Putting the Protest Back into Protestant

When Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the Wittenberg Castle Church on 31 October 1517, he did so in protest at abuses in Catholic theology and practice. Contemporary times, too, call for protest. The first “protest” concerns the revitalization of education and an increased commitment to intellectual excellence. The second “protest” concerns a recovery of Luther as a figure of protest. While scholars have tamed Luther's dangerous doctrines, the popular imagination still perceives him as an urban legend who spoke truth to power. An expansive notion of scholarship on Luther is required in order to approach a Luther who continues to inspire people around the world. The third “protest” is a critical protest of Luther's religious intolerance, specifically his anti‐Judaism. Christian theologians must acknowledge Luther's anti‐Judaism as central to his theology and radically revise this legacy to promote justice in inter‐religious relations.     

Putting Religion Back Into Religious Ethics

This essay on Richard Miller’s Friends and Other Strangers (2016) locates its arguments in the context of how the practice of religious ethics bears upon debates about normativity in the study of religion and the cultural turn in the humanities. After reviewing its main claims about identity and otherness, I focus on three areas. First, while commending Miller’s effort to analogize virtuous empathy with Augustine’s ethics of rightly ordered love, I raise questions about his use of Augustine and his distinctive formulation of Augustinian “iconic realism.” Second, I suggest his discussion of public reason is at odds with the dialogical spirit of the book and may distract from the democratic solidarity required by our political moment. Third, more briefly, I highlight the practical implications of Miller’s vision for higher education at both the graduate and undergraduate level.     

Putting the Ghost Back in the Machine: An Exploration of Somatic Dualism

In this article, I explore various views on which mind–body dualism is true, but the soul is located in the body. I argue that this sort of dualism (which I call ‘somatic dualism’) once was a not‐uncommon view in the philosophy of mind. I also argue that it has the resources to reply to some of the problems thought to affect Cartesian dualism.     

Putting Imagination to Work: Commentary on Papers by Kenneth Eisold and Marc Maltz

Writing as one engaged in the enterprise, the author discusses critically the possibilities and limitations of psychoanalytic and post-Jungian theorizing in connection with consultancy work in the field of organizations and corporations. Slippage between the individual and more collective perspectives is inevitable and, though intellectually inadequate, may turn out to be useful. Often in such work, the paucity of many approaches to leadership available to consultants becomes apparent. The author contributes some ideas of his own concerning the “good-enough leader.” In the next section of his response, the author discusses whether these consultancy interventions are of any use or not, and concludes, broadly speaking, caveat emptor. Finally, specific ethical challenges inherent in psychoanalytic consultancy work are identified and explored.     

The "Humpty Dumpty Problem" in the Study of Early Cognitive Development: Putting the Infant Back Together Again

ABSTRACT— In this article, I propose that the big question for the field of infant cognitive development is best characterized as the "Humpty Dumpty problem": Now that we have studied cognitive abilities in isolation, how do we put the developing cognitive system (and the infant) back together again? This problem is significant because cognitive abilities do not occur in isolation. Infants remember the items they have attended to and perceived, and their emotional state will influence their perception and representation of the events they encounter. Moreover, by examining the development of the whole cognitive system, or the whole child, we gain a deeper understanding of mechanisms developmental change. Thus, the big question for the study of infant cognition is like the question confronting all the king's horses and all the king's men: How do we put the infant's cognitive system back together again?     

Imagination

This paper begins by examining a text in which one writer, Richard Ford, is discussing both the persona and the work of another writer, Raymond Carver. Ford's positive reaction to Carver provides us with a puzzle as to what the basis for it is. I suggest that what he is really admiring is a kind of originality that he detects in Carver. I try to specify the constitutive rules for the generation of this form of originality. They seem to take the form of at once being able to preserve what is valuable in existing material and yet managing to add what could be said to be missing. I then argue that, if Carver is doing this sort of work, so too is Ford. Having seen various examples of a kind of originality, I argue that the process we have been seeing might be formulated as the exercise of imagination, and address the issue of the possible significance of accomplishing such imaginative work. If, as many contemporary philosophers and workers in the human sciences have argued, there is no escape from the need for interpretation, there is a problem of what could ever be a satisfactory interpretation. I suggest that the idea or the possibility of an imaginative interpretation could be a way of providing such satisfaction.     

Putting order in the impossible

The class of visual illusions called 'impossible figures' (illusory spatial interpretations of pictures) is analyzed in order to introduce an ordering into the great variety of such figures. Such an ordering facilitates reference, unifies terminology, and establishes a conceptual framework for further investigations of the subject, making easier the choice and systematic generation of various types of figures (for example, in systematic psychological experiments). First, the notion of 'impossible figure' is defined and certain other related classes of figures (so-called 'likely' and 'unlikely' figures) are distinguished. Second, the fundamental 'impossibility sources' are identified as elementary 'building blocks' of all impossible figures. Finally, two broad classes of impossible figures, multibars (or 'impossible polygons') and striped figures, are briefly described.     

恶的想象力

Sartre’s “transcendence of the ego” means that consciousness is outside of the ego, that the ego is the “ego of the other”, and that the other is neither in consciousness nor in the ego. Sartre viewed “reflection” as a pure mood rather than as the substantial carrier of mood. The strangeness and absurdity of the world emerge from this reflection. Sartre’s “imagination of the evil” has two aspects. On the one hand, “evil” corresponds to the concept of the other, transcending the capacity for domination of the ego; on the other hand, imagination is related to the other in a broad sense, with the ability to transform “philistinism” and “evil” into marvels.     

Imagination and the imaginary

This paper argues that real imagination depends on the capacity to acknowledge the absence of what is imagined from the world of material actuality. This leads on to a view of symbol formation as the operation of the transcendent function between the opposites of presence and absence. 'The imaginary' is contrasted with this as a defensive misuse of imagination that attempts to deny 'negation' where negation is defined as all those aspects of the world that constitute a check to the omnipotence of fantasy--e.g., absence, loss, difference, otherness etc. Parallels are drawn with theoretical antecedents in analytical psychology and psychoanalysis, with particular attention to papers published in the Journal of Analytical Psychology (JAP) in the 1960s on the relation between active imagination, transference and ego development. A clinical example is given to show the use of the imaginary as a means of warding off the unbearable pain of Oedipal disappointment.     

More Aboutness in Imagination

Journal of Philosophical Logic - In Berto’s logic for aboutness in imagination, the output content of an imaginative episode must be part of the initial content of the episode (Berto, Philos...