A matter of quality: Kurt Goldstein's assessment of the abstract attitude after brain damage / Una cuestión de calidad: El examen de Kurt Goldstein de la actitud abstracta después de un daño cerebral

ABSTRACT Neurologist and psychiatrist Kurt Goldstein (1878-1965) made substantial contributions to neuropsychology in general and to the development of tests for the assessment of brain damage sequelae in particular. Unlike present-day neuropsychology's psychometric orientation, Goldstein kept a critical distance to a mere quantitative evaluation. Eighty years ago, he impressively demonstrated his own, qualitatively oriented diagnostic approach both in a remarkable monograph and in a didactic film, in collaboration with psychologist Martin Scheerer (1900-1961). By modifying a classical paradigm for the assessment of deficits in visuospatial construction, the Block Design Test, the two authors developed the Goldstein-Scheerer Cube Test. This version characterizes itself by offering the patient different types of cues in order to reveal the nature of the deficit at stake. The test remains an impressive illustration of Goldstein's most famous neuropsychological concept, viz. the human ability to abstract from a concrete situation: the abstract (or categorial) attitude.

RESUMEN El neurólogo y psiquiatra Kurt Goldstein (1878-1965) hizo contribuciones sustanciales a la neuropsicología en general y al desarrollo de tests para el examen de las secuelas de daños cerebrales en particular. Contrariamente a la actual orientación psicométrica de la neuropsicología, Goldstein mantuvo una distancia crítica hacia una mera evaluación cuantitativa. Hace ochenta años, demostró de manera impresionante su propio enfoque diagnóstico cualitativo en una notable monografía y en una película didáctica, en colaboración con el psicólogo Martin Scheerer (1900-1961). Mediante la modificación de un paradigma clásico para la evaluación de déficits en la construcción visual espacial, el test de diseño en bloques, estos autores desarrollaron el test de cubo Goldstein-Scheerer. Esta versión se caracteriza por ofrecer tipos graduados de ayuda al paciente individual para revelar la naturaleza del déficit en juego. Además, la prueba sigue siendo una impresionante ilustración del concepto más famoso de Goldstein, a saber, la capacidad humana para abstraer de una situación determinada: la actitud abstracta.

A matter of quality: Kurt Goldstein's assessment of the abstract attitude after brain damage.

Neurologist and psychiatrist Kurt Goldstein (1878-1965) made substantial contributions to neuropsychology in general and to the development of tests for the assessment of brain damage sequelae in particular. Unlike present-day neuropsychology's psychometric orientation, Goldstein kept a critical distance to a mere quantitative evaluation. Eighty years ago, he impressively demonstrated his own, qualitatively oriented diagnostic approach both in a remarkable monograph and in a didactic film, in collaboration with psychologist Martin Scheerer (1900-1961). By modifying a classical paradigm for the assessment of deficits in visuospatial construction, the Block Design Test, the two authors developed the Goldstein-Scheerer Cube Test. This version characterizes itself by offering the patient different types of cues in order to reveal the nature of the deficit at stake. The test remains an impressive illustration of Goldstein's most famous neuropsychological concept, viz. the human ability to abstract from a concrete situation: the abstract (or categorial) attitude.

On Some Issues of Human-Animal Studies: An Introduction.

Animals are "in" - since prehistoric times when humans (or their ancient ancestors) were hunting animals, and when they fabricated the Paleolithic dog as well as the Paleolithic cat. In less general terms, animals are "in" since they received names and were listed, observed, mummified, turned into totems, and, later on, dissected, tortured under laboratory conditions, trained as experimental subjects or "purified" as model organisms. And they are massively "in" again, but now from overtly legal and moral points of view, at least since the last two decades of the twentieth century. This is to say that modern members of the species Homo sapiens have always been connected to animals of the most various kinds - from the human flea (Pulex irritans) and the cat flea (Ctenocephalides felis) to marine mammals, such as dolphins and whales, from horses to parrots, from scallops to worms, and so on.

Working with Instruments: Ernst Mach as Material Epistemologist, a Short Introduction.

With the death of Ernst Mach on February 19, 1916, one day after his seventy-eighth birthday, a question finally became explicit that had been looming for some time. It was as simple as it was fundamental: who, in the end, was this man, a scientist or a philosopher? The importance of this question for contemporaries can easily be gleaned from the obituaries that appeared in the weeks following Mach's death: one in the Physikalische Zeitschrift, written by Albert Einstein, and another in the Archiv für die Geschichte der Philosophie, written by Mach's former student Heinrich Gomperz. They both addressed this critical issue in plain words. Einstein stressed that Mach "was not a philosopher who chose the natural sciences as the object of his speculation, but a many-sided, interested, diligent scientist who also took visible pleasure in detailed questions outside the burning issues of general interest" (Einstein 1916, 104; translation cited in Blackmore 1992, 158). Gomperz in turn first emphasized the great loss science had experienced with Mach's death, asking subsequently whether "the suffering science is physics or philosophy?" (Gomperz 1916, 321). His answer broadly followed Einstein's conclusion; relying on Mach's own words, he reminded his readers that Mach never claimed to be a philosopher, but merely was looking for a viewpoint that transcended the disciplinary constraints of particular scientific activities.

Ernst Mach Invents a New Sphygmograph.

Argument The sphygmograph as designed and tested by Jules-Étienne Marey - an apparatus destined to write pulse tracings on paper - revolutionized medical diagnostics in the early 1860s. Since the accuracy with which this device registered and objectified the pulse was controversial from the outset, the young scholar Ernst Mach (soon to become a leading theoretician and philosopher) decided to thoroughly examine Marey's sphygmograph. The investigation led to the invention of an alternative, truly Machian, sphygmograph. Mach's sphygmograph had originated in the regime of theoretical and applied physics, whereas the instrument invented by Marey had been rooted in the regime of experimental physiology. This one type of instrument thus serves as the focal object of a comparative study of two antagonistic epistemological approaches to sphygmography.