read either as a history of psychology in both its philosophical and aspiring scientific periods or as a concise history of Western philosophy’s concepts of human nature.

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Man for Himself: An Inquiry Into the Psychology of Ethics

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Author: Erich Fromm

In Man for Himself, Erich Fromm examines the confusion of modern women and men who, because they lack faith in any principle by which life ought to be guided, become the helpless prey forces both within and without. From the broad, interdisciplinary perspective that marks Fromm’s distinguished oeuvre, he shows that psychology cannot divorce itself from the problems of philosophy and ethics, and that human nature cannot be understood without understanding the values and moral conflicts that confront us all. He shows that an ethical system can be based on human nature rather than on revelations or traditions. As Fromm asserts, “If man is to have confidence in values, he must know himself and the capacity of his nature for goodness and productiveness.”

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