Summary: | "'To have a scheme and a view of its dignity is of course congruously to work it out, and the 'amusement' of the chronicle in question - by which, once more, I always mean the gathered cluster of all the kinds of interest, was exactly to see what a consummate application of such sincerities would give' (Henry James, 2009/1909, p. xliv). "The active nature asserts its rights to the end" (William James, 1896, p. 85). This book is intended both as critique and as a constructive project, for it proceeds from conviction that the epistemic priorities of the discipline of psychology are in need of re- examination and re-envisioning in keeping with unprecedented challenges facing human kind, and unforeseeable, even unthinkable changes ahead of us. It is written at a time when climate change, terrorism, pollution, poverty, genocide, information wars, natural disasters and nuclear proliferation are daily realities, and when technologies dynamically transform patterns of interaction with extraordinary speed and impact. Although a societal and disciplinary need for a moral progress (collective wisdom) is paramount, we also remain in need of groundbreaking conceptual and theoretical resources, resources that require passionate intellectual engagement and imagination in the service of new possibilities. In focusing on epistemic priorities, the project of this book takes inspiration from the idea of "frontier science"-science that seeks new windows of understanding the world, and especially from the suggestion that the generation of resources for creative problem solving is the appropriate epistemic goal for scientific advance, and one conditional to the possibility of a sustainable human future (Pandit and Dosch, 2013)"--
|