Hegel,the Trinity,and the ‘I’

The main goal of this paper is to argue the relevance of Hegel’s notion of the Trinity with respect to two aspects of Hegel’s idealism: the overcoming of subjectivism and his conception of the ‘I’. I contend that these two aspects are interconnected and that the Trinity is important to Hegel’s strategy for addressing these questions. I first address the problem of subjectivism by considering Hegel’s thought against the background of modern philosophy. I argue that the recognitive structure of Hegel’s idealism led him to give the Trinity a decisive role in his philosophical account. Next, I discuss the Trinity by analysing the three divine persons. This analysis paves the way for the conclusion, where I argue that the Trinity represents a model for re-thinking the ‘I’ in a way that overcomes a ‘naïve realist’ and a ‘subjective’ account of the self. I suggest that Hegel’s absolute idealism can be conceived as an approach to the ‘I’ that considers the role of acts of mutual recognition for the genesis of self-conscious thought, and that the Trinity is the Darstellung of the relational and recognitive structure of the ‘I’.     

Decrypting ‘the Christian Thinking of the Flesh, Tacitly, the Caress, in a Word, the Christian Body’ in Le Toucher—Jean-Luc Nancy

This article responds to the question of the ‘implicit and presupposed theological turn of phenomenology’ by providing a close reading of Jacques Derrida’s Le Toucher—Jean-Luc Nancy (2000 French/2005 English translation), particularly concerning what Derrida alludes to as ‘the Christian thinking of the flesh’ in the French phenomenological tradition post-Husserl. In reading Derrida’s own text, the article identifies and then performs a ‘cryptonomy’ of references to the ‘Christian body,’ and of the ‘return of religion.’ The article also focuses on the more recent writings of Jean-Luc Nancy, especially Corpus (2000 French), concerning the body and its relationship to the concept of corporality (Leiblichkeit) from Husserl’s Ideas II.

The one,the true,the good… or not: Badiou,Agamben, and atheistic transcendentality

Continental Philosophy Review - This article offers a reading of the “transcendental” character of Alain Badiou’s and Giorgio Agamben’s ontologies. While neither Badiou nor...     

Mediate Auscultation, the Stethoscope, and the “Autopsy of the Living”: Medicine's Acoustic Culture

The practice of mediate auscultation—listening to the body through a stethoscope—was at the center of new articulations of medical thought and practice in the 19th century. During that period, the stethoscope became the hallmark of medical modernity. This article offers a detailed examination of the work of RTH Laennec and other important writings on the stethoscope in order to argue for the centrality of a distinctive orientation toward listening in modern medicine. The development of mediate auscultation applied medical and scientific reason to listening, just as a particular practice of hearing the body became integral to everyday functioning of medicine. Mediate auscultation was thus an artifact of a new approach to reason and the senses, one based in a scientific mindset and a logic of mediation.     

Mirror,Mirror in the Brain,What's the Monkey Stand to Gain?

Primatologists generally agree that monkeys lack higher‐order intentional capacities related to theory of mind. Yet the discovery of the so‐called “mirror neurons” in monkeys suggests to many neuroscientists that they have the rudiments of intentional understanding. Given a standard philosophical view about intentional understanding, which requires higher‐order intentionality, a paradox arises. Different ways of resolving the paradox are assessed, using evidence from neural, cognitive, and behavioral studies of humans and monkeys. A decisive resolution to the paradox requires substantial additional empirical work and perhaps a rejection of the standard philosophical view.     

A postcolonial Pannenberg? Mimicry,the law,and the cross of love

This paper employs the postcolonial concepts of mimicry and hybridity to interpret Wolfhart Pannenberg's understanding of the violence done to Jesus on the cross and the subversive reconciliatory love that it engenders. According to Pannenberg, although the man Jesus was crucified as blasphemer of the Jewish law, the resurrection vindicated Jesus so that the ones accusing Jesus were retroactively deemed to be the actual blasphemers. As a result, Jesus ended up dying not for his own alleged breaking of the law, but as an inclusive substitute for all blasphemers of God (through amour propre) deserving death. Thus, the resurrection confirmed Jesus’ divine identity and his earthly teaching that love supersedes and transforms the law. Applying the concept of mimicry to Pannenberg, on the cross the symbolic and semiotic are held together in tension for in mimicry the “not-quite sameness” menaces the colonizer. The cross, ostensibly a symbolic sign of abjection, is mimicked by the suffering of Jesus and subverted through a practice of inclusive semiotic love which recapitulates sinful human life toward a life of transformed autonomy. Pannenberg displays a pseudo postcolonial understanding of subverting oppressive law into love. However, on account of his futurist ontology, the eschatological totality is underscored relative to formative experiences, leaving him vulnerable to postcolonial critiques of essentialism, which can reinscribe colonialism. I contend that Pannenberg employs a strategy of “strategic particularism” in which concepts such as mimicry and hybridity are helpful as hermeneutical tools but ultimately provisional and temporary relative to the whole.     

On the Use,the Misuse,and the Very Limited Usefulness of Cronbach’s Alpha

This discussion paper argues that both the use of Cronbach’s alpha as a reliability estimate and as a measure of internal consistency suffer from major problems. First, alpha always has a value, which cannot be equal to the test score’s reliability given the interitem covariance matrix and the usual assumptions about measurement error. Second, in practice, alpha is used more often as a measure of the test’s internal consistency than as an estimate of reliability. However, it can be shown easily that alpha is unrelated to the internal structure of the test. It is further discussed that statistics based on a single test administration do not convey much information about the accuracy of individuals’ test performance. The paper ends with a list of conclusions about the usefulness of alpha.     

Past, present, and future (?); or the more things change the more they stay the same

The presidential address from the 27th Annual Meeting of the Society for Computers in Psychology, here slightly revised, traces a history of the Society through the papers that have been presented at previous annual meetings. Certain themes, such as the use of computers to facilitate teaching and research, emerge as constants over time. Computer technology has changed dramatically over those 27 years, however, as can be seen merely from the titles of the papers presented at the annual meetings. The present paper also proposes a direction for the Society’s future: the continuation of its strong history of facilitating communication among psychologists interested in applying the most current technology to their teaching and research.     

Philosophy, the “unknown knowns,” and the public use of reason

There are not only true or false solutions, there are also false questions. The task of philosophy is not to provide answers or solutions, but to submit to critical analysis the questions themselves, to make us see how the very way we perceive a problem is an obstacle to its solution. This holds especially for today’s public debates on ecological threats, on lack of faith, on democracy and the “war on terror”, in which the “unknown knowns”, the silent presuppositions we are not aware of, determine our acts.     

Infrahumanization or familiarity? Attribution of uniquely human emotions to the self, the ingroup, and the outgroup

People attribute more secondary emotions to their ingroup than to outgroups. This effect is interpreted in terms of infrahumanization theory. Familiarity also could explain this differential attribution because secondary emotions are thought to be less visible and intense than primary ones. This alternative explanation to infrahumanization was tested in three studies. In Study 1, participants attributed, in a between-participants design, primary and secondary emotions to themselves, to their ingroup, or to an outgroup. In Study 2, participants answered for themselves and their ingroup or for themselves and an outgroup. In Study 3, participants made attributions to the ingroup or a series of outgroups varying in terms of familiarity. The data do not support an explanation in terms of familiarity. The discussion centers on conditions not conducting to infrahumanization.     

The Pleasant Life, the Engaged Life, and the Meaningful Life: What about the Balanced Life?

Martin Seligman, in his very popular book Authentic Happiness (Seligman 2002), argued that authentic happiness is derived from three major sets of experiences in life, namely experiencing pleasantness regularly (the pleasant life), experiencing a high level of engagement in satisfying activities (the engaged life), and experiencing a sense of connectedness to a greater whole (the meaningful life). In this paper, we maintain that balance in life contributes significantly to subjective well-being. Balance contributes to subjective well-being because of the satisfaction limit that people can derive from a single life domain. People have to be involved in multiple domains to satisfy the full spectrum of human development needs. Different life domains tend to focus on different human developmental needs. More specifically, balance contributes to subjective well-being because subjective well-being can only be attained when both survival and growth needs are met. High levels of subjective well-being cannot be attained with satisfaction of basic needs or growth needs alone. Both needs have to be met to induce subjective well-being.     

Beyond the medical model? Disability,formal justice,and the exception for the "profoundly impaired"

The formal justice model proposed by Anita Silvers in Disability, Discrimination, and Difference emphasizes the social model of disability and the need for full equality of opportunity, and it suggests that a distributive model of justice that gives special benefits to individuals with disabilities is self-defeating. Yet in that work, Silvers allows an exception for the "profoundly impaired." In this paper, I show how the formal justice theory falls short when it comes to defining and dealing with "profoundly impaired" individuals and explore the ways in which making the exception raises serious theoretical concerns for the grounding of the formal justice model.     

The “concept of time” and the “being of the clock”: Bergson, Einstein, Heidegger, and the interrogation of the temporality of modernism

The topic to be addressed in this paper, that is, the distinction between the “concept” of time and the being of the clock, divides into two parts: first, in the debate between Albert Einstein and Henri Bergson, one discovers the ground for the diverging concepts of time characterized by physics in its opposing itself to philosophy. Bergson’s durée or “duration” in opposition to Einstein’s ‘physicist’s time’ as ‘public time,’ one can argue, sets the terms for Martin Heidegger’s extending, his ontological analysis of Da-sein, as human being-in-the-world. Second, in this the ‘concept of time’ gives way to the analysis of the ‘being of the clock.’ What is this being of the clock that makes evident the fundamental temporality of Da-sein? This question is rehearsed in Division Two of Being and Time. My claim is that the fundamental insight into the nature of time revealed by the encounter between Bergson and Einstein is that time extemporizes itself. Temporality “is” not a being but a process that temporalizes itself, precisely because it “is not.”     

Healing the Wound: Rossi on Kantian Critique,Community, and the Remedies to the “Dear Self”

Philosophia - The main purpose of these introductory remarks is to give the reader a sense of Philip Rossi’s philosophical project and its importance (§§1-2). I will then advance an...