Description
Book SynopsisIn The Human Image in Helmuth Plessner, Pierre Bourdieu, and Psychocentric Culture, Isaac E. Catt offers a unique criticism of naturalistic reductions of humans to animals, to neuro substrates and to DNA. Catt explores a new interpretation of Plessner and Bourdieu, revealing the combinatory logic of semiotic phenomenology in both and their common problematic of communication. Through an emergent synthesis of philosophical anthropology and communicology, this book provides a basis for criticism of the failed mechanistic medical model in psychiatry, a fresh argument for reconceptualizing psychiatry as a human science, and for construction of a new ecological image of communicative being. Throughout the book, alternative attempts to transcend dualisms such as cybernetics, anti-anthropocentrism, and biosemiotics are revealed to risk reification of the very objects of their analysis. Scholars of communication, semiotics, and psychology will find this book of particular interest.
Table of ContentsTable of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part One: Disembodied Images of the Human Person
Chapter 1: Problematics of Communication in Signifying the Human Person
Chapter 2: A Crisis of Communication in the Human Sciences Then and Now
Chapter 3: Where It Hurts: Pathologizing Everyday Life in Psychocentric Culture
Part Two: Embodied Images of the Human Person
Chapter 4: Helmuth Plessner’s Image of Embodied Communication
Chapter 5: Constructing a New Image of the Human Person: Bourdieu and Plessner on Psychological Precarity
Chapter 6: Being Human in Communication
Bibliography
About the Author
