NEW PERSPECTIVES ON TEILHARD PUBLICATIONS

Abstract. Teilhard's texts were published in two complementary publications, the more philosophical-theological ones in the L'Oeuvres (OV), the scientific ones in the L'Oeuvre Scientifique (OS)¹. His letters were published in a nonsystematic way. The publication of the Oeuvres presented thematic compilations. The papers had their own production history, creating different versions. Scientific texts were published by Teilhard in widely dispersed journals and have been collected into L'Oeuvre Scientifique. The scientific status of Teilhard is related to his positions in the scientific world and the continued use of his publications. The influences causing different versions of theological and philosophical papers are analyzed. The present accessibility of the diaries and their importance for a full understanding of Teilhard is elaborated.     

金庸小说与《周易》

金庸小说不仅有精彩的武功描写,而且有丰富的文化内涵.金庸小说独特的审美价值与<周易>的影响密不可分,这种影响表现在武功描写、人物设计和理想追求三个方面.正是由于金庸将<周易>学说融人到他武侠世界的武功、生活和理想之中,融人到对历史和现实、人性和人生、社会与文化、英雄与人格等的思考之中,因此,他的作品具有了丰富的文化内涵.     

The Sin of Ian McEwan's Fictive Atonement:Reading his Later Novels

Ian McEwan is arguably the best living British novelist. His most successful novel, Atonement , was recently made into an internationally successful film. And indeed, through analysis of his novels, it is clear that Ian McEwan believes literature—precisely as fictive—might very well bear the task of atonement for postmodernity. His novels, though, are patently hopeless, (even as they are truly well-written). Because McEwan doesn't accept or see the causes of sin as such—formally understood as rebellion against the Creator—his diagnostic aesthetic of our postmodern malaise is incomplete and ineffectual. The literary or fictive atonement that he would achieve through his novels does not satisfy. This article aims to lay bare the philosophico-literary characteristics of Ian McEwan's later novels. The ultimate goal of this critical reading, though—tending toward an "evangelical lection"—is to transfigure McEwan's imaginative and creative virtuosity for otherwise disappointed Christian readers, precisely by envisioning his novels in the dark light of their redemptive deficit. Thus, the literary or fictive atonement that Ian McEwan's atheism cannot achieve might be saved apropos the Judeo-Christian revelation of divine atonement.     

Martin Bucer and the Revision of the 1549 Book of Common Prayer: Reform of Ceremonies and the Didactic Use of Ritual

Abstract

This paper looks again at Erasmus's Ciceronianus, a satire published in 1528, which created enormous controversy on it's appearance. The text raises questions which are difficult to answer. One of the central characters in the work is Nosoponus (Mr Workmad). The paper puts the case for identifying this character with Giulio Camillo Delminio (c. 1480-1544).     

Corpus Meum: Disintegrating Bodies and the Ideal of Integrity

This essay shows that Jean‐Luc Nancy's reconceptualization of corporeality in such texts as L'Intrus and Corpus can be an important ally to feminist theories of body. I introduce Nancy's ontology and argue that his rejection of the unified, integrated body of humanist discourses in favor of dis‐integrated bodies constituted by multiple alterities and his consequent reinterpretation of body as a “being‐exscribed” begin the task of thinking bodies beyond traditional dualisms and their ahistorical and rationalist frameworks. I then address three potential criticisms of Nancy's work and suggest that though there may be reasons to move cautiously in adopting the framework he provides, his work harbors resources directly beneficial to critiques of prevailing forms of gender normativity. Quel étrange moi! —Jean‐Luc Nancy, Corpus     

Freud's ego ideals: a study of admired modern historical and political personages

It is appropriate to conclude this study with a statement that characterizes Freud and his search for particular models, and this is: "A genius chooses his family from among heroes." His historical heroes were Cromwell, Napoleon, Masséna, Garibaldi, Bismarck, Adler, Lasalle, Lasker, and Wilson. Of course, toward many of these figures, Freud was also ambivalent. Yet these leaders have certain common denominators. In various degrees, they may be characterized as progressive, secular, and anti-Catholic. Moreover, they all had spectacular careers, stood up against great odds, and in many instances had serious conflicts with their fathers or men in authority. These leaders had a special significance for Freud, and their selection is representative not only of his own personal dynamics, but also of his historical milieu. His ego ideals demonstrate that Freud was ambitious and had partisan political feelings and concerns. In some cases the choice of the ego ideals stemmed from his ambivalent feelings toward his father and his particular resolution of the oedipal situation. Also very significant is the fact of Freud's Jewish heritage and the anti-Semitism he experienced as a citizen of the Hapsburg Empire. Moreover, Freud was always sensitive about the power and the influence of the Catholic church. Still another reason for his selection of widely scattered figures with whom to identify is the broadening influence of his classical education. In addition, being gifted linguistically, he was able to transcend a parochial environment. In general then, Freud's ego ideals reveal that he was informed politically and historically and that he regarded these men as promoting policies that were liberating.     

On Understanding Worship in School Part Two: On worship and educating

This article continues a discussion begun in Part One. Together they re-examine the central thesis of Professor John Hull's (1975) book, School Worship, An Obituary, that the practice of worship in school is inappropriate. He attempted to establish his thesis through the analysis of the concept of education and of the concept of worship, and thus to show their essential incompatibility. Part One reviewed what an incompatibility might mean in the school context. After all, many diverse activities are pursued during the school day that, practically speaking, could not be done simultaneously in the same room. His thesis must be taken in the stronger form that, theoretically, the sense of education and the sense of worship are such that the two activities together are conceptually incoherent. The earlier article also reviewed his analysis of the concept of education. It questioned his definition and showed that it hinged on some of the dubious assumptions of an evidentialist philosophy. A better view of understanding and pedagogy might actually require the practise of worship in school. If it is the intention of our society to communicate the substance of religious life to the young, training them in worship may be the best, if not the only, way to do this. The features of education that Hull has identified have been selected for their rhetorical force. They appear to challenge what are assumed to be essential features of worship. Whether they do so in fact will depend on one's understanding of worship, but in what follows, his key assumptions about worship are put to the test and found wanting. Part Two, therefore, investigates Hull's understanding of worship. It finds that he believes a prior unconditional commitment to the belief 'God exists' is of the essence of worship. For him, it is this commitment that puts it at odds with education which he believes must scrutinise everything. The arguments against Hull here are designed to show that he is mistaken in his understanding of worship. Practices do not develop on the formation of belief systems first. Furthermore, religiously speaking, worship actually embraces a radical questioning. Finally, his assumption that there is a logical incompatibility in having an unconditional commitment and in embracing the practice of radical questioning is tested against the figure of Socrates. In the life of Socrates one can see how piety and educational practice belong together in such a way that one is the expression of the other. It is concluded that the nature of education and worship are at stake. These may have changed in such a way that they can no longer be pursued together. But there was a time when education flowered into worship, and worship found its substance in education. Hull's case concerning their intrinsic conceptual incoherence through philosophical analysis does not succeed. He has only shown us how our world has changed, and that, not necessarily for the better.     

Resistance in treatment as a means of avoiding inner conflict

It is not commonly known that, in his eighties, Michael Fordham sought the help of Donald Meltzer in what Dr Meltzer described as ‘more a weekly supervision of dreams than an analysis’. Dr Fordham is said to have commented that it was ‘a weekly supervision of my inner world - and you can't get closer to psychoanalysis than that’ He was greatly helped by these ‘supervisions’ and at the end of their work together, Meltzer suggested that Fordham wrote his memoirs. This resulted in The Making of an Analyst: Michael Fordham, published in 1993.

This fascinating account of Fordham's life and work contains much of interest about his personal development. He talks with candour about his confusions and passions in what is at times a surprisingly revealing manner. In particular Fordham talks openly about his closest relationships and how they affected him. The book was published, as he wanted it to be, after careful discussion with James Astor and Karl Figlio.

We are pleased to be able to publish the following contribution from Dr Meltzer about the book which he prompted. It is a mixture of personal responses on reading the book and memories of the man.     

The fate of the oedipus complex: Dissolution or waning

Abstract

Fried R. Personal and Classical Myth; A Confrontation on the Acropolis. Int Forum Psychoanal 1997;6:715. Stockholm, ISSN 0803-706X.

On his only visit to Greece, Sigmund Freud experienced brief but unsettling feelings of alienation as he stood on the Acropolis. Haunted by this experience, Freud did not succeed in analyzing it to his own satisfaction until 32 years after the event, in 1936. His interpretation, that he had felt guilt about superseding his father, did not convince most of the critics who have commented on it. The aim of this essay is to demonstrate that while Freud's critics were right in sensing that his explanation was only partial, none were able to decipher his secret. Prominent among the reasons for these repeated failures was lack of acquaintance with the Acropolis itself. Anyone standing where Freud stood becomes enabled to understand otherwise incomprehensible details of his essay. Seeing what Freud saw, however, still is not enough unless one also attempts to acquire some of his knowledge of archaeology and mythology. His competence in these areas made him aware of contradictions (e.g. between classical and archaic architecture and myth) that do not trouble the casual tourist. But his knowledge also furnished him with the tools for mastering his anxiety, turning fear of death into confidence in immortality, and gratifying desires even more ambitious than that of superseding his father.     

CAUSATION AND THE CANBERRA PLAN

David Lewis has a general recipe for analysis: the Canberra Plan. His analyses of mind, color, and value all proceed according to the plan. What is curious is that his analysis of causation – one of his seminal analyses – doesn't. It doesn't and according to Lewis it can't. Lewis has two objections against using the Canberra Plan to analyze causation. After presenting Lewis' objections I argue that they both fail. I then draw some lessons from their failure.     

Egoism,Labour, and Possession: A reading of “Interiority and Economy,” Section II of Lévinas' Totality of Infinity

Lévinas is the philosopher of the absolutely Other, the thinker of the primacy of the ethical relation, the poet of the face. Against the formalism of Kantian subjectivity, the totality of the Hegelian system, the monism of Husserlian phenomenology and the instrumentalism of Heideggerian ontology, Lévinas develops a phenomenological account of the ethical relation grounded in the idea of infinity, an idea which is concretely produced in the experience with the absolutely other, particularly, in their face. The face of the other, irreducible to any ontological structure of being or any epistemological intentionality of representation, reaches out from on high across the abyss of the isolated ego, commanding respect all the while granting the possibility of murder. This experience overflows the subjective capacity of the separated ego, forcing it “beyond being.” This anarchic relation with the Other is the groundless condition of possibility for ethical life, that is, truly human life. The structure of the ethical relation can then be determined in hindsight as the ground of meaning for what it is to be an I at all.

This is a pretty uncontroversial reading of Lévinas' work, especially Totality and Infinity (TI). And yet, there is one small problem. If this is what Lévinas is doing, then why does the largest section of Totality and Infinity – section II, “Interiority and Economy” – have nothing to do with ethics, the other, or the face at all? Why is it devoted to an arduous analysis of what he calls separation, egoism, economy, enjoyment, labour, and possession? In other words, why does Lévinas spend so much energy on writing about the egoist at the heart of his magnum opus, which is supposedly a text devoted to the Other? And furthermore, why is this section one of the least discussed in the secondary literature on Lévinas?

These questions motivate the present inquiry, which modestly seeks to understand what Lévinas is up to in this section. Once laying out the basic story, I will focus on the concepts of labour and possession, for I think these are the unrecognized pivots upon which the transition from ego to Other turns. I will also make some slight attempts to interpret Lévinas' direct or indirect comments on Plato, Kant, Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger. For although he distances himself from these giants, he stands on their shoulders as well.     

Bruno Klopfer,A Measure of the Man and His Work: A Review of Developments in the Rorschach Technique: volumes I,II, and III

This article reviews Bruno Klopfer's life and his contributions to the Rorschach, especially as they are represented in his three volume series: Developments in the Rorschach Technique, volumes I, II, and III. It emphasizes Klopfer's many contributions to Rorschach administration and interpretation, as well as his superior teaching and organizational abilities. Klopfer organized what eventually became The Society for Personality Assessment and began the journal that eventually became the Journal of Personality Assessment. His legacy is reflected in much of Exner's system of administration and scoring.     

Naming without knowing and appearance without associations: Evidence for constructive processes in semantic memory?

Abstract

This study describes a patient (SE) with temporal lobe injury resulting from Herpes Simplex Encephalitis, who displayed a previously unreported impairment in which his knowledge of associative and functional attributes of animals was disproportionately impaired by comparison with his knowledge of their sensory attributes (including their visual properties and characteristic sounds). His knowledge of man-made objects was preserved. A striking aspect of the present case was that the patient remained able to name many animals from their pictures, despite making gross errors in generating associative information about these same animals. This suggests that a semantic representation incorporating stored sensory knowledge may be sufficient for naming (at least for biological categories) and associative information may be unnecessary. Semantic knowledge may normally incorporate more information than is necessary for identification. SE's errors were found to be confabulatory and reconstructive in nature and it is argued that this aspect of his performance challenges passive conceptions of semantic memory couched in terms of a catalogue of stored representations. It is proposed that the patient's disorder affects a dynamic, constructive, and inferential component of his knowledge base, and that this component is sensitive to semantic category.     

A Single Intervention: A Visit to the Family

The following letter is reported unchanged except for disguised names. Concern with repairing disrupted relationships of adult members of a family with their own parents has been a matter of growing interest to a number of family therapists; Bowen (1), Boszormenyi-Nagy (2), and Framo (3), among others have stressed the importance of sending family members back to their families of origin. This report makes no effort to formulate the process in any particular theoretical framework (i.e., as reestablishing connectedness after an “emotional cut-off” or rebalancing a ledger of fairness, or whatever) but is intended only to illustrate the kind of outcome one may hope for in prescribing such a maneuver. It is offered simply as a clinical note. The letter needs little prefatory explication. Mr. Jack Newburgher had been a patient in psychoanalytic treatment for four years, with a quite successful outcome. On two occasions in the course of his therapy a joint session had been held with Mr. Newburgher and his wife, Muriel, when changes in his behavior had precipitated crises in the marital relationship. His therapy had terminated about two years before the visit referred to in the letter. Mr. Newburgher had called and asked for a joint consultation with Muriel about an acute family problem they were experiencing. Some — not all — of the background material was described, not nearly as coherently as it is reported in Muriel's letter, but in sufficient detail to make it plain that she was in distress about having to withdraw completely from her parents and that their family was in disarray as a consequence of her distress. The acuteness of the emotional disturbance, against a background of a lifelong adversary relationship between Muriel and her father and a history of ten years of illness on her fathers' part, suggested that the distress was the product of Muriel's anxiety and guilt over a decision to cut herself off completely from her parents. As a consequence, Muriel was urged to visit her family of origin, with the caveat that she might indeed discover them to be malignantly self-centered people indifferent to their effect on her and her family, but that she would at least have the gratification of having tried. The reference to “speaking French” was to the therapist having suggested that, on the other hand, she might find that her parents expressed their feelings in a different modality from her definitions of how feelings should be expressed, much as though their native tongue were French and she were insisting that they must speak to her in English.     

Let my people go! Sayyid Qutb and the vocation of Moses

Moses is a great figure of moral and social liberation. His role in the Muslim tradition has been as multifaceted as in Judaism and Christianity. This essay attempts to explore his importance in the ideology of radical Islam by exploring Sayyid Qutb's responses to a number of the Moses scenes of the Qur'an in his work Fi zilal al‐qur'an. Qutb's treatment reveals aspects of the ideological structure that informs his writing, his love of Egypt and his spirituality. It shows, also, how he had a vision of Islam that went far beyond the boundaries of a nation state and regarded Nasser as a betrayer of this vision. He saw the Egyptians suffering under him as they had suffered under Pharoah.     

‘Characters’ in psychoanalytic and interpersonal therapy: A comparison

In this paper the author considers how the therapist might listen to the characters talked about by his or her patients. In psychoanalytic therapy the emphasis is on listening to the patient's characters as though they are located in psychic reality and as representatives of the transference relationship, whereas in interpersonal therapy (IPT) the patient's characters are taken as inhabiting the realm of external reality. It is argued that clinical thinking in IPT would be enhanced by taking more account of psychic reality, which will make clearer the quality of external reality in which the patient's characters are located. It is also argued that both therapies share an interest in enabling the patient to find characters which can serve as holograms of previously unexpressed affective experience.     

Skolem and the löwenheim-skolem theorem: a case study of the philosophical significance of mathematical results

The dream of a community of philosophers engaged in inquiry with shared standards of evidence and justification has long been with us. It has led some thinkers puzzled by our mathematical experience to look to mathematics for adjudication between competing views. I am skeptical of this approach and consider Skolem's philosophical uses of the Löwenheim-Skolem Theorem to exemplify it. I argue that these uses invariably beg the questions at issue. I say ‘uses’, because I claim further that Skolem shifted his position on the philosophical significance of the theorem as a result of a shift in his background beliefs. The nature of this shift and possible explanations for it are investigated. Ironically, Skolem's own case provides a historical example of the philosophical flexibility of his theorem.

Our suspicion ought always to be aroused when a proof proves more than its means allow it. Something of this sort might be called ‘a puffed-up proof’.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the foundations of mathematics (revised edition), vol. 2, 21.     

Does this book make me look fat? The effect of protagonist body weight and body esteem on female readers’ body esteem

Effects of visual representations of the thin ideal in the media have been widely explored, but textual representations of the thin ideal in novels have received scant attention. The chick literature genre has been criticized for depicting characters who worry about their body weight and who have poor body esteem. Excerpts from two chick lit novels were used to examine the effect of a protagonist's body weight and body esteem on college women's (N = 159) perceptions of their sexual attractiveness and weight concern. Two narratives were used to minimize the possibility that idiosyncratic characteristics of one excerpt might influence the study's results. Underweight (vs. healthy weight) protagonists predicted readers’ lower perceived sexual attractiveness. Protagonists with low body esteem (vs. control) predicted readers’ increased weight concern. Scholars and health officials should be concerned about the effect chick lit novels might have on women's body image.     

The ‘Compositional Rigidity’ of Recognitionality

Abstract

Empiricist philosophers of mind have long maintained that the possession conditions of many concepts include recognitional abilities. One of Jerry Fodor's recent attacks on empiricist semantics proceeds by attempting to demonstrate that there are no such, ‘recognitional’ concepts. His argument is built on the claim that if there were such concepts, they would not compose: i.e., they would exhibit properties which are not in general ‘inherited’ by complex concepts of which they are components. Debate between Fodor and his critics on this issue has focused on his construal of compositionality, the critics in effect advocating a weaker conception than that assumed by Fodor. I argue that the critics' contention is under-motivated, and in the current context ad hoc. But there is something else wrong with Fodor's argument. He misidentifies the notion of recognitionality in which the empiricist should trade. A proper understanding of recognitionality allows us to disarm Fodor's argument without resolving the question about compositionality that divides Fodor and his critics. I end with two very general remarks. First a contention about the motivation for empiricist semantics, and second, a suggestion that my proposal about recognitionality may be extended to disarm a more familiar and influential type of concern about their viability.