G.H. Mead
He did his PhD in Cambridge (St. Edmund’s College, 2000-03): the expression “transformative experience” could hardly be more felicitously employed than to describe what those years meant to him. His stay in Cambridge also marks the beginning of a new topic of research.
In Cambridge, he devoted himself to the reconstruction neither of a concept nor of a universe of discourse, as he had previously done, but of the entire intellectual building of a single author. That author is George Herbert Mead (1863-1931), an American social psychologist who eventually made it to the sociological canon of “founding fathers”.
His work on Mead tries to provide fresh answers to the questions of “how and why one should read a classic author?” In his PhD, published in revised form in 2008 in the United States and recently translated into Brazilian Portuguese, he tries to show the extent to which theory building and intellectual history are but different sides of the same coin – the way one reconstructs the past is part and parcel of one’s strategy of theory construction. The latest development in his work on Mead is the publication of a critical edition of Mead’s writings (Routledge, forthcoming).
References
SOCIAL THEORY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY AND BEYOND with Patrick Baert, Cambridge: Polity Press
MEAD AND MODERNITY Science, Selfhood, and Democratic Politics, Filipe Carreira da Silva, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books
EM DIÁLOGO COM OS TEMPOS MODERNOS O Pensamento Social e Político de G.H. Mead, Filipe Carreira da Silva, Rio de Janeiro: Tempo Brasileiro.
Silva, Filipe Carreira da (2007). Re-Examining Mead: G. H. Mead on the Material Reproduction of Society. Journal of Classical Sociology Vol. 7, 3, 291-313. [online] [document (pdf)]
Silva, Filipe Carreira da (2007). G. H. Mead. A System in a State of Flux. History of the Human Sciences Vol. 20, 1, 45-65. [online] [document (pdf)]
Silva, Filipe Carreira da (2006). G. H. Mead in the history of sociological ideas. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences Vol. 42, 1, 19-39. [online]
Current project:
Forthcoming : G.H. Mead. A Reader London: (Routledge’s classics in sociology series) Read more