MICHAEL COLE Alexander Luria , Cultural Psychology , and the Resolution of the Crisis in Psychology

It is a great personal pleasure for me to address this conference, honoring the life and work of Alexander Romanovich Luria. I am not a Russian and I am acutely aware that I am speaking to you, so to speak, from afar, about a person you know very differently than I do. So, to begin with, I want to give a brief account of how I first encountered Alexander Romanovich and his work. I will then provide my interpretation of his contributions to psychology, in particular, the issue of creating a unified science of psychology.