[Xmca-l] Re: how to broaden/enliven the xmca discussion

[mike cole]

I, to, have returned to Leontiev's develoment book following David's
suggestion. Still reading,
but passages such as the following really dicombobulate me.

"The coincidences of sense and meanings is the main feature of primitive
consciousness."

mike

On Thu, Oct 9, 2014 at 4:21 PM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:

> This discussion has sent me back to looking at A N Leontyev's "Development
> of Mind." For all his faults, ANL expended a lot of energy in tracing the
> phylogenetic evolution of activity (which for ANL is a broad category,
> inclusive of unconscious activity). He traces the evolution of behaviour
> (as in animals without a central nervous system operating on a reflex
> basis) through conditioned reflexes and habits to operations (scripts which
> can be moved from one situation to another and adapted to conditions
> without conscious awareness) to actions (consciously determined by their
> immediate goal) to activities (where the goal is remote from the immediate
> actions, and a whole series of actions are required to meet the goal). Then
> he is able to trace the movement back and forth between behaviour,
> operational activity, actions and activities in both ontogenesis and
> microgenesis. I have always been a bit impatient with this kind of move
> (reifying a theory of human activity into Nature and then importing it
> back), but I have to say it was a useful exercise. And clarifying.
> Here is a link to an excerpt from part of this work:
> http://www.marxists.org/archive/leontev/works/1981/evolution.htm
> Andy
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> *Andy Blunden*
> http://home.pacific.net.au/~andy/
>
>
> David Kellogg wrote:
>
>> All of which has to be sung with screams of pain (Strauss has, you
>> see, stacked the deck in Rousseau's favor). But maybe both singing and
>> speech are exaptations of something that is functionally neither and
>> not specific to humans at all, which for want of a better name we can
>> call activity WITHOUT thinking.
>>
>> David Kellogg
>> Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
>>
>>
>>
>
>


-- 
It is the dilemma of psychology to deal with a natural science with an
object that creates history. Ernst Boesch.