The Philosophical Dimension of Psychology: A Beginner’s Guide

James A. Harold, Pepperdine University, Franciscan University of Steubenville

Both students and professors typically assume that the content of introductory psychology textbooks, which are empirical in nature, are identical to psychology proper. Yet, what is surprising is how many interesting psychological insights can be found in both philosophy and literature that are often not found in psychology texts. Such insights are clearly psychological in nature, yet they do not go back to any empirical investigation. It seems that basic psychology textbooks—typically providing the basis for undergraduate and graduate psychology programs—represent only one important dimension of psychology: empirical psychology. But there is no simple, co-extensive identity between psychology and empirical psychology. ‘The Philosophical Dimension of Psychology: A Beginner’s Guide’ begins with an investigation of what constitutes the subject matter of psychology, which demonstrates the aspects of psychological reality that are ignored, missed or at times even theoretically denied by mainline contemporary psychology (if they lack an empirical warrant). Such matters include inner conscious experience, the world of intrinsic value, as well as the higher, uniquely personal dimension of human nature (that is, of intellect and will). This book, therefore, offers a more complete survey of the entire sphere of psychological reality, which could provide the context for more properly interpreting empirical psychological phenomena. For example, should we understand psychological conditioning principles within a broader context of personal freedom? Is a person more rightly conceived in a psychologically immanent way, that is, oriented simply toward the fulfillment of instincts and needs, or is there as well a transcendent orientation, oriented to truth and meaning? Should we understand psychology simply from the point of view of efficient causation, or do we need to also take into account final causation? It will be of interest to psychology students of either undergraduate or graduate level and of great use to those with no prior knowledge of philosophy.

Three Hollywood Stalwarts in Literature

A Study in Film Perception Through References to Peck, Mitchum and Holden

Henryk Hoffmann

This book focuses on the perception of the names, personae, performances and films of three Hollywood megastars, Gregory Peck, Robert Mitchum and William Holden, as presented in the references and allusions encountered in American and foreign literature. Its secondary aim is to establish the ‘impact factor’ of the three actors and their major films and provide extensive data for further studies on the complex and bilateral relationships between film and literature. The pertinent quotations in ‘Three Hollywood Stalwarts in Literature: A Study in Film Perception Through References to Peck, Mitchum and Holden’ have been extracted from nearly 220 works by about 140 authors. The majority of the works were written by acclaimed authors; amongst them are some well-known American mainstream writers such as John Updike, John Irving, Fannie Flagg and Anne Tyler; some leaders of the mystery genre include Martha Grimes, Stuart Kaminsky, Elmore Leonard, Sara Paretsky; and a few masters of other popular genres, such as Stephen King and Dean Koontz. The global flavor of the citations is provided by international authors (e.g., Julio Cortázar, Elizabeth Hay, Henri Charrière, Sebastien Japrisot) and authors born to first-generation U.S. immigrants (e.g., Oscar Hijuelos). Almost seventy films referenced in world literature are discussed in the book, and those mentioned in the biggest number of works include ‘Sunset Boulevard’, ‘The Wild Bunch’, ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’, ‘Roman Holiday’, ‘Spellbound’, ‘The Guns of Navarone’, and ‘Duel in the Sun’, among others. This book will appeal to college professors and students interested in film studies, specifically film analysis and criticism, film perception, and film genres. It will also hold interest for the general reader interested in biographies of movie personalities and the careers of the three actors, movie and stage actors, and fans of the western, film noir, and war genres.

Dimensions of Shared Agency: A Study on Joint, Collective and Group Intentional Action

Giulia Lasagni, Europa-Universität Flensburg, Germany

"Dimensions of Shared Agency" investigates the way in which standard philosophical accounts have been dealing with the issue of collective actions. In particular, the book focuses on the ‘Big Five’ of analytical social ontology (namely, Michael Bratman, Margaret Gilbert, Philip Pettit, John R. Searle and Raimo Tuomela) and their accounts of shared/collective intentions and actions. Through systematic readings of different positions in the debate, the author proposes original ways of analyzing and classifying current theories of shared agency according to whether they advance a member-level or a group-level account of shared agency. While member-level accounts (MLA) are theories of shared agency based on individuals’ attitudes and actions, group-level accounts (GLA) give attention to the group of individuals considered as a whole, i.e., as an agent itself. Criticism arises against the idea that the Big Five have proposed stable group-level accounts suitable for explaining the case of shared agency as a group-level phenomenon. The widespread tendency in the debate is to endorse a perspective called holistic individualism, which maintains that high-level explanations are objective even though social facts are ontologically reducible to facts about individuals. Lasagni argues that as long as holistic individualism is held, the GLA is reducible to the MLA because holistic individualism upholds ontological individualism based on a deep individualistic premise, fixing the special status of individual agents as natural persons. The premise makes the claim to treat groups as agents contradictory to the general framework of the theory. This book profiles an alternative interpretation according to which agency should be considered as a functional kind, which is equally instantiated by different systems, such as individual human beings and organized social groups. In this way, the author claims, the reduction of the social can be avoided. "Dimensions of Shared Agency" will be of interest to doctoral students, researchers, and scholars interested in social ontology and the philosophy of the social sciences. It can also be utilised as supplementary reading or an introduction to philosophy students and scholars who are first approaching the philosophy of collective intentionality and shared agency.

Posthumanist Nomadisms across non-Oedipal Spatiality

Edited by Java Singh, Doon University, Dehradun, India and Indrani Mukherjee, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India

As an epistemological perspective, ‘nomadism’ is an emerging field of scholarship, offering intersectionality with eco-criticism, feminism, post-colonialism, migration studies, and translation. Much of the scholarship that uses the precepts of nomadism to read cultural texts and phenomena is scattered as separate articles in academic journals or as single chapters in books wherein the primary focus is the intersectional fields. Few book-length publications solely focus on the ramifications of nomadism; Posthumanist Nomadisms across non-Oedipal Spatiality fills that void. The fifteen chapters in this volume explore the possibilities offered by the nomadic perspective to explore a wide range of literary and cultural texts; organized into three sections, “Nomadic Assemblages,” “Non-Oedipal Cartographies”, and “Space-Time Montages”, that work as one to negate absorption into the interiority of sovereign territory. These sections are not an attempt at corralling the nomadic spirit into separate enclosures; instead, they are bands of warriors that operate the violence of the hunted animal, dehumanized human others, and earth others. The chapters are in constant multi-vocal conversations with narratives that camp on the turbulent weathers of global transitory spaces. They charter real or intellectual turfs of interstitial/rhizomatic nomadic epistemologies as political resistance to the exclusionary practices of a violently wired world. This book will appeal to post-graduate students, researchers, and faculty in the departments of literature, comparative literary and cultural studies. Researchers in sociology, cultural anthropology, gender studies, and migration studies will also find the material applicable to the expanding approaches available in their fields.

History and Myth: Postcolonial Dimensions

Edited by Arti Nirmal, Banaras Hindu University, India and Sayan Dey, Wits Centre for Diversity Studies, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg

This anthology, "History and Myth: Postcolonial Dimensions", seeks to interrogate and dismantle the colonially structured symmetrical interpretations of the histories and mythological narratives of the former European colonies through depolarization, pluriversality, and border thinking. The concepts of history and myth have been addressed from different perspectives and spatiotemporal zones by scholars from different parts of the globe, which add to the global value of the book. It has been argued in this volume that the understanding of postcolonial histories and myths in the contemporary era is highly influenced by the colonially fashioned binaries: valid/ invalid, civilized/barbaric, inclusive/exclusive, relevant/irrelevant, good/bad, etc., which continue to preserve the epistemic citadels of coloniality and selectively promote such historical and mythological narratives that celebrate the superiority of the Global North and the inferiority of the Global South. This book will be of particular interest to scholars, researchers, teachers, and those interested in studying history, postcolonial studies, decolonial studies, cultural studies, literature, and sociology.