“I am NN”: A Reconstruction of Anscombe's “The First Person”

This paper develops a way of understanding G. E. M. Anscombe's essay “The First Person” at the heart of which are the following two ideas: first, that the point of her essay is to show that it is not possible for anyone to understand what they express with “I” as an Art des Gegebenseins—a way of thinking of an object that constitutes identifying knowledge of which object is being thought of; and second, that the argument through which her essay seeks to show this is itself first personal in character. Understanding Anscombe's essay in this light has the merit of showing much of what it says to be correct. But it sets us the task of saying what it is that we understand ourselves to express with “I” if not an Art des Gegebenseins, and in particular what it is that we understand ourselves to express with sentences with “I” as subject that might seem to express identity judgments, such as “I am NN”, and “I am this body”.     

“Never Again War”

This essay addresses the complexities of the Roman Catholic position on war by evaluating recent documentary evidence, attending to the contemporary challenges of terrorism and humanitarian interventions. It presents two arguments. First, attending to traditional Catholic resources for assessing war, papal criticism of recent military action, and debates about a recent shift in Catholic just war logic, this essay argues that Catholic teaching on war has undergone a repositioning in a pacifist direction. Second, it contends that recent critiques of this shift in position by scholars such as George Weigel and James Turner Johnson, however, are wrong to categorize this a “functional pacifism.” Though a development from within just war theory and pacifist reasoning, the Church's new stance does not operate as a type of pacifism, allowing too many possibilities for justified armed conflict to be labeled as “functional” pacifism. The essay concludes by examining the traditional Catholic theological commitments that place limits on any movement toward pacifism, precluding even a functionally pacifist position.     

Teaching Exodus as “Problem Text”

This essay explores how one might use the “problem” of the hardening of Pharaoh's heart as a learning opportunity in the classroom. The author identifies two pedagogical aims: (1) cultivating more sophisticated, critical readers of the Bible; and (2) helping students reflect on the contextual nature of interpretation. The essay discusses in some detail various ways of teaching the text, including an exercise in close reading, examination of sources, and a selective study of the history of interpretation. It also explores various lessons to be learned from these exercises, and addresses applicability of the approaches to other teaching contexts. An earlier version of this paper was prepared for the “Problem Texts” group of the consultation “Teaching the Bible in the 21st Century,” held at the Wabash Center in Crawfordsville, Indiana.     

The “Meta” Level of Integrity: Integrity in the Context of Structural Injustice

This essay argues for a new, “meta,” level of integrity that is created by the context of structural injustice. The essay will draw from Margaret Walker to bring out a defining social value of integrity, namely, its ability to facilitate reliable response to harms caused by “moral luck.” The essay will then argue that, when bad luck is caused by complex social‐structural function, traditional advice for maintaining one's integrity fails to provide adequate guidance; following such advice facilitates unjust social‐structural function, and so unreliability in response to harm. The essay will address this problem by arguing that in the context of structural injustice, a “meta‐level” meaning of integrity emerges. This new meta‐level of integrity, unlike the more traditional first‐level integrity, does not instruct an individual to disassociate herself from structural harms; instead, it instructs an individual to manage the way in which she participates in unjust social structures. Meta‐level integrity, unlike first‐level integrity, does not facilitate an end to structural harm, but it does promote a reliable presence of social‐justice movements within unjust structures.     

THE INSPIRATION OF GOD AND WOLFHART PANNENBERG'S “FIELD THEORY OF INFORMATION”

Abstract This paper will examine the implications of an extended “field theory of information,” suggested by Wolfhart Pannenberg, specifically in the Christian understanding of creation. The paper argues that the Holy Spirit created the world as field, a concept from physics, and the creation is directed by the logos utilizing information. Taking into account more recent developments of information theory, the essay further suggests that present creation has a causal impact upon the information utilized in creation. In order to adequately address Pannenberg's hypothesis that the logos utilizes information at creation the essay will also include an introductory examination of Pannenberg's Christology which shifts from a strict “from below” Christology, to a more open “third way” of doing Christology beyond “above” and “below.” The essay concludes with a brief section relating the implications of an extended “field theory of information” to creative inspiration, as well as parallels with human inspiration.     

The First Sophists and Feminism: Discourses of the “Other”

In this essay, I explore the parallel between the historical exclusions of rhetoric from philosophy and of women from fields of rational discourse. After considering the usefulness and limitations of deconstruction for exposing marginalization by hierax' chical systems, 1 explore links between texts of the sophists and feminist proposals for rewriting/rereading history by Cixous, Spivak, and others. I conclude that sophistic rhetoric offers a flexible alternative to philosophy as an intellectual framework for mediating theoretical oppositions among contemporary feminisms.     

“Voices of the People”: Linguistic Research Among Germany's Prisoners of War During World War I

This paper investigates the history of the Royal Prussian Phonographic Commission, a body that collected and archived linguistic, ethnographic, and anthropological data from prisoners‐of‐war (POWs) in Germany during World War I. Recent literature has analyzed the significance of this research for the rise of conservative physical anthropology. Taking a complementary approach, the essay charts new territory in seeking to understand how the prison‐camp studies informed philology and linguistics specifically. I argue that recognizing philological commitments of the Phonographic Commission is essential to comprehending the project contextually. My approach reveals that linguists accommodated material and contemporary evidence to older text‐based research models, sustaining dynamic theories of language. Through a case study based on the Iranian philologist F. C. Andreas (1846–1930), the paper ultimately argues that linguistics merits greater recognition in the historiography of the behavioral sciences.     

Teaching World Religions without Teaching “World Religions”

Tomoko Masuzawa and a number of other contemporary scholars have recently problematized the categories of “religion” and “world religions” and, in some cases, called for its abandonment altogether as a discipline of scholarly study. In this collaborative essay, we respond to this critique by highlighting three attempts to teach world religions without teaching “world religions.” That is, we attempt to promote student engagement with the empirical study of a plurality of religious traditions without engaging in the rhetoric of pluralism or the reification of the category “religion.” The first two essays focus on topical courses taught at the undergraduate level in self‐consciously Christian settings: the online course “Women and Religion” at Georgian Court University and the service‐learning course “Interreligious Dialogue and Practice” at St. Michael's College, in the University of Toronto. The final essay discusses the integration of texts and traditions from diverse traditions into the graduate theology curriculum more broadly, in this case at Loyola Marymount University. Such confessional settings can, we suggest, offer particularly suitable – if somewhat counter‐intuitive – contexts for bringing the otherwise covert agendas of the world religions discourse to light and subjecting them to a searching inquiry in the religion classroom.     

Freudianism, behaviour therapy and “self-disclosure”

The Editors of this Journal have graciously invited me to write “a comparative revaluation of the works of Wolpe and of Dollard and Miller on the subject of psychotherapy”. I am happy to accept this assignment but wish to extend it by also placing these works in juxtaposition to another, very different approach and point of view which I believe involves a much more realistic conception of neurosis and holds far greater promise of effective treatment and prevention.     

AFFECT IN PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY: DISCUSSION OF ANDRÉ GREEN'S “ON DISCRIMINATING AND NOT DISCRIMINATING BETWEEN AFFECT AND REPRESENTATION”1

André Green's 1999 programmatic essay on affect and representation, an attempt to extend Freud's model of the neuroses (where affect and representation have different vicissitudes) to non‐neurotic cases is submitted to critical reading. Green wishes to restore the importance of representation; to use the second topographical theory, where id, psychical impulse and object‐cathexis replace the unconscious and the ideational representation in order to conceptualise borderline disturbance, and to show how ultimately the ‘non‐discrimination’ affect‐representation obtains in non‐neurotic cases as well. The author, interested in the question posed in Green's essay as to what we have to sell our borderline patients, addresses the various reasons why this project fails. Among the problematic points are the paradox of Green's model of unconscious affect, that does not allow the analyst to generate meaning with borderline patients, the view of ‘representation’ as replacing presence and perception of the object that does not allow the analyst to be a nonabsent object, and the inabilty to conceptualise affect‐representatives and to work out the definition of affect as ‘the anticipation of a meeting with the other's body’ which does not allow the analyst to function as an ‘anticipatory object’ or ‘an object of affect’.     

Towards a Non‐Essentialist Pedagogy of “Islam”

Abstract. Traversing a rock‐strewn terrain of essentialist methodologies historically employed for teaching Islam, the author espouses a non‐Essentialist pedagogy that combines critical reflection, analysis of historical methods, and development of an appreciation for alternative notions about Islam and global interdependence. In this essay the author contends that teaching Islam ought to avoid our and their language and instead aim at helping students think in critically reflective, creative, and relational ways so that they might learn to “think of civilizations as transformative, reflexive, and fluid entities.”     

Terrorists,Hostages, Victims,and “The Crisis Team”: A “Who's Who” Puzzle

This essay examines the relationship between nonviolence and trustworthiness. I focus on questions of accountability for people in midlevel positions of power, where multiple loyalties and responsibilities create conflicts and where policies can push people into actions that reinstate hegemonic relations. A case study from crisis counseling is presented in which the (mis) management of the case exacerbated previous violence done to a biracial female. The importance of resistance to dominant ideology is scrutinized.     

A Response to My “Critics”

This essay is a response to comments made by Shane Fhelan, Cheshire Calhoun, and Naomi Scheman on my book The Play of Reason: From the Modern to the Postmodern (1999). I reiterate my belief that we best approach the issue of consensus and dissension in second’ Order justifications of social and political claims not philosophically but sociologically, politically, historically. I suggest similar approaches for dealing with the question of meaning. This mow signals an endorsement not of indifference but rather of commitment and humility.     

Response to Kathleen Fisher's “Look Before You Leap”

This article provides two short responses to Kathleen M. Fisher's essay “Look Before You Leap: Reconsidering Contemplative Pedagogy,” published in this issue of the journal.     

Effects of visual familiarity on “same” and “different” decision processes

An experiment was conducted in which subjects matched upper and lower case versions of well-known abbreviations, such as BBC and etc, and meaningless controls. “Same” RT showed a familiarity effect for upper case versions of abbreviations such as BBC and GPO, but not for the lower case versions bbc and gpo. The converse did not occur for abbreviations such as etc, which were thought to occur most frequently in lower case. The “different” RT was inhibited by familiarity, with pairs such as IBM GPO being classified less rapidly than their lower case versions or controls. These effects occurred for subjects instructed to report “No” for “same” displays and “Yes” for “different” displays as well as for subjects given a conventional decision-report assignment. Some implications of these results for an account of the manner in which familiarity affects graphemic comparison processes are considered.     

American social scientists and the domestication of “class” 1929–1955

This essay examines social scientists' newfound interest in the American class system and their changing conceptions of “class” in the years from 1929 until 1955. Specifically, it compares Robert and Helen Lynd's views with those of W. Lloyd Warner. Emphasis shifted in class analysis from occupation and income to social acceptance and cultural lifestyle, and moral outrage over the inequities enshrined in the American class system gave way to a functionalist explanation that class differences were the inevitable by-products of a complex division of labor. Once the class system was held to integrate rather than to divide Americans, classes came to be seen as rungs on a ladder on which Americans were constantly moving up and down. Divisive connotations were thus played down in this peculiarly American conception of class, and the discovery of class differences was squared with the venerable belief in American classlessness.