This book brings together some of the finest recent critical and expository work on Mead, written by American and European thinkers from diverse traditions. For English-speaking audiences it provides an introduction to recent European work on Mead. The essays reveal the richness of Mead’s thought, and will stimulate those who have thought about him from very specific vantage points to consider him in new ways.

This volume is composed of extended versions of selected papers presented at an international conference held in June 2011 at Opole University—the seventh in a series of annual American and European Values conferences organized by the Institute of Philosophy, Opole University, Poland. The papers were written independently with no prior guidelines other than the obvious need to address some aspect of George Herbert Mead’s work. While rooted in careful study of Mead’s original writings and transcribed lectures and the historical context (...) in which that work was carried out, these papers have brought that work to bear on contemporary issues in metaphysics, epistemology, cognitive science, and social and political philosophy. There is good reason to classify Mead as one of the original classical American pragmatists (along with Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey) and consequently as a major figure in American philosophy. Nevertheless his thought has been marginalized for the most part, at least in academic philosophy. It is our intention to help recuperate Mead’s reputation among a broader audience by providing a small corpus of significant contemporary scholarship on some key aspects of his thought. (shrink)

Ethnomethodologists have very often distorted G. H. Mead’s works, partly because they have read them through H. Blumer’s interpretations. Therefore they have undervalued many similarities existing between Mead’s and Garfinkel’s thoughts. Of course there are lots of ambiguities and problems in Mead’s writings, and ethomethodologists are right when they criticize them. But they are wrong when they misread Mead. This paper examines two points. The first one is one about which Mead has often been misread: his use of the internal-exernal (...) distinction with regard to mind and action. This use doesn’t aim at maintaining a pychological interiority, but at grasping motricity as a kind of intentionality. The second point is about Garfinkel’s respecification of one of Mead’s main leitmotiv: “taking the attitude of the generalized other.” Garfinkel’s respecification is done in A. Schütz’s terms : the attitude of the generalized other is internal to the “attitude of everyday life,” and the generalized other takes the form of that which is normal, i.e. of that which is “in accordance with the mores.”. (shrink)