(George Herbert Mead had a powerful influence on the devel...)
George Herbert Mead had a powerful influence on the development of American pragmatism in the twentieth century. He also had a strong impact on the social sciences. This classic book represents Mead's philosophy of experience, so central to his outlook.
(This collection gets to the heart of Mead’s meditations o...)
This collection gets to the heart of Mead’s meditations on social psychology and social philosophy. Its penetrating, conversational tone transports the reader directly into Mead’s classroom as he teases out the genesis of the self and the nature of the mind. The book captures his wry humor and shrewd reasoning, showing a man comfortable quoting Aristotle alongside Alice in Wonderland.
(Never before published, this book features George Herbert...)
Never before published, this book features George Herbert Mead's illuminating lectures on the Philosophy of Education at the University of Chicago during the early 20th century. These lectures provide unique insight into Mead's educational thought and reveal how his early psychological writings on the social character of meaning and the social origin of reflective consciousness was central in the development of what Mead referred to as his social conception of education.
(One of the most brilliantly original of American pragmati...)
One of the most brilliantly original of American pragmatists, George Herbert Mead published surprisingly few major papers and not a single book during his lifetime. Yet his influence on American sociology and social psychology since World War II has been exceedingly strong. This volume is a revised and enlarged edition of the book formerly published under the title The Social Psychology of George Herbert Mead.
George Herbert Mead was an American philosopher prominent in both social psychology and the development of Pragmatism. While Mead is best known for his work on the nature of the self and intersubjectivity, he also developed a theory of action, and a metaphysics or philosophy of nature that emphasizes emergence and temporality, in which the past and future are viewed through the lens of the present.
Background
George Herbert Mead was born on February 27, 1863, in South Hadley, Massachusetts. He was the second child and only son of Hiram Mead, pastor of the Congregational church at South Hadley, and Elizabeth Storrs Billings Mead. When the boy was seven the family moved to Oberlin, Ohio, where Hiram Mead became professor of homiletics at Oberlin Theological Seminary.
His mother Elizabeth Storrs Billings Mead also worked as an academic; she taught at Oberlin College and would go on to serve as president of Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts.
Education
In 1879, George Herbert Mead enrolled in Oberlin College, where he pursued a bachelor's degree focusing on history and literature, which he completed four years later. After a brief stint as a school teacher, Mead worked as a surveyor for the Wisconsin Central Railroad Company for a few years. Following that in autumn 1887, he enrolled at Harvard University, where he studied psychology and philosophy, but he left in 1888 without a graduate degree.
After Harvard, Mead joined his close friend Henry Castle and his sister Helen Kingsbury Castle in Leipzig, Germany, where he enrolled in a Ph.D. program for philosophy and physiological psychology at the University of Leipzig. In 1889, Mead transferred to the University of Berlin, where he began to study economic theory. The University of Michigan offered Mead a teaching position in philosophy and psychology two years later and he stopped his doctoral studies to accept this post, never actually completing his doctorate.
Upon his return to the United States Mead taught philosophy at the University of Michigan from 1891 to 1894 and then at the University of Chicago, where he was successively an assistant professor, 1894-1902, an associate professor, 1902-1907, and a professor of philosophy, 1907-1931. He had accepted an appointment for the year 1931-1932 at Columbia University, but his death intervened. His considerable influence upon American social philosophy was effected chiefly through his teaching and especially through his course on social psychology given for many years at the University of Chicago. During his lifetime he published only occasional articles and reviews. After his death, four volumes made up of his lectures and unpublished manuscripts were edited and published by his colleagues and students.
When fields such as psychology and sociology were still new, George Herbert Mead became a leading pragmatist and pioneer of symbolic interactionism, a theory that explores the relationships between people in societies. More than a century after his death, Mead is widely considered to be one of the founders of social psychology, the study of how social environments influence individuals.
He is regarded as one of the founders of symbolic interactionism and of what has come to be referred to as the Chicago sociological tradition.
(This collection gets to the heart of Mead’s meditations o...)
1934
Religion
Mead's mother, Elizabeth Storrs Billings, was a devoutly religious woman, who taught at Oberlin for two years after the death of her husband in 1881. After his college years, Mead became a committed naturalist and non-believer, but he had struggled for years with the religious convictions that he had inherited from his family and community. For a period of time after college, he even considered Christian Social Work as a career, but in 1884 he explained in a letter to his friend Henry Castle why this career path would be problematic:
"I shall have to let persons understand that I have some belief in Christianity and my praying be interpreted as a belief in God, whereas I have no doubt that now the most reasonable system of the universe can be formed to myself without a God. But notwithstanding all this, I cannot go out with the world and not work for men. The spirit of a minister is strong with me and I come fairly by it."
Politics
Mead marched in support of women's suffrage, served as a treasurer for the Settlement House movement, immersed himself in civic matters in Chicago, and generally supported progressive causes. He also worked for the City Club of Chicago. He also served as a treasurer of Chicago's Hull House.
Views
Early in his intellectual career, Mead became interested in psychology. To him, as to many thinkers of his generation, it seemed that nineteenth-century science required a fundamental revision of beliefs about man's place in nature and in the particular reconstruction of doctrines about the nature of man's mind, personality, and activity. During the remainder of his life, his vigorous, original, and analytic mind was directed to the problem of describing thinking and other human activities as natural processes. The interests and doctrines of William James were congenial to, and perhaps helped form, Mead's philosophical thinking; and functional psychology furnished a general program and point of view within which Mead's problems and beliefs could easily be fitted. With much greater detail his thinking fitted into the thinking of John Dewey, his colleague, who said of Mead that he not only influenced his own thinking but possessed "the most original mind in philosophy in the America of the last generation." It is difficult to determine just how much Mead contributed to the development of the pragmatism of "The Chicago School," but certainly he accepted enthusiastically the expression given it by Dewey and attacked his own special problems within the framework of pragmatism as formulated by Dewey. Mead's own important contribution is his description of the development of thinking, personality, and self-consciousness and his description of social activity. The distinctive characteristic of his doctrine is that he combines these two descriptions into one a behavioristic account of thinking and social activity. He hit upon the striking idea that human thinking and the characteristically human forms of social activity are aspects of the same fundamental process, the development of communication. Communication is a social process dependent upon activities in which an individual learns to assume the roles of others and to respond to these assumed roles. Within this process, we find, on one side, the development of thinking, personality, and self-consciousness and, on the other side, the development of cooperation and human social organization. Though Mead emphasized the philosophical implications of his social psychology and particularly its congruence with pragmatic speculation, his illuminating description, and analysis of the relations between individual and social development have been useful to many philosophers and social scientists who disregarded or rejected the accompanying philosophy.
Quotations:
"Society is unity in diversity."
"Man lives in a world of meaning."
"Social psychology is especially interested in the effect which the social group has in the determination of the experience and conduct of the individual member."
"Imagery is not past but present. It rests with what we call our mental processes to place these images in a temporal order."
"The intelligence of the lower forms of animal life, like a great deal of human intelligence, does not involve a self."
"The beauty of a face is not a separate quality but a relation or proportion of qualities to each other."
"Social psychology has, as a rule, dealt with various phases of social experience from the psychological standpoint of individual experience."
"Warfare is an utterly stupid method of settling differences of interest between different nations."
"No very sharp line can be drawn between social psychology and individual psychology."
Personality
Dewey referred to Mead as "a seminal mind of the very first order."
Interests
Philosophers & Thinkers
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, John Dewey, Adam Smith
Connections
In 1891, Mead got married to Helen Kingsbury Castle. Helen was the sister of Henry Northrup Castle, who was a friend Mead had met at Oberlin. Helena and Henry had gone to study at Oberlin from Hawaii.
Mead and Helen had a son, their only child, Henry Castle Albert Mead, born on November 30, 1892.
