George Herbert Mead Discussion List

G-H-MEAD is an international electronic forum devoted to the interpretation and extension of George Herbert Mead's philosophy and social psychology. The list is open to anyone with an interest in any facet of Mead's work.

The broad aims of the list are to explore the merits of Mead's work, including its relations to any and all developments in philosophy and the social sciences at large.

Members of the forum are expected to strive for the spirit of cooperative inquiry. This does not mean suppressing disagreements. It does mean avoiding personal attacks, uncharitable interpretations of members' arguments, and so forth and so on.

To subscribe to the G.H.Mead email discussion list (it's free!), send a message from your usual email address to listserv@listserv.sc.edu with a one-line command
        subscribe g-h-mead Your Name
as the body of the message (with your name in place of "Your Name"). You will be asked to confirm the subscription, and then you'll receive a couple of messages with more information about how the list works.

This may not work if your email is not "plain text" but rather (invisibly) includes HTML formatting of some sort. In that case, either change your email preferences to send only plain text messages or use the web interface for the G-H-Mead forum to join (or leave) the list (see below).

As a new member, feel free to introduce yourself, perhaps with a brief statement of what you might like to discuss with others on the list.

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To unsubscribe from the list, send a message (from the same address you subscribed with) to listserv@listserv.sc.edu with the one-line command
        signoff g-h-mead
as the body of the message.

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The web interface for the G-H-MEAD forum includes message archives. It also has facilities for joining or leaving the list, and for reading and posting messages. To use many if not any of the web-based facilities, you will need to establish a server password. When prompted to login with a password, read the brief instructions on that page and follow the "get a new LISTSERV password" link.

If you want to suppress reception of G-H-Mead email messages and participate entirely through the web interface (somewhat like a chat room or bulletin board), then follow out the "Join or Leave the List (or change settings)" link. Click on the "Mail delivery disabled temporarily" check-box (nomail) on the update page and click the "Update Options" button. This will suppress the receipt of G-H-Mead emails for as long as you want — that is, until you re-do what you just did except to uncheck the "Mail delivery disabled temporarily" check-box.

You can use the "Post message" and "Reply to this message" functions on the web to send messages to the list. Or, even if you do not receive G-H-Mead email, you can still use your standard email program to send messages to the list. The web archives will remain available whether you receive G-H-Mead email messages or not.

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A list of other LISTSERV User Commands is also available.

For the benefit of the list, keep the following things in mind:

• Make sure that you are mailing your message to the appropriate recipient:
  • Personal messages go to some person's private email address.
  • Administrative commands go to the listserver (LISTSERV@LISTSERV.SC.EDU).
  • Messages for all subscribers go to the mailing list (G-H-MEAD@LISTSERV.SC.EDU).
  To help minimize the possibility of sending private messages to this public forum, the default Reply-To: field for Dewey-L messages is set to be the original sender of the message, not the whole list.
• Clearly indicate the content of your message in the "Subject:" line in your message header. Maintain the same Subject: heading if you are contributing to an existing thread. Change it only if you are initiating a new topic.
• Put your real name at the end of your comments if it does not appear in the "From:" line in your message header.
• Quote selectively from posts that you are responding to. Don't just post comments at the beginning or end of a very long quoted message.
• Provide references complete enough for scholarly purposes.
• Attack arguments (or lack thereof), not persons.
• Be sensitive to the cultural and disciplinary diversity of the list.
• Make your postings to the list as relevant to the writings and philosophy of John Dewey as possible.
• Avoid personal wrangling and irrelevant conversations.
• Ignore obnoxious postings or postings by cranks.
• Do not be a crank who submits obnoxious postings.
• Look at your remarks carefully before posting them to make sure they cannot be (mis)interpreted as snide, arrogant, vile, offensive, inflammatory, self-righteous, impolite, or otherwise inappropriate. If they might be so interpreted, then they no doubt will be so interpreted by someone or other.
• Do not post commercial solicitations or advertisements to the list.
• Do not use the list for surveys, petitions, or for partisan purposes.
• Avoid excessive posting to the list and make an effort to keep the list free from clutter.
• Turn off HTML formatting when posting to discussion lists.
• Avoid excessively long posts. Large documents, images, or html-based text can be announced to the list and made available via web links, or else sent to individual list members who personally request them.
• Do not send email attachments to the list—different computing platforms handle attachments differently, so what works for you may not work for other list members. It is also well-known that attachments are possible vehicles for potentially destructive applications. If you receive a G-H-Mead message with an attachment, seriously think about that possiblity before opening it. You might want to just immediately delete it.
• Do not forward virus warnings to the list—too often they are only hoaxes.
• Do not use the list for sending personal email.

The current list manager of G-H-MEAD is Tom Burke, at burke@sc.edu.
Postal address: Department of Philosophy, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208.

Also visit George's Page. This site includes web-accessible copies of many of Mead's works, plus references to a lot of secondary literature.