Western Conceptions of the Individual

Part 1 Mechanistic philosophy and the human subject: Descartes; mechanistic materialism; Spinoza and Leibniz; the empiricist tradition; the Kantian synthesis. Part 2 The psychology of the will: Schopenhauer; Nietzsche and the will to power; Freud - his life and work; libido and the unconscious. Part 3 The varieties of empiricism: Darwin and evolution; behaviourism; Skinner and operant conditioning; Wittgenstein and philosophical behaviourism; sociobiology. Part 4 Culture and psychology - neo-Kantian perspectives: Silthey and the neo-Kantian school; Wundt and the Libnizian tradition; cultural anthropology; patterns of culture; Margaret Mead. Part 5 The Hegelian-Marxist tradition: Hegel's phenomenology of spirit; historical materialism; Lukacs; Marxist psychology. Part 6 The sociological tradition: positive philosophy; Durkheim - his life and work; the dualism of human nature; Durkheimian perspectives; holism and individualism. Part 7 Pragmatism and symbolic interaction: pragmatism and William James; the principles of psychology; Dewey's empirical naturalism; mind, self and society; Erving Goffman. Part 8 Critical theory and psychoanalysis: the Frankfurt school; Hegelian Marxism; Eros and civilization; knowledge and human interests. Part 9 Phenomenology and existentialism: the background to existentialist phenomenology; the phenomenology of consciousmess; Merleau-Ponty. Part 10 Structuralism and Levi-Strauss: Piager's genetic structuralism; structural Marxism; the archaeology of knowledge; power and the human subject; post structuralism.