THE RELATIONSHIP OF ‘EXCHANGE-ORIENTATION’ AND ‘COMMITMENT’ SCALES TO MARRIAGE ADJUSTMENT*

Believing that “exchange” and “commitment” are basic dimensions associated with marriage adjustment (MA), scales measuring these three dimensions were administered to 40 married couples. Exchange was predicted to be negatively correlated with MA, commitment positively associated with it, and an individual's exchange and commitment qualities were predicted to affect his partner's MA. The hypotheses were all supported. Further analyses, however, revealed that husbands' MA was more strongly associated with their own exchange and commitment scores than those of their wives. However, wives' MA was equally associated with their own and their husbands' exchange and commitment scores. The implications of this finding for women's position in marriage are discussed.     

‘A DESIRE UNTO DEATH’: THE DECONSTRUCTIVE THANATOLOGY OF JEAN‐LUC MARION*

One of the most persistent questions in modern theology has been that of how we can adequately acknowledge the stranger. Drawing upon the work of post‐Heideggerian theorist of language and death, Jacques Derrida, and his own creative re‐reading of Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas, the Catholic theologian and phenomenologist Jean‐Luc Marion has attempted to reconstruct what he regards as a genuinely Husserlian phenomenology. In so doing he has mapped out a phenomenology of love and a phenomenology of that divine gift as ‘being given as givenness’; that is, a condition of life itself. In fact, as I will argue, this rests on the boundary between theology and thanatology (the philosophy of our encounter with that most radical stranger, death) and in his recent reflections upon ‘saturated phenomena’ Marion has explored the interplay between traditional theological topics such as hope and death and contemporary arguments on meaning, symbol and ritual. Christian hope resides in an act of remembrance and Marion argues for the eucharist – in its recollection of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ – as the site of human hope; only this crucial eucharistic move upwards and outwards can overcome the burden of Western metaphysics. It is a literary move which takes us some way towards elevating the language which we use in talking about and recognising the other beyond that of the narrow model offered to us by some commentators of Levinas and one which encourages us to look again at poetry, hymn and Scripture.     

‘BORN AGAIN’ JEWS IN ISRAEL: THE DYNAMICS OF AN IDENTITY CHANGE*

Fifty-nine Israeli men who had switched to Orthodox Judaism and fifty-nine Israeli men who remained secular were the experimental and control groups of this study. The two groups, matched for several personal background variables, were interviewed and then filled out a biographical inventory and two questionnaires. Thirty measures were extracted and the two groups were compared on them. Significant differences were found in 14 of the measures. Those who had turned Orthodox showed higher scores on the F scale, and less identification with their parents. They were also lower in self-esteem and level of aspirations, and higher in their readiness to seek help. The findings are mostly consistent with results of research in other times and places, as reported by other authors.     

THE ‘EXTENDEDNESS’ OF SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE

In recent years, the idea has been gaining ground that our traditional conceptions of knowledge and cognition are unduly limiting, in that they privilege what goes on inside the ‘skin and skull’ (Clark 1997: 82) of an individual reasoner. Instead, it has been argued, knowledge and cognition need to be understood as embodied (involving both mind and body), situated (being dependent on the complex interplay between the individual and its environment), and extended (that is, continuous with, rather than separate from, the world ‘outside’). Whether these various interrelations and dependencies are ‘merely’ causal, or are in a more fundamental sense constitutive of knowledge and cognition, is as much a matter of controversy as the degree to which they pose a challenge to ‘traditional’ conceptions of cognition, knowledge and the mind. In this paper we argue that when the idea of ‘extendedness’ is applied to a core concept in epistemology and the philosophy of science—namely, scientific evidence—things appear to be on a much surer footing. The evidential status of data gathered through extended processes—including its utility as justification or warrant—do not seem to be weakened by virtue of being extended, but instead are often strengthened because of it. Indeed, it is often precisely by virtue of this extendedness that scientific evidence grounds knowledge claims, which individuals may subsequently ascribe to themselves. The functional equivalence between machine‐based gathering, filtering, and processing of data and human interpretation and assessment is the crucial factor in deciding whether evidence has been gathered, rather than the distinction between intra‐ and extracranial processes or individual and social processes (or combinations thereof). To prioritize biological processes here, and to assert the superiority of human cognitive capacities seems both arbitrary and unwarranted with respect to gathering evidence, and ultimately would lead to an unattractive skepticism about many of the methods used in science to gather evidence. In other words, conceiving of scientific evidence as ‘impersonal’ (or at least not necessarily personal) not only better captures the character of evidence‐gathering in practice, but also makes sense of a large amount of evidence‐gathering that ‘personal’ accounts fail to either acknowledge or accurately describe. Whilst we suggest it is likely that all internally‐distributed evidence‐gathering processes are merely contingently internal processes, a significant number of externally‐distributed evidence‐gathering processes are necessarily externally‐distributed. Some evidence can only be gathered by extended epistemic agents.     

THE ILLIBERALITY OF ‘LIBERAL EUGENICS’

This essay evaluates the moral logic of ‘liberal eugenics’: the ideal of genetic control which leaves decisions about what sort of people to produce in the hands of individual parents, absent government intervention. I argue that liberal eugenics cannot be justified on the basis of the underlying liberal theory which inspires it. I introduce an alternative to Rawls's social primary goods that might be called natural primary goods: hereditable mental and physical capacities and dispositions that are valued across a range of projects and pursuits. I suggest that reproductive genetic biotechnologies like embryo selection, cellular surgery, and genetic engineering, which aim to enhance ‘general purpose’ traits in offspring are less like childrearing practices a liberal government leaves to the discretion of parents than like practices the state makes compulsory. I argue that if the liberal commitment to autonomy is important enough for the state to mandate childrearing practices such as health care and basic education, that very same interest is important enough for the state to mandate safe, effective, and functionally integrated genetic practices that act on analogous all‐purpose traits such as resistance to disease and general cognitive functioning. I conclude that the liberal case for compulsory eugenics is a reductio against liberal theory.     

ON THE ‘FITTINGNESS’ OF THE VIRGIN BIRTH

In modern theology the doctrine of the Virgin Birth of Christ, including the doctrine of his Virginal Conception, has been the subject of considerable scepticism. One line of criticism has been that the traditional doctrine of the Virgin Birth seems unnecessary to the Incarnation. In this essay I lay out one construal of the traditional argument for the doctrine and show that, although one can offer an account of the Incarnation without the Virgin Birth which, in other respects, is perfectly in accord with catholic Christianity, such a doctrine is still contrary to the plain teaching of Scripture and the Creeds on the question of the mode of the Incarnation. It might still be thought that the Incarnation was an ‘unfitting’ means of Incarnation. In a final section I draw upon Anselm's arguments in defence of the Incarnation to show that this objection can also be overcome.     

THE ‘MEDEA FANTASY’: AN UNCONSCIOUS DETERMINANT OF PSYCHOGENIC STERILITY1

The author begins by pointing out that myths have always been powerful vehicles for the projection of ubiquitous unconscious fantasies. Having noted the importance of certain male protagonists of the Greek myths in Freud's theories, she observes that their female counterparts exert an equal fascination and suggests that the Medea myth as recounted by Euripides can be invoked to elucidate a central unconscious fantasy found to underlie the psychogenic frigidity and sterility of several of her female patients. The manifestation of this ‘Medea fantasy’ is illustrated by a clinical account in which a dream is analysed. The author next summarises the Medea story as told by Euripides and attempts a psychoanalytic interpretation of it. She draws attention to features of the ‘unconscious truth’ inherent in the myth that were shared by all the members of her group of patients. A case history then shows how the progressive understanding and working through of the Medea fantasy led to a change in the analysand's experience of femininity and enabled her to have children. It is postulated that both early infantile sexual fantasies and repressed memories of early objectrelations traumas such as maternal depression combine with ubiquitous bodily fantasies to produce the unconscious Medea fantasy.