Joseph Brent – författare

"[Brent] has produced a thoughtful, sometimes moving, and entirely accessible intellectual biography which is also, under the circumstances, indispensable." —The New York Review of Books" . . . a fine biography." —The New York Times Book Review". . . an extraordinary, inspiring portrait of the largely forgotten Peirce, a progenitor of modern thought who devised a realist metaphysics and attempted to achieve direct knowledge of God by applying the logic of science." —Publishers WeeklyIn this expanded paperback edition of the critically acclaimed biography of a true American original, the philosopher-polymath Charles Sanders Peirce, Joseph Brent refines his interpretation of Peirce's thought and character based on new research, and has added a glossary and a detailed chronology.

This volume addresses itself to the ways in which the so-called 'new sciences of complexity' can deepen and broaden neurobiological and psychological theories of mind. Complexity theory has gained increasing attention over the past 20 years across diverse areas of inquiry, including mathematics, physics, economics, biology, and the social sciences. Complexity theory concerns itself with how nonlinear dynamical systems evolve and change over time and draws on research arising from chaos theory, self-organization, artificial intelligence and cellular automata, to name a few. This emerging discipline shows many points of convergence with psychological theory and practice, emphasizing that history is irreversible and discontinuous, that small early interventions can have large and unexpected later effects, that each life trajectory is unique yet patterned, that measurement error is not random and cannot be justifiably distributed equally across experimental conditions, that a system's collective and coordinated organization is emergent and often arises from simple components in interaction, and that change is more likely to emerge under conditions of optimal turbulence.