Concepts
A Critical Approach
Description
Andy Blunden presents an interdisciplinary review of theories of concepts of interest to cognitive psychology, analytic philosophy, linguistics, and the history of science. Problems within these disciplines establishing reductive theories of the conceptual have led some to abandon concepts altogether in favor of interactionist or narrowly pragmatic approaches.
Blunden responds with an account of the development of the theory of concepts from Descartes through Hegel with special focus on the latter’s critical appropriation by early critical social science culminating in the cultural psychology of Lev Vygotsky. He then proposes an approach to concepts which draws on activity theory, according to which concepts are equally subjective and objective: both units of consciousness and of the cultural formation of which one’s consciousness is part. This continues the author’s earlier work in An Interdisciplinary Theory of Activity (Haymarket, 2011).
Author Bios
Andy Blunden is an independent scholar in Melbourne, Australia. Andy works with the Independent Social Research Network and the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy and has run a Hegel Summer School since 1998. Andy retired from Melbourne University in 2002.
More Info
Publication date: March 11, 2014
Table of Contents
Introduction
Part I. Contemporary Theory
1. The Psychology of Concepts
2. Narratives and Metaphors
3. Conceptual Change and Linguistics
4. Robert Brandom on Concepts
5. Where we are Now with Concepts
Part II. Hegel
6. The Story of the Concept
7. Hegel’s Logic
8. The Genesis of the Concept
9. The Realisation of the Concept
10. Hegel’s Psychology
Part III. From Philosophy to the Human Sciences
11. The Critical Appropriation of Hegel
12. Sources of Cultural Psychology
Part IV. Vygotsky
13. Concepts in Childhood
14. Vygotsky on ‘True Concepts’
15. Concepts and Activity
Part V. Conclusion.
Acknowledgments
References
Index
