Consciousness as a Process: From the Loneliness of William James to the Buzzing and Booming Voices of Contemporary Science

This Special Issue of IPBS brings the old metaphor of William James—consciousness as a “stream of thought”—to a contemporary critical inspection. It is demonstrated—based on materials of language (Panksepp 2008; Shanahan 2008), perception (Engelmann 2008) and dialogical self (Bertau 2008) that the classic river metaphor is an inadequate depiction of the multi-level psychological processes that are regulated by the affective systems of the brain and hierarchically integrated through dialogical and semiotic mechanisms.

Jaan ValsinerEmail:

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Jaan Valsiner   is Editor-in-Chief of IPBS, and the founding editor of Culture & Psychology (Sage/London). He is the author of ten monographs and numerous edited books, focusing on the epistemology of knowledge in the social sciences. He also edits Transaction Publishers’ new book series History and Theory of Psychology.