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This history explores the exceptionally complex scientific and medical techniques and practices that have allowed practitioners to claim expertise in the brain and mind sciences over the past two centuries. Based on meticulous historical research, essays in this volume reveal the richness of the history of the brain and mind sciences and show that this history cannot be reduced to an uncomplicated narrative of progressive discovery. Rather, the volume contributors collectively contend that it is in the seemingly obscure, peripheral, and marginal stories of the past that the medicine and science of the brain and the mind took shape.
In nineteenth-century imperial Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, new scientific fields like psychophysics, empirical psychology, clinical psychiatry, and neuroanatomy transformed the understanding of mental life in ways long seen as influencing modernism. Turning to the history of psychiatric classification for mental illnesses, Cate I. Reilly argues that modernist texts can be understood as critically responding to objective scientific models of the psyche, not simply illustrating their findings. Modernist works written in industrializing Central and Eastern Europe historicize the representation of consciousness as a quantifiable phenomenon within techno-scientific modernity. Looking...
Phenomenology has the strongest claim to the mantle of continental philosophy. Edward Baring shows that credit for its prodigious growth goes to a surprising group of early enthusiasts: Catholic intellectuals. Tracing debates in Europe from existentialism to speculative realism, he shows why European philosophy bears the mark of Catholicism.
“Superb… a nuanced account of biological psychiatry.” —Richard J. McNally In Mind Fixers, “the preeminent historian of neuroscience” (Science magazine) Anne Harrington explores psychiatry’s repeatedly frustrated efforts to understand mental disorder. She shows that psychiatry’s waxing and waning theories have been shaped not just by developments in the clinic and lab, but also by a surprising range of social factors. Mind Fixers recounts the past and present struggle to make mental illness a biological problem in order to lay the groundwork for creating a better future.
An authoritative and comprehensive survey of the major themes, thinkers, and movements in modern European intellectual history.
Drawing on a wealth of archival materials and in-depth interviews, Erika Lorraine Milam reveals how the scientists who advanced this "killer ape" theory capitalized on an expanding postwar market in intellectual paperbacks and widespread faith in the power of science to solve humanity's problems, even to answer the most fundamental questions of human identity. The killer ape theory spread quickly from colloquial science publications to late-night television, classrooms, political debates, and Hollywood films. Behind the scenes, however, scientists were sharply divided, their disagreements centering squarely on questions of race and gender. Then, in the 1970s, the theory unraveled altogether when primatologists discovered that chimpanzees also kill members of their own species. While the discovery brought an end to definitions of human exceptionalism delineated by violence, Milam shows how some evolutionists began to argue for a shared chimpanzee-human history of aggression even as other scientists discredited such theories as sloppy popularizations.
The collapse of state socialism in eastern and central Europe in 1989 had a dramatic impact on women. Witnessing the loss of state support for their economic activity, the curtailing of their reproductive rights, and the rise of gender ideologies that value women primarily as mothers and wives rather than as active participants in the workforce, women across eastern and central Europe organized on a local level to resist these changes. Making Their Place brings to light how feminist movements in two eastern German cities, Erfurt and Rostock, utilized local understandings of politics and gender to enhance their possibilities for meaningful social change. The book chronicles the specific reasons why place matters, the importance of localized experiences during the socialist era, and how history shapes contemporary identities, cultures, and politics. What emerges is the fascinating story of the different ways people have struggled to define themselves, their values, and their understandings of gender in a period of monumental social, economic, and political upheaval.
Essays on the history of girlhood in modern Europe.