Edward Sapir

Edward Sapir
1884 - 1939
Edward Sapir was born in Lauenburg, Germany in 1884 to an orthodox Jewish family. He emigrated to the United States in 1889 and lived in New York City. He received his Bachelors Degree in 1904 and his Ph.D. in 1909 from Columbia University where he came under the influence of Franz Boas. He taught briefly at the University of California and the University of Pennsylvania, he became Chief of Anthropology for the Canadian National Museum from 1910 to 1925, then went on to teach at the University of Chicago from 1925 to 1931 and Yale University from 1931 to 1939.
Although he is most often thought of as working with language, Sapir was also interested in cultural behaviorism and the development of personality. He is noted for his work with the ethnology and linguistics of Native American groups, and saw language as a verbal symbol of human relations. Dr. Sapir stressed that language shapes our perceptions, and he thought that understanding cultural behavior was impossible unless its development through language was thoroughly traced.
Even more than the facts of the fields he studied, Sapir was interested in the more abstract connections between personality, verbal expression and socially determined behavior. He was one of those rare individuals who was brilliant and devoted, yet expressed himself clearly and modestly, and attempted to pass on his love, specifically that of anthropology. Edward Sapir inspired literally thousands of students over his too-short career; so profound was his effect on them that many of his now well-renowned former students put together a collection of their own essays based on his studies, entitled Culture, Language, and Personality, and dedicated it to him.
After reviewing some of his writings, one can draw out and learn from some of Sapir’s more influential ideas, such as: Nothing in language is perfectly static. It is always changing, due to a phenomenon Sapir called "The Language Drift." Although the parts of language that change most quickly often seem to be the most important parts of that language, they usually show themselves to be less fundamental than the slower-changing parts once the groups have grown to be mutually alien forms of speech.
It is an illusion that reality adjusts without language or that languages are just incidental means of solving problems of communication. In fact, the "real world" is, to a large extent, unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group. We see, hear and experience what we do largely because the language habits of our culture predispose certain choices of interpretation. We are at the mercy of our form of expression…our language.
The most important aspect of our interpersonal communication may be our wordless, sometimes unconscious body language read by others in social situations.
Edward Sapir produced an extremely large volume of writing over his lifetime. To list them here would be impractical, but one can find a listing of all of his scientific works in American Anthropologist, Vol. 41, pg. 469-77, 1939. Also, many of his main themes are discussed by his former students in the aforementioned book Language, Culture, and Personality.
Perhaps Sapir is best known for his work with Benjamin Lee Whorf on what has come to be known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. Edward Sapir died on February 4, 1939.

http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/information/biography/pqrst/sapir_edward.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Sapir
http://www.bartleby.com/people/Sapir-Ed.html

Gestalt psychology

Gestalt psychology or gestaltism (also Gestalt of the Berlin School) is a theory of mind and brain that proposes that the operational principle of the brain is holistic, parallel, and analog, with self-organizing tendencies; or, that the whole is different from the sum of its parts. The Gestalt effect refers to the form-forming capability of our senses (the word Gestalt in German literally means "shape" or "figure"), particularly with respect to the visual recognition of figures and whole forms instead of just a collection of simple lines and curves. In psychology, gestaltism is often opposed to behaviorism.

完形心理學（Gestalt Psychology）
Gestalt Psychology又譯為「格式塔心理學」，其機本主張謂任何心理現象都是有組織的、不可分的整體。心理上的整體經驗得之於整體知覺，而整體知覺並非由分散的部分知覺之和構成的。因此，完形心理學既反對強調心理元素的結構論，也反對持分析態度的行為論。完形論者認為，行為論所強調刺激反應聯結，在學習中積少成多的觀點，是錯誤的解釋。完形心理學家認為，學習是個體對整個刺激情境所做整體性的反應，而非向部分刺激去做分解式的反應。（P. 281）

【資料來源】張春興（1991）。張氏心理學辭典（第二版）。臺北：東華書局。

reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestalt_psychology
http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/gestalt.html
http://www.cyut.edu.tw/~rtchang/modern_%20psychology.doc

The Wurzburg School

烏茲堡學派（The Wurzburg School ）：在1910年代德國南部所發展出來的烏茲堡學派，這一學派基本上認為解決問題並不是漫無目的的聯想（這一心智活動），解決問題是有目的、有關係的理念的結合（Assocition of ideal ），所以解決問題的過程是一種可以用語言來描述的、有目的的心智活動，烏茲堡學派興起隨即取代了聯想主義的不可說論．

reference: http://teacher.yuntech.edu.tw/yangyf/boq/fn011.html

The Wurzburg School :http://www.psychologie.uni-wuerzburg.de/w_schule/WSCHOOL2a.pdf

Vygotsky's Theory about Mental Development (Youtube)

Introduction
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdyUJQ9LvuE&feature=PlayList&p=9BE74C4FCA3CFF34&index=14
1. Children Construct Knowledge
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9KDH8sHhtM&feature=PlayList&p=9BE74C4FCA3CFF34&index=10
2. Zone of Proximal Development
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6oQfZ-PrwM&feature=PlayList&p=9BE74C4FCA3CFF34&index=11
3. Development Cannot be Seperated form Its Social Context
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JR0iOfVv6p4&feature=PlayList&p=9BE74C4FCA3CFF34&index=12

Viktor Shklovsky

He was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and attended St. Petersburg University. During the war, he served as a Commissar in the Russian army, as described in his memoirs, Sentimental'noe puteshestvie, vospominaniia (A Sentimental Journey).
He was the founder of the OPOYAZ (Obshchestvo izucheniya POeticheskogo YAZyka—Society for the Study of Poetic Language), one of the two groups, with the Moscow Linguistic Circle, which developed the critical theories and techniques of Russian Formalism.
In addition to literary criticism and biographies about such authors as Laurence Sterne, Maxim Gorky, Leo Tolstoy, and Vladimir Mayakovsky, he wrote a number of semi-autobiographical works disguised as fiction.
Shklovsky developed the concept of ostranenie or defamiliarization in literature. He explained this idea as follows:
"The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important." (Shklovsky, "Art as Technique", 12)
In other words, art presents things in a new, unfamiliar light by way of formal manipulation. This is what is artful about art.
Shklovsky's work pushes Russian Formalism towards understanding literary activity as integral parts of social practice, an idea that becomes important in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and Russian and Prague School scholars of semiotics.
He died in Moscow in 1984.

Reference:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Shklovsky

BELORUSSIA

Belarus is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe which borders Russia to the east, Ukraine to the south, Poland to the west, and Lithuania and Latvia to the north. Its capital is Minsk — other major cities include Brest, Grodno, Gomel, Mogilev, Vitebsk and Bobruisk. One third of the country is forested, and agriculture and manufacturing are pillars of the economy.Until the twentieth century the Belarusian nation lacked the opportunity to form their national polity as the lands of modern-day Belarus belonged to several countries, including the Duchy of Polatsk, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the Russian Empire. After the failure of a short-lived Belarusian People's Republic (1918–1919) Belarus became a constituent republic of the Soviet Union, the Byelorussian SSR.The final unification of the Belarusians lands in the modern borders took place in 1939 when the ethnically Belarusian lands that were a part of interwar Poland were annexed by the USSR and attached to the Soviet Belarus. The territory and its nation were devastated in the Second World War as Belarus lost about 1/3 of its population while the loss of the economy amounting to 35 times the republic's annual GDP but the republic recovered in the post-war years and became one of the founding members of the United Nations. The parliament of the republic declared the sovereignty of Belarus on July 27, 1990 and following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Belarus officially declared independence on August 25, 1991. Belarus is negotiating with Russia to unify into a single state called the Union of Russia and Belarus, although the discussions have stalled for several years.A total of population of approximately 9,849,000 reside in Belarus, mostly in the urban areas surrounding Minsk and other oblast capitals. Over 80% of the population are native Belarusians, with Russians, Ukrainians and Polish making a sizable minority. Since a referendum in 1995, the two official languages spoken in Belarus are Belarusian and Russian. Belarus does not establish an official religion, yet the primary religion in the country is Russian Orthodox.
Reference:

http://www.belorussia.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belarus

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (August 27, 1770 – November 14, 1831) was a German philosopher, and with Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, one of the creators of German idealism.
Hegel influenced writers of widely varying positions, including both his admirers (Bauer, Bradley, Dewey, Sartre, Küng, Kojève, Žižek), and his detractors (Schelling, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Peirce, Russell). Hegel developed a comprehensive philosophical framework, or "system", to account in an integrated and developmental way for the relation of mind and nature, the subject and object of knowledge, and psychology, the state, history, art, religion, and philosophy. In particular, he developed a concept of mind or spirit that manifested itself in a set of contradictions and oppositions that it ultimately integrated and united, such as those between nature and freedom, and immanence and transcendence, without eliminating either pole or reducing it to the other. His influential conceptions are of speculative logic or "dialectic," "absolute idealism," "Spirit," negativity, sublation (Aufhebung in German), the "Master/Slave" dialectic, "ethical life," and the importance of history.

reference:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Wilhelm_Friedrich_Hegel