Marriage,religion and human flourishing: how sustainable is the classic Durkheim thesis in contemporary Europe?

This paper draws on the three waves of the European Values Survey across five countries (Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Northern Ireland, Spain and Sweden) to investigate the relationship between indicators of positive psychology (conceptualised as feelings of happiness and satisfaction with life), religiosity (conceptualised as self-assigned religious affiliation and self-reported religious attendance) and marital status. The results demonstrate that religiosity is, in general, positively correlated with both indicators of positive psychology. Further, across all waves and all countries, the pattern emerges that those respondents who are married are likely to report higher levels of happiness and greater satisfaction in life. These data provide contemporary support for the classic Durkheim thesis linking the two institutions of marriage and religion with human flourishing.     

Bringing culture to the nation: Hebraism, Yiddishism, and the dilemmas of Jewish cultural formation in Russia and Ukraine, 1917–1919

Focusing on the pivotal 1917–1919 conjuncture in Russia and Ukraine, this paper analyzes the efforts of the divided Jewish nationalist intelligentsia to disseminate new forms of Jewish culture to a mass audience, the reception of these efforts in the former Tsarist empire’s variegated Jewish population, and the intelligentsia’s parallel exploration of other forms of cultural formation less dependent on popular support. Comparing the cultural programs of Hebraism and Yiddishism, it demonstrates important parallels in their cultural visions and highlights their shared belief in the possibility of implanting a secularist, aestheticist intelligentsia culture in the whole of “the nation.” The paper reconstructs both substantial forms of popular openness to this culture and its sociocultural weaknesses. Finally, it examines experiments made by the intelligentsia with alternative routes to cultural transformation: suppression of popular culture, non-market cultural arrangements, cultural revolution through education, and the uses of the state. The paper seeks a fuller understanding both of the roots of interwar cultural programs in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and of the Jewish nationalist intelligentsia’s underlying conception of “culture,” its own authority, and the evolving relationship between these conceptions and the realities of East European Jewish social, cultural, and political life from the 1890s onward.     

Nietzsche,postmodernism and the phenomenon of Arvydas Šliogeris in contemporary Lithuanian philosophy

This article is based on the presupposition that postmodern philosophy has been largely influenced by Nietzsche’s writings. The author raises the question of how Nietzsche and postmodern philosophy are interpreted in the contemporary philosophical discourse in Lithuania. The conclusion drawn is that many philosophy critics in Lithuania are interested in Nietzsche’s philosophy (Mickevi?ius, Sodeika, ?erpytyt?, Sverdiolas, Baranova) and in the problems of postmodern philosophy (Ker?yt?, Rubavi?ius, ?ukauskait?, ?erpytyt?, Sverdiolas, Baranova, Norkus). The article also raises a second crucial question: beyond the critics, are there any truly authentic postmodern thinkers in Lithuania? This article’s main hypotheses is that Arvydas ?liogeris’ philosophy is the best and perhaps the only example of original Lithuanian postmodern thought; it is based on, and interconnected with, the deeply inherited roots of existential thought in Lithuanian philosophical culture. The arguments for these hypotheses are as follows: first, ?liogeris is the first philosopher in Lithuania who has tried to reason in an interdisciplinary manner, e.g. trying to overcome the modernistic distinction between philosophy and the arts (especially literature, poetry, and the visual arts); secondly, ?liogeris’s philosophizing is indispensable to his writings—his texts are examples of an experience of writing as thinking and thinking as writing; thirdly, following Deleuze’s presupposition that the philosopher is a creator, one can see this creative aspect in ?liogeris’s approach. His texts show how it is possible to synthesize insights from philosophy and poetry.     

Unruly difference: the politics of stigma and the space of the sacred

This essay looks at three contemporary Jewish American playwrights: Tony Kushner, Martin Sherman and Deb Margolin, whose plays ask fundamental questions about Jewish identity in its political, cultural and spiritual dimensions. Breaking from the concerns of their theatrical predecessors, most of whom ignored or disguised their Jewish roots, these playwrights draw on profoundly Jewish concepts to reconfigure narratives of redemption, obligation, ethical community, and Messianic utopianism. Their plays are characterized by a sensibility of “unruly difference.” Attracted by the politics of marginality; these writers re-imagine otherness in plays that celebrate a different understanding of faith and conjure the sublime. By carving out a more capacious definition of Judaism that embraces contradiction and contention, faith and doubt, progressive social vision and deepened spiritual commitment, they sit aslant the mainstream. They are drawn to their understanding of the spiritual power and cultural grandeur of the Jewish heritage, but question the politics of accommodation and the limitations of tradition and law. The ambivalence these writers express about Judaism adds to the complexity of their writing and to its value as a cultural indicator. Working in new idioms, they refute traditional discourses and dominant paradigms of conformity and coalescence that characterize modern Jewish-American life.     

Nonverbal working memory of humans and monkeys: Rehearsal in the sketchpad?

Investigations of working memory tend to focus on the retention of verbal information. The present experiments were designed to characterize the active maintenance rehearsal process used in the retention of visuospatial information. Rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta;N=6) were tested as well as humans (totalN=90) because these nonhuman primates have excellent visual working memory but, unlike humans, cannot verbally recode the stimuli to employ verbal rehearsal mechanisms. A series of experiments was conducted using a distractor-task paradigm, a directed forgetting procedure, and a dual-task paradigm. No evidence was found for an active maintenance process for either species. Rather, it appears that information is maintained in the visuospatial sketchpad without active rehearsal.     

Religion in the American Congress: the case of the US House of Representatives, 1953–2003

Although there has been a surge of scholarship on the role of religion in American electoral politics, there has been much less analysis of its influence over the behaviour of public officials, such as national legislators. In this study, I review the literature on religion in the Congress, noting the limitations of that research, primarily its failure to measure adequately the religious affiliations, activities and beliefs of members. I then outline an alternative approach that promises a fuller assessment, showing how both ethnoreligious affiliation and theological perspectives have influenced legislative voting since the 1950s. Ethnocultural affiliation was the most powerful influence until the 1990s, but has recently been overlain by deepening ‘culture war’ divisions. The study concludes with a stringent multivariate analysis that controls for important variables typically included in legislative roll call analysis, showing that many religious measures survive those controls.     

Affect, accessibility of material in memory, and behavior: a cognitive loop?

Two studies investigated the effect of good mood on cognitive processes. In the first study, conducted in a shopping mall, a positive feeling state was induced by giving subjects a free gift, and good mood, thus induced, was found to improve subjects' evaluations of the performance and service records of products they owned. In the second study, in which affect was induced by having subjects win or lose a computer game in a laboratory setting, subjects who had won the game were found to be better able to recall positive material in memory. The results of the two studies are discussed in terms of the effect that feelings have on accessibility of cognitions. In addition, the nature of affect and the relationship between good mood and behavior (such as helping) are discussed in terms of this proposed cognitive process.     

Recollection and phantasy: The problem of the truth of memory in Husserl’s phenomenology

The epistemological problem of the truth of memory cannot be resolved without establishing a clear distinction between recollection and phantasy. Husserl’s position in this regard is both paradoxical and compelling. It is paradoxical because Husserl repeats his antiskeptical intention many times; but nevertheless in his phenomenology, recollection and phantasy are almost completely identical. Perhaps no philosopher has so radically approached the experience of remembering and the experience of fantasizing as Husserl. But at the same time, the recognition of this fundamental similarity is precisely what allows the phenomenologist to avoid empiricist misunderstandings and thus approach the problem of the distinction between recollection and phantasy in a much more persuasive way than the traditional one. In this paper, I will first try to show how and why Husserl approaches recollection and phantasy. Then I will try to show how it is possible to establish a clear distinction between these two phenomena without misunderstanding the possibility of false memory.     

Technical expertise and the construction of the rural Yishuv, 1882–1948

In fin de sièecle Europe, political economy viewed science as an indispensable tool of state power. Accordingly, in the early 1900s exponents of Zionist political economy saw the World Zionist Organization (WZO) as a government with the responsibility to direct the nation-building enterprise in Palestine. The principle beneficiaries of assistance from the WZO, youthful pioneer laborers from eastern Europe,shared the WZO's reverence for technical knowledge, but distrusted technicians, whom they associated with authoritarianism. In the eyes of the pioneer laborers, a technican should not lead, but rather make vital resources available to the workers to use as they saw fit. Key figures in the WZO's settlement institutions accepted this subordinate status for the technician and employed technical experts to guide,rather than direct, the labor movement in the construction of publicly-funded, co-operative agricultural settlements. From its beginning, however, the Zionist movement featured an alternative conception of technical expertise, drawn more from business economics than political economy, and tending to favor as its model the corporation rather than the state. One characteristic of this approach was the conviction that apolitical experts should direct settlement activity.For a brief period during the 1920s, champions of this approach wielded influence over the WZO's settlement institutions. But as a result of the tumultuous events of the years 1929–1939, the Zionist settlement enterprise fused politics and economics tightly together. From the mid-1930s on to the founding of the state of Israel, technical expertise was mobilized to serve the political and military leadership of the Yishuv. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Aging,source memory,and the experience of “remembering”

In a previous study, we found source memory for perceptual features to differentiate between younger but not older adults’ reports of recollective (“remember”; R) and “know” (K) experiences. In two experiments with younger (17–30 years) and older (64–81 years) participants, we examined whether memory for meaningful speaker sources would accompany older adults’ recollective experience. Indeed, memory for male and female speakers (but not partial memory for gender; Experiment 1) as well as bound memory for speakers and their facial expressions (Experiment 2) distinguished between both younger and older adults’ RK reports. Thus, memory for some sources forms a common basis for younger and older adults’ retrieval experience. Nonetheless, older adults still showed lower objective source memory and lower subjective source-attribution confidence than younger adults when reporting recollective experiences, suggesting that source memory is less relevant to their retrieval experience than for younger adults.