Marginalisation Is Not Unbearable. Is It Even Undesirable?

Marginalised movements in psychology and psychotherapy tend to retain their identity, and the writings of their founders continue to exercise an influence. Once absorbed into the mainstream the identity is lost, and the founders are relegated to the forgotten past. Movements are kept marginalised when they are at odds with the central, untested assumptions (the hard core) of the mainstream. Many of REBT's insights have already been assimilated by the mainstream, which is currently an alliance between experimental psychology and CBT. But the mechanistic hard core of the mainstream is at odds with normative assumptions about self-worth held by REBT. As long as that continues REBT is likely to remain marginalised, but will keep its most significant insights.     

What Is Music? Is There a Definitive Answer?

Philosophers frequently defend definitions by appealing to intuitions and contemporary folk classificatory norms. I raise methodological concerns that undermine some of these defenses. Focusing on Andrew Kania's recent definition of music, I argue that the way in which it has been developed leads to problems, and I show that a number of other definitions of interest to philosophers of art (and others) run into similar problems.     

Is philosophy progressive?

Any adequate attempt to discuss progressivity in philosophy should provide some explanation of why philosophy persistently honours the old and the false and deals with original texts in a way in which science does not. An attempt is made to answer this question by appealing to: (1) the aporetic character of philosophy; (2) the semantical solipsism of philosophy; (3) the subjectivity of philosophy, and; (4) poetical continuities in philosophy.     

Is jealousy justifiable?

Jealousy has been disparaged as psychologically debilitating and morally flawed since well before Shakespeare wrote Othello and is indeed represented—particularly well—as far back as in Homer's portrayal of gods and goddesses in The Iliad. According to some of these traditional views, often shared by philosophers, psychologists and the general public, jealousy is the sign, if not of an irredeemably corrupt mind, then at least of an excessively possessive and insecure character. But does jealousy always indicate some sort of flaw or failure? Is jealousy rerehensible in all contexts? In the present paper, I intend to suggest some modifications to the view that it is, by giving jealousy a more sympathetic and charitable hearing than it normally receives, and suggesting that jealousy might, in some cases, be justifiable.     

Is backing grounding?

Separatists are grounding theorists who hold that grounding relations and metaphysical explanations are distinct, yet intimately connected in the sense that grounding relations back metaphysical explanations, just as causal relations back causal explanations. But Separatists have not elaborated on the nature of the ‘backing’ relation. In this paper, I argue that backing is a form of (partial) grounding. In particular, backing has many of the properties commonly attributed to grounding, and taking backing to be partial grounding allows Separatists to make the most of their position vis-à-vis their Unionist opponents.     

Is symmetry identity?

Wigner found unreasonable the "effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences". But if the mathematics we use to describe nature is simply a carefully coded expression of our experience then its effectiveness is quite reasonable. Its effectiveness is built into its design. We consider group theory, the logic of symmetry. We examine the premise that symmetry is identity; that group theory encodes our experience of identification. To decide whether group theory describes the world in such an elemental way we catalogue the detailed correspondence between elements of the physical world and elements of the formalism. Providing an unequivocal match between concept and mathematical statement completes the case. It makes effectiveness appear reasonable. The case that symmetry is identity is a strong one but it is not complete. The further validation required suggests that unexpected entities might be describable by the irreducible representations of group theory.     

What Is Ignorance?

This article offers an analysis of ignorance. After a couple of preliminary remarks, I endeavor to show that, contrary to what one might expect and to what nearly all philosophers assume, being ignorant is not equivalent to failing to know, at least not on one of the stronger senses of knowledge. Subsequently, I offer two definitions of ignorance and argue that one’s definition of ignorance crucially depends on one’s account of belief. Finally, I illustrate the relevance of my analysis by paying attention to four philosophical problems in which ignorance plays a crucial role.     

Is Evidence Non-Inferential?

Evidence is often taken to be foundational, in that while other propositions may be inferred from our evidence, evidence propositions are themselves not inferred from anything. I argue that this conception is false, since the non-inferential propositions on which beliefs are ultimately founded may be forgotten or undermined in the course of enquiry.     

Is identity non-contingent?

I present a novel argument against the non-contingency of identity. I first argue that the necessity of distinctness is intimately connected with numerous paradoxes of recombination. In particular, I argue that those who reject the necessity of distinctness have natural solutions to various paradoxes of recombination which have plagued the metaphysics of modality. Moreover, I argue that adding the necessity of distinctness to modest, paradox-free assumptions is sufficient to reinstate the paradoxes. Given that identity is non-contingent only if distinctness is necessary, I suggest this constitutes new evidence against the non-contingency of identity.     

What Is Ineffable?

In this essay, I argue, via a revision of Freud's notions of primary and secondary process, that experiences of resonant form lie at the root of many serious ineffability claims. I suggest further that Western European culture's resistance to the perception of resonant form underlies some of its present crises.     

Is Divorce Promise-Breaking?

Wedding vows seem to be promises. So they go: “I promise to love, honour, and cherish ....” But this poses a problem. Divorce is not widely seen as a serious moral wrong, but breaking a promise is. I first consider, and defend against preliminary objections, a ‘hard-line’ response: divorce is indeed prima facie impermissible promise-breaking. I next consider the ‘hardship’ response—the hardship of failed marriages overrides the prima facie duty to keep promises. However, this would release promisors in far too many cases. I resolve the triad by considering the content of the vows. Vows concerning love are not promises at all. We cannot promise to do acts the performance of which is outside our control, and love involves states of mind outside our control. Vows concerning spousal roles are complicated by diverse social understandings of marriage and the centrality of emotion to the roles.     

Is Science Neurotic?

Neurosis can be interpreted as a methodological condition from which any aim-pursuing entity can suffer. If such an entity pursues a problematic aim B but represents to itself that it is pursuing a different aim C and, as a result, fails to solve the problems associated with B which, if solved, would lead to the pursuit of aim A, then the entity may be said to be "rationalistically neurotic." Natural science is neurotic in this sense insofar as its basic aim is represented as improving knowledge of factual truth as such (aim C), when actually the aim of science is to improve knowledge of explanatory truth (aim B). Science itself does not suffer significantly from this neurosis, but philosophy of science does. Much more serious is the rationalistic neurosis of the social sciences and academic inquiry more generally. freeing social science and academic inquiry from neurosis would have far-reaching beneficial, intellectual, institutional and cultural consequences.     

Is Mother Other?

Abstract

The discourse of maternality figures a contentious site for feminist theology. If figured in terms of a fecund womb, maternality risks reinscribing women in a masculine symbolic order of world-making that has long conflated women’s differences with motherhood, narrowly defined in terms of fecundity. After considering the ways identifying female sexual difference with motherhood reifies a masculine model of subjectivity, this paper turns to Lynne Huffer’s reading of feminist psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray to suggest that maternality has the potential to interrupt the self-same movement of masculine discourse and engender an ethical space of difference of and for the other. Examining Irigaray’s interweaving of maternality with pleasure to create space for women’s desires, this paper concludes that the ambiguity of desires through which maternality is constituted challenges the care-driven, natality-centered discourse of maternality itself. As a scene of unresolved desire between flesh and discourse, immanence and transcendence, self and other, maternality can be narrated to disrupt views of mother as origin that would otherwise return motherhood to a figure of sameness and to construct a possibility of desire for intersubjective becoming that is at once beyond narration and entirely concrete. Maternality thus presents desires unrecognizable within a prevailing symbolic framework in a way that bears witness to the disruptiveness of those desires and engenders radical alterity.