Good Counsel - by Matt J Rossano (Paperback)

About the Book

The book is structured as a dialogue between the American intellectual William James and one of his famous students (Gertrude Stein, Theodore Roosevelt, W.E.B. Du Bois, etc.) discussing a topic.

Book Synopsis

The book is structured as a dialogue between the American intellectual William James and one of his famous students (Gertrude Stein, Theodore Roosevelt, W.E.B. Du Bois, etc.) discussing a topic.

Review Quotes

Good Counsel offers an accessible introduction to the themes of James's thinking. Each chapter presents an innovative dialogic format, which reflects James's own dialogic writing style and it has something in common with James's own preference for what he called 'ambulatory' over 'saltatory' conceptions of knowledge.

Absolutely novel. Matt J. Rossano is a very polished writer with an excellent 'voice' that will speak to both scholarly academics as well as relatively untutored students. In this book, William James has conversations with other significant thinkers as a vehicle for covering important ideas in Philosophy and Psychology, like a set of Socratic dialogs but set in a more modern era. This would be a great book for an honors, capstone, or special topics course, or even a historically-oriented, American-focused course, at the graduate or undergraduate level for Psychology or Philosophy.

About the Author

Matt J. Rossano is a retired Professor of Psychology. For more than thirty years, he taught at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond, Louisiana. He is an evolutionary psychologist who has authored or co-authored scores of scholarly papers, book chapters, commentaries, reviews, and five previous books. His work has appeared in highly respected scholarly journals such as: Psychological Bulletin, Cognition, Current Anthropology, PaleoAnthropology, and Cambridge Archeological Journal; as well as more popular outlets such as: Men's Health, New Scientist, The Huffington Post, Smithsonian Magazine, and Psychology Today. He is the author of several previous books including: Supernatural selection: How religion evolved (2010, Oxford University Press); Mortal rituals: What the story of the Andes' survivors tells us about human evolution (2013, Columbia University Press); and Ritual in human evolution and religion: Psychological and ritual resources (2020, Routledge). He is also co-editor (and chapter author) on two recent volumes on psychology and cognitive archaeology (both published by Routledge).