I think that ideas and concepts start like small snowballs. And for a long
time they don't make a difference.
But they grow - not like snowballs, more like fungus - linking underground
and spawning to seemingly great distances. No one knows who are their
carriers and how exactly they travel from one person (group,
institution...) to another. Sometimes you can partially trace their
probable and likely paths. For instance:
I have always heard that Vygotsky knew the work of Dewey and that in some
way Dewey's ides have had an influence on him.
But did you know that Dewey had some links to Moscow himself??
I read in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy that:
"Dewey's retirement from active teaching in 1930 did not curtail his
activity either as a public figure or productive philosopher. Of special
note in his public life was his participation in the Commission of Inquiry
into the Charges Against Leon Trotsky at the Moscow Trial, which exposed
Stalin's political machinations behind the Moscow trials of the mid-1930s"
The time (mid thirties) is right, the location is right. Did Dewey ever go
to Moscow?? Who did Dewey know among the Moscow circle Psychologists and
intellectuals in general? Did Dewey ever know about Vygotsky's ideas and
theories?
Maybe someone knows??
It is very hard to say when some idea will "suddenly" emerge and how long
did it take to "cook" it, what paths did it traverse, what contexts did it
touch, how did it change along the way and how did it gain all the
significance.
It is eery, I agree, but maybe it is possible to study it?? Arne Reithel
once made a map with arrows showing the genealogy of western philosophical
and social scientific ideas and how they travelled from philosopher to
another... I know I have it somewhere- but it will take me some time to
find it.
Ana
At 12:14 AM 4/14/2002 +0000, you wrote:
>I don't think it is so eery (as i may have in the past)
>but only at a gut level, e.g. another coincidence are
>some authors close to home who have come to the same
>kind of conclusions on the papers they are working on
>more or less "independently". maybe the convergences
>are something "in the air" so to speak with "air" being
>something between an institutional and a global scale --
>it may be, in perversion of Durkheim's words, the
>current which sweeps us off our feet, and places us on
>the same sandbar. And metaphor is only as far as i can
>understand it. A really good puzzle, eh?
>--
>
> >
> > BB-- monday we have a discussion of co-genetic logic at lchc. And my
> > daughter is studying the changing nature of prostitution in the globalized
> > fourth world.
> >
> > Put that together with discussion of emergence, charcter development
> (thanks
> > Peter), the level of coincidence gets kind of eery!
> > mike
> >
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