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(2017) Understanding educational psychology, Dordrecht, Springer.
The dichotomy of body and mind is apparent in the continuing of the nature vs. nurture debates; and it continues its life in the version of a nature and nurture parallelism. But some 80 years ago, Vygotsky already knew a way out of the dilemma. Rather than encountering the two aspects as external to each other and then having to figure out a way to put them back together, the Marxist approach he envisioned conceptualizes the rise of the societal (cultural) nature of thought in natural evolution. We provide a glimpse from the origin of the psyche, articulating how thinking, acting, and emoting are not three different factors of animal life but are different modes of one irreducible system. We use this as a model for the genesis of qualitatively new forms in the {organism | environment} development. This model describes the emergence of culture as a qualitatively new dominant function in the lives of our species during anthropogenesis. Culture (mind), therefore, is not different from nature but in fact constitutes a mode of being in and of the natural world. Biology and culture are two manifestations of the same Nature.
Publication details
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-39868-6_2
Full citation:
Roth, W. , Jornet, A. (2017). Biology | culture, in Understanding educational psychology, Dordrecht, Springer, pp. 33-55.
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