[Xmca-l] Re: Oliver Sacks/Romantic Science
Andy Blunden
ablunden@mira.net
Mon Aug 31 21:17:16 PDT 2015
Try this, in Word this time.
Andy
------------------------------------------------------------
*Andy Blunden*
http://home.pacific.net.au/~andy/
On 1/09/2015 1:32 PM, mike cole wrote:
> It might be helpful to this discussion if someone would
> post the chapter on Romantic Science from Luria's
> autobiography which MUST be somewhere public in pdf. It
> appears that I do not have one.
>
> After reading what the person said, then discussion of the
> ideas seems appropriate. Ditto Sacks, who has written a
> couple of extended essay's on
> his view of Romantic Science.
>
> It is true that the Russian psychologists, erudite as they
> were, were not sociologists. Nor were they
> anthropologists. The nature of their enterprise
> encompassed those fields and more.
>
> Doing Romantic Science and immersing oneself in the
> individual case in no way excludes inclusion of sociology,
> anthropology, in their work. Nor does Luria argue so.
>
> mike
>
>
> On Mon, Aug 31, 2015 at 7:29 PM, David Kellogg
> <dkellogg60@gmail.com <mailto:dkellogg60@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> I think the problem with this view of romantic science
> is that it
> completely precludes building a psychology on a
> sociology. In that sense
> (and in others), Vygotsky wasn't a romantic scientist
> at all. Vygotsky
> certainly did not believe in "total immersion in the
> individual case"; such
> an immersion is a refusal to rise to the level of
> theory. I'm not sure
> Luria was romantic that way either: "the Man with a
> Shattered Mind" and
> "The Memory of Mnemonist" are really exceptions.
> Remember the main
> criticism of Luria's book "The Nature of Human
> Conflicts" was always that
> it was too quantitative.
>
> There are, of course, some areas of psychology that
> are well studied as
> case histories. Recently, I've been looking into
> suicidology, and in
> particular the work of Edwin Shneidman, who pioneered
> the linguistic
> analysis of suicide notes (and who appears to have
> been influenced, as
> early as the 1970s, by Kasanin and by Vygotsky's work
> on schizophrinia).
> Now you would think that if ever there was a field
> that would benefit from
> total immersion in the individual case, this is one.
> But Shneidman says
> that suicide notes are mostly full of trite, banal
> phrases, and as a
> consequence very easy to code--and treat quantiatively
> (one of his first
> studies was simply to sort a pile of real and
> imitation suicide notes and
> carefully note the criteria he had when he made
> correct judgements). And of
> course the whole point of Durkheim's work on suicide
> is that the individual
> case can be utterly disregarded, since the great
> variations are
> sociological and the psychological variables all seem
> trivial, transient,
> or mutually cancelling when we look at suicide at a
> large scale (as we must
> these days). Shneidman says he has never read a
> suicide note he would want
> to have written.
>
> David Kellogg
>
>
>
> On Tue, Sep 1, 2015 at 9:21 AM, Andy Blunden
> <ablunden@mira.net <mailto:ablunden@mira.net>> wrote:
>
> > As little as I understand it, Larry, Oliver Sacks'
> style of Romantic
> > Science was his complete immersion in the individual
> case before him, and
> > development of a science of complete persons. The
> paradigm of this type of
> > science was Luria. A limit case of "Qualitative
> Science" I suppose. The
> > opposite is the study of just one aspect of each
> case, e.g. facial
> > recognition, and the attempt to formulate a
> "covering law" for just this
> > aspect.
> > Andy
> >
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> > *Andy Blunden*
> > http://home.pacific.net.au/~andy/
> <http://home.pacific.net.au/%7Eandy/>
> > On 1/09/2015 8:40 AM, HENRY SHONERD wrote:
> >
> >> Mike,
> >> I recall in an obituary in the NYTimes that
> naysayers were cited in
> >> reviewing Oliver Sacks’ life work. I am wondering
> if some of that push back
> >> was related to his practice of romantic science,
> which, if I understand
> >> from things Andy has written, involves immersion in
> the phenomena of
> >> interest in search of a unit of analysis. Goethe,
> for example, immersed
> >> himself in the phenomena of living things. His
> writing prefigures the cell
> >> as a unit of analysis, but the technology of
> microscopes could not confirm
> >> such a unit until later on. Your contrasting Bruner
> and Sacks makes me
> >> wonder if the subject, not just the object, is at
> issue. Different styles
> >> of research bring different construals. This may be
> the bane of
> >> objectivist, empiricist science but does it really
> make Sacks less of a
> >> researcher and just a lowly clinician?
> >> Henry
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>> On Aug 30, 2015, at 7:02 PM, mike cole
> <mcole@ucsd.edu <mailto:mcole@ucsd.edu>> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> Hi Laura-- I knew Oliver primarily through our
> connections with Luria and
> >>> the fact that we
> >>> independently came to embrace the idea of a
> romantic science. He was a
> >>> shy
> >>> and diffident person. You can get that feeling,
> and the difference
> >>> between
> >>> him and Jerry Bruner in this regard in the
> interview with them that
> >>> someone
> >>> pirated on
> >>> to youtube.
> >>>
> >>> Jerry is very old but last heard from by me,
> engaging intellectually all
> >>> the while.
> >>>
> >>> mike
> >>>
> >>> On Sun, Aug 30, 2015 at 5:18 PM, Laura Martin
> <martinl@azscience.org <mailto:martinl@azscience.org>>
> >>> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> Thanks, Mike. A number of years ago I had the
> privilege of spending an
> >>>> evening with Sacks when Lena Luria was visiting
> Jerry Bruner and Carol
> >>>> Feldman in NY. I stood in for Sylvia who
> couldn't make the dinner - it
> >>>> was
> >>>> an extraordinary evening in many ways. Do you
> ever hear from Bruner? I
> >>>> wonder if he's still active.
> >>>>
> >>>> Laura
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>> Sent from my iPad
> >>>>
> >>>> On Aug 30, 2015, at 3:29 PM, mike cole
> <mcole@ucsd.edu <mailto:mcole@ucsd.edu>> wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>> Dear Colleagues ---
> >>>>
> >>>> I am forwarding, with personal sadness, the news
> that Oliver Sacks has
> >>>> succumbed to cancer.
> >>>> Its not a surprise, but a sad passing indeed.
> >>>> mike
> >>>> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> >>>>
> >>>> Date: Sun, Aug 30, 2015 at 3:07 PM
> >>>> Subject: NYTimes.com: Oliver Sacks Dies at 82;
> Neurologist and Author
> >>>> Explored the Brain’s Quirks
> >>>> To: lchcmike@gmail.com <mailto:lchcmike@gmail.com>
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>> Sent by sashacole510@gmail.com
> <mailto:sashacole510@gmail.com>: Oliver Sacks Dies at
> 82; Neurologist
> >>>> and Author Explored the Brain’s Quirks
> >>>> <
> >>>>
> http://p.nytimes.com/email/re?location=InCMR7g4BCKC2wiZPkcVUieQKbejxL4a&user_id=bd31502e6eb851a9261827fdfbbcdf6d&email_type=eta&task_id=1440972441657668®i_id=0>
> >>>> By
> >>>> GREGORY COWLES
> >>>>
> >>>> Dr. Sacks explored some of the brain’s strangest
> pathways in
> >>>> best-selling
> >>>> case histories like “The Man Who Mistook His Wife
> for a Hat,” achieving
> >>>> a
> >>>> level of renown rare among scientists.
> >>>> Or, copy and paste this URL into your browser:
> http://nyti.ms/1LL040D
> >>>> <
> >>>>
> http://p.nytimes.com/email/re?location=InCMR7g4BCKC2wiZPkcVUieQKbejxL4a&user_id=bd31502e6eb851a9261827fdfbbcdf6d&email_type=eta&task_id=1440972441657668®i_id=0>
> >>>> To
> >>>> get unlimited access to all New York Times
> articles, subscribe today.
> >>>> See
> >>>> Subscription Options.
> >>>> <
> >>>>
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> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>> --
> >>>>
> >>>> It is the dilemma of psychology to deal as a
> natural science with an
> >>>> object that creates history. Ernst Boesch
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>> --
> >>>
> >>> It is the dilemma of psychology to deal as a
> natural science with an
> >>> object that creates history. Ernst Boesch
> >>>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >
>
>
>
>
> --
>
> It is the dilemma of psychology to deal as a natural
> science with an
> object that creates history. Ernst Boesch
>
>
>
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