Among the pioneers of psychology, Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934) may be the best known of those who are least understood. This is not just a problem of historical scholarship: The misunderstanding of Vygotsky started with his own students and collaborators—during his lifetime—and continued after his death. It is, in other words, integrated into the literature. And that literature, as a result, appear...

ion. The second coordinate will represent the object reference of the concept. (Vygotsky, 1986 p199) Many of those who quote Vygotsky as if he was a dialogic thinker compatible with Bakhtin are most influenced by the edited collection of translations of his work which appeared in 1978 under the title: Mind in Society. This collection is suspect as a representation of Vygotsky. The editors of th...

The current prominent influence of the theories of L. S. Vygotsky on studies of education, particularly of pedagogic practice, requires a re-examination. The dominance of deficient editions of his writings has had regrettable consequences such as a misplaced reading of the ‘zone of proximal development’. The publication of his recent, albeit incomplete, Collected Works in English affords an opp...

In this article it is demonstrated that topics discussed in contemporary metacognitive research are integral parts of Vygotsky's (1978, 1986) theory of cognitive development. This conclusion is reached through a discussion of Vygotsky's views of self-regulation, the relationship between self-awareness and self-regulation, and the relationship between awareness/regulation on the one hand and cog...

Jerome Bruner points out in his prologue to the first volume of the English translation of The Collected Works that Vygotsky flirts with the idea that language creates free will. This paper attempts to consider the influence of the Dutch seventeenth-century philosopher Spinoza on Vygotsky. An account of Spinoza's anti-Cartesian conception of will is given, to which Vygotsky recognises his indeb...

Psychologists often speak about language and meaning in terms of individual "words" that label "things" in the world. Such expressions emerge not only in casual speech, but also pervade the scholarly literature. Influential works such as Roger Brown's (1958) Words and Things lend support to this tendency in their titles, if not always in their detailed argu ments. Speaking in this way perpetuat...

Abstract The article analyzes Lev Vygotsky’s attempts to utilize Spinoza’s philosophical ideas in solving the methodological crisis of psychology 1920s and 1930s. Vygotsky had a manuscript, Uchenie ob emocijakh , where he scrutinized doctrines effects on Descartes Spinoza. Whilst Descartes’ doctrine built dualistic soul versus body premise, starting point was monistic. Despite his clear sympath...

concepts out of one's language through interacting with other language users. In a monumental philological study, Havelock (1978) traced the historical development of The Greek concept of justice from its shadow in Homer to its substance in Plato, and what Vygotsky discerned as the movement from concrete conceptualization to abstract thinking in children is but a telescoped and transformed reca...

The aims of this paper are: 1) to show the role of clinical experience for the theoretical contributions of L.S. Vygotsky, and 2) to analyze the development of these theories in contemporary applied neuropsychology. An analysis of disturbances of mental functioning is impossible without a systemic approach to the evidence observed. Therefore, medical psychology is fundamental for forming a syst...