![]() Military and diplomatic victories and reforms with a view to reorganising the kingdom are illustrated through allegories from Antiquity. Political successes are illustrated through the 30 painted compositions on the vaulted ceiling by Le Brun, which depict the glorious history of Louis XIV during the first 18 years of his reign, from 1661 to the peace treaties of Nijmegen. The results are an astonishingly original reinterpretation of the trajectory of a discipline over more than a century.Following on from the victory over the three united powers, depicted in the War Room, the whole length of the Hall of Mirrors (73m) pays tribute to the political, economic and artistic success of France. “Who can recognize themselves in a mirror? In this brilliant and intrepid study, Katja Guenther shows that a test once relied upon to prove that humans are distinct from other animals offered recurrent other uses in the history of psychology. “Guenther’s exploration of self-recognition takes the reader on a fascinating, unexpected, generative journey through the history of the mind sciences, with revelations as delightful as they are profound at every bend in the road.”-Cathy Gere, author of Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism The Mirror and the Mind is a very impressive book-it is at once broadly and deeply researched, full of brilliant analyses, and a joy to read.”-Stefanos Geroulanos, director of the Remarque Institute, New York University “Guenther demonstrates in very clear terms the value of the mirror test in the making of modern knowledge, as well as how one can use an epistemic object of its sort for a highly readable history. "Clearly written and beautifully detailed, this book will be of interest to psychologists, neuroscientists, and anthropologists at all levels of expertise interested in issues of self-recognition or misidentification between the self and other."-Saira Khan, Quarterly Review of Biology The Mirror and the Mind offers an intriguing history of experiments in self-awareness and the advancements of the human sciences across more than a century. ![]() From the robotic tortoises of Grey Walter and the mark test of Beulah Amsterdam and Gordon Gallup, to anorexia research and mirror neurons, the mirror test offers a window into the emergence of such fields as biology, psychology, psychiatry, animal studies, cognitive science, and neuroscience. But because researchers could not rely on language to determine what their nonspeaking subjects were experiencing, they had to come up with significant innovations, including notation strategies, testing protocols, and the linking of scientific theories across disciplines. Thereafter the mirror, previously a recurrent if marginal scientific tool, became dominant in attempts to demarcate humans from other animals. The mirror test was thrust into the limelight when Charles Darwin challenged the idea that language sets humans apart. Investigating the ways mirrors could lead to both identification and misidentification, Guenther looks at how such experiments ultimately failed to determine human specificity. Mirrors served as the possible means for answering the question: What makes us human? In The Mirror and the Mind, Katja Guenther traces the history of the mirror self-recognition test, exploring how researchers from a range of disciplines-psychoanalysis, psychiatry, developmental and animal psychology, cybernetics, anthropology, and neuroscience-came to read the peculiar behaviors elicited by mirrors. Since the late eighteenth century, scientists have placed subjects-humans, infants, animals, and robots-in front of mirrors in order to look for signs of self-recognition.
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