Michael A. Weinstein

The human mind has proven uniquely capable of unraveling untold mysteries, and yet, the mind is fundamentally challenged when it turns back on itself to ask what it itself is. How do we conceive of mind in this postmodern world; how can we use philosophical anthropology to understand mind and its functions? While philosophers and social scientists have made important contributions to our understanding of mind, existing theories are insufficient for penetrating the complexities of mind in the twenty-first century.Mind Unmasked: A Political Phenomenology of Consciousness draws on twentieth-century philosophies of consciousness to explain the phenomenon of mind in the broadest sense of the word. Michael A. Weinstein and Timothy M. Yetman develop a thought provoking discourse that moves beyond the nature of the human experience of mind at both the individual and interpersonal levels and present a meditation on life in the contemporary world of global mass-mediated human culture.

The human mind has proven uniquely capable of unraveling untold mysteries, and yet, the mind is fundamentally challenged when it turns back on itself to ask what it itself is. How do we conceive of mind in this postmodern world; how can we use philosophical anthropology to understand mind and its functions? While philosophers and social scientists have made important contributions to our understanding of mind, existing theories are insufficient for penetrating the complexities of mind in the twenty-first century.Mind Unmasked: A Political Phenomenology of Consciousness draws on twentieth-century philosophies of consciousness to explain the phenomenon of mind in the broadest sense of the word. Michael A. Weinstein and Timothy M. Yetman develop a thought provoking discourse that moves beyond the nature of the human experience of mind at both the individual and interpersonal levels and present a meditation on life in the contemporary world of global mass-mediated human culture.

A philosophical essay on personal virtue of self-control, artistry, and love. A contemporary account of how virtue can have significance in a world that has lost the certainty of common and collective meanings.

The great crisis of twentieth-century philosophy has been the loss of meaning as a criterion for conduct. With the collapse of the historical sociologies of the nineteenth century and their replacement by relativistic doctrines, contemporary thought has retreated to the fleeting present moment as the ground for describing action. In Meaning and Appreciation, Michael Weinstein traces the history of the failure of historical meaning, showing how the disappearance of collective purpose has altered our sense of time and made us aware that we are the creators of our time perspectives. Drawing upon the vitalistic tradition of Bergson, Weinstein returns to the intuition of the durée and argues that beneath practical life, we are rooted in successive lived presents. Weinstein identifies the lived present with appreciation, arguing that the life of expression, not nihilism, lies beyond the wreckage of historical teleology. The climax of Weinstein's work is an original vision of human existence, in which our essence is to express one another to ourselves. Vindicating our intrinsic sociality against the abstract and mechanistic claims of both individualism and collectivism, the author argues that our destiny is not to project meanings into a symbolic future, but to attend to and care for one another in the present. Weinstein's sensitive analysis offers new insights into such contemporary movements as existentialism, the sociology of knowledge, and cultural philosophy, evaluating all of them in terms of the fundamental tension in our society.