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Very Short Introductions #715
Ivan Pavlov: A Very Short Introduction
In this book, Daniel P. Todes provides concise introduction to the life and science of the great Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936). Todes weaves together Pavlov's life, values, context, and science by focusing upon his quest to understand the psyche and the "torments of our consciousness".
This introduction follows the origins and maturation of Pavlov's quest from his early life in a priestly family in provincial Riazan, to his struggles and late professional success in the glittering capital of St. Petersburg, through the cataclysmic destruction of his world during the Bolshevik seizure of power and civil war of 1917-1921, to the rebuilding of his life in his 70s as a "prosperous dissident" during the Leninist 1920s, and his success and personal torments in 1929-1936 during the industrialization, cultural revolution, and terror of Stalin times.
Beyond a basic biography, Todes devotes particular attention to Pavlov's Nobel Prize-winning research on digestion (1891-1903) and his iconic studies of conditional reflexes and higher nervous activity (1903-1936), as well as his experiments with dogs. Fundamentally reinterpreting Pavlov's famous research on conditional reflexes, Todes shows that Pavlov was not a behaviorist, did not use a bell, and was uninterested in training dogs. The Russian scientist sought to explain not merely external behaviors, but the emotional and intellectual life of animals and humans. Furthermore, this iconic "objectivist" was a profoundly anthropomorphic thinker whose science was suffused with his own experiences and values. Exploring the two unpublished manuscripts upon which Pavlov was working when he died, Todes shows the importance of his little-known experiments on chimps and explores his final thoughts about the relationship of science, Christianity, and Bolshevism.
This introduction follows the origins and maturation of Pavlov's quest from his early life in a priestly family in provincial Riazan, to his struggles and late professional success in the glittering capital of St. Petersburg, through the cataclysmic destruction of his world during the Bolshevik seizure of power and civil war of 1917-1921, to the rebuilding of his life in his 70s as a "prosperous dissident" during the Leninist 1920s, and his success and personal torments in 1929-1936 during the industrialization, cultural revolution, and terror of Stalin times.
Beyond a basic biography, Todes devotes particular attention to Pavlov's Nobel Prize-winning research on digestion (1891-1903) and his iconic studies of conditional reflexes and higher nervous activity (1903-1936), as well as his experiments with dogs. Fundamentally reinterpreting Pavlov's famous research on conditional reflexes, Todes shows that Pavlov was not a behaviorist, did not use a bell, and was uninterested in training dogs. The Russian scientist sought to explain not merely external behaviors, but the emotional and intellectual life of animals and humans. Furthermore, this iconic "objectivist" was a profoundly anthropomorphic thinker whose science was suffused with his own experiences and values. Exploring the two unpublished manuscripts upon which Pavlov was working when he died, Todes shows the importance of his little-known experiments on chimps and explores his final thoughts about the relationship of science, Christianity, and Bolshevism.
160 pages, Paperback
First published September 22, 2022
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October 28, 2022
Prior to reading this, the only thing I knew of Pavlov was his experiments with dogs to make them salivate at the ringing of a bell. The books covers the work that won him the Nobel prize, his attempts to combine psychology and physiology under a mechanist framework, and his interactions with the Czarist and then the Soviet states. It gets a little in the weeds in descriptions of his various vivisection experiments and theories, but still enjoyed it.
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