Focusing on two late-Ming or early-Qing plays central to the Chinese canon (Peony Pavilion and Peach Blossom Fan), this study explores crucial questions concerning personal identity.

Today’s approaches to the study of the human mind are divided into seemingly opposed camps. On one side we find the neurosciences, with their more or less reductionist research programs, and on the other side we find the cultural and discursive approaches, with their frequent neglect of the material sides of human life. Persons and their Minds seeks to develop an integrative theory of the mind with room for both brain and culture. Brinkmann’s remarkable and thought-provoking work is one of the first books to integrate brain research with phenomenology, social practice studies and actor-network theory, all of which are held together by the concept of the person. Brinkmann’s new and informative approach to the person, the mind and mental disorder give this book a wide scope. The author uses Rom Harré’s hybrid psychology as a meta-theoretical starting point and expands this significantly by including four sources of mediators: the brain, the body, social practices and technological artefacts. The author draws on findings from cultural psychology and argues that the mind is normative in the sense that mental processes do not simply happen, but can be done more or less well, and thus are subject to normative appraisal. In addition to informative theoretical discussions, this book includes a number of detailed case studies, including a study of ADHD from the integrated perspective. Consequently, the book will be of great interest to academics and researchers in the fields of psychology, philosophy, sociology and psychiatry.

Persons and Their Minds compares the conflicting claims of mindism and personism and argues for placing persons at the center of philosophy of mind. Mindism stems from Descartes, takes the spectator stance, and makes the mind the subject of mental verbs such as ?know,? ?think,? and ?believe.? Personism stems from Wittgenstein and Ryle, takes the agent stance, and restores persons to their proper place as subjects of mental verbs.Employing lessons taught by Wittgenstein and Ryle, the book offers a running criticism of mindism as it appears in the work of Descartes, Locke, Davidson, Fodor, Hume, Parfit, Dennett, Searle, McGinn, Flanagan, Chalmers, and Baars, and demonstrates personism's ability to resist various forms of mindism. Intended for upper-level or graduate students of philosophy, Persons and Their Minds should also interest psychologists, psychotherapists, and other professionals who use philosophy of mind in their work.

Stimulating introduction to the most central and interesting issues in the philosophy of mind. Topics covered include dualism versus the various forms of materialism, personal identity and survival, and the problem of other minds.

Relationships may be understood as the contact that emerges from observable social rooles underpinned by inter-personal attitudes. Using transactional analysis and other approaches, this book presents a series of models based on an analysis of the relationships that are created when contact between people links imagos and roles to confirm existential life positions.Because the models provide a meta-level framework for understanding and influencing any sequence of interaction, irrespective of setting or TA specialism, they give ample scope for practitioners to exercise widely differing preferences, techniques and strategies for interacting with clients in ways that encompass a transpersonal or a spiritual view of relationships.

Runkel links Perceptual Control Theory (PCT) thinking to psychological literature and discusses it against that background.

This 2004 book provides the foundations for the view that the mind extends beyond the boundary of the individual.