This book brings together Wollheim's broad and abiding concerns to illuminate human thought at its furthest reaches of introspection and expression.

As a model for explaining the inwardness of mental life, a computer in the cortex is no improvement on an immaterial mind trapped wherever Descartes or Newton originally located it. For both models distract our attention from certain crucial differences between inwardness and interiority - that is, from certain crucial respects in which these two inherited ways of thinking about the inner mind diverge from one another. Clearly, interiority is an inescapable feature of our brains and of all the physiological (...) processes that go on in the central nervous system. There is no doubt at all that those processes are permanently located inside our bodies. So, if our mental lives were, properly speaking, trapped within our brains, they must be trapped there from birth. In this view, our minds must indeed operate permanently à huis clos: like prisoners who are born, live, and die in permanent deadlock. Yet the inwardness of mental life, as we know it and speak of it in everyday experience, is not like that at all. The things that mark so many of our thoughts, wishes, and feelings as inner or inward are not permanent, inescapable, lifelong characteristics. On the contrary, inwardness is in many respects an acquired feature of our experience, a product, in part, of cultural history but in part also of individual development. So understood, our mental lives are not essentially inner lives. Rather, they become inner because we make them so. And we do develop inner lives, in this direct, experiential sense, because we have reasons for doing so. Stephen Toulmin presented an earlier version of this essay as the Nora and Edward Ryerson Lecture at the University of Chicago on 30 April 1979. He is the author of, among other works, Foresight and Understanding, Human Understanding, Knowing and Acting, and Wittgenstein's Vienna. (shrink)

From Freud's Consulting Room charts the development of his ideas through his clinical work, the successes and failures of his most dramatic and significant case ...

This book is based on the William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1982. It offers a new approach to the philosophical understanding of a person, taking as fundamental the process of living as a person, and emphasising the continuity and development across time of an individual life.

Until recently, psychoanalysis has been a most reluctant recipient of the new inheritance. For most of its century-long life it has clung to the positivist epistemology of Freud, its founding genius, belying his hope that his followers would be as skeptical about received wisdom in their time as he was in his. Psychoanalysis has protected itself from change by preserving its store of founding metaphors in their original form.

Marshall Edelson identifies the core theory of psychoanalysis and shows how free association and the case study method can provide rational grounds for believing its clinical inferences about the causal role of unconscious sexual fantasies. "Dr. Edelson has committed himself with gusto, persistence and intelligence [to] a spirited defense of psychoanalysis as science—not necessarily as it is, but as it can be in the best of hands as it should be.... It is a defense that I hope can resonate strongly (...) in psychoanalytic ranks. It is also a message that I hope would receive a warm reception in that wider intellectual world where ideas matter and where enlightened social policy and cultural cachet are fostered."—Robert Wallerstein, New York Times Book Review. (shrink)

This lucid survey takes readers on a thought-provoking tour through the life and work of Augustine. Explores new insights into one of antiquity’s most important philosophers Topics Include: skepticism, language acquisition, mind-body dualism, philosophical dream problems, time and creation, faith and reason, foreknowledge and free will, and Augustine’s standing as a ‘Socratic philosopher’.