Rowman & Littlefield Publishers eBooks
January 1, 2022
Patrick L. Schmidt
7 citations
Patrick L. Schmidt recounts how prominent social scientists in the 1930s, marginalized for pursuing Freudian and Jungian theories, persuaded Harvard to create a new Department of Social Relations. This interdisciplinary department aimed to surpass economics, government, and history but ultimately failed to achieve that goal. Despite this, it attracted outstanding faculty, produced important work, and trained notable graduates. The narrative includes scandals: Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert giving psilocybin to students, and Henry Murray's traumatic experiment on Theodore Kaczynski. Central is Talcott Parsons' obsessive quest for a unified social science theory. The story serves as a cautionary tale of academic infighting, hubris, and scandal.
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers eBooks
January 1, 2005
Lynn Bridgers
7 citations
A book-length analysis examines how William James's 1902 classic, Varieties of Religious Experience, holds up against a century of subsequent research in neuro-cognitive science, neuro-hormonal studies, resiliency, temperament, and trauma. The author extends James's own investigative methods to assess his assertions about religious experience. The work argues that James's perspective remains extraordinarily valuable for religion, psychology, and spirituality today, offering insights for pastoral care and faith development. It traces James's evolution as a psychologist and philosopher, and the author's account is described as remarkably clear and well-documented, making a major contribution to contemporary research on religious experience in a globalized context.
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers eBooks
January 1, 2022
Matthew Mackenzie
2 citations
This book is the first to fully engage embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended (4E) accounts of mind with Buddhist philosophy, drawing on and integrating enactivism and Buddhist thought. It deepens the dialogue between Buddhist philosophy and 4E philosophy of mind and phenomenology, engaging core issues in the philosophy of mind through this cross-cultural exchange. Indian philosophers developed sophisticated accounts of mind, self, cognition, perception, and embodiment. As a work of cross-cultural philosophy, the book investigates mind and experience in dialogue with Indian and Western thinkers, articulating and defending a dynamic, non-substantialist, and embodied account of experience, subjectivity, and self.