Book Description
This book constitutes a systematic study of the general philosophical outlook of George Herbert Mead, one of the leading (but often ignored) American thinkers of the twentieth century. Mead's work is presented as a philosophical anthropology which focuses on the sociality and temporality of human existence. For Mead, the human individual is a fundamentally social being whose existence is inescapably temporal and historical, a being-with-others who lives in-the-present-out-of-the-past-and-toward-the-future. Mead's social theory (chapters 2, 3, and 4), his analysis of the temporal structure of human existence (chapter 5), his description of the perspectival nature of human consciousness (chapter 6), and his philosophy of history (chapter 7 and 8) are subjected to comprehensive analysis and critical interpretation.
