In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:On Dialogue: An Essay in Free ThoughtMichael L. HallOn Dialogue: An Essay in Free Thought, by Robert Grudin; ix & 228 pp. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1996, $23.95.In the fifth chapter of his recent book Robert Grudin touched on a question that had been vexing me since I began reading On Dialogue: An Essay in Free Thought. There, amongst his ruminations on the “Social Channels (...) of Free Thought,” Grudin recalls a luncheon celebration for his first trade book during [End Page 181] which one of the executives asked him: “Where in the bookstore would you display this book for sale?” In the four years it had taken him to write the book, Grudin had not given that question a moment’s thought. But it startled him into the realization that books are commodities that must be marketed; as a result he found himself confronting a powerful truth, “that money, like water, flows in channels, and that projects that ignore these channels are likely to come up dry.” More to the point: “These market channels give the American book industry, and hence current American literature, their overall shape. They largely dictate what will be written and read and what will not” (pp. 82–83).Grudin had not only anticipated my question, his response was a practical demonstration of the need for dialogic thinking, for a greater array of choices, questions and answers. I had been looking at On Dialogue from a kind of market perspective, or worse, an academic market perspective. Was it philosophy? Was it literature? Was it both, or neither? I was following the same familiar channels, but Grudin was telling me, quite explicitly, that my approach was unnecessarily limiting. Were I to employ, instead, the method of Renaissance copia that Grudin recommends as a propaedeutic to dialogic thinking, I would quickly discover that On Dialogue is certainly philosophy, and literary criticism, and that it partakes of the history of ideas, dabbles in personal memoir, and takes up theories of interpretation, and education, and creative writing, as well as various forms of psychotherapy, journalism, political theory, and economics.Grudin is obviously at home in the realm of literary criticism. His deft uses of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and of Henry James’s Daisy Miller advance his discussion of dialogic thinking, while at the same time offering focused interpretations of these works. And his examination of the Renaissance rhetorical practice of copia provides a stunning example of the way Grudin grounds his presentations in history and makes connections to other disciplines, thus extending the reach of his arguments. For instance, his reading of Plato’s Parmenides as a “Dialogue of the One and the Many” transforms Plato from an advocate of dialectic to a practitioner of dialogue: “The deep message of Plato’s Parmenides is that wholeness and fragmentation—the One and the Many—are valuable only as joint parameters. They cannot be objects of choice, because they are the nature of choice: they establish the playing field on which choices can be made” (p. 191).If all this makes On Dialogue sound like a congeries, in some respects it is, except that the force of Grudin’s discussion of “dialogic thinking” carries through the entire book and makes the whole cohere in a way that satisfies even when some of the parts occasionally begin to bewilder. His title may call to mind the 1980s literary critical trend spun off by the English translation of Mikhail Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination (1981), but Grudin’s notions about dialogue are grounded more in Plato, Martin Buber and Hans-Georg Gadamer than in Bakhtin. His sense of dialogue is personal and transformative as much [End Page 182] as it is critical and interpretive. In fact, Grudin’s subtitle is no throwaway. His dialogic demonstrations, as they find their literary form, are the offspring of Michel de Montaigne’s Essays, as well as being firmly grounded in the writing of other Renaissance humanists such as Erasmus and Rabelais. In a book as multifarious as this, there will be many interesting (and a few not so interesting) loose ends. Grudin acknowledges this in chapters that sometimes end with a... (shrink)

Commentary on Montero, B. (2020) What experience doesn’t teach: Pain-amnesia and a new paradigm for memory research, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 27 (11–12).

I explore some of the ways that assumptions about the nature of substance shape metaphysical debates about the structure of Reality. Assumptions about the priority of substance play a role in an argument for monism, are embedded in certain pluralist metaphysical treatments of laws of nature, and are central to discussions of substantivalism and relationalism. I will then argue that we should reject such assumptions and collapse the categorical distinction between substance and property.

Издание содержит: теоретические основания субъектного подхода в психологии; основные направления психологического анализа; экспериментальные исследования психологии субъекта и др.

The debate over the temporal arrow is a debate over what fundamental ontology is needed for the temporal asymmetry of the universe, which determines the fact that time seems to be oriented or directed from earlier to later. This temporal asymmetry underlies (or, as some might argue, is the same as) the asymmetrical fact that the past is fixed while the future is open, as well as the global asymmetries of counterfactual, causal and agential direction. I explore the metaphysics of (...) the temporal direction within the context of empirical work in psychology and cognitive science. I argue that, in our debate over the metaphysics of the temporal arrow, we need to explore some of the deep connections between our cognitive response to the world and our metaphysical theory of the temporal direction. (shrink)

This collection of articles pays homage to the creativity and scientific rigor Jerome Singer has brought to the study of consciousness and play. It will interest personality, social, clinical and developmental psychologists alike.

Case Reports Int J Psychoanal -/- . 1989:70 ( Pt 3):461-79. Negative hallucinations, other irretrievable experiences and two functions of consciousness L W Brakel -/- PMID: 2793325 -/- Abstract -/- After providing a psychodynamic exploration of negative hallucinations in four clinical cases, the focus of this paper was broadened in an attempt to understand the mechanism of negative hallucination. To this end, after defining the term 'irretrievable experiences', two other examples--preconscious perceptions and infantile amnesia, both analogues to negative hallucination--were examined. (...) A discussion followed concerning two types of 'consciousness': 'consciousness' as a synonym for 'awareness' and 'consciousness' as a distinct psychological state. Next, the role of different functions of each sort of consciousness in the processes of conferring, fixing and retrieving mental contents within particular categories of experience was taken up. Finally, integrating developmental aspects of these same functions, explanations were offered regarding the mechanisms involved in preconscious perception, infantile amnesia and negative hallucinations. -/- PubMed. (shrink)