Mind Unmasked: A Political Phenomenology of Consciousness

The human mind has proven uniquely capable of unraveling untold mysteries, and yet, the mind is fundamentally challenged when it turns back on itself to ask what it itself is. How do we conceive of mind in this postmodern world; how can we use philosophical anthropology to understand mind and its functions? While philosophers and social scientists have made important contributions to our understanding of mind, existing theories are insufficient for penetrating the complexities of mind in the twenty-first century. Mind Unmasked: A Political Phenomenology of Consciousness draws on twentieth-century philosophies of consciousness to explain the phenomenon of mind in the broadest sense of the word. Michael A. Weinstein and Timothy M. Yetman develop a thought provoking discourse that moves beyond the nature of the human experience of mind at both the individual and interpersonal levels and present a meditation on life in the contemporary world of global mass-mediated human culture.

Table of Contents:
Preface [Deena Weinstein] Introduction [Timothy Yetman] 1. Mind, Narrativity, and the Euro-Romance 2. Integral Consciousness 3. Embeddedness, Serio-Comedy, and the Third Ape 4. Welcome to the Fragmentorium! It’s Ridiculous!

About the Author :
Michael A. Weinstein was Professor of Political Science at Purdue University from 1968 until mid-September 2015. Weinstein’s philosophical work addresses a variety of areas including existentialism, American classical philosophy, vitalism, twentieth-century Mexican, Canadian and Spanish philosophy, social philosophy, postmodernism, virtue, and technology, among others. He was the author of 22 books and more than 120 journal articles and book chapters in Political Theory, Philosophy, and Sociology. Weinstein also extensively wrote international political analyses for a number of online publications, and became widely recognized as a foremost academic authority on Somalia. Timothy M. Yetman is Adjunct Instructor in Philosophy at Ivy Tech Community College. He has taught courses in research methods, Introduction to Ethics, Introduction to Philosophy, and stepped in during the fall of 2015 to teach his late co-author’s classes at Purdue University in Current Political Ideologies and Introduction to Political Science. His interests range from continental philosophy to postmodernism and media studies.

Review :
'Weinstein and Yetman offer a fascinating and complex analysis of human existence and consciousness. They create a unique and provocative approach to reflecting on what it means to be ‘human’, and the rational and non-ration influences that permeate perception.' - James M. Glass, Department of Government and Politics, University of Maryland, College Park 'From political theory to popular culture, Michael A. Weinstein is, and will always remain, the truly indispensable thinker, a writer of lucid, intense and urgent imagination at the height of his times. His penetrating essays and excurses in Mind Unmasked provide a powerful counterpoint to the "serio-comedy" of contemporary culture by actually bending the fragmented, split postmodern mind in the direction of a new philosophy of life. Here, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra listens carefully again to this new telling of an ancient story: how do you continue to think lucidly, and in that thinking live ethically, in the midst of the culture blast that is life in the fast, but radically fragmented, 21st century?' - Arthur Kroker, Author of Exits to the Posthuman Future and Body Drift 'An invaluable inquiry into the phenomenology of mind and its application to contemporary socio-political life. A refreshing critique of totalizing discourses meant to project certainty and security at the expense of an appreciation for contingency and nuance.' - Timothy Seul, Waseda University