Movement as a creative form: Comment on S. Higgins' ‘Movement as an emergent form: its structural limits’

‘Movement as an emergent form’ (Higgins 1985) presents an eloquent argument for considering the dynamic interaction between a system and its surround. The purpose of this paper is to argue that where human movement is concerned the system, being imperfect, is less bounded by its environment and more guided by its ‘internal’ creative talent.     

Family therapy research: Comment on “research as a family therapy intervention technique”

Wright's emphasis on and illustration of the use of family therapy research as a unique intervention technique for therapy is an important contribution to the practice literature. Equally important, however, is the isomorphic shift in focus of the family therapy researcher. Rather than focusing only on process or outcome research, family therapists should become more interested in their clients as research subjects. Though rarely discussed in the family therapy literature, the competencies of family therapists as researchers and the utility of research in a family therapy context is critical to being a well-rounded professional. Examples are provided of how this emphasis is being introduced in a PhD family therapy program.     

Theology as a human science: Reflections on Gadamer’s Truth and Method

Abstract

Gadamer’s attempt to ’rehabilitate tradition in general clarifies that which theology and the human sciences have in common since he claims that the rehabilitation of tradition is crucial for all human science enquiry. His systematic unfolding of the hermeneutical process described in Truth and Method is discussed under three headings: The meaning of tradition and how the idea of tradition may be rehabilitated; how do we know in the human sciences? and, the nature of theological reflection as part of the human sciences. Gadamer’s hermeneutics helps to transcend the antithesis between reason and tradition. It offers a more appropriate way to understand cultural and historical texts and broadens the purview of the human sciences. It is within this broader understanding of the human sciences that theological reflection comes to itself.     

Generalised Chronic Musculoskeletal Pain as a Rational Reaction to a Life Situation?

While the biomedical model is still theleading paradigm within modern medicine and healthcare, and people with generalised chronicmusculoskeletal pain are frequent users of health careservices, their diagnoses are rated as having thelowest prestige among health care personnel. Anepistemological framework for understanding relationsbetween body, emotions, mind and meaning is presented.An approach based on a phenomenological epistemologyis discussed as a supplement to actions based on thebiomedical model.Within the phenomenological frame of understanding,the body is viewed as a subject and carrier ofmeaning, and therefore chronic pain can be interpretedas a rational reaction to the totality of a person'slife situation. Search for possible hidden individualmeanings in painful muscles presupposes meeting healthpersonnel who view the person within a holistic frameof reference.     

Empathy as a buffer: How empathy moderates the emotional effects on Preschoolers’ sharing

This study experimentally investigated how empathy moderated the influence of external emotional stimuli on preschoolers’ subsequent sharing behaviour. Children aged 4–6 (N = 218) were randomly presented with one of the video clips that elicited sad, happy, or neutral emotion, and were then asked to play a dictator game with puppet partners. Results revealed that compared to the neutral condition, children with higher empathy increased sharing after induced happiness but did not change sharing after induced sadness; by contrast, children with lower empathy decreased sharing after induced sadness. It appears that empathy may enhance the positive effect of happiness while reducing the negative effect of sadness on sharing behaviour. These findings provide experimental evidence in early childhood to support approaches that emphasize the role of immediate emotions in moral decision-making; critically, such emotional effects vary with individual differences in dispositional empathy.     

Constrained Choice: Children's and Adults’ Attribution of Choice to a Humanoid Robot

Young children, like adults, understand that human agents can flexibly choose different actions in different contexts, and they evaluate these agents based on such choices. However, little is known about children's tendencies to attribute the capacity to choose to robots, despite increased contact with robotic agents. In this paper, we compare 5- to 7-year-old children's and adults’ attributions of free choice to a robot and to a human child by using a series of tasks measuring agency attribution, action prediction, and choice attribution. In morally neutral scenarios, children ascribed similar levels of free choice to the robot and the human, while adults were more likely to ascribe free choice to the human. For morally relevant scenarios, however, both age groups considered the robot's actions to be more constrained than the human's actions. These findings demonstrate that children and adults hold a nuanced understanding of free choice that is sensitive to both the agent type and constraints within a given scenario.     

Comment on Hans-Peter Krüger’s paper

Abstract

In my Mind and World I appeal to second nature, which, according to Hans-Peter Kru¨ger, plays a central role in Plessner's philosophical anthropology. But I think this convergence is less significant than Kru¨ger suggests.This note differentaties my purpose–to disarm the temptation to think perceptual experience, natural as it is, could not figure in what Sellars called “the space of reasons”–from Plessner's, which is to disarm the temptation to hope for an ahistorical insight into what is properly authoritative over the shape of our lives,     

Comment on Björn Sahlberg’s paper

This paper is a comment on Björn Sahlberg’s paper on the function of training analysis in the Swedish psychoanalytic association and discusses some aspects of the candidates’ personal analysis and supervision. The paper further suggests some possible sources for inspiration and perspective on organizational and educational issues, for example taking an interest in the epistemology of professions, in what the concept of ‘reflection-in-action’ could mean in the training situation, or in empirical research about the educational models and the practice of psychoanalysis.     

Community Narrative as a Borderlands Praxis: Anzaldúa’s Mestiza Consciousness as Explored in Cortez’s Sexile

Journal of Medical Humanities - I apply Gloria Anzaldúa’s “borderlands theory” to Jamie Cortez’s Sexile, an HIV/AIDS prevention publication created as a...     

Soames on Russell’s logic: a reply

In “What is History For?,” Scott Soames responds to criticisms of his treatment of Russell’s logic in volume 1 of his Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century. This note rebuts two of Soames’s replies, showing that a first-order presentation of Russell’s logic does not fit the argument of the Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, and that Soames’s contextual definition of classes does not match Russell’s contextual definition of classes. In consequence, Soames’s presentation of Russell’s logic misrepresents what Russell took to be its technical achievement and its philosophical significance.     

Erratum: Comment: What's in a name?

Erratum . New Blackfriars Volume 86, Number 1004
In this article by Fergus Kerr in Volume 86, Number 1004, July 2005: - p. 360, line 5 of text: 'He reaffirms his predecessor's condemnation of "Modernism" (he is said to have found a document delating himself in the papal in-tray); but, by these "new terms"' should read: 'He reaffirms his predecessor's condemnation of "Modernism" (he is said to have found a document delating himself in the papal in-tray); but, by these "new terms", he means the categorization of Catholics as "modernists" and "integrists".'     

Weltanschauung as a priori: sociology of knowledge from a ‘romantic’ stance

In this paper I reconstruct the central concept of the young Lukács??s and Mannheim??s sociology of knowledge, as they present it in their writings in the early decades of the twentieth century. I argue that this concept, namely Weltanschauung, is used to refer to some conceptually unstructured totality of feelings, which they take to be a condition of possibility of intellectual production, and this understanding is contrasted to an alternative construal of the term that presents it as logically structured, quasi-theoretical background knowledge. This concept has Kantian reminiscences: it is a condition of possibility of intellectual production in general. The young Mannheim and Lukács rely on ??Weltanschauung?? so understood as a phenomenon mediating between the facts of society and individual intellectual production and reception: it is seen as being conditioned by sociological facts and therefore as a historical and sociological category through which, and therefore indirectly, society enters into intellectual production.