The Meaning of Mind: Language, Morality, and Neuroscience

by Thomas Szasz

Overview

This is Szasz's most ambitious work to date. In his best-selling book, The Myth of Mental Illness, he took psychiatry to task for misconstruing human conflict and coping as mental illness. In Our Right to Drugs, he exposed the irrationality and political opportunism that fuels the Drug War. In The Meaning of Mind, he warns that we misconstrue the dialogue within as a problem of consciousness and neuroscience, and do so at our own peril.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780815607755
Publisher:	Syracuse University Press
Publication date:	08/01/2002
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Thomas Szasz is professor emeritus of psychiatry at the State University of New York Health Science Center in Syracuse. The author of more than six hundred articles and twenty-four books, he is widely recognized as the leading critic of various coercive forms employed by the psychiatric medical establishment. His books include Law, Liberty, and Psychiatry; The Manufacture of Madness and Our Right to Drugs: The Case for a Free Market, all published by Syracuse University Press.

Table of Contents

Preface
Thought: Self-Conversation
Responsibility: Self-Blame and Self-Praise
Memory: Fabricating the Past and the Future
Brain: The Abuse of Neuroscience
Mind: The History of an Idea
Mental Illness and Mental Treatment: Modernity's Master Metaphors
Epilogue: The Person as Moral Agent
References
Bibliography
Name Index
Subject Index

Editorial Reviews

Within the broad church of anti-psychiatry, Thomas Szasz has been foremost in challenging a narrowly biological conception of human nature. Provocative, thoughtful, and highly readable, The Meaning of Mind extends his arguments to the bleak reductionism implicit in modern neuroscience.-- "K. W. M. Fulford, Universities of Oxford and Warwick"

From the Publisher

Within the broad church of anti-psychiatry, Thomas Szasz has been foremost in challenging a narrowly biological conception of human nature. Provocative, thoughtful, and highly readable, The Meaning of Mind extends his arguments to the bleak reductionism implicit in modern neuroscience.

Universities of Oxford and Warwick K. W. M. Fulford

Szasz (psychiatry, State U. of New York-Syracuse) sets out and defends the thesis that minding is the ability to pay attention and adapt to one's environment specifically by using language in its myriad forms to communicate with others and oneself. He adds a new preface citing recent examples and studies. The 1996 edition was published by Praeger. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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