Harwood FISHER, Self, Logic, and Figurative Thinking
Irvington, Columbia University Press, 2009, 368 p.
ISBN 978-0-231-14504-6
RÉSUMÉ
Harwood Fisher argues against neuroscientific and cognitive scientificexplanations of mental states, for they fail to account for the gapsbetween actions in the brain, cognitive operations, linguistic mapping,and an individual's account of experience. Fisher probes a rich arrayof thought from the primitive and the dream to the artistic figure ofspeech, and extending to the scientific metaphor. He draws onfirst-person methodologies to restore the conscious self to a primaryfunction in the generation of figurative thinking.
How doesthe individual originate and organize terms and ideas? How can wedifferentiate between different types of thought and account for theirorigins? Fisher depicts the self as mediator between trope and logicalform. Conversely, he explicates the creation and articulation of theself through interplay between logic and icon. Fisher explains how the"I" can step out of scripted roles. The self is neither a discursiveagent of postmodern linguistics nor a socially determined entity.Rather, it is a historically situated, dynamically constituted place atthe crossroads of conscious agency and unconscious actions and evolvingcontextual logics and figures.
BIOGRAPHIE
Harwood Fisher is professor emeritus, City College of the CityUniversity of New York. His writing focuses on how the individualoriginates ideas and the self's subjective experiences as a dynamiclogic of thinking. His books include Language and Logic in Personality and Society and The Subjective Self: A Portrait Within Logical Space.