Settling on what we are: The central place of the sense‐of‐self in education,and the implication of the concepts of the teleon and telentropy for the development of the sense‐of‐self

The purpose of this article is to illustrate the centrality of the development of a person's sense‐of‐self in his or her personal growth, and so to justify why educators should deliberately focus the attention of learners on the development of their own senses‐of‐self.

We describe the sense‐of‐self as a person's working hypothesis of what he or she is, as a functioning being. (This is in contrast to the notion of self‐concept, which is composed of the beliefs and evaluations that one has about oneself as a person in a social context.)

To illustrate the centrality of the sense‐of‐self we introduce two associated concepts—the teleon and telentropy. Teleons are “purposeful action patterns,” which may be regarded as the defining characteristic of any living system, including human beings.

Telentropy is similar to entropy (encountered in physics and chemistry), but instead of dealing with the level of disorder in externally described systems, it represents the level of informational confusion existing within an organism regarding its own true nature.

We discuss the implications of the concepts “teleon” and “telentropy” for a person's educability, using examples from daily life and educational institutions.

We provide a number of suggestions for the revising of educational practice to foster the development of the sense‐of‐self in learners. This we demonstrate to have potentially beneficial effects of the general stress levels of society.     

Towards the identification of situational barriers to creative behaviors: The development of a self‐report inventory

Four clusters of obstacles have been obtained from the Jones Inventory of Barriers (JIB), a self‐report inventory designed to investigate barriers to individual creativity in organizational environments. The barriers have been modelled as strategic, values, perceptual, and self‐image factors. Statistical evidence is presented for the reliability and validity of the measure across convenience samples of English speaking respondents (N=364). Correlational patterns between the barriers and a battery of established tests of creativity are complex, but satisfactory, as the barriers were negatively correlated with the creativity measures. Significant differences in mean scores for some barriers were found across the sampled occupational groups, including graduate engineers, architects, and business graduates. The JIB offers promise in a range of diagnostic and personal development situations.     

The evolution of consciousness as a self‐organizing information system in the society of other such systems

The evolution of consciousness is seen in the context of energy driven evolution in general in which energy and information, or the in‐forming of complex structure, are seen as two sides of the same coin. From this perspective consciousness is viewed as an ecological system in which streams of cognitive, perceptual, and emotional information form a rich complex of interactions, analogous to the interactive metabolism of a living cell. The result is an organic, self‐generating, or autopoietic, system, continuously in the act of creating itself. Evidence suggests that this process is chaotic, or at least chaotic‐like, and capable of assuming a number of distinct states best understood as chaotic attractors. Such systems do not exist in isolation, but function most normally in hypercomplex attractor patterns termed societies.     

The refugee’s flight: homelessness,hospitality, and care of the self

This paper argues that the contemporary international refugee regime is grounded in a paradigm of ‘homesickness’, which puts the refugee in an inferior position of the supplicant, whose subjectivity is framed by the regime of fixed belonging. In order to address this situation, we need to challenge the ontological primacy of homesickness and embrace ‘homelessness’, which offers the possibility of rethinking the positions of both refugees and non-refugees in ethical terms. While the responsibility of the non-refugees lies in cultivating an ethos of hospitality, the refugee can take hold of her subjectivity through the practice of care of the self. This paper first examines Nietzsche’s thought on homelessness and compares it with Foucault’s reading of the role of anakhōrēsis in the Hellenistic practice of care of the self. It then suggests how, by building on the project of universal hospitality, we can interpret the figure of the refugee through the prism of an ethic of freedom, anchored in a positive break with the city. From this perspective, the refugee regains her ethico-political agency by cultivating the relationship with her own living self, which offers new avenues for resistance against the dominant paradigm of ‘homesickness’ that governs her subjectivity today.     

For the Common Good: The Church of England,Christian–Muslim Relations and A Common Word

This paper seeks to explore some of the dynamics of Christian–Muslim relations today, particularly in England, and asks what might be the relationship between such dynamics and current Anglican theology, belief and practice. It explores the lecture of 7 February 2008 given by Archbishop Rowan Williams to the Royal Courts of Justice in London, and suggests that the Archbishop's remarks on this occasion are consonant with his understanding of Anglican ecclesiology. Finally the paper concludes by looking at the Archbishop's response to the document A Common Word and draws links between the Archbishop's interest in this document and his more domestic concerns.     

The theory‐ladenness of observations,the role of scientific instruments,and the Kantian a priori

During the last decades it has become widely accepted that scientific observations are ‘theory‐laden’. Scientists ‘see’ the world with their theories or theoretical presuppositions. In the present paper it is argued that they ‘see’ with their scientific instruments as well, as the uses of scientific instruments is an important characteristic of modern natural science. It is further argued that Euclidean geometry is intimately linked to technology, and hence that it plays a fundamental part in the construction and operation of scientific instruments. Finally, Euclidean geometry is compared to fractal geometry, and the question of its a priori status is raised. Although the position that Euclidean geometry is a priori in the original Kantian sense is untenable, the paper concludes that in some restricted sense Euclidean geometry may be said to be a priori.     

The influence of culture on the self and selfobject relationships: An asian‐north american comparison

This essay first situates the development of self psychology within the culture of North American individualism, then delves into its relevance for understanding Asians, and comes full circle in reassessing what is universal or culturally variable in the current formulation of self psychology. The Asian self is compared with the North American one, and Asian familial hierarchical relationships with American egalitarian ones, resulting in a different cultural structuring of selfobject relationships, including the psychoanalytic one. A comparative psychology of idealizing selfobject relationships is then developed. Intercultural encounters between Asians and North Americans in the United States reveal problems in the interface because of the different culturally influenced selfobject relationships.     

Early Muslim–Christian dialogue: a closer look at major themes of the theological encounter

Muslim–Christian relations are as old as Islam. Over the centuries the relationship between the two communities has sometimes been one of enmity, sometimes one of rivalry and competition. But there have also been periods of frank and fruitful dialogue and collaboration and even moments of sincere friendship, which were not overcome by conflicts. This article deals with instances of fruitful dialogue in the first four centuries of Islam when Muslims and Christians engaged in serious theological discussions. A number of factors in the early ^c Abbasid era favored such discussions, such as the cosmopolitan nature of Baghdad and its province, the caliphs' patronage of scholarship, the emergence of Arabic as a lingua franca and the deployment of dialectical reasoning (kalām). But also, quite simply, there were matters that needed debating. In this article, the author selects three major themes of the theological encounter with the intention of demonstrating how religious ideas were developed over the centuries.     

The White Cross in Muslim Java: Muslim–Christian Politics in the Javanese City of Salatiga

The interplay of religion and politics has been a consistent theme within the literature of political radicalism and religious violence in the contemporary Muslim world. Indonesia, which has long paraded its multi-layered history of religions, recently emerged as one of the main sites of Muslim–Christian violence. The religious volatility that has characterized Indonesia over the past decade has, however, left variations in vitality between faith-based organizations under-researched. In order to examine how the Christian churches undergird their institutions in the world's largest Muslim country, this article takes as its case study Salib Putih (White Cross) in the Javanese city of Salatiga and traces how a legal issue comes to transcend the boundary between religion and politics at local and national levels.     

The fragmentation of the religious tradition of the creation,after‐life and morality: Modernity not post‐modernity

Religion asks three central questions: ‘What becomes of us after death?’, ‘How should we lead a moral life?’, and ‘How and why were the universe, life and human beings created?’ In the past, these questions were answered together as part of a single unified narrative. From the mid‐nineteenth century onwards, the growth of modern science and of spiritualism led to a fragmentation of this religious tradition so that the questions are now often asked separately and the answers combined in unexpected ways. This phenomenon is an outgrowth of modernity, not post‐modernity. Post‐modernists have suggested that there has been a recent, new and definitive ending of modernity with a collapse of all dominant grand narratives. Religion is one of the grand narratives supposed to have suddenly unravelled and fragmented in this recent sea‐change, although post‐modernists in general have not bothered to provide the empirical evidence to demonstrate this. The detailed account of the long, slow process of religious fragmentation and the particular role of nineteenth‐century spiritualism given here shows that the post‐modernist thesis does not work for Europe's most important grand narrative—the Christian religion. We can see rather a process of slow unravelling of the origins which go back at the very least to the latter half of the nineteenth century, a time of classic modernity and confidence in progress. This tendency towards fragmentation has continued at least in Europe, but religion persists; it has not experienced the mushroom rise and sudden implosion that has characterised the (until recently) fashionable, grand narratives of the secular intellectuals. We are living in modern, not post‐modern, times.     

The demotion of alpha‐homo sapiens: Consciousness,punctuated equilibrium,and the laws of the game

The result of using Eigen and Winkler's LIFE/DEATH GAME to integrate Rashevksy's social physics and Rapoport's mathematical game theory, synchrony removes the arbitrariness from problems of ethics. It focuses on the primary conflicts between strategies that optimize individual survival and those that optimize survival of groups. According to synchrony, cooperation is an optimal strategy, not because cooperation conforms to some ethical pattern, but because the evolution of our technical societies has made the alternatives to cooperation potentially lethal at all levels of human interaction. Eigen and Winkler offer hypercycles as a possible method of resolving problems that conventional wisdom has labeled “irreconcilable differences.”

Combined with the findings of clinical psychologist Paul Meehl and cultural anthropologist Magoroh Maruyama, Eigen and Winkler's LIFE/ DEATH GAME indicates that a pattern of reasoning, called Alpha‐H, is not only a formidable obstacle to cooperation, it threatens contemporary societies with extinction through violent conflicts, social upheavals economic collapse or all three together.

The Demotion of Alpha‐H argues that an inability to deal constructively with change and/or diversity is Alpha‐H's fatal flaw. And the removal of gender bias toward opponent processes reasoning is a crucial step toward correcting it. The key concept is the LIFE/DEATH GAME.     

Johann Christian August Heinroth (1773–1843): The First Professor of Psychiatry as a Psychotherapist

Heinroth is known as the first professor of psychiatry. His chair was established 200?years ago on the 21st of October 1811. His major importance for the history of psychotherapy has not yet been acknowledged. Heinroth regarded restriction as well as activation as fundamental remedies for mental illnesses. Restriction meant making a voluntary decision to live a life based on religious faith and to abstain from earthly satisfaction. Within his specific psychotherapeutical module??the ??direct-psychic?? method??he utilized the patient??s mental powers??mood, mind and will, but also his spirituality. His therapeutic approach additionally contained elements of cognitive, behavioral and conversational therapy.     

The infinite qualitative difference: Sin,the self,and revelation in the thought of Søren Kierkegaard

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion -     

A review of the day–night task: The Stroop paradigm and interference control in young children

The day–night task is a widely used measurement of interference control in young children between ages 3 and 7. This integrative review examines the development of interference control by describing day–night task performance. We outline essential task demands and task variants, describe theoretical explanations of performance, highlight key methodological concerns relevant to future research, and speculate upon the neural events that likely correspond to distinct components of task performance. The review concludes with suggestions for future investigation.     

On the nature of international sales and sales management research: a social network–analytic perspective

This research uses a combination of text mining, co-word analysis, and social network analysis (SNA) to review 132 international sales and sales management (ISSM) articles published between 1980 and 2017. The study provides a unique view of the past and future of ISSM research and provides three principal contributions. First, from a social network–analytic perspective, it offers a unique examination of the ways ISSM research topics are interconnected, as reflected by keyword network structure. Second, by conducting SNA across two periods (1980–1999 and 2000–2017) and examining the changes in network centrality measures, the study offers initial insights into the evolving nature of the ISSM literature. Third, the study reports keyword network disconnections (i.e., structural holes) to propose a fruitful agenda for future ISSM research. Taken together, this research offers a current perspective of the ISSM research domain's evolving nature.