The Dialogical concept of consciousness in L.S. Vygotsky and G.H. Mead and its relevance for contemporary discussions on consciousness In my paper I show the relevance of cultural-activity theory for solving the puzzles of the concept of consciousness which encounter contemporary philosophy. I reconstruct the main categories of cultural-activity theory as developed by M.M. Bakhtin, L.S. Vygotsky, G.H. Mead, and J. Dewey. For the concept of consciousness the most important thing is that the phenomenon of human consciousness is (...) consider to be an effect of intersection of language, social relations, and activity. Therefore consciousness cannot be reduced to merely sensual experience but it has to be treated as a complex process in which experience is converted into language expressions which in turn are used for establishing interpersonal relationships. Consciousness thus can be accounted for by its reference to objectivity of social relationships rather than to the world of physical or biological phenomena. (shrink)

The current prominent influence of the theories of L. S. Vygotsky on studies of education, particularly of pedagogic practice, requires a re-examination. The dominance of deficient editions of his writings has had regrettable consequences such as a misplaced reading of the 'zone of proximal development'. The publication of his recent, albeit incomplete, "Collected Works" in English affords an opportunity to reassess Vygotsky's work. Potential areas for such rethinking include: a comparison between his work and influence with that of (...) Piaget; Vygotsky's own epistemology and methodology; and the relevance of his approach to contemporary concerns. (shrink)

This work relates L. S. Vygotsky’s theory to the rhetorical and poetic pedagogy, which is a set of educational ideas and practices derived from the philosophical-educational tradition initiated by the Sophists. It is verified that the Vygotskyan concepts contribute to broaden the foundations of poetic and rhetorical pedagogy, presenting a psychology of language that integrates decorum, kairos and antilogical argumentation within aesthetic experiences; communication sustains knowledge and reflection of reality, aiming at the strengthening of the individual’s identity, the education (...) of the creative subject and the improvement of the collective. It is considered that the rhetorical and poetic character of Vygotsky’s theory encourages the contemporary school to be a space for investigation and search for creative solutions, contradicting the measurementist pedagogical tendencies that dehumanize education. (shrink)

In this paper, I attempt to sketch a dialectical approach on scientific representations and their role in scientific cognition. In my understanding, scientific representations can be construed as ‘tools’ mediating scientific cognition. These ‘tools’ are products of our cognitive activity, by which we signify which features of certain objects or states of affairs should be embodied in abstractive representations of them. In such a context, I explore the merits of bringing some ideas of thinkers whose work is underestimated in the (...) relevant discussion nowadays (such as K. Marx, E.V. Ilyenkov, L.S. Vygotsky, M. Wartofsky) in dialogue with currently discussed approaches. (shrink)

Vygotsky (1997) coined the term speech-drawing to describe what he saw as the most significant moment in intellectual development, the moment when two psychological tools intersect each other. This paper resurrects the utilization of speech-drawing as a methodological tool to investigate children’s thinking. Specifically, this paper will examine children’s drawings of make-believe houses and the private speech, or spontaneous self-directed speech, children produccd while drawing. These instances of speech-drawing will be utilized to illuminate critical and creative thinking from a (...) Vygotskian perspective. The future use of speech-drawing, as a promising methodological tool to study children’s thought processes, will also be presented and discussed. (shrink)

As I read Paula Casal's excellent paper, ‘Sexual Dimorphism and Human Enhancement,’1 three thoughts kept circulating through my mind. First, I found myself largely in agreement with virtually everything she wrote. In particular, if Casal was being accurate and fair in writing that ‘Robert Sparrow alleges that those who…advocate biomedical welfare enhancements are committed to selecting only female embryos because women live longer than men,’1 then she has given compelling reasons for believing that that claim is, on reflection, as ludicrous (...) as it first sounds! In fact, I can think of many additional reasons to those which Casal forcefully adduced for rejecting the view in question, but I do not see the need to present them here, given the abundance of sufficiently compelling reasons Casal already presented.Second, I confess that as I read Casal's article a strong feeling of shame washed over me in virtue of my being a man! Indeed, I found myself thinking that Jonathan Glover's important and chilling book Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century2 was misleadingly, and somewhat unfairly, titled. Heretofore, when I have read Glover's powerful book, which details many of the twentieth century's worst instances of large-scale crimes against humanity, I have often been overcome by a sense of shame of the actions of my species, homo sapiens; but Casal's article suggests that perhaps the scope of my shame has been too wide, and grossly unfair to the distaff members of our species! In the well-worked expression ‘man's inhumanity to man,’ the second use of the word ‘man’ undoubtedly extends to all humans, but the first use overwhelming picks out men insofar as it denotes the actual flesh and blood perpetrators of the horrific actions in question . Accordingly, perhaps a …. (shrink)

The article introduces the Vygotskian tradition in the realist theoretical discussion of the structure-agency problem. Archer's concept of internal conversation is discussed in terms of internalization and externalization of conversational dynamics. The article addresses in particular the methodological issue of observing how external events trigger internal use of language, and how these internal dynamics are externalized. The experience of talk is proposed as a conceptual key to the understanding of internal conversations and of the relation between structured activity and agency. (...) The experience of talk is defined with the help of the notions of emotional experience, personal sense and inner speech, as they are conceptualized in activity theory and in particular in the works of L.S. Vygotsky and A.N. Leont’ev. Students’ experiences of critical conversational events with teachers are analyzed on the basis of written autobiographical accounts. The experience of talk emerges from the analysis as a form of emotional experience in which the horizon of the individual's subjective view relates to specific circumstances external to the individual. Autobiographical accounts of critical conversations are suggested as a type of data which allows access to the experience of talk. (shrink)

My purpose in what follows is not so much to defend the basic principle of utilitarianism as to indicate the form of it which seems most promising as a basic moral and political position. I shall take the principle of utility as offering a criterion for two different sorts of evaluation: first, the merits of acts of government, social policies, and social institutions, and secondly, the ultimate moral evaluation of the actions of individuals. I do not take it as implying (...) that the individual should live his life on the basis of constant evaluations of this sort. For there are different levels of decision making each with its appropriate criteria. For example, we each inevitably make many of our decisions from the point of view of our own personal self-fulfilment and this cannot regularly take a directly utilitarian form, nor should the utilitarian want it to do so. His claim is at most that we should sometimes review our life from the point of view of a kind of impersonal moral truth of a universalistic utilitarian character. (shrink)

The period of the mid-1920s to the mid-1980s was a portentous period for Soviet psychology. As this period recedes into the past, the figure of L. S. Vygotskii rises more and more before us. Vygotskii died of tuberculosis when not quite 37 years old. He was a psychologist for only 10 years, and it was only in the last 6 of these that he did the work we now associate with his name. During those brief years Vygotskii wrote over 120 (...) works, including more than 10 large books. His was a short life — filled with inspired, indefatigable, and heroic work. A significant part of his written work has remained unpublished and indeed much of it remained unfinished. A seven-volume collection of Vygotskii's work is currently underway, and even this will not contain everything he wrote. The final volume of this collection will include his articles "The Sense of the Psychological Crisis" and "Spinoza's Theory of the Passions.". (shrink)

Theory of Mind is the cognitive achievement that enables us to report our propositional attitudes, to attribute such attitudes to others, and to use such postulated or observed mental states in the prediction and explanation of behavior. Most normally developing children acquire ToM between the ages of 3 and 5 years, but serious delays beyond this chronological and mental age have been observed in children with autism, as well as in those with severe sensory impairments. We examine data from studies (...) of ToM in normally developing children and those with deafness, blindness, autism and Williams syndrome, as well as data from lower primates, in a search for answers to key theoretical questions concerning the origins, nature and representation of knowledge about the mind. In answer to these, we offer a framework according to which ToM is jointly dependent upon language and social experience, and is produced by a conjunction of language acquisition with children's growing social understanding, acquired through conversation and interaction with others. We argue that adequate language and adequate social skills are jointly causally sufficient, and individually causally necessary, for producing ToM. Thus our account supports a social developmental theory of the genesis of human cognition, inspired by the work of Sellars and Vygotsky.How are we to decide whether to take reason to be an essentially private thing that can, however, turn on a public display when it chooses to do so, or, like conversing, to be an essentially social skill, which can, however, be retained a while through periods of solitary confinement? .The squirrel does not infer by induction that it is going to need stores next winter as well .The problem of thought and language thus extends beyond the limits of natural science and becomes the focal problem of historical human psychology, i.e. of social psychology. Consequently, it must be posed in a different way .From the very first days of the child's development his activities acquire a meaning of their own in a system of social behaviour and, being directed towards a definite purpose, are refracted through the prism of the child's environment. The path from object to child and from child to object passes through another person. This complex human structure is the product of a developmental process deeply rooted in the links between individual and social history. (shrink)

Vygotsky has become an authority, but the authority has more to do with justifying a sociocultural relativism than it has with his Marxist objectivist approach to psychology and pedagogy. This paper is an attempt to understand Vygotsky's perspective in relation to Marxist epistemology, and will critically examine the sociocultural interpretation of Vygotsky but within the light of his own perspective. It will be shown that the relativism of the sociocultural school not only takes Vygotsky's zone of (...) proximal development out of its social and historical context, but as a consequence downplays the zone of proximal development as a dynamic research methodology. As an extension of the discussion of the zone of proximal development, this paper will also examine the sociocultural interpretation of Vygotsky's relation between scientific and everyday concepts, and the pedagogical consequences of such an interpretation. (shrink)

The increasing demand for horticultural products for nutritional and economic purposes by lesser developed countries (LDC's) is well-documented. Technological demands of the LDC's producing horticultural products is also increasing. Pesticide use is an integral component of most agricultural production, yet chemicals are often supplied without supplemental information vital for their safe and efficient implementation. Illiteracy rates in developing countries are high, making pesticide education even more challenging. For women, who perform a significant share of agricultural tasks, illiteracy rates are even (...) higher than for men. The dilemma exists of how a developing country can improve its nutritional and economic situation without giving consideration to social and environmental consequences. (shrink)

Utilitarian ethics and metaphysical idealism, especially of a Bradleyan sort, are not usually thought of as natural allies. Yet when one considers that it is a crucial part of utilitarian doctrine that the only genuine value is experienced value and almost the definition of idealism that for it the only genuine reality is experienced reality one should surely suspect that the two views have a certain affinity. The essential impulse behind utilitarianism is the sense that the only criterion of something (...) really being intrinsically good is that it feels good. To the ordinary man to say that something feels good is much the same as saying that it is a pleasure, so that for him it is a small step from identifying good with what feels good to identifying it with pleasure. It suggests itself, then, that the utilitarian is essentially one who thinks that, so far as the good goes, esse ispercipi. In that case the utilitarian is an idealist about value. It does not follow that he should be an idealist about things in general, but it does suggest the converse, that the idealist about things in general might be expected to be a utilitarian in his ethics. (shrink)

In this paper I shall speak sympathetically of a hedonistic theory of intrinsic value which, ignoring any other such theories, I shall simply call the hedonistic theory of value. How far I am finally committed to it will partly appear at the end.

Although many facets of Lev Vygotsky’s life have drawn considerable attention from historians of science, perhaps the most popular feature of his personal narrative was that his work was actively chastised by the Stalinist government. Almost all contemporary references to Vygotsky’s personal history emphasize that from 1936 to 1956, it was forbidden to either discuss or disseminate any of Vygotsky’s works within the Soviet Union. Although this ‘Vygotsky ban’ is both widely acknowledged and frequently cited by (...) a variety of scholars, the exact nature of this alleged Communist party censure has received far less historical attention. Through focusing on the logistics of Soviet ‘bans,’ this article attempts to shed light on this historical mystery and augment the growing body of revisionist literature that serves to deconstruct the mythologized persona of Lev Vygotsky. (shrink)

The importance of an author can be evaluated by the extent to which his theoretical contribution transforms a certain area of knowledge: major researchers create new vistas. This certainly applies to Lev Vygotsky (1896–1934), one of the most brilliant authors of contemporary psychology. His work, owing to its originality, is of epistemological interest to several areas of knowledge. In fact, Vygotsky was at the center of a historical time of change in twentieth-century Russia, in which Mikhail Bakhtin, Roman (...) Jakobson, Serguei Eisenstein, Alexander Luria, and Yuri Lotman took part. Their theoretical proposals had repercussions in several areas of knowledge: in literature, semiotics, film, and .. (shrink)

_Vygotsky Philosophy and Education_ reassesses the works of Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky work by arguing that his central ideas about the nature of rationality and knowledge were informed by the philosophic tradition of Spinoza and Hegel. Presents a reassessment of the works of Lev Vygotsky in light of the tradition of Spinoza and Hegel informing his work Reveals Vygotsky’s connection with the work of contemporary philosophers such as Brandom and McDowell Draws on discussions in contemporary philosophy to (...) revise prominent readings of Vygotskian psychology and revisits educational debates where Vygotsky’s ideas were central Reveals the limitations of appropriations of Vygotsky which fail to recognize the Hegelian provenance of his work Shows the relevance of Brandom’s inferentialism for contemporary educational theory and practice. (shrink)

Can philosophy offer reasonable grounds for the existence of a God possessing genuine religious significance and not proposed simply as the solution to a purely intellectual philosophical problem? Timothy Sprigge offers a fascinating exploration of the metaphysical systems of a diverse range of philosophers, from Spinoza and Hegel to T. H. Green and Josiah Royce, testing objections to what might be called 'metaphysical religion' against the systems of these distinguished thinkers. In the process, Sprigge offers a compelling new defence of (...) a highly unfashionable Idealist worldview. (shrink)

Lev Vygotsky has acquired the status of one of the grand masters in psychology. Following the English translation and publication of his Collected Works there has been a new wave of interest in Vygotsky, accompanied by a burgeoning of secondary literature. Ronald Miller argues that Vygotsky is increasingly being 'read' and understood through secondary sources and that scholars have claimed Vygotsky as the foundational figure for their own theories, eliminating his most distinctive contributions and distorting his (...) theories. Miller peels away the accumulated layers of commentary to provide a clearer understanding of how Vygotsky built and developed his arguments. In an in-depth analysis of the last three chapters of Vygotsky's book Thinking and Speech, Miller provides a critical interpretation of the core theoretical concepts that constitute Vygotsky's cultural-historical theory, including the development of concepts, mediation, the zone of proximal development, conscious awareness, inner speech, word meaning and consciousness. (shrink)

This article explores Vygotsky?s concept of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) in the Malaysian context to support local reform of the Moral Education (ME) classroom. Small groups of students in three different types of school were involved in a participant action research (PAR) project. Such classrooms in Malaysia bring together students from various ethnicities aligned with Hindu, Confucian and Christian beliefs and understandings. Using the Malaysian multicultural ME classroom as a case study, we offer some examples of group (...) conversations around moral dilemmas that illustrate ways that collaborative processes beyond the individual might expand an individual student?s ZPD and the consensual as well as divergent views of each group as a whole. This suggests possibilities for an extension of the ZPD into a zone of collaborative development (ZCD). (shrink)

In this study, we take up L. S. Vygotsky’s challenge to study learning and development in terms of categories, irreducible units that preserve the characteristics of the whole. One such category is experiencing [pereživanie], a process that integrates over the relation of person and environment. Using a case study from Iceland, we theorize the process of “becoming as a teacher-in-a-village school” in terms of experiencing [pereživanie]. The case describes a stage of development in the life of a person who (...) becomes a teacher and then experiences a developmental trajectory very different from his previous life as a fisherman. This is an aspect of teacher education that is hardly described in the teacher education literature which tend to be concerned with events after a person has entered a professional program or after a person has begun teaching. We discuss the implications of taking experiencing [pereživanie] as the developmental unit for theory and the practice of teacher education and development. (shrink)

It would be pleasant to start with a paradox. Santayana was an American philosopher, but he was not an American, and he was not a philosopher. The first of these two qualifying propositions is legally true, the second is a glaring, but sometimes asserted, falsehood.