Mead, George Herbert

Abstract

Abstract George Herbert Mead (1863–1931) received his undergraduate philosophical education at Oberlin College, where his father taught theology, and at Harvard University, where he studied under Josiah Royce and served as a summer tutor for the young son of William James ( see James, William; he then pursued several years of graduate study in philosophy and physiological psychology at the Universities of Leipzig and Berlin in Germany. He taught briefly at the University of Michigan (1891–4), but then spent the remainder of his long teaching career as a member of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. He is known primarily for his social psychological theories concerning the genesis of language, self‐consciousness, and reflective intelligence; it is these theories that establish his place in the history of American pragmatism and account for the considerable influence his ideas have exerted upon the school of symbolic interactionism in American sociology. But Mead also had a good deal to say about ethics, and it is with this dimension of his thought that we must be chiefly concerned here. There is, in fact, an important relationship between these two aspects of his thought: both are based upon an organic view of conduct first set forth by his colleague John Dewey ( see Dewey, John) in the 1890s. The discussion that follows will begin by summarizing the main features of this model of conduct; it will then show how Mead further articulated this view so as to provide the basis for both his social psychological theorizing and his contributions to moral philosophy.