Franz Boas and his plans for an International School of American Archaeology and Ethnology in Mexico.

The expansionist policy of the United States at the turn of the century widened the horizons of American anthropology. The International School of American Archaeology and Ethnology was one of the first attempts by American anthropologists to carry out systematic research in foreign lands. Motivated partly by a wish to strengthen the quality of American anthropology, Franz Boas succeeded in gaining the cooperation of several European and American institutions. The purpose of the school was to conduct rigorous anthropological investigations in Mexico. Obsessed with professionalizing the discipline, Boas failed to take into account the turbulent political climate of Mexico when planning the school. Although it did good work for a number of years (1910-1914), the school was broken up forever in 1914 because of the Mexican revolution. Attempts at resurrection failed for numerous reasons.     

Advance directives and the personal identity problem

The value and authority of advance directives such as the living will and the durable power of attorney are discussed, as well as the dangers of loss of personal identity and psychological continuity that these directives present. Differing theories of the degree of psychological continuity necessary for the preservation of personal identity are examined, concluding with the author's "compromise position" that cases of permanent unconsciousness and neurological dementia destroy some of the preconditions for personhood and thereby negate the choice between respecting the wishes of the formerly competent person and the new, different person's life because such beings are not persons at all.     

Fear of engulfment and the problem of identity

Centuries ago, our ancestors had already intuited that death anxiety is unequivocally linked to introspection and the search for identity. In mythology, the image of heroes being engulfed by monsters was often used symbolically to describe the potential dangers associated with such search. The author gives an overview of hero-myths and legends with engulfment motifs and presents a critical appraisal of Carl G. Jung's interpretation of its symbolism and relationship to heroism (that is, mental health). The prophet Jonah is also studied to highlight another type of hero rarely alluded to by Jung. Finally, parallels are drawn throughout with the fear of engulfment as seen in psychotherapy.This paper is based on a series of lectures on Jonah delivered at the Chicago Theological Seminary during the fall of 1982. Request for reprints should be addressed to the author at Lutheran General Hospital.     

Some reflections on the problem of advance directives, personhood, and personal identity

In this paper, I consider objections to advance directives based on the claim that there is a discontinuity of interests, and of personal identity, between the time a person executes an advance directive and the time when the patient has become severely demented. Focusing narrowly on refusals of life-sustaining treatment for severely demented patients, I argue that acceptance of the psychological view of personal identity does not entail that treatment refusals should be overriden. Although severely demented patients are morally considerable beings, and must be kept comfortable whilst alive, they no longer have an interest in receiving life-sustaining treatment.     

Narrative identity,practical identity and ethical subjectivity

The narrative approach to identity has developed as a sophisticated philosophical response to the complexities and ambiguities of the human, lived situation, and is not – as has been naively suggested elsewhere – the imposition of a generic form of life or the attempt to imitate a fictional character. I argue that the narrative model of identity provides a more inclusive and exhaustive account of identity than the causal models employed by mainstream theorists of personal identity. Importantly for ethical subjectivity, the narrative model gives a central and irreducible role to the first-person perspective. I will draw the connection between narrative identity and ethical subjectivity by way of an exposition of work by Paul Ricoeur and Marya Schechtman, and a brief consideration of Korsgaard’s work on practical identity and normative ethics. I argue that the first-person perspective – the reflective structure of human consciousness – arises from human embodiment, and therefore the model of identity required of embodied consciousness is more complex and irreducibly first-personal than that provided in a causal account. What is required is a self-constitution model of identity: a narrative model of identity.     

Compatibilism,determinism, and the identity theory

Two issues are raised with regard to Ted Honderich's A Theory of Determinism. First, regarding the relation between a token identity theory of mental and physical events and Honderich's ‘psychoneural union theory’, it is suggested that a token identity theory would serve Honderich's purposes while securing a simpler ontology. Second, it is argued that there is a substantive philosophical issue dividing compatibilists and incompatibilists on the question of whether persons possess free will, contrary to Honderich's contention that the compatibilist and incompatibilist differ only in responsive attitude.     

Names,identity, and predication

It is commonly accepted, after Frege, that identity statements like “Tully is Cicero” differ from statements like “Tully is Tully”. For the former, unlike the latter, are informative. One way to deal with the information problem is to postulate that the terms ‘Tully’ and ‘Cicero’ come equipped with different informative (or cognitive) values. Another approach is to claim that statements like these are of the subject/predicate form. As such, they should be analyzed along the way we treat “Tully walks”. Since proper names can appear in predicative position we could go as far as to dismiss the sign of identity altogether, some told us. I will try to discuss the advantages and/or disadvantages of this approach and investigate whether Frege’s view that the ‘is’ of identity must be distinguished from the ‘is’ of predication (copula) can be reconciled with the fact that names can appear in predicative position.     

Persons,animals, and identity

The paper is concerned with how neo-Lockean accounts of personal identity should respond to the challenge of animalist accounts. Neo-Lockean accounts that hold that persons can change bodies via brain transplants or cerebrum transplants are committed to the prima facie counterintuitive denial that a person is an (biologically individuated) animal. This counterintuitiveness can be defused by holding that a person is biological animal (on neo-Lockean views) if the “is” is the “is” of constitution rather than the “is” of identity, and that a person is identical with an animal in a sense of “animal” different from that which requires the persistence conditions of animals to be biological. Another challenge is the “too many minds problem”: if persons and their coincident biological animals share the same physical properties, and mental properties supervene on physical properties, the biological animal will share the mental properties of the person, and so should itself be a person. The response to this invokes a distinction between “thin” properties, which are shared by coincident entities, and “thick” properties which are not so shared. Mental properties, and their physical realizers, are thick, not thin, so are not properties persons share with their bodies or biological animals. The paper rebuts the objection that neo-Lockean accounts cannot explain how persons can have physical properties. To meet a further problem it is argued that the biological properties of persons and those of biological animals are different because of differences in their causal profiles.     

Substance,relation, and identity

One of the great insights of postmodern thought is that our understanding is perspectival, and that we have the perspectives we do because we have privileged one element of certain important binaries over others. Western civilization, or our understanding of it, is based upon our privileging of the male perspective over the female, the rich over the poor, and the white over the black. If that order were reversed and we privileged the perspective of those who had been marginalized, we would see things very differently. Traditional attempts to understand both our own identity and the identity of God all hinge on Aristotle’s privileging of substance over relation. The distinction between substance and relation is another important binary that has shaped Western Civilization. This paper looks at both human and divine identity by privileging relation over substance and considering identity from that marginalized perspective. Classic attempts to explain both our own identity and the identity of God all hinge on Aristotle’s privileging of substance over relation. Jesus, however, seems to privilege relation as a source of identity rather than substance. The social and behavioral sciences of the twentieth century also seem to indicate that human identity is based upon our relations with others rather than our own substance. Thus, contrary to Aristotle’s belief that substance (i.e., that which is independent of all else) is most real, perhaps relation is what is truly most real and the basis of both human and divine identity.     

Entitativity,identity, and the fulfilment of psychological needs

Social groups provide many benefits to the individual and some groups are better able to meet the needs of their group members. The current research examines the impact of perceived entitativity on the degree to which groups are able to fulfil the psychological needs of individual members. Participants listed ingroups based on the group typology of Lickel et al. (2000) and rated characteristics of the group, level of identification, and the degree to which the group met a series of needs. The results indicate that increased entitativity predicts greater perceived relative need fulfilment and that this effect is mediated by level of identification with the group. These results extend our understanding of the functions that different group types serve and the consequences of ingroup entitativity perceptions for the individual.     

Divorced mothers' gender role ideology,locus of control,and disciplinary patterns

This study examined gender role ideology, locus of control, and disciplinary patterns of divorced mothers. Data were gathered from 135 divorced mothers and their elementary school-aged children. Eighty-five percent of the subjects were white and 15% were nonwhite (African American, Hispanic, and Native American). Stepwise regression analyses were used to determine variations in child-rearing patterns explained by locus of control and gender ideology. Child-rearing patterns included four parental attitudes. The basic hypothesis that gender role ideology and locus of control are personal resources that influence child-rearing patterns of divorced mothers received clear support. These findings suggest that the relation between single parenthood and child socialization patterns are complex and that sociocognitive beliefs play an important role in single mothers' child-rearing choices.