The knower and the known

This paper is a presentation and discussion of Spinoza's view on the knower, or the mind, as an agent. The knower is on his view to be regarded as an active or generative complex cognitive experience. Imagination, reason and intuition are the cognitive principles. On account of their intrinsic relation to “the first law of nature”, that of selfpreservation, together with the thesis of the mind as constituted by ideas or knowledge, these principles function at the same time as moral principles. Consequently, it makes sense to speak of an individual's moral attitude toward everything be knows. A discussion of imagination, reason and intuition mainly as cognitive principles is followed by some concluding remarks on the cognitive and moral relation between human beings: To know another human being is to know his knowledge. The moral attitude of individuals to each other is a function of their mutual knowledge of knowledge.     

Moral Responsibility, Determinism, and the Ability to do Otherwise

In his classic paper, The Principle of Alternate Possibilities, Harry Frankfurt presented counterexamples to the principle named in his title: A person is morally responsible for what he has done only if he could have done otherwise. He went on to argue that the falsity of the Principle of Alternate Possibilities (PAP) implied that the debate between the compatibilists and the incompatibilists (as regards determinism and the ability to do otherwise) did not have the significance that both parties had attributed to it -- since moral responsibility could exist even if no one was able to do otherwise. I have argued that even if PAP is false, there are other principles that imply that moral responsibility entails the ability to do otherwise, and that these principles are immune to Frankfurt-style counterexamples. Frankfurt has attempted to show that my arguments for this conclusion fail. This paper is a rejoinder to that reply; I argue that he has failed to show this.     

Impulse and Self-Reflection: Frankfurtian Responsibility versus Free Will

Harry Frankfurt's early work makes an important distinction between moral responsibility and free will. Frankfurt begins by focusing on the notion of responsibility, as supplying counterexamples to the principle of alternative possibilities; he then turns to an apparently independent account of free will, in terms of his well-known hierarchy of desires. But the two notions seem to reestablish contact in Frankfurt's later discussion of issues and cases. The present article sets up a putative Frankfurtian account of moral responsibility that involves the potential for free will, as suggested by some of Frankfurt's later remarks about taking responsibility. While correcting what seem to be some common misinterpretations of Frankfurt's view, the article attempts to extract some reasons for dissatisfaction with it from consideration of cases of unfreedom, particularly cases involving addiction.     

Teaching,Reason and Risk

In his writings on teaching, Isreal Scheffler has argued for the close connection between teaching and reason, an argument which can be summarized by, Teaching is. . an initiation into open rational discussion. This essay examines Schefflier's thesis in the light of criticisms drawn from feminist writings on teaching. It is argued that Scheffler's thesis is consistent with a view of teaching in which it can be achieved through kindness, good example and the efficacy of unconscious imitation, characteristics of the private, reproductive processes typical of women. It is then argued that Scheffler's concept of teaching is compatible with views of education that try to do justice to both reason and emotion, mind and feeling.     

Empathy and justice motivation

Empathic distress is defined as an aversive feeling contingent on another's physical, emotional, or economic distress. The paper (1) summarizes a developmental scheme consisting of four stages of empathic distress; (2) suggests that causal attributions may partly transform empathic distress into sympathy, empathic anger, feeling of injustice, and guilt feeling; (3) notes the evidence that these empathic affects often serve to motivate moral behavior, and therefore that they qualify as moral motives; (4) points up limitations of these affects/motives and the need to embed them in justice principles; (5) discusses links between empathic affects/motives and principles of distributive justice/ (6) argues that Rawls' theory of justice, which excludes empathy, may nevertheless require it for the difference principle to influence behavior in real life; (7) hypothesizes a functional equivalence between empathy and the veil of ignorance; and (8) speculates that the conjunction of empathic affect and justice-principle thinking — in life and in abstract didactic contexts like Rawls' original position — may produce a principle having the motivational and stabilizing properties of a hot cognition.     

Richard Zaner’s Phenomenology of the Clinical Encounter

The clinical ethics propounded by Richard Zaner is unique. Partly because of his phenomenological orientation and partly because of his own daily practice as a clinical ethicist in a large university hospital, Zaner focuses on the particular concrete situations in which patients and their families confront illness and injury and struggle toward workable ways for dealing with them. He locates ethical reality in the clinical encounter. This encounter encompasses not only patient and physician but also the patients family and friends and indeed the entire lifeworld in which the patient is still striving to live. In order to illuminate the central moral constituents of such human predicaments, Zaner discusses the often-overlooked features of disruption and crisis, the changed self, the patients dependence and the physicians power, the violation of personal boundaries and their necessary reconfiguring, and the art of listening.     

Projecting pastoral care in revival preaching: Billy Graham

Conclusion How may the evangelist project pastoral care in his preaching? This discussion sought to delineate some of the answers to this question. However, these cannot become answers for any herald of the Gospel unless he exercises an honest, sustained, self-critical probe into the inter-relatedness of his own being, attitudes toward congregants, and preaching. Erich Fromm asserts: There is no concept of man in which I myself am not included.²⁹ Likewise, there is no discussion of preaching or of a preacher in which each minister should not include himself-self-evaluatively, perhaps confessionally.     

Michael Balint's Group Approach: The Boston Balint Group

Michael Balint was a physician/psychoanalyst who trained in Hungary and emigrated to England in 1939 when Nazi Germany began to dominate Europe. At the Tavistock Clinic, he and his wife met with social workers and physicians around case discussion seminars. With his strong interest in medicine and his curiosity about the patient-physician relationship, he initiated research/training groups with interested physicians, which ultimately led to publication of the now-classic The Doctor, His Patient, and the Illness, a rich text that has become a virtual staple of family practice residencies, along with Balint Groups for training. Balint refrained from considering his groups psychotherapy in order to minimize resistance of his physician-students. But because the groups lasted sometimes for years and explored transference and countertransference in patient-physician relationships, he acknowledged that the result was personal growth of the participants. His techniques are described and an example of a Balint Group (Boston Group) are presented here.     

The Late Life Reconstruction of Selfhood Analyzed in Peter Hall's Film She's Been Away

The film She's Been Away tells the story of an old woman who had been locked in a mental asylum while a teenager, for willfully violating repressive sexual codes. Sixty years later her ward is closed and she moves in with her nephew and his wife. Faced with what appears to be a hopeless situation, she manages to forge a sense of a meaningful closure to a misspent life. Through narrative, story structure, and characterization the film throws into focus coping mechanisms and ego strategies deployed by a triple disadvantaged person (woman, old, and mad) in her ascent to a reconstructed selfhood. As the protagonist ties both ends of her life, and faces the abyss in between she makes genuine adaptive use of so-called regressive, late-life development assets (available to a lesser degree to elderly people in normal life circumstances), primarily the abolition of linear time. Through this abolition she makes reminiscing an actual reality while still maintaining a functional separation between the real and the remembered. Her portrayal is a valuable document for gerontologists as it explores, through artistic imagination and intuition, the workings of an aging mind in search for a meaningful sense of closure.     

The drive for meaning in William James' analysis of religious experience

Summary Now that we have looked at the characteristics of mystical experience, we are ready to discuss the assumption made in this paper that mystical experience can be translated into an understanding of integration or the drive for meaning which Fingarette pursues in a much more analytic fashion. Reviewing the conversion process as an integration process we have seen that for the sick-souled, beset with the meaninglessness or melancholy which paralyzes his will, his own awareness of wrong in his situation prevents him from opening up to larger views of reality. But, as James has described, at the same time as the subject is attending so strongly to his own sense of worthlessness, all the while the forces of mere organic ripening within him are going on towards their own prefigured result, and his conscious strainings are letting loose subconscious allies behind the scenes, which in their way work toward rearrangements. Yet the rearrangements can only come about by obeying the command of Chaung-Tse: Cease striving. The result is self-transformation in reconciling, unifying states. There is achieved a supersensuous meaning to the ordinary outward data of consciousness; facts already objectively before us fall into a new expressiveness and make a new connection with our active life.However, James cautions us to realize that the same incursions of the subconscious which produce such reconciling, unifying states can also produce pathological states, a diabolical mysticism, a sort of religious mysticism turned upside down. In such a state the meanings of events become dreadful and the ruling emotion is pessimism. To this possibility James applied the pragmatic test, By their fruits..., and concluded that the mystical experience which brings optimism to the individual is a genuine experience and one which brings truth. In our context then, we would say that real integration brings the subject away from the melancholy and meaninglessness he felt into the genuinely insightful resolution of which Fingarette speaks.Conversion, then, is a process in James's analysis of religious experience analogous to the process of integration and meaning-discovery while mysticism is analogous to the state in which integration or meaning-discovery is achieved. Conversion is climaxed by self-surrender; mysticism is characterized by new determination, self-transformation: two ways of describing an indivisible event. Furthermore, the four characteristics James applies to mysticism are indeed characteristic of the experience of integration.Two other points should be added here which are much in line with James's treatment of experience. In the first place, one of the basic principles of radical empiricism is that not only objects but relations between objects are the subject of experience. Such an experience of relationships, of wholeness, is exactly what characterizes integration. At the same time, the five senses are suspended, and the insight is experienced with such a strong immediacy that it is almost sensed. James refers to this quality of mystical states: The records show that even though the five senses be in abeyance in them, they are absolutely sensational in their epistemological quality, if I may be pardoned the barbarous expression, - that is, they are face to face presentations of what seems immediately to exist.I am not saying that every integration is a mystical experience. Rather I have been saying that James's discussion of religious experiences such as healthy-minded, sick-souled, melancholy, conversion, and mysticism provide analogues for better understanding the phenomenological processes and characteristics of the drive for meaning and integration which Fingarette analyzes. In fact, the very notion of religion itself for James bears not just an analogous resemblance but perhaps an identification with integration. For in his personal letters James had defined religious experience as Any moment of life that brings the reality of spiritual things more home to one. And in Varieties James defines religion as a man's total reaction upon life....; his attitude towards what he felt to be the primal truth.If we look upon this outlook of James toward religion as an exaggeration of the reality of integration, we can follow James to what he perceives as the importance of religion upon an individual's life. The man of religious feeling possesses the excitement of a higher kind of emotion, an enthusiastic temper of espousal in regions where morality strictly so called can at best but bow its head and acquiesce. So we are brought again to the area of creativity in which an individual has experienced the widening of the area of his immediate experience and is re-born in the karmic pattern, a valid pattern for both James and Fingarette. As Fingarette describes it, the converted individual creates values which the dead reality he had previously faced did not possess. The result of the achieved integration is explained by James when referring to religious experience as an excitement of the cheerful, expansive, dynamogenic order which, like any tonic, freshens our vital powers. This emotion overcomes temperamental melancholy [meaninglessness] and imparts endurances to the subject, or a zest, or a meaning, or an enchantment and glory to the common objects of life.We might sum up this discussion not by a criticism of the shortcomings of James's treatment of the religious life, such as his apparent insensitivity to the part played by institutions in the religious experience itself, but rather by underscoring the richness of the phenomenological analysis James has undertaken. James Edie acknowledges that James's studies of religious experience itself rather than of religion. ... are not only more sound phenomenologically than some of the studies which have, under the influence of Husserl, up to now explicitly invoked the phenomenological method, but they are also the first to establish any solid basis for a true phenomenology of religious experience.And John Wild has pointed out the parallel between James's concept of melancholy and Heidegger's concept of anxiety as the genesis of the process of becoming: beginning with the prospect of death and nothingness, the individual gropes toward new birth.As we have seen, then, James's analysis of the varieties of religious experience leads to a fruitful discussion of the psychological processes involved in melancholy and meaninglessness, rearrangement and integration. In all such experiences, a sense of inner unity is reached to which the following words of Fingarette would apply by analogy: The soul-racking death which leads to blissful rebirth is the death of the subjectively experienced, anxiety-generated self perception; it is the emergence into the freedom of introspective self-forgetfulness of the psychically unified self.     

Fallacies and moral dilemmas

The continuing debate between utilitarians and deontologists often takes the form of disagreement over how particular moral dilemmas are to be resolved, but protagonists on both sides tend to overlook the possibility of resolving a dilemma with remainder, such as regret. The importance of remainder is also overlooked by critics of some absolutist ways of resolving or slipping between the horns of certain moral dilemmas. Moreover, deontologists, if not utilitarians, can be criticised for overlooking the possibility that, according to their theory, some dilemmas may be irresolvable. Virtue ethics, with its concentration on the agent, readily accommodates both mention of remainder and irresolvable dilemmas, and yields a specification of tragic dilemmas which the other two theories might like to take on.     

The Self Psychology of Heinz Kohut: What's It All About Theologically?

As a psychoanalytic thinker who offered by means of his self psychology a new paradigm of psychological development and functioning, Heinz Kohut was also a theologian manqué. With the help of the method of interpretation devised by Paul Tillich and David Tracy, Kohut's limit-concepts of tragic man, the self-object, and empathy, all set within his theory of narcissism, are elucidated as theological constructs. These are critiqued for adequacy from a Christian perspective. The conclusion is that Kohut's understanding of the human dilemma and of the way of salvation correlates well with Christianity, while his view of empathy as the means of salvation has created some confusion. Kohut has thus left an unfinished, profoundly important, agenda for theologians and clinicians.     

Private events revisited: Does unobservable mean private?

This paper presents a discussion on the misapplication of the concept private events in traditional psychotherapy interpretation. Shown is that, logically, the term privacy is contradictory to principles of science and it further inhibits anaturalistic approach to observation. Evidence of so-called private clinical events are presented within an alternative model that obviates the role of privacy and encourages primarily an objective outlook on the events.     

On Chomskyan mentalism: A reply to Peter Slezak

Conclusion Introducing his paper, Slezak (p. 428) proposes to examine Botha's criticisms in detail with a view to demonstrating that they are without foundation and are based on the most fundamental misunderstandings. Concluding his paper, Slezak (p. 439) expresses the hope that he has shown that the conceptions on which these criticisms rest are so seriously flawed as to make it unprofitable to attempt to unravel the rest of his analysis. These formulations, by all standards, represent rather strong rhetoric. But, as the preceding paragraphs have shown, Slezak's discussion sadly lacks the relevant and accurate analyses needed to give substance to his rhetoric.I would like to thank Marina Savini and Thereza Botha for suggestions which led to improvements in the formulation of this paper.     

Where Have All the Critics Gone? Moral Psychology and the Question of Selective Resistance to War: From Vietnam, to an Israeli Vietnam, to the Intifada

War has been particularly a world apart for the vast majority of psychological studies on morality which for the most part were conducted in university settings among first-year psychology students. Combatant soldiers, their moral dilemmas, and their critical narrative of criticism and position of moral resistance are missing from the formative stages of our psychological theories. This paper discusses Kohlberg's pioneering and only attempt to understand moral criticism in the battlefield. In what follows it will be argued that from Kohlberg's perspective, Bernhard's case is analyzed as a case of moral separateness and thus provides limited view on the narrative of moral resistance. It will be further argued that the narrative of moral resistance, particularly as involving a detachment from one's own community, might as well be seen as a narrative of moral connectedness. This thesis will further be supported with the analysis of a narrative of moral criticism of an Israeli combatant during the Intifada.     

Autocritica filosofica e critica storica in J.-P. Sartre

Summary In this essay the author examines Sartre's attitude toward Marxism as related to his existentialism and his approach to history. Existentialism, from a methodological point of view, has been of much avail as an ideology rooted in personal freedom. Still, judging it from a Marxist point of view, Sartre has criticized existentialism for a) its theoretical limits (it is abstract, nonhistorical, non-dialectic); and b) its ethical and political faults, since it is self-defeating and almost exclusively leaning toward privacy. And yet one has to note how Sartre neglected to point out that existentialism's theoretical limits are due not only to its non-dialectical foundations but also to its nonscientific character and its hidden religiousness. Moreover, Sartre has not properly considered its historical value as a struggle against metaphysical thought and against a farfetched use of science. Basically — and apart from the views stated in such articles as Les Communistes et la paix — Sartre's Marxism is, from a political and ideological standpoint, strongly biased toward Soviet Marxism and socialism, since its main emphasis is anti-dogmatic and humanistic. Above all, this basic attitude could be explained by the negative influences of some historical and political events of the 40s and 50s on the development of his thought. As a matter of fact, his Marxism grew up against the background of Soviet politics in the Stalin and post-Stalin eras. Therefore, he refuses to accept any dogmatic and deterministic images of Marxism; instead of dogma he affirms the relevance of problems; in lieu of given truths, a concern for moral demands. In so doing, Sartre has based his Marxism more on the subjective praxis than on nature and history naturalistically viewed.     

On Ultrafilter Logic and Special Functions

Logics for generally were introduced for handling assertions with vague notions,such as generally, most, several, etc., by generalized quantifiers, ultrafilter logic being an interesting case. Here, we show that ultrafilter logic can be faithfully embedded into a first-order theory of certain functions, called coherent. We also use generic functions (akin to Skolem functions) to enable elimination of the generalized quantifier. These devices permit using methods for classical first-order logic to reason about consequence in ultrafilter logic.Presented by André Fuhrmann     

On seeing oneself as “left out”: The chronically complaining patient in psychotherapy

A clinical observation regarding patients who complain about feeling left out and/or second best provides the framework for this paper. What is expressed is a form of separation anxiety coupled with a loser self-concept. It is suggested that these patients represent a milder form of the moral masochism. Early theoretical formulations include Freud and his emphasis on the superego and Reich's emphasis on the masochist's fear of being left alone. Kramer's little man phenomenon is an example of a more current theoretical formulation which takes account of the complexities of the ego, and composite self and identity in the clinical phenomena observed. A case of a latency-aged child is provided.     

Freud and the Visual Arts

Freud was more interested in literature than painting and sculpture, as Louis Fraiberg and Richard Sterba note. The question is how this affected his analysis of Leonardo's paintings and Michelangelo's sculpture of Moses The author argues that because he regarded them as intellectual puzzles to be psychoanalytically deciphered, he reduced them to a species of literature, suggesting his reluctance to recognize their aesthetic significance, and perhaps his inability to do so. The visual work of art becomes something to be read rather than seen. Its sensuousness is given short shrift. For example, Freud makes no mention of chiaroscuro and sfumato in his study of Leonardo—just those elements for which his art is famous as art. As Freud said, his analytic turn of mind kept him from obtaining any pleasure from what he could not rationally explain. The author traces Freud's elevation of the literary over the visual, and with that of the analyzable over the unanalyzable, to his critique of Charcot, whom he described as a visuel,' a man who sees his patients (and photographed them) rather than listens to them. Finally, Freud's dislike of modern art is contrasted with Karl Abraham's appreciation of its sensuous uniqueness. The general point is made that Freud didn't understand that the key to art was the artist's engagement with the medium.     

Me and My Shadow: Therapy with Sexually Abused Pre-Adolescents

The purpose of this paper is to describe the use of solution focused techniques with preadolescent children who have been sexually abused and to present a therapeutic model that: 1) represents a blending of traditional psychological theoretical ideas with the more recent solution focused techniques; 2) presents a unique time-limited group format for assisting children to come to know and like their authentic selves; and 3) provides the therapist with the opportunity to expand his or her roles. In this model, the path from false self to authentic self is conceptualized as an interplay among abuse events, family relationships, and other life contexts.