Background
Harrell, Jean Gabbert was born on September 28, 1921 in Berkeley, California, United States. Daughter of Harry G. and Florence Edith (Doyle) Gabbert.
(Profundity is a book of strong originality and argumentat...)
Profundity is a book of strong originality and argumentative power. Jean Harrell's argument that profundity, to be found in the sense of the primal worth of all human life, is a subjective universal, grounded in prenatal and neonatal experience and manifested in art and religion as a basic experience, is important for scholars of aesthetics and ethics. At the same time, because Harrell writes clearly and well, the book will interest those in religion, literature, and value theory.-Arnold Berleant, Long Island University.The crisis or "death" of philosophy currently identified both within and outside professional circles is commonly attributed to the failure to find universals in metaphysics, epistemology, and, most obviously, in valuational judgment. Profundity concentrates on an assumption uniformly upheld in the theory of value, that all human values are contextually dependent. Harrell contends, to the contrary, that there exists one major value that is universal to humans, regardless of context. That value is profundity, or depth.Considering how "profundity" is used in our language leads Harrell to identify two fundamental sensory patterns that are common to all human life at its origin- an auditory pattern that is first experienced before birth and a visual one that is experienced immediately after birth. From analysis of these patterns as they recur in music and the visual arts, Harrell moves on to discuss their related manifestations in religious doctrine, ceremony, and experience and also in works of literature. Overall her theory entails a radical revamping of the concept of creativity, since no artist can create profundity as a universal value, and provides the first full-scale treatment of profundity in the history of Western philosophy.
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Harrell, Jean Gabbert was born on September 28, 1921 in Berkeley, California, United States. Daughter of Harry G. and Florence Edith (Doyle) Gabbert.
AB, University of California, Berkeley, 1943; Doctor of Philosophy, Columbia University, 1950.
Instructor, Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts, 1945-1947; professor, California State University, Hayward, 1964-1980; professor emerita, California State University, Hayward, since 1980.
(Profundity is a book of strong originality and argumentat...)
Member American Psychological Association, American Society for Aesthetics.
Married Mr. Harrell (deceased November 1963). Children: Scott F., Gail L. Lindberg, Brian G.