William James, Sciences of Mind, and Anti-Imperial Discourse

Description

In the past few decades, the humanities and social sciences have developed new methods of reorienting their conceptual frameworks in a 'world without frontiers'. In this book, Bernadette M. Baker offers an innovative approach to rethinking sciences of mind as they formed at the turn of the twentieth century, via the concerns that have emerged at the turn of the twenty-first. The less-visited texts of Harvard philosopher and psychologist William James provide a window into contemporary debates over principles of toleration, anti-imperial discourse and the nature of ethics. Baker revisits Jamesian approaches to the formation of scientific objects including the child mind, exceptional mental states and the ghost to explore the possibilities and limits of social scientific thought dedicated to mind development and discipline formation around the construct of the West.

Bernadette M. Baker is a professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin. Her research areas include philosophy, history, comparative cosmology and sociology as they intersect with curriculum studies and transnational and postfoundationalist approaches. She is the recipient of a Fulbright fellowship and of an Outstanding Book Award from the American Educational Research Association for In Perpetual Motion: Theories of Power, Educational History, and the Child (2001). Baker currently holds a visiting professorship at the University of Copenhagen.