Western Conceptions of the Individual

Brian Morris Emeritus Professor of Anthropology,Goldsmiths College, University of London

• Part 1 Mechanistic philosophy and the human subject: Descartes; mechanistic materialism; Spinoza and Leibniz; the empiricist tradition; the Kantian synthesis. Part 2 The psychology of the will: Schopenhauer; Nietzsche and the will to power; Freud - his life and work; libido and the unconscious. Part 3 The varieties of empiricism: Darwin and evolution; behaviourism; Skinner and operant conditioning; Wittgenstein and philosophical behaviourism; sociobiology. Part 4 Culture and psychology - neo-Kantian perspectives: Silthey and the neo-Kantian school; Wundt and the Libnizian tradition; cultural anthropology; patterns of culture; Margaret Mead. Part 5 The Hegelian-Marxist tradition: Hegel's phenomenology of spirit; historical materialism; Lukacs; Marxist psychology. Part 6 The sociological tradition: positive philosophy; Durkheim - his life and work; the dualism of human nature; Durkheimian perspectives; holism and individualism. Part 7 Pragmatism and symbolic interaction: pragmatism and William James; the principles of psychology; Dewey's empirical naturalism; mind, self and society; Erving Goffman. Part 8 Critical theory and psychoanalysis: the Frankfurt school; Hegelian Marxism; Eros and civilization; knowledge and human interests. Part 9 Phenomenology and existentialism: the background to existentialist phenomenology; the phenomenology of consciousmess; Merleau-Ponty. Part 10 Structuralism and Levi-Strauss: Piager's genetic structuralism; structural Marxism; the archaeology of knowledge; power and the human subject; post structuralism.

'... ideal for the reader who wishes to acquire a familiarity with influential Western accounts of human nature dating from the early 1600s to the present.'Choice'One cannot but admire the breadth of learning and research reflected in this study.'The Review of Metaphysics