Royaumont Revisited

Michael Dummett has claimed that the only way to establish communication between the analytic and Continental schools of philosophy is to go back to their point of divergence in Frege and the early Husserl. In this paper, I try to show that Dummett's claim is false. I examine in detail the discussions at the infamous 1958 Royaumont Colloquium on analytic philosophy. Many – including Dummett – believe that these discussions underscore the futility of attempting to bridge the gap between Continental and analytical philosophies in anything like their current shapes. I argue, however, that a close study of the Royaumont proceedings rather reveals how close some of the analytical speakers were to some of their Continental listeners.     

Love,money and madness: Money in the economic philosophies of Adam Smith and Jean-Jacques Rousseau

In this paper, the economic philosophies of Adam Smith (1723–1790) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) are discussed, with special reference to their respective views on money. It is argued that self-love plays an important role in their philosophies of money. For Smith, self-love is the foundation of economic activity and a means to quantify exchange relations. Rousseau, in turn, rejects money because of the possibility that it may give rise to destructive and narcissistic forms of self-love—which he calls amour-propre. It seems that Smith's and Rousseau's views of money are in opposition to each other; however, both argue that their view of money becomes unsustainable, if not qualified, by the embedded tension present in self-love. For Smith, self-love must remain in tension with sympathy for the economy to function, as discussed in his Theory of Moral Sentiments. Rousseau concedes that in society both amour-propre and amour de soi (passionate, sacrificial love) are necessary. This tension introduces a moment of madness that may have important implications when contemporary philosophies of economics engage issues such as economic inequality and poverty.     

Deus Ludus: The Christocentric Games of Nicholas of Cusa and Blaise Pascal

Nicholas of Cusa and his daringly speculative theology seem odd matches for Blaise Pascal, the constant critic of the philosophies en vogue during his life. A commonality they share is their mutual concern for the apparent disproportion between the infinite God and the finite human. In this paper, I compare and analyse the shape this question takes in Cusanus's De ludo globi and Pascal's Pensées. Both men observe a sort of ‘ludic’ character inherent to the pursuit of bridging finite and infinite. Cusanus's ‘ball game’ realises the universe and the human being's pursuit of salvation as a circular field in which the player seeks to reach the vanishing point of its centre. Pascal likewise portrays human life as a cosmic game that everyone must ‘play’ with their ethical decisions. Ultimately, they both come to register Christ as the agent and object of their games, the divine player who fashions finitude into infinity. I conclude by sketching a way to reconcile Pascal with natural theology based on his universal game.     

Integration or Sealing-Over. A Pilot Study of Coping Strategies of Severely Traumatised Patients

This article is an attempt to begin to weave together Freud's work - on dreams here envisioned as the original model for virtual reality - and from Fromm's work - on the impact of the market on personality. The contributions of these two psychoanalysts provide a necessary dual foundation for an understanding of emerging aspects of human psychology that are evolving, at the beginning of the 21st Century, alongside the profound influence of the electronically driven global market. It is time for psychoanalysis to engage more fully in the study of cultural forces. While it is easy to disregard dreams, both in the general culture and of late in psychoanalysis itself, dreams and their interpretation have always been central in human living, in the development of religion and in the birth of psychoanalysis as our own secular religion. Dreams, in their disembodiment and in their fluidity of information transformations have served as one model for developments within cyber culture and virtual living. The destruction of nature is seen as an underlying theme in the development of compatible relativist-subjectivist philosophies and in the growth of cyberculture. Thus, Freud's insights into dreams and Fromm's into the marketing personality are both crucial to an understanding of major contemporary forces.     

Holistic movement practices – An emerging category of physical activity for exercise psychology

BackgroundExercise psychology has an interest in physical activity behaviour and the psychological dimensions of physical activity delivery and outcomes. Holistic movement practices (HMPs) can be defined as physical practices embedded in holistic philosophies of well-being. As such, they go beyond what is typically offered in exercise contexts to purposefully include mental, emotional, social and/or spiritual components. Traditional Eastern movement practices (e.g., Yoga, Tai Chi, Qigong) are examples of HMPs, but a range of lesser known “Western-born” HMPs (e.g., 5Rhythms, Biodanza) also exist. HMPs have not yet received much structured attention within exercise psychology.ObjectiveTo analyse the nature of HMPs and discuss their relevance to the field of exercise psychology, with a view to raising awareness of HMPs within exercise psychology as well as encouraging and supporting future research.ContentWe discuss what we see as commonalities among HMPs and argue that it is useful to treat HMPs as a category of physical activity for exercise psychology, not only because they are forms of physical activity but also because psychological dimensions are an integral and purposeful part of these practices. We provide a tentative conceptualization of HMP philosophies, with brief examples, and consider how exercise psychology's subfields of participation behaviour, delivery parameters, outcomes, and mechanisms are applicable to the study of HMPs. Last, we briefly explore research issues, including HMPs' multicomponent nature, selected potential mechanisms, and methodologies.ConclusionHMPs are part of the leisure-based physical activities landscape in many modern societies, and deserve attention by exercise psychologists. Their embeddedness in holistic philosophies and multicomponent nature provide unique opportunities and challenges for research in exercise psychology.     

A Systems Approach to Perception and Action

ABSTRACT

On the 50th anniversary of its publication, we look back on some of the intellectual contributions of Gibson's (1966) The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems. This work is often seen as contributing a new perspective to our understanding of the 5 senses. In this paper, we explore another intellectual contribution: Gibson's treatment of perception–action as an irreducible, functional system. We review select examples of systems thinking from the physical, animal, and human social domains. Our suggestion is that a systems-level approach to social interactions would have been a natural extension of Gibson's ideas.     

Narratives of trauma,recovery, and growth: The complex role of sport following permanent acquired disability

ObjectivesThe purpose of this study was to explore how participation in sport may assist an individual in working through experiences of physical trauma.DesignAn instrumental, collective case study was used to illustrate the experiences of two men with acquired disabilities.MethodBoth men participated in sport at a high level and suggested that participation was a central feature of their recovery from trauma. Interviews invited participants to describe their lives pre-trauma, the trauma experience, and the recovery process. A narrative analysis was used to focus on the progression of the plot outlined in each participant's story.ResultsOur results exemplify two narrative types: assimilation and positive accommodation. The narrative of positive accommodation demonstrates how sport provided mastery experiences, enhanced relationships, corporeal understanding and enhanced life philosophies. The alternative narrative of assimilation was associated with resilience to trauma. Our case illustrates that such a narrative may be focused on re-capturing previous life meanings and creating an athletic identity using past definitions of sport.ConclusionWhile the narrative of positive accommodation is most frequently associated with posttraumatic growth, our case outlines the occurrence of synchronous positive and negative experiences, even within the same dimensions of growth. The narrative of assimilation demonstrates the challenges presented by the rehabilitation and sporting environments for an individual who aimed to restore their pre-trauma self and pre-trauma beliefs.     

Posttraumatic Response and Children Exposed to Parental Violence

Summary

In this article some of the literature on children's responses to natural and person-created trauma are discussed. In addition, data relevant to children's posttraumatic response as a result of exposure to interparental violence are presented. Using a factor analytic procedure, the study attempted to examine how the DSM-IV symptom clusters for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder come together for this sample of children. General suggestions are made regarding possible intervention with exposed children experiencing posttraumatic symptoms.     

Elementary schoolchildren's perceived competence and physical activity involvement: the influence of parents' role modelling behaviours and perceptions of their child's competence

ObjectivesTo study the influence of fathers' and mothers' physical activity involvement and perceptions of their children's physical competence upon children's perceptions of competence and children's time spent in physical activity. Two forms of parental socialization influence were assessed: the direct influence of parents' actual physical activity (PA) behaviour (role modelling) on children's physical activity and the indirect influence of parents' beliefs systems about their children's PA competence on children's physical activity through children's self perceptions.MethodsLongitudinal, with data from 152 French children (M=9.5 yrs, SD=0.8 yrs) and their parents collected at two times over a 12-month period and examined through structural equation modelling (SEM).ResultsSEM indicated that mothers' role modelling behaviour had a direct effect on children's time spent in PA and that mothers' beliefs about their child's competence had an indirect effect on children's PA by influencing children's perceived competence which, in turn, contributed to children's level of physical activity involvement. Fathers' beliefs directly influenced their child's PA as did the children's own self-perceptions of competence.ConclusionsParents can affect their children's PA involvement in direct and indirect manners through their role modelling of physical activity and through their beliefs about their child's competence. Furthermore, the influence of fathers and mothers may be manifested in different ways. Father and mother could influence their child's PA by different processes.     

Is Xunzi a utilitarian? Revisiting a disagreement

ABSTRACT

In Chinese scholarship, Xunzi is often regarded as an eclectic Confucian master who accepted some form of utilitarian thoughts (e.g. Fung Yu-lan, Mou Zongsan and Xu Fuguan). This characteristic was also observed by some western scholars such as Benjamin I. Schwartz. In a recent study, I argued that the basic character of Xunzi’s philosophy is utilitarianism in a broad sense based on an examination on his intellectual criticism and political criticism. Xunzi asserts that humans are innately driven by self-interested desires, and he evaluates all intellectual works and political behaviours by their utility. However, he does not limit utility to only basic animal desires such as food and sex. In Xunzi’s view, humans also have innate emotions; hence, these emotions should also be accounted for in their utility. This is similar to John Stuart Mill’s redefinition of Bentham’s concept of utility. Are Xunzi’s and Mill’s concepts of utility exactly the same? This question has yet to be examined. This article is a comparative study between utilitarianism and Xunzi’s philosophy which especially explores the compatibility of these two philosophies.     

Investigating Inter-Christian and Intercultural Couples Associated with the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America: A Qualitative Research Project

This qualitative research project described individual, marital, and family challenges from the perspective of 376 intermarried respondents associated with the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America. Participants' observations generally suggested that their religious and cultural differences enriched their own and their family's well-being. However, some participants described pervasive and lingering unresolved couple disagreements linked to their religious and cultural differences. These differences seemed to have a decidedly negative impact on individual, couple, and family well-being. Clinical implications suggest that intermarried couples' different religious and cultural backgrounds may be interconnected to the presenting problem(s) of couples.     

Temporal Externalsm,Natural Kind Terms,and Scientifically Ignorant Communities

Abstract

Temporal externalism (TE) is the thesis (defended by Jackman (1999)) that the contents of some of an indvidual's thoughts and utterances at time t may be determined by linguistic developments subsequent to t. TE has received little discussion so far, Brown (2000) and Stoneham (2002) being exceptions. I defend TE by arguing that it solves several related problems concerning the extension of natural kind terms in scientifically ignorant communities. Gary Ebbs (2000) argues that no theory can reconcile our ordinary, practical judgments of sameness of extension over time with the claim that linguistic usage determines word extensions. I argue that Ebbs shows at most that no theory other than TE can effect this reconciliation. Furthermore, while Ebbs' argument undermines Jessica Brown's solutions to two closely related problems about natural kind term extensions (Brown 1998), TE can solve both problems without difficulty. Some criticisms of TE are briefly addressed as well.     

McDowell’s Alternative Conceptions of the World

Abstract

Feminists have interpreted Rousseau's attitudes to women as characteristic of a patriarchal ideology in which passion, nature and love are associated with the feminine and repressed in favour of masculine reason, culture and justice. Yet this reading does not cohere with Rousseau's adulation of nature, nor with the repression of writing and culture in favour of natural speech which Derrida finds in his texts. This paper uses Rousseau's accounts of his personal experiences to resolve this conflict and to develop a more complex understanding of Rousseau's attitudes to women. The reading emphasizes that Rousseau operated with a triadic picture in which reason, the passions of the heart and the passions of the body are distinguished. The discussion of Derrida's reading of Rousseau gives rise to some reflections on the relationship of speech and writing to subjectivity, autonomy and women's oppression.     

Evolution and Providence: Discovering Creation as Carmen Dei

Abstract

Bonaventure describes the natural world as carmen Dei (song of God) that humanity should be able to detect through philosophical wisdom. Many contemporary evolutionary biologists, however, present the natural world as an argument against God's existence. Evolution is deemed incompatible with Providence and natural causes competitively exclusive of divine ones. These arguments against God are not proper to science, but to scientism. This purported conflict between evolution and faith is overcome by respecting the epistemological boundaries among science, philosophy, and theology, understanding creation as ontological dependence, and having a non-contrastive divine transcendence, in which God's transcendence does not oppose God's immanence.     

Sartre and Bergson: A Disagreement about Nothingness

Abstract

Henri Bergson's philosophy, which Sartre studied as a student, had a profound but largely neglected influence on his thinking. In this paper I focus on the new light that recognition of this influence throws on Sartre's central argument about the relationship between negation and nothingness in his Being and Nothingness. Sartre's argument is in part a response to Bergson's dismissive, eliminativist account of nothingness in Creative Evolution (1907): the objections to the concept of nothingness with which Sartre engages are precisely those raised by Bergson. Even if Sartre's account of nothingness in its entirety is found to be flawed, I argue that the points he makes specifically against Bergson are powerful.

My discussion concludes with a brief examination of the wider philosophical background to Sartre's and Bergson's discussion of nothingness: here I point to some important aspects of Sartre's early philosophy, including some features of his conception of nothingness, that may testify to Bergson's positive influence on his thought.     

On-court position and handedness in visual anticipation of stroke direction in tennis

ObjectivesIn racket sports, players integrate information picked up from their opponent's kinematics and contextual cues like on-court position into shot outcome anticipation. In view of suggested difficulties with anticipating left-handed opponents' action intentions, here we examined whether an opponent's handedness interacts with position-dependency in visual anticipation.Design and methodFollowing a 2 (Group) x 2 (Handedness) x 2 (Position) x 3 (Temporal Occlusion) factorial design, 20 tennis players and 20 non-players predicted directional outcome of temporally manipulated point-light animations of identical left- and right-handed forehand groundstrokes performed near vs. far from the court's midline.ResultsTennis players' response selection was mostly affected by an opponent's on-court position, particularly at an early stage of a hitting movement. Opponents' handedness affected response selection similarly in both groups (i.e., bias towards down-the-line predictions against left-handed strokes occluded at racket-ball-contact), but it did not interact with on-court position.ConclusionsFindings highlight that on-court position, and opponents' handedness to some extent as well, appears relevant for skilled visual anticipation in tennis.     

Depressive symptoms and use of perspective taking within a communicative context

Objective: The ability to take the perspective of one's conversational partner is essential for successful communication. We assessed whether individuals who report high levels of depressive symptoms have more difficulty with navigating this interpersonal task. Method: Undergraduate students participated in a computerised communication task that, on some trials, required perspective taking (N=125). Results: When participants were grouped according to their self-reported depressive symptoms, the “dysphoric group” (BDI ≥ 16, n=37) showed more errors than a “non-dysphoric group” (BDI ≤ 10, n=56) on trials requiring participants to use the perspective of the speaker, but not on control trials where perspective taking was not required. The dysphoric group demonstrated slower response times overall. Conclusions: Individuals with moderate to high levels of depressive symptoms are more challenged by using a speaker's perspective to interpret statements.     

The Paradox of Inwardness in Kant and Kierkegaard

Aside from bioethics, the main theme of Ronald Green's lifework has been an exploration of the relation between religion and morality, with special emphasis on the philosophies of Immanuel Kant and Søren Kierkegaard. This essay summarizes and assesses his work on this theme by examining, in turn, four of his relevant books. Religious Reason (1978) introduced a new method of comparative religion based on Kant's model of a rational religion. Religion and Moral Reason (1988) expanded on this project, clarifying that religious traditions cannot be reduced to their moral grounding. Kierkegaard and Kant: The Hidden Debt (1992) offered bold new evidence that Kant, not Hegel, was the philosopher whose ideas primarily shaped Kierkegaard's overtly religious philosophy; both philosophers focused on the problem of how to understand the relation between moral reasoning and historical religion. And Kant and Kierkegaard on Time and Eternity (2011) republished ten essays that explore various aspects of this theme in greater depth. I argue that throughout these works Green defends a “paradox of inwardness”: principles or ideals that are by their nature essentially inward end up requiring outward manifestation in order to be confirmed or fully justified as real.