Narrative Representation and Phenomenological Knowledge

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that narrative representations can provide knowledge in virtue of their narrativity, regardless of their truth value. I set out the question in section 1, distinguishing narrative cognitivism from aesthetic cognitivism and narrative representations from non-narrative representations. Sections 2 and 3 argue that exemplary narratives can provide lucid phenomenological knowledge, which appears to meet both the epistemic and narrativity criteria for the narrative cognitivist thesis. In section 4, I turn to non-narrative representation, focusing on lyric poetry as presenting a disjunctive objection: either lucid phenomenological knowledge can be reduced to identification and fails to meet the epistemic criterion, or lucid phenomenological knowledge is provided in virtue of aesthetic properties and fails to meet the narrativity criterion. I address both of these problems in sections 5 and 6, and I close with a tentative suggestion as to how my argument for narrative cognitivism could be employed as an argument for aesthetic cognitivism.     

Hegemonic Masculinity and the Experience of Prostate Cancer: A Narrative Approach

Prostate cancer is a major health problem—one that inevitably challenges men's notions about themselves and their expressions of masculinity. As part of a larger study investigating linkages between masculinity and prostate cancer, this article focuses on the narratives of three men with prostate cancer—all of whom shed light on contemporary forms of hegemonic masculinity. Multiple interviews were conducted with study participants, capturing experiencesboth prior to and following cancer diagnosis. Analysis of individual narratives showed how social factors such as work and family influenced (and were influenced by) men's experiences with illness. All three men were forced to renegotiate their performances of masculinity—with this renegotiation mostly occurring within the parameters of performance consistent with hegemonic masculinity. However, there was also some evidence of shifts into new socialterritory and new expressions of masculinity. In contrast to more traditional, trait-based approaches to studying men's experiences, a narrative approach allows social scientists to do justice to the temporal realities and contextual complexities of men's lives. Men will be better understood as more attention is paid to the actual shape of individual lives.     

Biopolitics: Look in the Lost and Found for Peace of Mind

Pastoral Psychology - This is a report on biopolitics, current cognitions (quality of mind), and our fundamental human nature. Biopolitics means biology and politics considered together. It...     

Queering gender: anima/animus and the paradigm of emergence

An exploration into the world of the queer others of gender and sexuality moves us beyond the binary opposition of male/masculinity and female/femininity in our understanding of gender and expands the meaning of gender and sexuality for all humans. A revision of Jungian gender theory that embraces all genders and sexualities is needed not only to inform our clinical work but also to allow us to bring Jungian thought to contemporary gender theory and to cultural struggles such as gay marriage. The cognitive and developmental neurosciences are increasingly focused on the importance of body biology and embodied experience to the emergence of mind. In my exploration of gender I ask how gender comes to be experienced in a developing body and how those embodied gender feelings elaborate into a conscious category in the mind, a gender position. My understanding of emergent mind theory suggests that one's sense of gender, like other aspects of the mind, emerges very early in development from a self-organizing process involving an individual's particular body biology, the brain, and cultural environment. Gendered feeling, from this perspective, would be an emergent aspect of mind and not an archetypal inheritance, and the experiencing body would be key to gender emergence. A revised Jungian gender theory would transcend some of the limitations of Jung's anima/animus (A/A) gender thinking allowing us to contribute to contemporary gender theory in the spirit of another Jung; the Jung of the symbolic, the mythic, and the subtle body. This is the Jung who invites us to the medial place of the soul, bridging the realm of the physical body and the realm of the spirit.     

Shame,Belonging, and Biopolitics: Agamben Among the Phenomenologists

How are we to understand Agamben’s philosophical anthropology and his frequent invocations of the relation between bios and zoe? In Remnants of Auschwitz Agamben evokes a quasi-phenomenological account of shame in order to elucidate this question thus implying that the phenomenon of shame carries an ontological significance. That shame has an ontological significance is also a belief held in current debates on moral emotions and the phenomenology of intersubjectivity, but despite this common philosophical intuition phenomenologists have criticized Agamben’s account of shame. In this paper, I will try to show how these criticisms often rely on misreadings of Agamben’s (at times rather confusing) terminology. Once Agamben’s analysis of shame have been properly placed in the broader context if his work, I will outline how Agamben’s analysis of shame and his ontology of life feeds into a rethinking of community and belonging.     

In Sickness and in Health: Cripping and Queering Marriage Equality

On the heels of the groundbreaking Obergefell v. Hodges ruling legalizing same‐sex marriage in the United States, the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) movement for marriage equality has received unprecedented coverage. Few people, however, have heard of the marriage equality movement for people with disabilities (PWD). In order to understand the lack of coalition between the two movements, as well as the invisibility of the PWD marriage equality movement, I provide a conceptual analysis of both marriage movement discourses. Drawing on Cathy Cohen's work on secondary marginalization in the black community, I argue that both LGBT folks and PWD actively obscure the most needy, most dependent, and most queer members of their respective communities to gain sympathy and support from a (perceived) independent, heteronormative majority. However, bringing the two movements into dialogue can help us rethink intimate relationships, marriage, and who counts as a citizen worthy of rights.     

Studies in Affective Reaction: II. Dependence of Affective Ratings upon the Stimulus-Situation

Meehl, Paul E. Clinical vs. Statistical Prediction: A Theoretical Analysis and Review of the Evidence. Minneapolis: Univ. Minnesota Press, 1954. Pp. 149. Reviewed by Henry Winthrop.     

Plural signification and the Liar paradox

In recent years, speech-act theory has mooted the possibility that one utterance can signify a number of different things. This pluralist conception of signification lies at the heart of Thomas Bradwardine’s solution to the insolubles, logical puzzles such as the semantic paradoxes, presented in Oxford in the early 1320s. His leading assumption was that signification is closed under consequence, that is, that a proposition signifies everything which follows from what it signifies. Then any proposition signifying its own falsity, he showed, also signifies its own truth and so, since it signifies things which cannot both obtain, it is simply false. Bradwardine himself, and his contemporaries, did not elaborate this pluralist theory, or say much in its defence. It can be shown to accord closely, however, with the prevailing conception of logical consequence in England in the fourteenth century. Recent pluralist theories of signification, such as Grice’s, also endorse Bradwardine’s closure postulate as a plausible constraint on signification, and so his analysis of the semantic paradoxes is seen to be both well-grounded and plausible.

Caring for a Family Member With Cancer: Past Communal Behavior and Affective Reactions1

An important recent development in the caregiving literature is an increased focus on the role played by the interpersonal relationship between caregiver and care recipient. In this study, a prediction derived from communal relationship theory (Clark & Mills, 1979, 1993; Mills & Clark, 1982) was tested in a sample of patients with recurrent cancer and their family caregivers. Specifically, it was hypothesized that if a relationship had been communal in the past (i.e., characterized by mutual demonstrations of concern for and responsiveness to one another's needs), positive feelings about helping one's partner should continue even when one partner's needs far outweigh those of the other. Consistent with this hypothesis, results indicated that caregivers whose relationship with the patient before illness onset had been characterized by relatively infrequent communal behaviors evidenced more symptoms of depression that did those whose relationship had been characterized by more frequent communal behaviors. In addition, the effects of prior communal behavior on depressed affect were both mediated and moderated by feelings of burden. Caregivers who recalled relatively few communal behaviors in their past relationship felt more burdened by their caregiving role, and burden in turn predicted greater depressive symptomatology. Implications for early identification of caregivers at risk for becoming distressed are discussed.     

Pancreatic Cancer Surveillance Among High-Risk Populations: Knowledge and Intent

Pancreatic cancer is the fourth most common cancer in both men and women in the United States. It has the lowest survival rate of all cancers, largely due to the presence of non-specific symptoms, leading to diagnosis at advanced stages. While the majority of cases of pancreatic cancer are sporadic, up to 10% may be associated with an inherited predisposition. Currently, there is no standard screening protocol for pancreatic cancer, although this will change in the future as technology improves. Additionally, there is little information regarding the perceptions and intent to screen for pancreatic cancer among those with an increased risk due to a hereditary cancer predisposition syndrome, which was the objective of this study. Focus groups and individual telephone interviews were conducted, with questions focused on knowledge about pancreatic cancer and screening, perceived motivators, and perceived barriers related to each of the screening techniques currently available. Participants were recruited from the High Risk Breast Cancer and Pancreatic Cancer Registries at Huntsman Cancer Institute. The findings of this study indicated that individuals from these high-risk groups have low knowledge levels of pancreatic cancer screening, despite their desire for this information. Motivation to undergo a particular screening technique is related to whether the test is recommended by a physician, cost, degree of invasiveness, and comfort level. This information is useful to genetics professionals who counsel at-risk individuals, physicians who formulate patient care plans, and translational researchers who are developing pancreatic screening methods.     

On the Innocence and Determinacy of Plural Quantification

Plural logic is widely assumed to have two important virtues: ontological innocence and determinacy. It is claimed to be innocent in the sense that it incurs no ontological commitments beyond those already incurred by the first‐order quantifiers. It is claimed to be determinate in the sense that it is immune to the threat of non‐standard (Henkin) interpretations that confronts higher‐order logics on their more traditional, set‐based semantics. We challenge both claims. Our challenge is based on a Henkin‐style semantics for plural logic that does not resort to sets or set‐like objects to interpret plural variables, but adopts the view that a plural variable has many objects as its values. Using this semantics, we also articulate a generalized notion of ontological commitment which enables us to develop some ideas of earlier critics of the alleged ontological innocence of plural logic.     

Singular and Plural Pronominal Reference in Spanish

In two self-paced, sentence-by-sentence reading experiments, we examined the difference in the processing of Spanish discourses containing overt and null pronouns. In both experiments, antecedents appeared in a single phrase (John met Mary) or in a conjoined phrase (John and Mary met). In Experiment 1, we compared reading times of sentences containing singular overt and null pronouns referring to the first or to the second mentioned antecedent. Overt pronouns caused a processing delay relative to null pronouns when they referred to the first antecedent in single but not in conjoined phrases. In Experiment 2, we compared reading times of sentences containing overt and null pronouns referring to singular or plural entities. Plural null pronouns were read faster than their singular counterparts in conjoined conditions. Plural overt pronouns were read more slowly than their null counterparts both in single and conjoined conditions. We explain our findings in a framework based on the notion of balance between processing cost and discourse function in line with the Informational Load Hypothesis.     

Testicular Cancer and Genetics Knowledge Among Familial Testicular Cancer Family Members

Purpose  

It was our aim to determine baseline levels of testicular cancer and genetics knowledge among members of families with Familial Testicular Cancer (FTC).     

Religious Education in a Plural Western Society: Problems and Challenges

Books reviewed: Ziebertz, Hans‐Georg, Religious Education in a Plural Western Society: Problems and Challenges
Reviewed by Sebastian Mahfood
Kenrick‐Glennon Seminary     

Queering Black Homophobia: Black Theology as a Sexual Discourse of Transformation

Abstract

This article explores black homophobia as a co-constitutive phenomenon which harbors the fear of the loss of a black archetypal identity that can be understood as (hetero)normative. Using a method of queering black homophobia from a hetero non-normative viewpoint, an exploration of the authenticity of a liberation viewpoint that is multivocal, multidimensional, and offering an interpretation that is inclusive of identities that trouble the waters of black hetero-patriarchal hegemony will be in question as it relates to the role of the Hamitic hypothesis and those interpretations that conflate evil, sexual perversion, and human degeneration within blackness.