G.H. Mead

 

Filipe Carreira da Silva 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 - G.H. Mead. A Reader (Routledge, 2011).

References

 

  • 2011. Books and Canon Formation in Sociology. The Case of Mind, Self, and Society. Journal of Classical Sociology 11(3): 356-377. With Mónica Brito Vieira [online]
  • 2010. School and Democracy. A Reassessment of G.H. Mead’s Educational Ideas. Ethics and Politics 12(1): 181-194.[online]
  • 2007. Re-Examining Mead: G. H. Mead on the Material Reproduction of Society. Journal of Classical Sociology 7(3) :291-313. [online] [document (pdf)]
  • 2007. G. H. Mead. A System in a State of Flux. History of the Human Sciences 20 (1): 45-65. [online] [document (pdf)]
  • 2006. G. H. Mead in the Hstory of Sociological Ideas. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 42(1): 19-39. [online]