Seeing and Being Seen: Courage and the Therapist in Cross-Racial Treatment

ABSTRACT

Correction of the patient's distortion is often the focus of therapeutic treatment. However, the therapist's distortions, based upon pre-existing fears, which themselves are often rooted in greater societal issues and energized by the work with the patient (especially as they relate to issues of racial difference between the therapist and patient), can lead to clinical impasse. Just as an effective treatment relies upon the patient's opening up to correcting distortions, so too the therapist must be able to use transference response and become vulnerable to knowing and moving beyond his own fears and distortions.     

Being Right,and Being in the Right

This paper presents a critique of a prevailing conception of the relation between moral reasoning and judgment on the one hand, and moral goodness on the other. I argue that moral reasoning is inescapably vulnerable to moral, as opposed to merely theoretical, failure. This, I argue, means that there is something deeply misleading in the way that Kant's moral theory, and some of its main rivals, have invited us to conceive of their subject matter.     

Being grateful for being: Being, reverence and finitude

Atheists are rarely associated with holiness, yet they can have deeply spiritual experiences. Once such experience of the author exemplified ‘the holy’ as defined by Otto. However, the subjectivism of Otto’s Kantianism undermines Otto’s otherwise fruitful approach. While the work of Hegel overcomes this, it is too rationalistic to account for mortal life. Seeking to avoid these shortcomings, this paper places ‘holiness’ within a self-differentiating ontological unity, the Heideggerian ‘fourfold’. This unity can only be experienced by confronting groundless finite mortality, and the resulting existential disposition is characterized as ‘reverence’. Reverence is gratitude for mortal existence, and existence itself. Moreover, it is as much political as it is ontological, atheistic as it is theistic.     

是、应该与做--对解释世界、规范世界与改变世界诸问题的形上离析

检讨西方哲学史 ,我们能够清楚地发现两大平行演进的问题 :一是“是” (ｂｅｉｎｇ)的问题 ,一是“应该” (ｏｕｇｈｔ)的问题。“是”的问题也就是“事实”的问题 ,“应该”的问题也就是“价值”的问题。对“是”的问题的提问方式主要有 :是否存在“事实” ?能否以及如何认识“事实” ?对“事实”的表述何以可能 ?对“应该”的问题的提问方式主要有 :何谓“价值” ?存在着哪些价值 ?“价值”选择的前提和基准是什么 ?应当说 ,这两类问题在西方哲学史的两大传统 (古希腊传统和基督教传统 )中都同时存在 ,但古希腊传统以开掘“是”的问题见长…     

Heidegger,Communal Being,and Politics

There are two critical, but opposite interpretations of Heidegger’s understanding of being as a social ontology. One charges Heidegger with adhering to an anti-social “private irony,” while the other charges him with promoting a “self-canceling” totality. The current essay replies to these two charges with a discussion of Heidegger’s understanding of being as “communal being,” which is implicated both in the early Heidegger’s concept of “being-in-the-world-with-others” and in the later Heidegger’s keyword of Ereignis. It argues that Heidegger’s understanding of being as communal being is neither identical with totalitizing publicness nor the same as voluntaristic egotism. According to Heidegger, both the publicness of das Man and voluntaristic egotism are the real threats to humanity at present. Because of them, we human beings are in danger of being uprooted from the earth upon which we—as communal beings—have already and always dwelled and lived with others from the very beginning of human history.     

Mind,Mortality and Material Being

Many religiously minded materialist philosophers have attempted to understand the doctrine of the survival of death from within a physicalist approach. Their goal is not to show the doctrine false, but to explain how it can be true. One such approach has been developed by Peter van Inwagen. After explaining what I call the duplication objection, I present van Inwagen’s proposal and show how a proponent might attempt to solve the problem of duplication. I argue that the very features of the view that aid the proponent in responding to the duplication objection entails the possibility of an impossible state of affairs—that two distinct persons can at the same time be identical with the same bundle of material simples. The religiously minded materialist is caught between the horns of a dilemma. One’s view regarding human persons must be robust enough to account for personal identity over time, and so not fall to the duplication objection. At the same time, the view must not entail the possibility of two persons temporarily having complete coincident existence.     

Being Aggrieved,Faith Crises,and Racism

In this article, I depict the notion of being aggrieved and its relation to crises in or struggles of , faith, using racism to illustrate my claims. I begin the discussion by explaining what I mean by being aggrieved and its relation to faith vis-à-vis racism, relying on theological, philosophical, and psychological frameworks. In the second section of the paper, the faith journey of Malcolm X serves to illustrate this hermeneutical perspective. More specifically, I argue that his faith journey, marred by experiences of racism, led him to a faith wherein his experiences of being aggrieved no longer meant that his being was being aggrieved.     

Love, Power, and Being Born Married

This article responds both sympathetically and critically to some feminist writing about the psychology of women and of gender differences. Though love and the will to power often oppose one another, as Jung maintained, to understand their bearing upon gender it is sometimes important to regard other kinds of relations between them. There is something to be said for imagining the self as being born married. Still, the otherness of the sexes to one another cannot be overcome, and appreciating the implications of this given leads to a more complex understanding of the relational self symbolized by marriage.     

Being Brave, Being Nice: Themes of Agency and Communion in Children's Narratives

Although much is known about the presence of themes of agency and communion in adults' autobiographical stories, little is known about the presence of these themes in children's autobiographical stories. In this paper we examine the extent to which children describe themselves and others as agentic and communal beings in ordinary conversational narratives. Subjects were 96 rural, working-class children between the ages of 4 and 9 years. Personal narratives were elicited in the course of informal conversations with an adult experimenter. Narratives were analyzed for the presence of storyworld participants, and for the presence of themes of agency and communion. For both genders, themes of agency were more common than were themes of communion. Girls, however, were more likely to describe themes of communion than were boys, and were more likely to include family members in their narratives than were boys. Finally, correlations between themes of agency and communion were generally low. The findings extend the age to which the concepts of agency and communion can be productively applied to personal narratives. Implications for future theoretical and empirical work are also discussed.