Reading group

Welcome to our reading group!

Our goal is to create a collaborative space where participants can share insights, discuss critical ideas, and deepen their understanding through collective discussion and analysis. We will meet once a month to engage with selected texts. 

In our first cycle, we will focus on Rethinking Cultural-Historical Theory: A Dialectical Perspective to Vygotsky by Manolis Dafermos.

"The book focuses on the neglected dialectical underpinnings of Vygotsky’s theory. Vygotsky explicitly stated his commitment to dialectics:

We are dialecticians. We do not at all think that the developmental path of science follows a straight line, and if it has had zigzags, returns, and loops we understand their historical significance and consider them to be necessary links in our chain, inevitable stages of our path... (Vygotsky 1997, p. 336).

A dialectical way of thinking has been marginalized in the western academy. Western scholars and philosophers tend to examine dialectical thinking as irrelevant, vague, and problematic. The roots of the negative stance to dialectic can be found in the “cult of empiricism” (Toulmin and Leary 1985) and the “enduring dominance of positivism” (Breen and Darlaston-Jones 2008) in psychology as well as in other disciplines. Additionally, it should be mentioned that schematic and formalist interpretations of dialectics doubtless contribute to the reproduction of its negative reception in western Academia" (Dafermos, 2018, p. vii).