Publication date:
07 March 2008Length of book:
252 pagesPublisher
Lexington BooksDimensions:
239x161mm6x9"
ISBN-13: 9780739115114
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approach in exploring the meaning of Mead's writings, Carreira da Silva reads the entire corpus of Mead's published and unpublished writings in light of the context in which they were originally produced, from concrete events like the American involvement in World War I to more general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.
His goal is to suggest some ways in which Mead's ideas could inform contemporary social theories of modernity. The result is a short but informative book on a broad range of topics associated with Med's thought, and a useful corrective to some of the ways he is misrepresented in contemporary sociology....Contemporary scholars of Mead have been trying to dislodgge this profile by drawing out his more pragmatist and materialist ideas, a goal that Silva furthers with some success in this book...the central thesis of Filipe Carreira da Silva's book is an excellent way to conceive of Mead's ideas as a whole, and his insights and critiques are both useful and original. It is an essential reference for Mead shcholars, and would also serve as an accessible and comprehensive introduction to Mead's social theory for students.