Wollheim, Richard

Discusses the nature and function of germs and how they can be responsible for both good and bad effects.

The mind as it is manifested in philosophy and art, in the moral life and psychoanalysis, has always been at the core of Richard Wollheim's celebrated work. This book brings together Wollheim's broad and abiding concerns to illuminate human thought at its furthest reaches of introspection and expression. Interweaving philosophy, psychoanalysis, and aesthetics, these essays reveal the critical connections between ideas and disciplines too often regarded as separate and distinct. At the same time, by focusing on actual experience, whether in art or ritual, sexuality or criminal behavior, they retrieve the ways and workings of the mind from the ponderous abstraction in which much contemporary thought is trapped. A central theme of The Mind and Its Depths is the importance of psychoanalysis to philosophical discussion. From Freud's writings Wollheim extracts the thesis of the "corporealization of thought," which he uses in a highly original way to reframe the mind/body question. His discussions of issues of moral, social, and political philosophy also emphasize the psychological dimensions of such problems. These, along with his essays on artistic expression and pictorial style, demonstrate the advantages of psychological sophistication in thinking about philosophical issues in general - and about the nature and impact of art in particular.

A philosophical discussion of the nature of art.

"In this distinguished book, first published in 1984, Richard Wollheim offers an original approach to the philosophical understanding of a person. Countering prevailing theories on the nature of persons, Wollheim submits an account of the mind dynamically conceived and proposes that we take as fundamental the process of living as a person. To illuminate this process, the author draws on psychoanalysis and literature, in particular the case studies of Freud and the writings of Proust."--BOOK JACKET.