The missing self in scientific psychiatry

Synthese - Various traditions in mental health care, such as phenomenological, and existential and cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy, implicitly or explicitly acknowledge that a disruption of the...     

Rorty,religion, and humanism

This article offers a review of Richard Rorty’s attempts to come to terms with the role of religion in our public and intellectual life by tracing the key developments in his position, partially in response to the ubiquitous criticisms of his distinction between private and public projects. Since Rorty rejects the possibility of dismissing religion on purely epistemic grounds, he is determined to treat it, instead, as a matter of politics. My suggestion is that, in this respect, Rorty’s position is best construed as that of a humanist rather than a post-modernist. Ultimately, it appears that, in his view, the positive element of religion—i.e. the idea of religion as a social gospel—has been absorbed and transformed into a utopian striving which humanists associate with the ideal of democracy. Hence, in this regard, religion can be considered obsolete. Yet, without explicitly invoking the usual epistemic grounds, Rorty’s arguments for excluding religion from the public sphere remain rather thin, and an interest in reforming rather than excluding religion would have been more consistent with his general outlook.     

普遍人文主义与中国社会的现代化

二十世纪之初,中西文化、学术强烈交流、冲击的时代,深受西方十九世纪前半叶实证主义的影响,科学万能、科技救国的口号大行其道。新文化运动时期,在要科学、民主,就不能要传统文化和礼教,就不能要形上学和宗教,使合乎中道的人文精神受到严重的打压与破坏。知识分子心目中的人文思想及人道精神变得日益偏狭。此种科学与人文对立的形成,虽然在理论上非常脆弱,并且不乏非理性成份,     

Integrating humanism and behaviorism: toward performance

The current emphasis on performance criteria in training programs and in professional services poses a threat to the humanistically oriented helper. Having been trained in the self-actualizing psychology of Maslow and Rogers, humanists equate competence-based education and counseling with behaviorism and therefore resist the demand for performance criteria and the adjunct behavioral principles. This article suggests a behavioral humanism as the desired solution to the dilemma and proposes some guidelines for formulating and implementing such a synthetic system without jeopardizing one's personal-professional integrity.     

The psychological speciesism of humanism

Philosophical Studies - Humanists argue for assigning the highest moral status to all humans over any non-humans directly or indirectly on the basis of uniquely superior human cognitive abilities....     

The Secular University and Its Critics

Universities in the USA have become bastions of secularity in a distinctly religious society. As such, they are subjected to a variety of robust and rigorous religious critiques. In this paper I do not seek to engage in the debate between the supporters of the secular university and its opponents. Furthermore, I do not claim to summarize the history of the critique of the secular university, nor to present an exhaustive map of its current articulations. My purpose is rather more limited and modest, namely, to locate some of the key arguments of the current religious criticism of the secular university and put them in a wider philosophical context. Exploring the philosophical infrastructure of this criticism enables not only a more comprehensive and profound understanding of it, but also urges us to rethink the purpose and essence of the university as an institution that both reflects and forms our society and culture. The article is structured as follows; first section puts the religious criticism of the secular university in the context of the latest wave of criticism levelled at contemporary universities. Second section explores the argument according to which the secularization of the university led to the loss of the ideal of education for excellence in the wide, classical sense of the term. Third section examines the theoretical foundations of the call to reintegrate religion in contemporary universities, while fourth section explores the various practical consequences of this demand.