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This introductory chapter examines Vygotsky's uptake in past and current educational psychology, where problematic translations from the original works and a frequent disregard of Vygotsky's Marxist epistemological premises have characterized the Russian scholar's tremendous impact in the field. Instead of a finalized theory ready to be applied, Vygotsky's work was in vibrant and constant development, a development that his untimely death broke at a point when the psychologist, building on Spinoza, was on the verge of a major shift in his theory. We revisit Vygotsky's living legacy in the light of recent historical and archival analyses that provide a sense of the direction that Vygotsky was taking to overcome the problems that plagued the (educational) psychology of his time, problems that continue to this day. They revolve around the Cartesian dualisms that divide mind and body, collective and individual, or culture and biology. Instead there is not a body, and a thinking mind, but a thinking body that manifests itself as thinking and as body. This is a dialectical materialist reading of Spinoza, the foundations and implications of which we develop throughout the rest of the book.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-39868-6_1

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