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The Ambiguity of the Sciences of Man

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 July 2024

Georges Gusdorf
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At the conference on scientific psychology held in Strasbourg in the autumn of 1956, Professor Leontiev of the U.S.S.R. gave a highly anticipated report on the present trends of Russian psychology. He emphasized the now recognized necessity of going beyond the simplistic schemas of Pavlov and of studying complex systems of adaptation, which are the constitutive elements of the mental life in its richness and which are expressed particularly on the speech level. The elite of the French scientific psychologists listened to him in a kind of anguished confusion, mixed with admiration. One of them, expressing the general feeling, exclaimed: “You tell us that we must not hesitate to approach that formidable domain, before which we shrink back—the conscious ….” And one knew not whether to laugh or to cry at the sight of psychologists thus confronted with a subject so unusual for them as to be quite out of the question.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 7 , Issue 26 , June 1959 , pp. 48 - 70
Copyright
Copyright © 1959 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

References

1. Georges Dumas (ed.), Traité de psychologie (Paris: Alcan, I923), I, ix.

2. Georges Dumas, Nouveau traité de psychologie (Paris: Alcan, I930), I, 339.

3. Cf. particularly Politzer, Critique des fondements de la psychologie (Rieder, I929), and D. Lagache, L'Unité de la psychologie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, I949).

4. A. L. Kroeber (ed.), Anthropology Today (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, I953), extended by a volume of discussions: Sol Tax et al. (eds.), An Appraisal of An thropology Today (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, I953).

5. Anthropology Today, p. xiii.

6. Ibid., p. xiv.

7. An Appraisal of Anthropology Today, p. I54.

8. William Straus, ibid., p. I53; cf. Claude Lévi-Strauss, ibid., p. I54: "We all agree that anthropology has a close relationship with the humanites, the social sciences, and the natural sciences."

9. Raymond Aron, Introduction à la philosophie de l'histoire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France), p. I20.

10. Lucien Fabvre, "Vivre l'histoire," in Mélanges d'histoire sociale, I943, p. 6.

11. Combats pour l'histoire (Paris: Colin, I953), p. 3I.

12. Ibid., p. 32.

13. Louis Rougier, Traité de la connaissance (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, I955), p. 298.

14. Ibid., p. 369.

15. Ibid., p. I07.

16. Jean Piaget, Traité de logique (Paris: Colin, I949), p. 292.

17. Piaget, Introduction à l'épistémologie génétique, Vol. 1, La Pensée mathématique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, I950), p. 3I6.

18. Jean Cavaillès, Méthode axiomatique et formalisme (Paris: Hermann, I938), p. 88.

19. La Recherche scientifique et le progrès technique (Report to the President of the Council of Ministers and to the General Planning Commission, June, I957), p. II7.

20. Charles Morazé, "La Synthèse dans les sciences humaines," in Travail et méthodes (Paris: Editions Science et Industrie, I958), p. I9I.

21. M. Merleau-Ponty, "La Philosophie et la sociologie," Cahiers inernationaux de sociologie, X (I95I), 69. Cf. A. de Waelhens, "Sciences humaines, horizon ontologique et rencontre," in Rencontre (Utrecht: Spectrum, I957), p. 496: "All the sciences of man refer originally to an experience, actual at least implicitly, the explanation of which they will furnish on a certain plane. The mode of being which, in this attempted explanation, they will be likely to attribute to man is the same as that which would be revealed by a phenomenological analysis of the actual experience, undertaken with the purpose of show ing this mode of existence."

22. Merleau-Ponty, op. cit., p. 65.

23. Paul Guiraud, Psychiatrie générale (Le François, I950), p. 5I4.

24. O. Mannoni, "La Psychanalyse et la notion d'objectivité dans les sciences de l'hom me," Revue de métaphysique et de morale, I957, p. 2I0.

25. Georges Gurvitch, "Réflexions sur les rapports entre philosophie et sociologie," Cahiers internationaux de sociologie, XXII (I957), I0.