Lucien Lévy-Bruhl

Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857—1939) was a French philosopher, sociologist, and ethnographer, whose primary field of study involved primitive mentality.

Lévy-Bruhl was the first anthropologist to address comparative cognition. In his work How Natives Think (1910), Bruhl speculated about what he posited as the two basic mindsets of mankind, "primitive" and "Western." The primitive mind does not differentiate the supernatural from reality, but rather uses "mystical participation" to manipulate the world. According to Lévy-Bruhl, moreover, the primitive mind doesn't address contradictions. The Western mind, by contrast, uses speculation and logic. Lévy-Bruhl believed in a historical and evolutionary teleology leading from the primitive mind to the Western mind.

Evans Pritchard critiqued Lévy-Bruhl, arguing that the primitive mind addresses contradictions, but does so differently.

Works

Mental Functions in Primitive Societies (1910)
Primitive Mentality (1922)
The Soul of the Primitive (1928)
The Supernatural and the Nature of the Primitive Mind (1931)
Primitive Mythology (1935)
The Mystic Experience and Primitive Symbolism (1938)

External links

Biography of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl

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