Teaching and Cultural Otherness

This work focuses on the relational dimension of the encounter between teacher and students meant as a structural element for teaching practice. By using theoretical group-analytical and anthropo-analytical coordinates, the authors psychodynamically problematize some relational conditions that may influence learning. This research concentrates on the circumstances that limit and allow the birth of a group arrangement capable to learn from experience, rather than on a perspective to teach-learn in a perfect agreement with planning. Intercultural education is pointed out and located as a horizon and ideal term to guide educational practice.     

Three Views of Otherness

In this article, I retrace a development in psychoanalytic conceptions of the experience of otherness from narcissistic loss to enjoyment of difference and argue that the latter conception of otherness in terms of difference involves a subtle but important ambiguity. In one sense, difference remains compatible with the objectification of the other; I therefore propose that the experience of otherness is an experience of the freedom of the other, which is not compatible with objectification. And I show how certain basic affective interpersonal attitudes (such as feeling jealous or feeling self-conscious) presuppose an experience of others as free.     

Pluralism, Otherness, and the Augustinian Tradition

Recent work on religious pluralism profits from the systematic theological framework offered by the Augustinian tradition, which uses interrreligious dialogue in the service of its larger "conversionist" purposes. In so using dialogue, the tradition transforms our vision of the epistemic problem of pluralism into the theological problem of otherness; interreligious dialogue reflects the self's inescapable dialogue with God, and reveals the self as constituted by such dialogue. Thus, those more mundane forms of dialogue, which engage the self in conversation with others, offer opportunities for the further manifestation of the Divine love and the fulfillment of the divine purpose.     

Archetype X: Visible and Invisible Otherness

This article applies Jungian psychology to the film Get Out (2017), written and directed by Jordan Peele. It examines American culture, race, and racism issues through the conceptual lenses of complexes, archetypes, and personal myth. The movie is organized into a series of chapters exploring psychological, racial complexes: the complex of being the objectified other, the complex of not being other enough, and the complex of otherness and annihilation. The article then considers personal myth and the presence of invisible otherness in the lives of both Jung and Peele. The author places emphasis on the necessity and responsibility of the other as a disrupter and developer of personal and cultural individuation, and proposes the development of an archetype of otherness through the arts, Archetype X. The naming of this new archetype opens a way for the marginalized to begin to be seen, to create a home in which to place themselves and to belong.     

Radical Otherness: Sociological and Theological Approaches

Abstract

This article reports two studies on the development of the Embodied Spirituality Scale (ESS), an instrument designed to measure the level of integration between one's experience of sexuality and spirituality. Both studies were limited to specifically Christian samples. Study 1 reports the initial construction of the ESS. Participants in Study 1 consisted of 128 women and 64 men (ages 16 to 75, M = 22.7 years). Study 2 reports a validation study of the ESS. Participants in Study 2 consisted of 125 female (46.5 per cent) and 142 male (52.8 per cent) adults between the ages of 18 and 78 (M = 47; SD = 10.9). The results offer empirical support for the concept of embodied spirituality as an integral relationship between sexuality and spirituality. The results also suggest that, as a measure of embodied awareness, the ESS may offer clues to the nature of the ‘active ingredient’ in the relationship between spirituality and health.     

Diffusing the Clash of Otherness in Projective and Complex-Discharging Fields

Journal of Religion and Health - Given the frequent tendencies of our institutional structures to undergo splitting, how does analytical psychology give us some pointers in knowing how to diffuse...     

Assimilation and Otherness: the Theological Significance of Négritude

This article argues that otherness is a root concept in Christian theology, functioning as such in Christology and the doctrines of the Trinity, creation, sanctification and consummation. Recent philosophical and theological treatments of otherness or alterity have, however, focused on its problematic aspects, its link to ills such as racism, sexism and genocide. The thought of the Senegalese statesman and poet Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906–2001) is proposed as an aid in mediating between the tradition's conceptions of otherness and contemporary debates and contexts, illuminating root concepts which have not been recognized as such, their systematic interconnectedness and their enduring relevance.     

Gadamer and the Otherness of Nature: Elements for an Environmental Education

In this work I search for elements that contribute to the development of the ethical dimension of environmental education. I start with the existence of what C.A. Bowers calls “areas of silence” in the curriculum in both schools and universities. The reason for this silence, I argue, is to be found in the Cartesian conceptual structures of curricula. I suggest that the works of Bacon, Galileo and Descartes provoke a twofold process that I have termed the forgetting of tradition and objectification of nature. As a corrective to this process, I explore the possibilities that the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer opens for rehabilitation of tradition and de-objectification of nature. I work with the concept of the “dignity of things” present in Greek dialectics: that nature is not simply a projection of mind (as the neo-Kantians claim), but something that thought suffers. In my conclusions I argue that for nature to be reinserted into almost all areas of knowledge it is necessary that we respect “the otherness of nature.”     

Space Exploration: Current Thinking on the Notion of Otherness

Space appears today as one of the major limits of human knowledge and experience. It offers a challenge for philosophy and theology to offer answers to the questions of the other, of origins, of faith, of image of God.     

Rupturing Otherness: Becoming Estonian in the Context of Contemporary Britain

While identity construction continues to be a widely discussed and researched area in contemporary social sciences, the existing theories have overlooked the importance of understanding why and how identities as semiotic constructions emerge in individuals’ consciousness in the flow of their everyday functioning. This article seeks to address this limitation in the theorizing by proposing an alternative conceptualization of identity, according to which identity construction is triggered by rupturing life-experience, which surfaces another perspective and makes the person aware of a possibility to be otherwise or of the reality of being different. Theoretical claims put forward in the paper are drawn from data gathered in a recent study, which explored lived-through experiences of young Estonians, who made study-visits to the United Kingdom. The discussed data will also highlight some interesting aspects in Estonians’ self-definition as it is constructed in relation to Eastern-European identity in the context of contemporary Britain.     

I-ness and Otherness: A review of Dan Zahavi's Self-Awareness and Alterity

Continental Philosophy Review -     

Process-Product Dynamics: The Role of Otherness in Cultural Cultivation

Carriere (2013) presents a stimulating perspective on the cultural phenomena aiming to recover the role of the external products of culture to imbalance the currently popular emphasis on subject’s process of cultivation highlighted by semiotic developmental cultural psychology. The excessive focus on subject’s internal processes dismissing a better consideration of products of culture and the compelling objective realities of other dimensions of culture are pointed out. By this way the author’s proposes a better dialogue with others perspectives on (cross)cultural psychology. These arguments are analyzed through a closer consideration of I-Other perennial movement. A dialogical view of process-product dynamics is then proposed. The role of Otherness—the one that (partially)shares and the one as witness, approving or disapproving subject’s products of cultivation—is discussed through the analysis of a concrete episode of the cultivation of the subject. It is concluded that a semiotic developmental cultural psychology and (cross) cultural psychology have different objects of knowledge comprising distinct interests and research fields.     

The Consubstantial Otherness of God: Divine Simplicity and the Trinity in Hans Urs von Balthasar

Martin explores divine simplicity according to the twentieth‐century Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar. She grants that Balthasar does not provide a traditional presentation of the attribute of divine simplicity. In his doctrine of the Trinity, Balthasar emphasizes such themes as distance, “hiatus,” and infinite difference, none of which seems to promise a robust doctrine of divine simplicity. Indeed, some have suggested that Balthasar's Trinitarian theology does not allow for traditional claims about divine simplicity. Martin argues, however, that one finds in Balthasar's Trinitarian theology the doctrine of divine simplicity, assumed as an internalized starting point and rooted in his understanding of the analogia entis. This can be seen, for example, in his various engagements with Aquinas as well as with contemporary thinkers such as Gustav Siewerth and Erich Przywara. Likewise, when addressing the issue of whether the Trinitarian Persons can be “counted” according to our normal understanding of number, he insists with Evagrius that God is simple. In the same context, he similarly draws upon Plotinus, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory Nazianzen, Tertullian, Ambrose, and Aquinas. Martin therefore gives particular attention to the Theo‐Logic and to Balthasar's affirmation in his Trinitarian theology of the points that the divine Persons are fully God, the divine attributes are identical with each other in God, and the distinction of Persons has to do not with three parts of God but with opposed subsistent relations.     

利他行为的谱系分析

利他是道德的基本价值导向和追求,其具体落实为利他行为,但因对利他的不同理解,利他行为呈现出为一个复杂的行为体系.因此有必要对其进行一个基本的理论梳理,以此廓清利他行为的基本谱系及其合理性基础.     

The new grammar of Otherness: Europe,the Shoah,and the Jews

The essay discusses the passage from an ideological, patriotic and anti-fascist memory of the deportations and the extermination to what the author describes as the “ethnic” memory of the Shoah, which has played, and continues to play, a central role in constructing the European historical narrative as that narrative depicts the Jews as Europe’s “other”. Theoretical reflection on memory is intertwined with historical analysis of the period between 1945 until the end of the twentieth century. Two, binary perspectives are featured, one, which examines memory from a cognitive point of view and the other, which examines memory from a cultural, ideological, moral and political perspective. These perspectives come to the fore in memoire-literature, movies, plays, historiographic and philosophical debates, which illustrate the two perspectives and their articulation, as well as they justify the essay’s periodization.