SOURCE: "Concerning Mead's The Philosophy of the Act," in The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. XXXVI, No. 4, February 16, 1939, pp. 85-103.

In the following essay, Murphy attempts to explicate ambiguous areas in Mead's The Philosophy of the Act.

With the appearance of this important volume [The Philosophy of the Act] one major phase in the task of making Mead's philosophic doctrines accessible to a wider public than that of his own colleagues and pupils is completed. The editors tell us that "except for a large body of student notes, which contain much of interest on Mr. Mead's interpretation of the history of ideas, the present material exhausts all the known literary remains deemed worthy of publication" (pp. v, vi). "Practically all the material from Mr. Mead's own hand was used" and this, consisting in considerable part of alternative statements of a theory which Mead himself never brought to a final...