Cinema,Philosophy and Education

Studies in Philosophy and Education - This special issue responds to the current discourse on cinema and education from a philosophical point of view. Considering the fact that young people...     

Levinas,Rosenzweig and the Deformalization of Time: Toward an Ethical Destruction of the Schematism

This essay reveals the destructive possibility inherent in the deformalization of the Kantian notion of time governing Levinas' engagement with Rosenzweig. It demonstrates that this programme of deformalization not only retains Rosenzweig's idea that the abstract aspects of time can be deformalized, and thus grounded concretely, in the biblical events of temporality, but also moves toward an ethical destruction of the schematism understood as an exposition of the temporality of the Other which can be distinguished essentially as a threefold grounding of time in the Kantian sense. This unique connection between the temporality of the Other and this ethical destruction of the schematism is then developed according to the ontological destruction of the schematism in Heidegger's exposition of the problematic of temporality on the one hand, and to the repetition or renewal of this temporal problematic of the schematism in Levinas' deformalization of the Kantian notion of time on the other. The essay concludes that this deformalization does indeed reopen the same temporal problematic, the destruction of the transcendental schematism in and through the exposition of ecstatic-horizonal temporality. It therefore repeats the threefold grounding of time in the Kantian sense. The conclusion ends with an invitation to consider Levinas' reading of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason as the possible terrain upon which this renewed temporal problematic unfolds in its entirety, and thus consequently, as rendering possible an ethical interpretation of the Critique of Pure Reason which surpasses the ontological limits of Heidegger's own interpretation.     

Framed writing of argumentative monologues by sixteen-and seventeen-year-old students

When 16- and 17-year-old students are required to write a framed argumentative text which first supports position A and then supports an opposing position B, the familiarity of the debated topic seems to determine the argumentative quality of the texts produced. Indeed, the possibility of getting personally involved in the discourse leads to more effective writing strategies and to the use of typical marks of argumentation.     

Actors,observers, and the attribution process: Toward a reconceptualization

Jones and Nisbett hypothesize that actors attribute their actions to situational requirements whereas observers attribute the same actions to personal dispositions. This hypothesis is critically examined and a reconceptualization is proposed. Our conceptual analysis focuses on the attributional consequences of differences between actors and observers in: (a) availability of information about the contemporary and historical determinants of the actor's behavior, and (b) susceptibility to possible motivational distortions and cognitive biases. The relationship between this formulation and Jones and Nisbett's analysis of differences between self-perception and interpersonal perception is discussed.     

Object Relations,Affects, and Drives: Toward a New Synthesis

This paper summarizes my efforts to develop a contemporary psychoanalytic theory of drives, integrating this theory with contemporary affect theory and with psychoanalytic object relations theory. It proposes, in essence, that affects are the primary motivations of behavior, that they include a fundamental communicative function in the infant/caregiver relationship, and that it is the integration of, respectively, positive and negative affects that will crystallize libido and aggression as supraordinate motivational systems or drives. At the same time, insofar as peak affect states organize the internalization of the relationship between self and objects in the form of affect-invested self and object representations, affects are also contributing fundamentally to the organization of an internalized world of object relations, eventually consolidated in the tripartite structure of the mind.

This proposed interrelationship of affects, self- and object representations, and drives rejects the assumption of incompatibility of drive theory and object relations theory and provides potential bridging functions with the neurobiology of affects.     

Job stress,emotion, and work environment: Toward a causal model

Based on a theoretical job stress model, a causal structure linking antecedent variables, intervening processes, and a physiological response variable has been proposed. Antecedent variables comprise work environment, trait-anxiety, age and weight. Cognitive appraisal processes are conceived as intervening variables that may be assessed by two questionnaire scales ‘General Job Pressure’ and ‘General Job Dissatisfaction’. It is hypothesized that job pressure results from an accumulation of negative conditions, whereas job dissatisfaction arises from a lack of positive conditions. The model was tested by a sample of 98 male Ss involved in different occupations. Emotions were incorporated into the model assuming that job pressure leads to emotional reactions of anxiety and anger, while job dissatisfaction is connected with anger only. The total model was supported by the data, although consistent relationships of work environment with job stress variables could not be established. The personality and emotion measures displayed relations expected with the subjective job stress variables. There was no relationship between blood pressure and the variables associated with stress or emotion. The results are interpreted within the theoretical framework of a general job stress model.     

自然、文化和自然遗产：走向自然之文化

人们常把自然和文化看作是对立的。按这一看法,自然因为文化的发展或作用而逐渐衰落。人们需要根据“文化景观”的概念,对这两个术语间的关系进行新的分析。通过分析认识到,即使承认文化结构的创建作用,也可把自然视为是一重要的、独特的范畴。谈论并且追求自然的文化是明智的,所以人们不必把文化和自然考虑成彼此对立的,这些思考对自然遗产的保护具有重要的意义。     

Toward a research-informed,evidence-based psychoanalytic supervision

The first paper on the subject of an analyst's pregnancy appeared more than 50 years ago, and was followed by a complete silence on the subject for the following 17 years. Slowly, a few substantial papers began to emerge, and there has been a gradual expansion in this area of the psychoanalytic literature particularly over the past 25 years, so that by now we have at least 60 papers on the subject, several chapters in books, and at least one complete book that I am aware of. There is of course a substantial separate literature on the subject of pregnancy itself, which is of direct relevance to an understanding of the subject of the analyst's pregnancy. In addition, the literature on special events in the course of therapy is pertinent to the subject too. I have limited my own review of the literature specifically to that related to the analyst's pregnancy but I have included all the references I could trace in the bibliography at the end of this issue.

I have grouped the papers to some extent around key areas of interest as they emerge from the whole literature. In particular, I have noted that the earliest papers began to outline some generic responses to the analyst's pregnancy, ranging in intensity from supposedly minor turbulence in men to intense transference storms in women. The early papers seem to have regarded pregnancy solely as an interference in the treatment process. Later papers began to place more emphasis on the analyst's countertransference response and to acknowledge that the therapist herself is confronted at this time with issues involving her own identity, integration of new roles, maternal identification and redefinition of important relationships in her own life. At the same time she is having to find a way of functioning as an analyst in the face of intensified transference reactions. If the analyst can negotiate the challenges to her own pre-existing psychological equilibrium which pregnancy confronts her with, she will be better placed to address the stormy period in therapy which her pregnancy is likely to provoke in her patients, and some therapeutic gains can be made over this phase of the analysis.

Later papers attempt to differentiate male from female responses to the pregnancy, and the demarcation is not surprisingly found to track psychosexual development along familiar gender lines. Examination of responses of homosexual patients, whether male or female, emphasizes the point. In addition, attempts to differentiate responses to the event according to the core psychopathology in the patient, confirm the pattern of anxieties and defences to be expected in particular configurations.

A few papers examine the responses of patients to the therapist's pregnancy in different treatment modalities, and although there is some evidence to suggest that patients having group treatment are more likely to present with issues of sexual curiosity, sexual identity, or sibling rivalry, compared with patients in individual therapy, in the final analysis all patients confirm a core complex of fear of abandonment and feelings of loss of the fantasized exclusive mother-infant relationship.

There is very little discussion in the literature on the impact of an analyst's absence due to unsuccessful pregnancies and it is postulated that this remains an area of great difficulty for the patient and the analyst, to the extent that it is almost obliterated. I can find only three papers on this topic. However, a few papers are published on the patients' responses to an analyst who has had two pregnancies. While this constitutes a particularly complex challenge to both patient and analyst, the overview suggests that there are additional therapeutic gains to be made in terms of working through, in the course of the second pregnancy.

Numerous authors address the subject of the inevitable changes in technique that follow from the fact of the analyst's pregnancy. Some of these changes are felt to be directly related to the physical and psychological changes with which the therapist is confronted at this time, and by association so is her patient. The more these changes can be acknowledged by the therapist, within herself, the more likely it is that she will be able to continue to function as an analyst. It is also apparent that the role of the supervisor is of particular importance during and immediately following this life-changing event (Imber 1995 Goldberger, M, Gillman, R, Levinson, N, Notman, M, Seeling, B and Shaw, R. 2003. On supervising the pregnant psychoanalytic candidate. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 72: 439–463. [Taylor &; Francis Online] , [Google Scholar], Goldberger et al. 2003) and this is described in some detail in these two recent papers.     

Toward a Science of Other Minds: Escaping the Argument by Analogy

Since Darwin, the idea of psychological continuity between humans and other animals has dominated theory and research in investigating the minds of other species. Indeed, the field of comparative psychology was founded on two assumptions. First, it was assumed that introspection could provide humans with reliable knowledge about the causal connection between specific mental states and specific behaviors. Second, it was assumed that in those cases in which other species exhibited behaviors similar to our own, similar psychological causes were at work. In this paper, we show how this argument by analogy is flawed with respect to the case of second‐order mental states. As a test case, we focus on the question of how other species conceive of visual attention, and in particular whether chimpanzees interpret seeing as a mentalistic event involving internal states of perception, attention, and belief. We conclude that chimpanzees do not reason about seeing in this manner, and indeed, there is considerable reason to suppose that they do not harbor representations of mental states in general. We propose a reinterpretation model in which the majority of the rich social behaviors that humans and other primates share in common emerged long before the human lineage evolved the psychological means of interpreting those behaviors in mentalistic terms. Although humans, chimpanzees, and most other species may be said to possess mental states, humans alone may have evolved a cognitive specialization for reasoning about such states.     

Social context,student's motivation,and academic achievement: Toward a process model

The purpose of the present research was to propose and test a motivational process model of academic achievement. The model posits that parental, teachers, and school administration support for students' autonomy positively influences students' perceived school competence and autonomy. In turn, perceived school competence and autonomy affect positively self-determined school motivation which in turn influences academic achievement. Two studies using a prospective design tested the adequacy of the model. In Study I, participants were 1,623 ninth-grade students. Results from structural equation modeling supported the motivational model. Participants in Study 2 were 1,098 tenth-grade students. Results from this study corroborated those of Study 1 controlling for students' prior achievement in the ninth grade. The role of self-determinod school motivation in academic achievement is discussed and avenues for future research are considered. This research is part of a larger project that is being funded by grants from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation; the San Francisco Foundation; the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation; the Danforth Foundation; the Smart Foundations; the Pew Charitable Trusts; the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; the Annenberg Foundation; Spunk Fund, Inc.; the DeWitt Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund, Inc.; Louise and Claude Rosenberg; and the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The views expressed in the paper are those of the authors and not necessarily of the funders. We are grateful to the many educators, students, and colleagues who cooperated with us on this project and to several anonymous reviewers who provided helpful suggestions.     

Race,Aesthetics, and Shelter: Toward a Postcolonial Historical Taxonomy of Buildings

This article proposes that one source of deep‐rooted prejudices among peoples derives from their fundamental lifeways respectively as settled or peripatetic. Although the advantage in the present is clearly with settled, notably urban, peoples, that is no reason either to project an attitude of superiority into consideration of the past or to assume inherent superiority in the present. Building types characterize these fundamentally different lifeways, and settled peoples unthinkingly assume the superiority not only of their own building types but of a small subset thereof conceived as architecture, conceived as the work, principally, of the mind rather than the hand. This article proposes a fundamental historical taxonomy on grounds of function—the provision of shelter—of buildings of all types employed by both settled and peripatetic peoples, from tents to temples. Although the antagonism between settled and peripatetic peoples, based on different conceptions of the land, rests on their fundamental differences in lifeways, including building practices, those differences are often entangled with racial considerations.     

Social context,student's motivation,and academic achievement: Toward a process model

The purpose of the present research was to propose and test a motivational process model of academic achievement. The model posits that parental, teachers, and school administration support for students' autonomy positively influences students' perceived school competence and autonomy. In turn, perceived school competence and autonomy affect positively self-determined school motivation which in turn influences academic achievement. Two studies using a prospective design tested the adequacy of the model. In Study I, participants were 1,623 ninth-grade students. Results from structural equation modeling supported the motivational model. Participants in Study 2 were 1,098 tenth-grade students. Results from this study corroborated those of Study 1 controlling for students' prior achievement in the ninth grade. The role of self-determinod school motivation in academic achievement is discussed and avenues for future research are considered.     

Technology,gender, and history: Toward a nonlinear model of social evolution

This paper presents a new nonlinear cognitive map of social evolution— sharply departing from the conventional 19th century‐based theories of linear stages from barbarism to civilization. It draws from a data base that includes the whole of humanity (both its female and male halves). And it takes into account new data from archaeology indicating that civilization is not only thousands of years older than previously thought, but originally oriented more closely to what the author calls a Partnership rather than a Dominator model of social organization. Covering over 25,000 years of social history, this article charts major technological phase changes—from the agricultural revolution circa 10,000 years ago to the industrial and more recently electronic revolutions or modern times—from the perspective of the tension between the Dominator and Partnership models. Most critically, it shows how the present period of social disequilibrium leads us to either an evolutionary breakdown or breakthrough, with the determining factor not technology per se, but rather how effectively and quickly we shift to a social organization orienting primarily to partnership rather than domination.