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Lucien Lévy-Bruhl

 

 
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Lucien Lévy-Bruhl
 
 
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Lucien Lévy-Brühl (April 19, 1857 - March 13, 1939) was a French
France

France , officially the French Republic , is a country whose Metropolitan France is located in Western Europe and that also comprises various Overseas departments and territories of France....
 scholar trained in philosophy
Philosophy

Philosophy is the study of general problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, truth, beauty, justice, validity, mind, and language....
, who made contributions to the budding fields of sociology
Sociology

Sociology is a branch of the social sciences that uses systematic methods of Empiricism and critical theory to develop and refine a body of knowledge about human social structure and activity, sometimes with the goal of applying such knowledge to the pursuit of social welfare....
 and ethnology
Ethnology

Ethnology is the branch of anthropology that compares and analyzes the origins, distribution, technology, religion, language, and social structure of the ethnicity, Race , and/or national divisions of humanity....
. His primary field of study involved primitive mentality.

Lévy-Brühl was born in Paris. He was an anthropologist who wrote about the 'primitive mind'. In his work How Natives Think (1910), Lévy-Brühl speculated about what he posited as the two basic mindsets of mankind, "primitive" and "Western." The primitive mind does not differentiate the supernatural from reality, but rather uses "mystical participation" to manipulate the world.






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Lucien Lévy-Brühl (April 19, 1857 - March 13, 1939) was a French
France

France , officially the French Republic , is a country whose Metropolitan France is located in Western Europe and that also comprises various Overseas departments and territories of France....
 scholar trained in philosophy
Philosophy

Philosophy is the study of general problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, truth, beauty, justice, validity, mind, and language....
, who made contributions to the budding fields of sociology
Sociology

Sociology is a branch of the social sciences that uses systematic methods of Empiricism and critical theory to develop and refine a body of knowledge about human social structure and activity, sometimes with the goal of applying such knowledge to the pursuit of social welfare....
 and ethnology
Ethnology

Ethnology is the branch of anthropology that compares and analyzes the origins, distribution, technology, religion, language, and social structure of the ethnicity, Race , and/or national divisions of humanity....
. His primary field of study involved primitive mentality.

Lévy-Brühl was born in Paris. He was an anthropologist who wrote about the 'primitive mind'. In his work How Natives Think (1910), Lévy-Brühl speculated about what he posited as the two basic mindsets of mankind, "primitive" and "Western." The primitive mind does not differentiate the supernatural from reality, but rather uses "mystical participation" to manipulate the world. According to Lévy-Brühl, moreover, the primitive mind doesn't address contradictions. The Western mind, by contrast, uses speculation and logic. Like many theorists of his time, Lévy-Brühl believed in a historical and evolutionary teleology leading from the primitive mind to the Western mind.

Works

  • Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures (1910), translated as How Natives Think (1926)
  • La mentalité primitive (1922), translated as Primitive Mentality (1923)
  • L'âme primitive (1927), translated as The "Soul" of the Primitive (1928, reedited in 1965 with a foreword by E.E. Evans-Pritchard)
  • Le surnaturel et la nature dans la mentalité primitive (1931), translated as Primitives and the Supernatural (1936)
  • La mythologie primitive (Primitive Mythology, 1935)
  • L'expérience mystique et les symboles chez les primitifs (The Mystic Experience and Primitive Symbolism, 1938)
  • Les carnets de Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (Notebooks of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, published posthumously in 1949)


External links