The left hand has traditionally represented the powers of intuition, feeling, and spontaneity. In this classic book, Jerome Bruner inquires into the part these qualities play in determining how we know what we do know; how we can help others to know-that is, to teach; and how our conception of reality affects our actions and is modified by them. The striking and subtle discussions contained in On Knowing take on the core issues concerning man's sense of self: creativity, the search for identity, the nature of aesthetic knowledge, myth, the learning process, and modem-day attitudes toward social controls, Freud, and fate. In this revised, expanded edition, Bruner comments on his personal efforts to maintain an intuitively and rationally balanced understanding of human nature, taking into account the odd historical circumstances which have hindered academic psychology's attempts in the past to know man. - Publisher.

"One of the greatest works in philosophical aesthetics of this century, Languages of Art presents 'a systematic study of symbols and symbol systems and the way they function in our perceptions and actions and arts and sciences, and thus in the creation and comprehension of our worlds'. This enquiry, ranging across psychology, linguistics, the theory of mind, technology, and the sciences, furnishes a deeper understanding of art in its many forms--music, dance, literature, and the visual arts."--

'The Archeology of the Frivolous is a brilliant essay by an original, historically knowledgeable and fascinating thinker of great importance to our understanding of the metaphysics which, he claims, has dominated Western thought from Plato to Hegel... John Leavey has done an heroic job by translating into English a writer who plays in Joycean fashion on the nuances of French words.' - Philosophical Topics

Originally published in 1969. Since the seventeenth century the kind of knowledge afforded by mathematical physics has come more and more to furnish mankind with an ideal for all knowledge. The ideal also carries with it a new conception of the nature of things: all things whatsoever are held to be intelligible ultimately in terms of the laws of inanimate nature. This reductionist formula can be overcome only by the fundamental rethinking of our philosophical premises. To contribute towards thsi rethinking was the aim of the Study Group at whose meetings this collection originated. The essayists come from a wide range of disciplines but all want to address the conflict in our culture. The first part consists of discussions of various fundamental problems in the sciences. There are essays on the inter-relation of physics and psychology, on the possible reduction of biology to physics and chemistry, on new approaches to experimental psychology, against the possibility of giving a purely 'factual' account of social and political life, and for a fundamental reform of our concept of responsibility. The second section of the book suggests lines of philosophical inquiry which might help to resolve the epistemological and ethical problems arising at the foundations of physics, biology, psychology and the social sciences.