1st Edition
The Reciprocity of Perceiver and Environment The Evolution of James J. Gibson's Ecological Psychology
Originally published in 1987, this title intended to historically reveal, through tracing Gibson’s development, the substance of his views and how they bore upon general philosophical issues in theories of knowledge, and to investigate in detail the historical context of Gibson’s theoretical position within psychology. Though the author has included a history of Gibson’s perceptual research and experimentation, the focus is to explicate the ‘dynamic abstract form’ of Gibson’s ecological approach. His emphasis is philosophical and theoretical, attempting to bring out the direction Gibson was moving in and how such changes could restructure the theoretical fabric of psychology. He devotes considerable attention to the Greeks, Medievalists, and the founders of the Scientific Revolution. This is because Gibson’s theoretical challenge runs deep into the structure of western thought. The authors’ central goal was to set Gibson’s ecological theory within the historical context of fundamental philosophical-scientific issues.
Introduction Part 1: The Philosophy of Knowledge and the Science of Perception 1. Ecological Psychology and Mind-Matter Dualism 2. Pre-Socratic Philosophy and Science 3. Platonic and Aristotelian Philosophy 4. Medieval Psychology, Optics, and Philosophy Part 2: The Psychology and Biology of Knowledge 5. The Scientific Revolution 6. Berkeley and Empiricist Psychology 7. Nineteenth Century Structural Psychology 8. Evolution and Functional Psychology 9. Gestalt Psychology 10. The Antecedents of Gibson’s Psychophysics Part 3: The Psychophysics of Perception 11. The Genesis of Gibson’s Psychophysics 12. Gibson’s "Perception of the Visual World" 13. Gibson’s Psychophysics 14. The Genesis of Ecological Psychology Part 4: Ecological Psychology and Perceptual Epistemology 15. Gibson’s "Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems" 16. The Development of Gibson’s Ecological Psychology 17. Gibson’s Ontology and Epistemology 18. Gibson’s "Ecological Approach to Visual Perception". Epilogue. References. Author Index. Subject Index.
Biography
Thomas J. Lombardo
