Awards

• Winner of 2024 Distinguished Book Award in Philosophy of Communication 2024

Overview

In The Human Image in Helmuth Plessner, Pierre Bourdieu, and Psychocentric Culture, Isaac E. Catt offers a unique criticism of naturalistic reductions of humans to animals, to neuro substrates and to DNA. Catt explores a new interpretation of Plessner and Bourdieu, revealing the combinatory logic of semiotic phenomenology in both and their common problematic of communication. Through an emergent synthesis of philosophical anthropology and communicology, this book provides a basis for criticism of the failed mechanistic medical model in psychiatry, a fresh argument for reconceptualizing psychiatry as a human science, and for construction of a new ecological image of communicative being. Throughout the book, alternative attempts to transcend dualisms such as cybernetics, anti-anthropocentrism, and biosemiotics are revealed to risk reification of the very objects of their analysis. Scholars of communication, semiotics, and psychology will find this book of particular interest.

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9781666918557

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Reviews

Current psychocentric culture is diagnosed by Isaac Catt as missing something vital, for it views humans as organisms rather than persons. The treatment he proposes consists in focusing on meaning as a communication problem of lived experience and conceiving psychiatry, while still inclusive of the brain, as a human science. By synthesizing the ideas of Plessner and Bourdieu with the American philosophy of pragmatism, he develops a semiotic phenomenological framework that presents a revitalized - vital and viable - image of the human person. To that end, particular emphases are placed not only on ontology and epistemology, but also logic, ethics, and aesthetics. Carefully researched, theoretically grounded, well-timed, and well-written. --Igor Klyukanov, Eastern Washington University

Current psychocentric culture is diagnosed by Isaac E. Catt as missing something vital, for it views humans as organisms rather than persons. The treatment he proposes consists in focusing on meaning as a communication problem of lived experience and conceiving psychiatry, while still inclusive of the brain, as a human science. By synthesizing the ideas of Plessner and Bourdieu with the American philosophy of pragmatism, he develops a semiotic phenomenological framework that presents a revitalized-vital and viable-image of the human person. To that end, particular emphases are placed not only on ontology and epistemology, but also logic, ethics, and aesthetics. Carefully researched, theoretically grounded, well-timed, and well-written. --Igor Klyukanov, Eastern Washington University This book is a major contribution to our current understanding of the practical combination of philosophy and communicology as an applied human science. An exceptionally well researched critique of the regrettable consilience and hypostatization found in post-positive ' cognitive science, 'especially the counterfeit and misguided beliefs that (1) psychopathology is an organic ' brain ' problem and that (2) ' Big Pharma ' provides the solution of psychopharmacology. An excellent introduction to the synergism of phenomenology, semiotics, and communication science grounded in the discourse model of human embodied speaking and listening. A ' must read ' for students of applied communication and philosophy. Best of all, the author gives a readable explication of the failed machine metaphor of ' information theory ' in computers, and, replaces it with the practical experience of ' communication theory ' as the living voice of human culture. --Richard L. Lanigan, International Communicology Institute

Author Information

Isaac E. Catt is visiting scholar in philosophy of communication at Duquesne University.

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