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Part One of this book shows how bureaucracy sustained the Habsburg Empire while inciting economists, legal theorists, and socialists to urge reform. Part Two examines how Vienna's coffeehouses, theaters, and concert halls stimulated creativity together with complacency. Part Three explores the fin-de-siecle world view known as Viennese Impressionism. Interacting with positivistic science, this reverence for the ephemeral inspired such pioneers ad Mach, Wittgenstein, Buber, and Freud. Part Four describes the vision of an ordered cosmos which flourished among Germans in Bohemia. Their philosophers cultivated a Leibnizian faith whose eventual collapse haunted Kafka and Mahler. Part Five explains how in Hungary wishful thinking reinforced a political activism rare elsewhere in Habsburg domains. Engage intellectuals like Lukacs and Mannheim systematized the sociology of knowledge, while two other Hungarians, Herzel and Nordau, initiated political Zionism. Part Six investigates certain attributes that have permeated Austrian thought, such as hostility to technology and delight in polar opposites.
Alzheimer’s disease, a haunting and harrowing ailment, is one of the world’s most common causes of death. Alzheimer’s lingers for years, with patients’ outward appearance unaffected while their cognitive functions fade away. Patients lose the ability to work and live independently, to remember and recognize. There is still no proven way to treat Alzheimer’s because its causes remain unknown. Mind Thief is a comprehensive and engaging history of Alzheimer’s that demystifies efforts to understand the disease. Beginning with the discovery of “presenile dementia” in the early twentieth century, Han Yu examines over a century of research and controversy. She presents the leading hypotheses for what causes Alzheimer’s; discusses each hypothesis’s tangled origins, merits, and gaps; and details their successes and failures. Yu synthesizes a vast amount of medical literature, historical studies, and media interviews, telling the gripping stories of researchers’ struggles while situating science in its historical, social, and cultural contexts. Her chronicling of the trajectory of Alzheimer’s research deftly balances rich scientific detail with attention to the wider implications. In narrating the attempts to find a treatment, Yu also offers a critical account of research and drug development and a consideration of the philosophy of aging. Wide-ranging and accessible, Mind Thief is an important book for all readers interested in the challenge of Alzheimer’s.
A guide to understanding the Austrians that delves into the cultural curiosities and peculiar characteristics of this land-locked nation"""""The Austrian needs lots of persuading to have his traditions tampered with in the name of modernization and efficiency. He is attached to his sausage, his insipid beer, and the young white wine that tastes so remarkably like iron filings. He prefers the familiar, tried, and tested to the novelty, the latter almost certainly being an attempt by persons unknown to make money at his expense.""""""""Home life for the Austrians is a never-ending quest for Gemutlichkeit or coziness, which is achieved by accumulating objects that run the gamut from the pleasingly aesthetic to the mind-blowingly kitsch.""""""""In Austria detonating pretension is a national pastime. It has to do with attitudes to power that date back to an absolutist form of government and with the self-irony developed by people who were (or thought they were) more talented than the authority to which they had to defer.""""""""The paradoxical character of the Austrian mingles profoundly conservative attitudes with a flair for innovation and invention. This creative tension usually takes the form of official obstructionism to good ideas, but sometimes the other way round. For example, the population were outraged by Josef II's attempt to make them adopt reusable coffins with flaps on the underside for dropping out the corpses. (The Emperor was forced to retreat, grumbling as he did so about the people's wasteful attitude.)""""
A group history of the Austrian School of Economics, from the coffeehouses of imperial Vienna to the modern-day Tea Party The Austrian School of Economics--a movement that has had a vast impact on economics, politics, and society, especially among the American right--is poorly understood by supporters and detractors alike. Defining themselves in opposition to the mainstream, economists such as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Joseph Schumpeter built the School's international reputation with their work on business cycles and monetary theory. Their focus on individualism--and deep antipathy toward socialism--ultimately won them a devoted audience among the upper echelons of business and government. In this collective biography, Janek Wasserman brings these figures to life, showing that in order to make sense of the Austrians and their continued influence, one must understand the backdrop against which their philosophy was formed--notably, the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and a half-century of war and exile.
"When Franz Brentano introduced the concept of intentionality into modern philosophy, he initiated a revolution in philosophical thinking whose effects are still being felt - not least in contemporary developments in the field of cognitive science. Barry Smith's Austrian Philosophy: The Legacy of Franz Brentano is the first extensive study of the philosophy of the Brentano school." "The Brentanian philosophy is oriented towards the problem of mental directedness, of how mind relates to objects. Thus in working out their 'theories of objects', the Brentanian philosophers - in contrast to Frege and his successors in the analytic movement - did not abandon psychological concerns in favor of an orientation towards language. Rather, their investigations in ontology proceeded always in tandem with work on the cognitive processes in which objects are experienced. In thus spanning the gulf between psychology and ontology, the Brentano school gave rise to movements of thought such as phenomenology and Gestalt psychology (the term 'Gestalt' was introduced as a technical term of philosophy by Brentano's student Ehrenfels)." "The Brentanists enjoyed close relations with Carl Menger and other early members of the Austrian school of economics and Austrian Philosophy contains a detailed study of the interconnections between their work on the general theory of value and subjective theories of value developed in the economic sphere. Brentano's student Kasimir Twardowski initiated the rich tradition of scientifically and logically oriented philosophy in Poland, and the role of Brentanianism in Polish philosophy, and especially in the development of Lesniewski's mereology, is here for the first time subjected to extended historical treatment. Another Brentano student, Carl Stumpf, was responsible for introducing into philosophy the technical term 'Sachverhalt' or 'state of affairs', and the associated doctrine of realism in logic, too, is shown to have been a special preserve of the Brentano movement on the continent of Europe." "In setting out the ways in which Brentanian philosophers crucially influenced the development of scientific philosophy in Central Europe around the turn of the century Barry Smith's ambitious new work provides a detailed survey of developments in Austrian philosophy in its classical period, from the 1870s to the Anschluss in 1938."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
A fresh look at Austrian economists and the dynamic intellectual and political context in which they lived and worked.
At the turn of the century, Sigmund Freud’s investigation of the mind represented a particular journey into mental illness, but it was not the only exploration of this ‘territory’ in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Sanatoriums were the new tourism destinations, psychiatrists were collecting art works produced by patients and writers were developing innovative literary techniques to convey a character’s interior life. This collection of essays uses the framework of journeys in order to highlight the diverse artistic, cultural and medical responses to a peculiarly Viennese anxiety about the madness of modern times. The travellers of these journeys vary from patients to doctors, artists to writers, architects to composers and royalty to tourists; in engaging with their histories, the contributors reveal the different ways in which madness was experienced and represented in ‘Vienna 1900’.
A brilliant book by Nobel Prize winner Eric R. Kandel, The Age of Insight takes us to Vienna 1900, where leaders in science, medicine, and art began a revolution that changed forever how we think about the human mind—our conscious and unconscious thoughts and emotions—and how mind and brain relate to art. At the turn of the century, Vienna was the cultural capital of Europe. Artists and scientists met in glittering salons, where they freely exchanged ideas that led to revolutionary breakthroughs in psychology, brain science, literature, and art. Kandel takes us into the world of Vienna to trace, in rich and rewarding detail, the ideas and advances made then, and their enduring influence today. The Vienna School of Medicine led the way with its realization that truth lies hidden beneath the surface. That principle infused Viennese culture and strongly influenced the other pioneers of Vienna 1900. Sigmund Freud shocked the world with his insights into how our everyday unconscious aggressive and erotic desires are repressed and disguised in symbols, dreams, and behavior. Arthur Schnitzler revealed women’s unconscious sexuality in his novels through his innovative use of the interior monologue. Gustav Klimt, Oscar Kokoschka, and Egon Schiele created startlingly evocative and honest portraits that expressed unconscious lust, desire, anxiety, and the fear of death. Kandel tells the story of how these pioneers—Freud, Schnitzler, Klimt, Kokoschka, and Schiele—inspired by the Vienna School of Medicine, in turn influenced the founders of the Vienna School of Art History to ask pivotal questions such as What does the viewer bring to a work of art? How does the beholder respond to it? These questions prompted new and ongoing discoveries in psychology and brain biology, leading to revelations about how we see and perceive, how we think and feel, and how we respond to and create works of art. Kandel, one of the leading scientific thinkers of our time, places these five innovators in the context of today’s cutting-edge science and gives us a new understanding of the modernist art of Klimt, Kokoschka, and Schiele, as well as the school of thought of Freud and Schnitzler. Reinvigorating the intellectual enquiry that began in Vienna 1900, The Age of Insight is a wonderfully written, superbly researched, and beautifully illustrated book that also provides a foundation for future work in neuroscience and the humanities. It is an extraordinary book from an international leader in neuroscience and intellectual history.
This volume brings together for the first time state-of-the-art contributions from neuroscientists and philosophers of mind as well as economists and social theorists, all critically engaging in many aspects of Hayek's philosophical psychology.
More than 25,000 people of African descent are living in Austria, one of the richest political economies in the world that is part and parcel of one of the strongest neo-imperialist blocks in the form of the European Union. Migration of Africans to Austria thus must be seen in the context of global capitalism, which has harmfully impacted on the global South by means of neo-imperialism and thus has led to migration to the global North. Byreferring to Marxist theory, more particularly world-systems-theory and Marxist migration theory, the book at hand examines the African Diasporain Austria from a twofold perspective. First, it illustrates the role of Austria in the global economy after World War II and during theemergence of global turbo-capitalism. Second, the narrative illustrates how people deprived of their livelihoods on the African continent becomesubjects of exploitation and discrimination in Austria via the asylum route.