Philosophy

July 10, 2013 When I last posted on May 29, I had just returned from Denmark where I co-taught a three-day course, ”Educational Psychology, Late-modernity and Social Therapeutics,” for PhD students in psychology at the University of Aarhus (Denmark’s second largest city). Two days later, I left for Singapore where I...

May 29, 2013 To New York Times columnist and cultural and political commentator David Brooks, psychiatrists are not heroes of science but “heroes of uncertainty.” Such is the title of his May 27, 2013 Op-Ed piece.  Brooks takes the compilers of the DSM-5 and contemporary psychiatry to task for presenting their field...

April 23, 2013 A few years ago while doing some teaching in Brazil, I was interviewed (in English) for Internet radio on where social therapeutics comes from and where it’s going. The interview was rich and far-reaching, as I recall—radical therapy,  social constructionism, politics, philosophy, culture, community...

April 9, 2013 Joseph LeDoux’s opinion piece in The New York Times, “For the Anxious, Avoidance Can Have an Upside,”  is an interesting essay that—like so many reports of neuroscience research in the mass media—miseducates the public. Here’s the formula, as I see it. Take a phenomenon of human social life—in this...

January 26, 2013 During January I’ve been writing a new introduction to Fred Newman’s and my 1993 book, Lev Vygotsky: Revolutionary Scientist  for the new “Classic Edition” Routledge’s Psychology Press will be releasing later in 2013. Part of my process has been doing a lot of searches, mostly on Google Scholar...

[caption id="attachment_1319" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Opening Plenary Ceremony[/caption]   August 14, 2012 The Second International Conference on Marxism and Psychology last week in Morelia Mexico was packed—about 700 participants, a good half of them Mexican university students and activists. It was challenging and fascinating to be part of the gathering of academics and activists,...

May 31,2012 For the past three Tuesday evenings, I’ve been leading “Making a Conceptual Revolution: The Practical-Critical Philosophy of Fred Newman”—an offering in the Institute’s Revolutionary Conversations series. It’s been delightful spending time with 30+ people from varied walks of life and varied levels of familiarity with Newman and his work...