Encountering the World: Toward an Ecological Psychology

Rating:
Summary: creative thinker and excellent writer
Review: I learned a great deal from this book-from beginning to end. Reed is not only a thinker of great scope but also of consistency. It's a little hard to tell that Reed is a philosopher and not just a psychologist, given how little philosophy he cites and how few purely conceptual arguments he engages in. But his theoretical consistency does give the book a strong philosophical cast.

Don't just read the first half of the book, where Reed lays out his conception of ecological psychology and explains how psychology is a much more ancient phenomenon in evolutionary history than we are led to believe by current cognitive science. The second half of the book offers interesting references to archeological and anthropological work for those whose primary interest is in psychology. It also describes early development in human childhood in a way that seems well aware of comparative-cultural issues. Thus the second part of the book could be interesting whether or not one is sympathetic to ecological psychology as a research program.