Beyond the Juxtaposition of Nature and Culture: Lawrence Krader, Interdisciplinarity, and the Concept of the Human Being

The essays contained in Beyond the Juxtaposition of Nature and Culture represent an attempt by scholars from Canada, Germany, and Mexico to come to grips with the innovative work of the American philosopher and anthropologist Lawrence Krader who has proposed nothing less than a new theory of nature, according to which there are at least three different orders—the material-biotic, the quantum, and the human—which differ from one another according to their different configurations of space-time, and which cannot be reduced the one to the others. Each author takes up Krader’s theory in relation to its impact on their own discipline: sociology, anthropology, the study of myth, the theory of labor and value, economics, linguistics, and aesthetics. The question of how nature and culture can be integrated within a theoretical framework which links them in difference and nexus and allows each their non-reductive space leads each of the contributors to move in their thinking beyond the old dualisms of materialism and idealism, fact and value, nature and culture.

Table of Contents:
Cyril Levitt: Preface: Lawrence Krader—a Personal Retrospective in Memoriam – Sabine Sander/Cyril Levitt: Introduction: The "Unknown" Krader: New Encounters – Cyril Levitt: Lawrence Krader: Noetics: The Science of Thinking and Knowing – Human Being in Relation to Several Orders of Nature – Dorothy Pawluch/Kathleen Steeves: Constructionist Reflections on Noetics – Sabine Sander: Variations of the Embodied Self: George H. Mead, Ernst Cassirer, and Lawrence Krader on the Human Being between Nature and Culture – Krader and Anthropology – Antje Linkenbach: Projecting a New Anthropology? Some Reflections on Lawrence Krader’s Contribution to the Discipline of Anthropology and His Significance Today – Brígida von Mentz: Krader’s Encompassing "Weltanschauung": His Concepts of Art, Techne, and Science, and the Ethno-history of Mesoamerica – Mayán Cervantes: Myth in Krader’s Mito e Ideologia Compared with Myth in Noetics – Economics, Labor, and Value – Carsten Herrmann-Pillath: Lawrence Krader’s Noetics and Its Implications for Resolving the Methodological Conundrum of the "Naturalistic Turn" in Contemporary Economics – Michelle Goldenberg: Science, Productive and Unproductive Labor, Mediate and Immediate Production – Lawrence Krader: Appendix: Theory of Nature. Theory of Human Being. Workplan – Contributors – Index.