The founders of psychology — thinkers such as Wundt, Freud, and Spencer — recognized the importance of psychologists formulating for themselves the conceptual foundations of the discipline. These parents of psychology not only did their own theorizing, in cooperation with many others; they realized the significance of constantly re-examining these theories and philosophies, including the theories and philosophies of psychology’s methods.
The Advances in Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology series is dedicated to this examining and re-examining. It identifies the pivotal and problematic non-empirical issues that face the discipline and addresses these issues in the tradition of the theorists of natural science — uncovering the implicit concepts and hidden assumptions of programs of research and strategies of practice to compare them to concepts and assumptions that might be better.
To learn more about the series or to propose a title, please contact Brent Slife ([email protected]) and Zoe Thomson ([email protected]).
Edited
By James Cresswell, Atsushi Tajima, Arthur Arruda Leal Ferreira
July 11, 2025
Interweaving rich theory on dialogism, power, and resistance together with situated scenarios addressing the production of psychological knowledge, this book explores decoloniality as it interfaces with strategic fields in psychology. Current movements in global sentiment have raised important ...
Edited
By Eeva K. Kallio, Päivi Tynjälä
April 30, 2025
What is Wisdom and Can it be Taught? uses careful theoretical analysis and a well-argued ontological conception of the human being to present a new ‘Holistic Wisdom Model’, summarizing existing research and presenting fresh insights. Human wisdom is a complex phenomenon. Psychological research in ...
By Mark Freeman
January 30, 2025
Mark Freeman’s inspiring account of the burgeoning field of the psychological humanities presents a clear and compelling vision of what the discipline of psychology might become. Valuable though the scientific perspective has been for advancing the discipline, Freeman maintains that significant ...
By James Costello
December 23, 2024
Philosophical Foundations of Psychotherapy promotes a critical understanding of the ideas, traditions, values, and principles that inform and shape – for better or for worse – what therapists do. The book challenges the unhelpful misconception that philosophy is for philosophers alone, because ...
By Frank C. Richardson
November 29, 2024
Suffering and Psychology challenges modern psychology's concentration almost exclusively on eradicating pain, suffering, and their causes. Modern psychology and psychotherapy are motivated in part by a humane and compassionate desire to relieve many kinds of human suffering. However, they have ...
By Matthew Clemente, Andrew J. Zeppa
October 09, 2024
Posttraumatic Joy presents the major themes and ideas of Nietzsche’s corpus from a continental and psychoanalytic perspective with a particular bent toward how they might illuminate ways of coping with and living beyond trauma and suffering. Through a series of transcribed and edited ...
By Jack Martin
June 21, 2024
This book illustrates how Life Positioning Analysis can be used as a theoretical and methodological approach to sociocultural psychobiography. Life positioning psychobiography studies lives as they unfold within a world of interactivity. It recognizes and portrays us as social beings embedded and ...
By James T. Lamiell
February 01, 2024
This insightful book offers contemporary psychologists and other social theorists an understanding of the comprehensive system of thought developed by the German scholar William Stern (1871–1938) known as critical personalism. Expanding the author’s ongoing efforts in this area, the book considers,...
By Nancy K Dess
January 29, 2024
This is a collection of pithy and accessible essays on the nature and implications of human embodiment which explore the concept of ‘human being’ in the most unprecedented manner through seemingly disparate academic disciplines. With contributions from key researchers from around the world, this ...
By Jack Martin
January 29, 2024
This is a critical, personalized approach to reframing the discipline of psychology through a singular narrative in the form of a memoir written by a successful research psychologist. In this book we follow Martin’s unique career, which has allowed him to understand and adopt different ...
Edited
By James Lamiell, Kathleen Slaney
January 29, 2024
This volume explores the abiding intellectual inertia in scientific psychology in relation to the discipline’s engagement with problematic beliefs and assumptions underlying mainstream research practices, despite repeated critical analyses which reveal the weaknesses, and in some cases complete ...
By Jennifer Cole Wright
December 30, 2022
A Psychological Perspective on Folk Moral Objectivism is a thoroughly researched interdisciplinary exploration of the critical role metaethical beliefs play in the way morality functions. Whether people are "moral objectivists" or not is something that deserves much more empirical attention than it...