A review of: “R.D. Laing: A divided self”

John Clay (1996) R.D. Laing: A Divided Self, London: Hodder & Stoughton, pp. 308, $20.00 (hb), $7.99 (pb)     

Time as image of eternity: A.F. Losev’s criticism of subjectivist conceptions of time

Studies in East European Thought - The paper analyses Aleksei F. Losev’s position in respect to the notion of time, which he considers in a dialectical perspective. The Russian philosopher...     

A Review of: “Remembering the Times of Our Lives: Memory in Infancy and Beyond. By Patricia J. Bauer.”

Patricia Bauer's impressive book, Remembering the Times of Our Lives: Memory in Infancy and Beyond, traces the development of autobiographical memory from infancy to adulthood. Drawing on a variety of different lines of evidence, ranging from brain development to cognitive development, this book reviews the fundamental questions (e.g., why do we remember so little about early childhood?) and proposes some provocative answers. Both experts and novices will have much to gain from this volume.     

A Review of: “The Secret Garden: Temenos For Individuation. 2004.”

abstract

Moulin Rouge. Written by Craig Pearce and Baz Luhrmann. Directed by Baz Luhrmann     

The shield of pallas: The virtual contemplation of the human soul: The aesthetic of Fr. Arthur Little S.J. (1887–1949)

This paper explores the extreme but well-argued-for thesis that the indirect object of an aesthetic experience of serious art is the human soul of the person having the experience. The author of the thesis was Fr. Arthur Little S.J. a mid twentieth-century Irishman, professional philosopher and philosophical popularizer. The paper treats Little’s thesis seriously: comparisons are drawn with Kant, which may be of interest even to those hostile to Little’s central assertion. Little makes a brilliant analysis of a ‘free-beauty’, making the sharpest contrast between this and the most serious art, tragedy. Tragedy, Little holds Kant not able to cope with. One agrees. The people who cry before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. Mark Rothko This book is a development of a series of lectures given to the Study Club of the Central Catholic Library in Dublin. The view of art that it proposes is, for reasons explained in the book, more exactly called Aristotelean than Thomistic. But where it has been necessary to base conclusions in aesthetics on philosophical presuppositions outside of that science the philosophy presupposed will be Thomism. Even so, however, the Thomistic doctrine, that must be accepted by anyone who will assent to the book’s thesis, is consistent with most philosophical positions that are not openly or latently materialistic. Anyone who believein the spirituality of the soul can accept that thesis… Arthur Little S.J.     

A Review of: “The Fundamentals of Brain Development: Integrating Nature and Nurture. By Joan Stiles.”

Reviews the book The Fundamentals of Brain Development: Integrating Nature and Nurture by Joan Stiles. This volume examines the complex interactions between inheritance and experience by detailing the hows and whys of brain development from conception through adolescence. Weaving together evidence from neuroscience, embryology, genetics, physiology, and psychology, Stiles presents a tour-de-force guide of the metamorphoses that take place in the creation of the mammalian brain—metamorphoses that are often overlooked or misunderstood by an analysis of behavior alone. Throughout, many surprising and counterintuitive findings are set forth. The volume provides a stunning, in-depth, biologically based way of thinking about innateness, learning, and experience for a broader psychology audience.     

The Perfection of the Teacher Through the Pursuit of Happiness: Cavell’s Reading of J. S. Mill

Drawing upon Nel Noddings’ contention that, if children are to be happy in schools, their teachers should also be happy, this paper tries to explore a way in which the obviously intimate but seemingly conflicting connections between students’ and teachers’ happiness can be understood from the viewpoint of Stanley Cavell’s reading of J. S. Mill. Mill’s conceptions of desire and pleasure are examined as a means of liberating the above connection from existing prioritization: that is, teachers’ or students’ happiness comes first. The pursuit of happiness for both teachers and students is discussed, in the hopes of illuminating alternative images of teacher education.     

In pursuit of a historical tradition: N. A. Rozhkov’s scientific laws of history

Despite all that has been written about Russian historiography and how it profoundly changed after the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, very little is known about the historical tradition immediately before the Soviet era. This article attempts to begin to address this issue by examining the major forces that shaped the historical and sociological thought of Nikolai Alesandrovich Rozhkov (1868–1927). It argues that as Kliuchevskii’s successor and as the first professional historian to eventually present a Marxist analysis of Russian history, Rozhkov was not only the most important historian at that time but one whose work best represented the most significant transition in Russia’s historical tradition. The article concludes that an examination of Rozhkov’s historical methodology offers a new interpretation of the origins of Soviet historiography.

Allegories of the Bioethical: Reading J.M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year

This essay reads J.M. Coetzee’s novel, Diary of a Bad Year, as an occasion to problematize contemporary bioethical (and neoliberal) paradigms. Coetzee’s rhetorical strategies are analyzed to better understand the “scene of address” within which ethical claims can be voiced. Drawing on Foucault’s Socratic understanding of ethics as the self’s relation to itself, self-relation is explored through the rhetorical figure of catachresis. The essay ultimately argues that the ethical voice emerges when the terms—terms by which I relate to myself, to others, to my own body, and to the bodies of others—are themselves subject to catachrestic refiguration.     

A philosophy of labour: comparing A. V. Lunačarskij and S. Brzozowski

At the end of 1907 within a couple of months Lunačarskij met both Gor’kij and Brzozowski in Italy and found many important points of contact with each. To compare Lunačarskij’s thought at that time with Brzozowski’s “philosophical program” of 1907 casts some new light on the great variety of interpretations that enlivened Easter European Marxism at the beginning of the twentieth century. On the one hand, it explains Lunačarskij’s “economism” as distinct both from Brzozowski’s extreme anthropologism and Gor’kij’s “cosmism”; on the other, it shows that Lunačarskij’s “philosophy of labour” promoted a violent attitude of conquest and humankind’s domination of nature. Although he criticized Brzozowski’s sympathies with German Idealism, Lunačarskij shared with him a deep appreciation of human creative power, which is evident in his peculiar form of collectivism as well.     

Perceptions of Female and Male Managers in the 1990s: Plus ça change . . .

Sex Roles - Despite an increase in the number of womenmanagers, women frequently have difficulty advancing toupper levels of management. Researchers such as V . E.Schein [(1973), “The...