Life seems to have righted itself this past week…feels like I had a chiropractic adjustment of my sensibility. I’ve started studying for my comps, and the digging my textbooks out of boxes felt like seeing old friends. I’m starting with Developmental Psych, which is, in my view, the basis of all the rest. I intend to be a bit compulsive and THOROUGH in going through the material, and it’s amazing what I got just from rereading (at least I think it’s a reread!) the preface to the text. The author contextualizes one of the basic questions of developmental psych–what is the basic nature of humans?–by aligning them with three world views: Locke & Hume’s mechanistic vision; Leibniz’ organismic; and James’ contextualism. Suddenly the psych stuff is a part of all the philosophy/sociology/politics, etc stuff the I did for my phD in lit–and that makes the psych stuff much more vivid for me. I believe–no, I know that knowledge is constructed and therefore the context of the construction is vital to understanding which is vital to action and so on and so on and so on… Thus, I’m thrilled when I can add another piece of the puzzle.