Between Philosophy and Cultural Psychology

This Brief provides an in-depth discussion of five major points of intersection between philosophy and cultural psychology. The first chapter frames central analytical and normative threads, foregrounding the focal notion of thresholds of sense. The second chapter explores the nature of contexts, situations, and backgrounds of meaning-making following the lead of John Dewey, Ben-Ami Scharfstein, and Gernot Böhme. Chapter three examines the complementary analytical power of the semiotic resources developed in the work of Peirce, Bühler, and Cassirer. Chapter four shows the heuristic fertility and psychological bearing of Susanne Langer's feeling-based aesthetic model of minding. The final chapter establishes affectivation as the inescapable consequence of human beings giving life to themselves by giving life to signs. The Brief concludes with three commentaries from leading researchers in the area. The chapters weave together interlocking themes: the nature of embodied perception, the variety of contexts and semiotic frameworks and their schematization of thresholds of meaning-making, the role of art and theories of imagination both in cultural psychology and in philosophy, and the centrality of feeling in all forms of meaning-making. Between Philosophy and Cultural Psychology will be of interest to cognitive and cultural psychologists as well as researchers and upper-graduate students in philosophy and related psychology fields.