Itemize Books In Favor Of Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology

Original Title:	Steps to an Ecology of Mind
ISBN:	0226039056 (ISBN13: 9780226039053)
Edition Language:	English

Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology Paperback | Pages: 565 pages

Details Out Of Books Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology

Title	:	Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology
Author	:	Gregory Bateson
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	Deluxe Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 565 pages
Published	:	April 15th 2000 by University of Chicago Press (first published 1972)
Categories	:	Philosophy. Anthropology. Psychology. Science. Nonfiction. Biology. Ecology. Sociology

Commentary To Books Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology

Gregory Bateson was a philosopher, anthropologist, photographer, naturalist, and poet, as well as the husband and collaborator of Margaret Mead. With a new foreword by his daughter Mary Katherine Bateson, this classic anthology of his major work will continue to delight and inform generations of readers.

"This collection amounts to a retrospective exhibition of a working life. . . . Bateson has come to this position during a career that carried him not only into anthropology, for which he was first trained, but into psychiatry, genetics, and communication theory. . . . He . . . examines the nature of the mind, seeing it not as a nebulous something, somehow lodged somewhere in the body of each man, but as a network of interactions relating the individual with his society and his species and with the universe at large."—D. W. Harding, New York Review of Books

"[Bateson's] view of the world, of science, of culture, and of man is vast and challenging. His efforts at synthesis are tantalizingly and cryptically suggestive. . . .This is a book we should all read and ponder."—Roger Keesing, American Anthropologist

 

Rating Out Of Books Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology

Ratings: 4.25 From 1155 Users | 81 Reviews

Appraise Out Of Books Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology

You will read this book 5 or 6 times and still get something new out of it. It is very dense and it will uncompress in your head until it is about to explode.

It's one of the most unique books I've ever read; a real mind-opener. Bateson attempts to include and connect diverse fields from Cybernetics, Philosophy and Sociology. The resulting brew is a heady and thought-provoking mix of ideas that are not presented elsewhere in popular science, as far as I know.

This is the most difficult to grasp page turner Ive ever read. Every other page blew my mind and each essay builds off the previous ones so that by the end you have some idea of what hes talking about. I cant say I understood the biology aspect of his essay on reduplicated limbs in beetles and amphibians but he managed to get his point across. This book has made me really interested in cybernetics and systems theory - I think a second reading is in order to solidify the concepts though.

I feel like Brian Sella has read this book. The part with the deer and the gunshot, and the idea that we all react to a source the same way, as long as the source is exactly the same for everyone and there are no differences at all, really convinced me- Bateson expands this further and further and basically says that nothing matters but it's the importance of nothing mattering that makes life livable. We strive to live only because it's natural instinct- there's no real reason to keep going

Anthropologist, psychiatrist, philosopher, biologist. Just a few of the names traveled under by Gregory Bateson in this magnificent collection of essays. More than just an eclectic romp through disparate fields of knowledge however, they attest instead to Bateson's grand and unified vision of the universe, one in which art and science, logic and dreams, pathology and sociology are all threaded through with the same cosmic weave. As the man himself writes, "the would-be scientist who knows

This is the most difficult to grasp page turner Ive ever read. Every other page blew my mind and each essay builds off the previous ones so that by the end you have some idea of what hes talking about. I cant say I understood the biology aspect of his essay on reduplicated limbs in beetles and amphibians but he managed to get his point across. This book has made me really interested in cybernetics and systems theory - I think a second reading is in order to solidify the concepts though.

I bought this book because of the title. In the Preface to my Master's thesis in 1969, I described the investigative process I used for the thesis as an "ecology of thought," so the title caught my attention. The most interesting part of Bateson's book, for me, was the Metalogues. For years I thought about writing a metalogue, but knew I couldn't get it right. However, in 2008, during an extremely emotionally-laden experience, I realized I could write a metalogue about that experience, and I