Not available to order
Publication date:
08 July 2010Length of book:
252 pagesPublisher
Lexington BooksISBN-13: 9780739150054
Filipe Carreira da Silva addresses the basic questions 'How should we read Mead?' and 'Why should we read Mead today' by showing that the history of ideas and theory-building are closely-related endeavors. Following a contextualist approach in exploring the meaning of Mead's writings, Carreira da Silva reads the entire corpus of Mead's published and unpublished writings in light of the context in which they were originally produced, from concrete events like the American involvement in World War I to more general debates like that of the nature of modernity. Mead and Modernity attests to the relevance of Mead's ideas by assessing the relative merits of his responses to three fundamental modern problematics: science, selfhood, and democratic politics. The outcome is an innovative intellectual portrait of Mead as a seminal thinker whose contributions extend beyond his well-known social theory of the self and include important insights into the philosophy of science and radical democratic theory.
The book, which is not just a narrow monograph of Mead as a classic of the social sciences, is a skillfully planned and well-written study of Mead's whole oeuvre....By using historically sensitive and thematically guided method, Carreira da Silva locates some important milestones in research concerning Mead's thinking....The main merit of Carreira da Silva's analysis is how he is able to show that Mead's moral and political thinking was closely related to his theory of the social formation of mind and self....In any case, Carreira da Silva's book is a masterpiece in the tradition started by David L. Miller and Gary Allan Cook, and followed by Hans Joas, which deepens our understanding of the meaning of Mead's thinking....Carreira da Silva is able to put all the pieces of a complicated jigsaw puzzle in the right places...methodologically an excellent and sharp analysis of Mead's thinking.