Partial Memories

Autobiographical sketches by the philosopher and semioticist Ernst von Glasersfeld. The author writes: "Memories are a personal affair. They are what comes to mind when you think back, not what might in fact have happened at that earlier time in your life. You can no longer be certain of what seemed important then, because you are now looking at the past with today’s eyes. The Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico had that insight three hundred years ago: When we think of things that lie in the past, we see them in terms of the concepts we have now."

This updated and expanded edition provides comprehensive coverage of the theory and practice of counselling survivors of child sexual abuse (CSA). In a reasoned and thoughtful approach, this book honestly addresses the complex issues in this important area of work, providing practical strategies valuable and new insights for counsellors.

From a barrage of photons, we readily and effortlessly recognize the faces of our friends, and the familiar objects and scenes around us. However, these tasks cannot be simple for our visual systems--faces are all extremely similar as visual patterns, and objects look quite different when viewed from different viewpoints. How do our visual systems solve these problems? The contributors to this volume seek to answer this question by exploring how analytic and holistic processes contribute to our perception of faces, objects, and scenes. The role of parts and wholes in perception has been studied for a century, beginning with the debate between Structuralists, who championed the role of elements, and Gestalt psychologists, who argued that the whole was different from the sum of its parts. This is the first volume to focus on the current state of the debate on parts versus wholes as it exists in the field of visual perception by bringing together the views of the leading researchers. Too frequently, researchers work in only one domain, so they are unaware of the ways in which holistic and analytic processing are defined in different areas. The contributors to this volume ask what analytic and holistic processes are like; whether they contribute differently to the perception of faces, objects, and scenes; whether different cognitive and neural mechanisms code holistic and analytic information; whether a single, universal system can be sufficient for visual-information processing, and whether our subjective experience of holistic perception might be nothing more than a compelling illusion. The result is a snapshot of the current thinking on how the processing of wholes and parts contributes to our remarkable ability to recognize faces, objects, and scenes, and an illustration of the diverse conceptions of analytic and holistic processing that currently coexist, and the variety of approaches that have been brought to bear on the issues.

Provides students with a guide to human memory, its properties, theories about how it works, and how studying it can help us understand who we are and why we do the things that we do. For undergraduate and graduate courses in Human Memory. This book provides a very broad range of topics covering more territory than most books. In addition to some coverage of basic issues of human memory and cognition that are of interest to researchers in the field, the chapters also cover issues that will be relevant to students with a range of interests including those students interested in clinical, social, and developmental psychology, as well as those planning on going on to medical and law schools. The writing is aimed at talking directly to students (as opposed to talking down to them) in a clear and effective manner. Not too dense, but also not too conversational as well. This 2nd edition includes a series of exercises that allow the student to try out the concepts and principles conveyed in the chapters, or to use as the basis for exploring their own ideas.

Once the home of Catherine the Great’s private art collection, Russia’s State Hermitage Museum became the largest museum in the Soviet Union and, since the collapse of the USSR, one of the most active museums in the world. The Hermitage is a global model for the collection and preservation of fine art, deeply shaped by its need to protect itself and its holdings from the world beyond its gates. In Art of Memories, Vincent Antonin Lépinay documents the Hermitage’s curatorial practices in an innovative consideration of the museum as a cultural laboratory. Lépinay analyzes the tensions between the museum as a space of exploration of the collections and as a culture heavily invested in self-protection from the outside world. During a time when traveling abroad was rare, a generation of art historians produced a culture of confined scholarship premised on their proximity to the holdings of a museum enclave. As the Hermitage has become increasingly present on the world museum scene, its culture of secrecy and orality has endured. Lépinay analyzes the ethos of Hermitage curators and scholars over the transition from Soviet to post-Soviet museum cultures, considering the mobility of art, documentation of the collection, and the transformation of expertise. Based on Lépinay’s extraordinary access to the Hermitage and the scholars who work there, Art of Memories opens the door of one of the world’s great museums to reveal how art history is made. It is an essential study for readers interested in the role that outside forces play in culture, organizations, and the production of knowledge.