Liah Greenfeld was born on 1954 and is an Israeli-American Russian-Jewish interdisciplinary scholar engaged in the scientific explanation of human social reality on various levels, beginning with the individual mind and ending with the level of civilization.
11 Facts About Liah Greenfeld
1.
2.
Liah Greenfeld has been called "the most iconoclastic" of contemporary sociologists and that her approach represents the major alternative to the mainstream approaches in social science.
3.
Liah Greenfeld was a brother of Yakov D Kirschenblat, a prominent biologist and a cousin of Yevgeny Primakov, a future Russian Prime Minister.
4.
In Sochi, before she emigrated to Israel with her parents, Liah Greenfeld was first known as a child prodigy, playing violin on TV at the age of 7, receiving the Krasnodar Region's Second Prize for poetry at 16, and publishing a collection of poems, under a properly Russified alias, in Komsomolskaya Pravda.
5.
Liah Greenfeld received her doctoral degree in Sociology and Anthropology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1982.
6.
At various periods, Liah Greenfeld has held visiting positions at RPI, MIT, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, Lingnan University and the Open University of Hong Kong.
7.
Liah Greenfeld was a recipient of the UAB Ireland Distinguished Visiting Scholar Award, fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Studies, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem, Israel.
8.
Liah Greenfeld argues that democracy is logically implied in nationalism because of the principles of popular sovereignty and equality of memberships.
9.
Liah Greenfeld explores the ways in which symbolic culture transforms and expands the biological mind, making it a far more complex and dynamic entity that reforms and reconfigures itself, ever emerging in relation to changing environmental events.
10.
Just as Darwin's theory of "survival of the fittest" and evolution resolved the conflict between philosophical materialists and philosophical idealists by providing a framework within which the autonomous biological reality of life could be studied scientifically, Liah Greenfeld proposes a symbolic process consisting of two levels: culture and the mind.
11.
Liah Greenfeld further identifies three possible, logically derived structures, or "functional systems", within the mind.