Selbstbewusstsein, die Fähigkeit, über uns nachzudenken, uns unserer Gefühle oder Gedanken bewusst zu sein, ist zweifellos eine unserer markantesten und wichtigsten kognitiven Fähigkeiten. Worin besteht Selbstbewusstsein jedoch genauer, welche Teilfähigkeiten kommen zum Tragen, wenn wir uns unserer Gedanken und Gefühle bewusst sind? Und wie erwerben Kleinkinder im Zuge ihrer Entwicklung diese Fähigkeit? Beide Frageperspektiven sind eng miteinander verzahnt. Da empirische und begriffliche Fragen rund um das Phänomen des Selbstbewusstseins nur durch einen intensiv geführten Dialog zwischen Psychologie und Philosophie angemessen beantwortet werden können, versammelt dieser Band Beiträge von Vertretern beider Disziplinen. Das besondere Augenmerk der in Englisch verfassten Beiträge des Bandes gilt der Frage, welche Rolle die soziale Einbettung von Kleinkindern im Erwerb von Selbstbewusstsein und den mit ihr verknüpften kognitiven Fähigkeiten spielt. Vor allem die Annahme, dass Kleinkinder nur dank bestimmter Arten von sozialen Interaktionen die Fähigkeit entwickeln, sich von anderen Personen in der Welt zu unterscheiden und eine eigene Perspektive auf sich und die Welt einzunehmen, wird aus verschiedenen Blickwinkeln kritisch geprüft.

Captains of Consciousness offers a historical look at the origins of the advertising industry and consumer society at the turn of the twentieth century. For this new edition Stuart Ewen, one of our foremost interpreters of popular culture, has written a new preface that considers the continuing influence of advertising and commercialism in contemporary life. Not limiting his critique strictly to consumers and the advertising culture that serves them, he provides a fascinating history of the ways in which business has refined its search for new consumers by ingratiating itself into Americans' everyday lives. A timely and still-fascinating critique of life in a consumer culture.

Using a cognitive approach to literature, this book uncovers representations of self-consciousness in selected modern British novels, exposing it as complicating character development. Miller provides new readings of works by Conrad, Joyce, and D.H. Lawrence to demonstrate the emergence of a self who feels split from the world.

The Social Roots of Discrimination explains the phenomenon of anti-Semitism. In this classic volume, Peretz F. Bernstein looks for objective reasons why anti-Semitism flourished in European countries. Some civilized people would consider the notion of race uncivilized, but the existence of different races and the inequality of races with their specific race characteristics and on top of that the existence of superior and inferior human races was accepted as a fact of life and as a scientific truth long before the Nazis came to power. Although there is a marked difference in dealing with anti-Semitism in continental Europe in 1920 and the anti-Semitism in, for instance, the US in 2000, Berstein's ideas remain valuable.Starting from a concrete problem, anti-Semitism in Central Europe, Bernstein puts anti-Semitism in a general sociological theoretical framework. Far from limiting himself to fruitless elaborations on the common perceived unpleasant characteristics of Jews, he recognizes that the group is heterogeneous and that the usual arguments to justify anti-Semitism do not have any general validity, although they may hold for some specific individuals of the hated group, like individual members of any group may be less pleasant. Bernstein's ideas remain valuable.Bernstein tries to explain the hatred of Jews as the working of a more general mechanism--one that has nothing to do specifically with of Jews as a collective or as individuals. In doing so Bernstein attempts to sketch a general theory of social groups and conflicts between groups. The Social Roots of Discrimination gives an important message both for social scientists and for all intellectuals who are concerned with the strifes between nations, races, and social groups.

The present book is the first to undertake a systematic study of Peirce’s conception of historical knowledge and of its value for philosophy. It does so by both reconstructing in detail Peirce’s arguments and giving a detailed account of the many ways in which history becomes an object of explicit reflection in his writings. The book’s leading idea may be stated as follows: Peirce manages to put together an exceptionally compelling argument about history’s bearing on philosophy not so much because he derives it from a well-articulated and polished conception of the relation between the two disciplines; but on the contrary, because he holds on to this relation while intuiting that it can easily turn into a conflict. This potential conflict acts therefore as a spur to put forth an unusually profound and multi-faceted analysis of what it means for philosophy to rely on historical arguments. Peirce looks at history as a way to render philosophical investigations more detailed, more concrete and more sensitive to the infinite and unforeseeable nuances that characterize human experience. In this way, he provides us with an exceptionally valuable contribution to a question that has remained gravely under-theorized in contemporary debates.

In this classic book, Michael Taussig explores the social significance of the devil in the folklore of contemporary plantation workers and miners in South America. Grounding his analysis in Marxist theory, Taussig finds that the fetishization of evil, in the image of the devil, mediates the conflict between precapitalist and capitalist modes of objectifying the human condition. He links traditional narratives of the devil-pact, in which the soul is bartered for illusory or transitory power, with the way in which production in capitalist economies causes workers to become alienated from the commodities they produce. A new chapter for this anniversary edition features a discussion of Walter Benjamin and Georges Bataille that extends Taussig's ideas about the devil-pact metaphor.

How do we manage to speak and understand language? How do children acquire these skills and how does the brain support them? This book provides a fascinating personal history of the men and women whose intelligence, brilliant insights, fads, fallacies, cooperations, and rivalries created the discipline we call psycholinguistics.

Dialogue between characters is an important feature of South Asian religious literature: entire narratives are often presented as a dialogue between two or more individuals, or the narrative or discourse is presented as a series of embedded conversations from different times and places. Including some of the most established scholars of South Asian religious texts, this book examines the use of dialogue in early South Asian texts with an interdisciplinary approach that crosses traditional boundaries between religious traditions. The contributors shed new light on the cultural ideas and practices within religious traditions, as well as presenting an understanding of a range of dynamics - from hostile and competitive to engaged and collaborative. This book is the first to explore the literary dimensions of dialogue in South Asian religious sources, helping to reframe the study of other literary traditions around the world.

In this book, first published in 2000, the authors elaborate on their notion of intellectual interdependency in the development of scientific ideas.

"Into the white" lays bare a hidden overall logic in Kafka's work. Kafka's fictitious characters, instead of restoring an initial balance - as it is the case in most fiction -, do everything they can to maintain the imbalance. The book shows that this should be linked to Kafka's own relationship to his calling as a writer. Although 'called', Kafka always felt that he could never really 'enter the gate of his vocation': he could only wait before the open but unapproachable entrance. Writing carried a promise for Kafka that was unfulfillable. Hence, by keeping open the imbalance of its fictitious characters, Kafka's prose tries to sustain the promise.