“Measuring up to Measure” Dysmorphophobia as a Language Game

We look into the transformation of meanings in psychotherapy and suggest a clinical application for Wittgenstein’s intuitions concerning the role of linguistic practices in generating significance. In post-modern theory, therapy does not necessarily change reality as much as it does our way of experiencing it by intervening in the linguistic-representational rules responsible for constructing the text which expresses the problem. Since “states of mind assume the truths and forms of the language devices that we use to represent them” (Foucault, 1963, p. 57), therapy may be intended as a narrative path toward a new naming of one’s reified experiences. The clinical problem we consider here, the pervasive feeling of inadequacy due to one’s excessive height (dysmorphophobia), is an excellent example of “language game” by which a “perspicuous representation” (the “therapy” proposed by Wittgenstein in the 1953) may bring out alternatives to linguistically-built “traps”, putting the blocked semiotic mechanism back into motion.     

Cassirer’s critique of culture

My purpose in this paper is to look at Cassirer’s relation to critical philosophy from a new perspective. Most discussions concerning Cassirer’s Kantianism have so far centered on his relation to neo-Kantianism and the Marburg school. My focus will not be on neo-Kantianism but on Cassirer’s notion of a “critique of culture.” In an often cited paragraph from the introduction to The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Cassirer says that his aim is to broaden Kant’s critical approach to all various forms of culture, to language as well as myth and art, and thus to transform the “critique of reason” into the “critique of culture.” I will explore Cassirer’s concept of the “critique of culture” and suggest that it can best be understood by placing it in the context of early twentieth century German philosophy. More precisely, I will aim to show that Cassirer’s critique can be seen as an effort to find a middle path between Lebensphilosophie and the positivism of the Vienna Circle.     

Two Therapists and One Client: Problems in Comparison

This paper is a response to Robb’s analysis of Ellis’ and Dryden’s sessions held with “Jane” in the summer of 1994. As Robb noted, these consecutive sessions with the same client make for interesting, and clarifying, comparisons. My analysis considers Robb’s overview of REBT and where I believe it diverges from the position of Ellis. It also considers why Ellis used the strategy he did with “Jane” and compares and contrasts the assumptions that Ellis and Dryden seem to be making during their respective sessions. It ends with a brief summary of the two approaches and some general comments about the nature of psychotherapy.     

Nibbanic (or Pure) Consciousness and Beyond

Pike’s phenomenology of mystical experiences articulates sharply where theological content may enter the structure of Christian mystics’ experiences (as characterized in their own words). Here we look to Buddhist (and other) accounts of “pure” or “nibbanic” consciousness attained in experiences of deep meditation. A contemporary “modal” model of inner awareness is considered whereby a form of pure consciousness underlies and embraces further content in various forms of consciousness, including mystical experiences in different traditions and experiences of “full union” (with God).     

Civilian Immunity,Supreme Emergency,and Moral Disaster

Any plausible position in the ethics of war and political violence in general will include the requirement of protection of civilians (non-combatants, common citizens) against lethal violence. This requirement is particularly prominent, and particularly strong, in just war theory. Some adherents of the theory see civilian immunity as absolute, not to be overridden in any circumstances whatsoever. Others allow that it may be overridden, but only in extremis. The latter position has been advanced by Michael Walzer under the heading of “supreme emergency.” In this paper, I look into some of the issues of interpretation and application of Walzer’s “supreme emergency” view and some of the criticisms that have been levelled against it. I argue that Walzer’s view is vague and unacceptable as it stands, but that the alternatives proposed by critics such as Brian Orend, C.A.J. Coady, and Stephen Nathanson are also unattractive. I go on to construct a position that is structurally similar to Walzer’s, but more specific and much less permissive, which I term the “moral disaster” view. According to this view, deliberate killing of civilians is almost absolutely wrong.     

Fearful asymmetry: Kierkegaard’s search for the direction of time

The ancient problem of whether our asymmetrical attitudes towards time are justified (or normatively required) remains a live one in contemporary philosophy. Drawing on themes in the work of McTaggart, Parfit, and Heidegger, I argue that this problem is also a key concern of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or (1843). Part I of Either/Or presents the “aesthete” as living a temporally volatilized form of life, devoid of temporal location, sequence and direction. Like Parfit’s character “Timeless,” these aesthetes are indifferent to the direction of time and seemingly do not experience McTaggart’s “A-Series” mode of temporality. The “ethical” conception of time that Judge William offers in Part II contains an attempt to normativize the direction of time, by re-orienting the aesthete towards an awareness of time’s finitude. However, the form of life Judge William articulates gives time sequentiality but not necessarily the robust directionality necessary to justify (and make normative) our asymmetrical attitudes to time. Hence while Either/Or raises this problem it remains unanswered until The Concept of Anxiety (1844). Only with the eschatological understanding of time developed in The Concept of Anxiety does Kierkegaard answer the question of why directional and asymmetrical conative and affective attitudes towards time are normative.     

Courage in The Analects: A Genealogical Survey of the Confucian Virtue of Courage

The different meanings of “courage” in The Analects were expressed in Confucius’ remark on Zilu’s bravery. The typological analysis of courage in Mencius and Xunzi focused on the shaping of the personalities of brave persons. “Great courage” and “superior courage”, as the virtues of “great men” or “shi junzi 士君子 (intellectuals with noble characters)”, exhibit not only the uprightness of the “internal sagacity”, but also the rich implications of the “external kingship”. The prototype of these brave persons could be said to be between Zengzi’s courage and King Wen’s courage. The discussion entered a new stage of Neo-Confucianism in the Song and Ming dynasties, when admiration for “Yanzi’s great valor” became the key of various arguments. The order of “the three cardinal virtues” was also discussed because it concerned the relationship between “finished virtue” and “novice virtue”; hence, the virtue of courage became internalized as an essence of the internal virtuous life. At the turn of the 20th century, when China was trembling under the threat of foreign powers, intellectuals remodeled the tradition of courage by redefining “Confucius’ great valor”, as Liang Qichao did in representative fashion in his book Chinese Bushido. Hu Shi’s Lun Ru 论儒 (On Ru) was no more than a repetition of Liang’s opinion. In the theoretical structures of the modern Confucians, courage is hardly given a place. As one of the three cardinal virtues, bravery is but a concept. In a contemporary society where heroes and sages exist only in history books, do we need to talk about courage? How should it be discussed? These are questions which deserve our consideration.     

Cracking the mirror: on Kierkegaard’s concerns about friendship

In this article, I offer a brief account of some of Kierkegaard’s key concerns about friendship: its “preferential” nature and its being a form of self-love. Kierkegaard’s endorsement of the ancient idea of the friend as “second self” involves a common but misguided assumption: that friendship depends largely upon likeness between friends. This focus obscures a vitally important element, highlighted by the so-called “drawing” view of friendship. Once this is emphasized, we can see a significant aspect - though by no means all - of Kierkegaard’s worry as misplaced. However, the “drawing” view also enables us to begin to see what a “Kierkegaardian” friendship might look like.     

Knowledge of place and knowledge of God: contemporary philosophies of place and some questions in philosophical theology

The paper examines three themes from the recent philosophical literature on place: the status of places as “concrete universals”; the narratively mediated agency of places; and the various ways in which human identity proves to be relative to place. I argue that these themes throw into new relief a set of correlative issues in philosophical theology concerning, respectively, God’s supra-individuality, God’s status as a final cause, and the divine grounding of human identity. On this basis, the paper proposes that knowledge of place is analogous to, and partly constitutive of, knowledge of God.     

Is the mystery an illusion? Papineau on the problem of consciousness

A number of philosophers have recently argued that (i) consciousness properties are identical with some set of physical or functional properties and that (ii) we can explain away the frequently felt puzzlement about this claim as a delusion or confusion generated by our different ways of apprehending or thinking about consciousness. This paper examines David Papineau’s influential version of this view. According to Papineau, the difference between our “phenomenal” and “material” concepts of consciousness produces an instinctive but erroneous intuition that these concepts can’t co-refer. I claim that this account fails. To begin with, it is arguable that we are mystified about physicalism even when the account predicts that we shouldn’t be. Further, and worse, the account predicts that an “intuition of distinctness” will arise in cases where it clearly does not. In conclusion, I make some remarks on the prospects for, constraints on, and (physicalist) alternatives to, a successful defence of the claim (ii).     

How to Define a Number? A General Epistemological Account of Simon Stevin’s Art of Defining

This paper explores Simon Stevin’s l’Arithmétique of 1585, where we find a novel understanding of the concept of number. I will discuss the dynamics between his practice and philosophy of mathematics, and put it in the context of his general epistemological attitude. Subsequently, I will take a close look at his justificational concerns, and at how these are reflected in his inductive, a postiori and structuralist approach to investigating the numerical field. I will argue that Stevin’s renewed conceptualisation of the notion of number is a sort of “existential closure” of the numerical domain, founded upon the practice of his predecessors and contemporaries. Accordingly, I want to make clear that l’Aritmetique have to be read not as an ontological analysis or exploration of the numerical field, but as an explication of a mathematical ethos. In this sense, this article also intends to make a specific contribution to the broader issue of the “ethics of geometry.”     

A developed nature: a phenomenological account of the experience of home

Though “dwelling” is more commonly associated with Heidegger’s philosophy than with that of Merleau-Ponty, “being-at-home” is in fact integral to Merleau-Ponty’s thinking. I consider the notion of home as it relates to Merleau-Ponty’s more familiar notions of the “lived body” and the “level,” and, in particular, I consider how the unique intertwining of activity and passivity that characterizes our being-at-home is essential to our nature as free beings. I argue that while being-at-home is essentially an experience of passivity—i.e., one that rests in the background of our experience and provides a support and structure for our life that goes largely unnoticed and that is significantly beyond our “conscious” control—being-at-home is also a way of being to which we attain. This analysis of home reveals important psychological insights into the nature of our freedom as well as into the nature of the development of our adult ways of coping and behaving.     

A New Mixed View of Virtue Ethics, Based on Daniel Doviak’s New Virtue Calculus

In A New Form of Agent-Based Virtue Ethics, Daniel Doviak develops a novel agent-based theory of right action that treats the rightness (or deontic status) of an action as a matter of the action’s net intrinsic virtue value (net-IVV)—that is, its balance of virtue over vice. This view is designed to accommodate three basic tenets of commonsense morality: (i) the maxim that “ought” implies “can,” (ii) the idea that a person can do the right thing for the wrong reason, and (iii) the idea that a virtuous person can have “mixed motives.” In this paper, I argue that Doviak’s account makes an important contribution to agent-based virtue ethics, but it needs to be supplemented with a consequentialist account of the efficacy of well-motivated actions—that is, it should be transformed into a mixed (motives-consequences) account, while retaining its net-IVV calculus. This is because I believe that there are right-making properties external to an agent’s psychology which it is important to take into account, especially when an agent’s actions negatively affect other people. To incorporate this intuition, I add to Doviak’s net-IVV calculus a scale for outcomes. The result is a mixed view which accommodates tenets (ii) and (iii) above, but allows for (i) to fail in certain cases. I argue that, rather than being a defect, this allowance is an asset because our intuitions about ought-implies-can break down in cases where an agent is grossly misguided, and our theory should track these intuitions.     

A Sketch of a Presentist Theory of Passage

In this paper I look to develop a defence of “presentist temporal passage” that renders presentism immune from recent arguments due to Eric Olson. During the course of the paper, I also offer comment on a recent reply to Olson’s argument due to Ian Phillips. I argue that it is not clear that Phillips’ arguments succeed.     

Wittgenstein and Basic Moral Certainty

In On Certainty, Wittgenstein’s reflections bring into view the phenomenon of basic certainty. He explores this phenomenon mostly in relation to our certainty with regard to empirical states of affairs. Drawing on these seminal observations and reflections, I extend the inquiry into what I call “basic moral certainty”, arguing that the latter plays the same kind of foundational role in our moral practices and judgements as basic empirical certainty does in our epistemic practices and judgements. I illustrate the nature and significance of basic moral certainty via critical examination of contemporary philosophical “explanations” of the wrongness of killing. These pseudo explanations, as I show them to be, will be seen to founder in a similar manner to Moore’s “Proof” of an external world, that is, in a manner that discloses the phenomenon of basic (moral) certainty.     

Darwin,Schleiden, Whewell,and the “London Doctors”: Evolutionism and Microscopical Research in the Nineteenth Century

This paper discusses some philosophical and historical connections between, and within, nineteenth century evolutionism and microscopical research. The principal actors are mainly Darwin, Schleiden, Whewell and the “London Doctors,” Arthur Henfrey and Edwin Lankester. I demonstrate that the apparent alliances—particularly Darwin/Schleiden (through evolutionism) and Schleiden/Whewell (through Kantian philosophy of science)—obscure the deep methodological differences between evolutionist and microscopical biology that lingered on until the mid-twentieth century. Through an understanding of the little known significance of Schleiden’s programme of microscopical research and by comparing certain features of his methodology to the activities of the “London Doctors,” we can identify the origin of this state of affairs. In addition, the outcome provides an insight into a critique of Buchdahl’s view on Schleiden’s philosophical conception.     

The Hope,Promise, and Possibility of Psychotherapy

In this paper, five values—diversity, science, education, practice, and spirit—(a) are examined within the professional context of psychotherapy, (b) are presented as forming the foundation of much if not all that is psychotherapy, and (c) are considered as binding values that join us as a community of practicing, theorizing, and researching psychotherapists. Some of the positives of each value are reviewed. Diversity has heightened our sensitivity to and respect for individual and cultural differences. Science has kept us focused on empirically challenging and empirically informing our practice. Education has maintained emphasis on providing solid training/supervision in psychotherapy and transmitting its culture. Practice has provided us with opportunities to increasingly implement and expand on our role as helpers and healers. Spirit has been the guiding light—the heart and soul—that supports, infuses and informs all of our therapeutic endeavors and gives them meaning. What follows is a celebration of sorts—(a) capturing some of what we have done and are doing right in psychotherapy, (b) reflecting some of the weight of those “right” efforts, and (c) conveying some of the inherent hope, promise, and possibility that forever guide us in our work.     

Mathematical Intuition and Natural Numbers: A Critical Discussion Charles Parsons, Mathematical Thought and Its Objects, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2008, xx + 378?pp

Charles Parsons’ book “Mathematical Thought and Its Objects” of 2008 (Cambridge University Press, New York) is critically discussed by concentrating on one of Parsons’ main themes: the role of intuition in our understanding of arithmetic (“intuition” in the specific sense of Kant and Hilbert). Parsons argues for a version of structuralism which is restricted by the condition that some paradigmatic structure should be presented that makes clear the actual existence of structures of the necessary sort. Parsons’ paradigmatic structure is the so-called ‘intuitive model’ of arithmetic realized by Hilbert’s strings of strokes. This paper argues that Hilbert’s strings, considered as given in intuition, cannot play the role Parsons assigns to them: the criteria of identity of these strings do not have the sharpness that Parsons wants to see in them, and Parsons inadvertently projects abstract structures into his ‘intuitive model’. This diagnosis is exemplified with respect to (a) Parsons’ distinction between addition and multiplication on the one hand and exponentiation on the other and (b) his analysis of arithmetical knowledge in simple cases like “7 + 5 = 12”. All in all, it is claimed that Parsons book contains many important insights with respect to, for example, different versions structuralism, the notion of “natural number” and its uniqueness, induction, predicativity and other things, for which he is rightly famous, but that his way of drawing on the notion of intuition leaves too many questions unanswered.     

Paying the cost of skeptical theism

In this paper I show that two arguments for the inconsistency of skeptical theism fail. After setting up the debate in “Introduction” section, I show in “The initial debate” section why Mylan Engel’s argument (Engel 2004) against skeptical theism does not succeed. In “COST” section I strengthen the argument so that it both avoids my reply to Engel and parallels Jon Laraudogoitia’s argument against skeptical theism (Laraudogoitia 2000). In “COST*” section, I provide three replies—one by an evidentialist theist, one by a closure-denying theist, and one by a necessitarian theist, and argue that the necessitarian’s reply successfully rebuts the inconsistency charge. I conclude that skeptical theism which accepts God’s necessary existence is immune to both kinds of arguments for its inconsistency.