Schizophrenia,Temporality, and Affection

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences - Temporal experience and its radical alteration in schizophrenia have been one of the central objects of investigation in phenomenological psychopathology....     

Trinity, Temporality, and Open Theism

A number of thinkers today, including open theists, find reasons to attribute temporality to God. According to Robert W. Jenson, the Trinity is indispensable to a Christian concept of God, and divine temporality is essential to the meaning of the Trinity. Following the lead of early Christian thought, Jenson argues that the “persons” of the Trinity are relations, and these relations are temporal. Jenson’s insights are obscured, however, by problematic references to time as a sphere to which God is related. Schubert M. Ogden gives the notion of divine temporality coherent content by arguing that God’s actuality is best understood as an unending succession of experiences. This paper was delivered in the APA Pacific 2007 Mini-Conference on Models of God.     

Temporality and psychopathology

The paper first introduces the concept of implicit and explicit temporality, referring to time as pre-reflectively lived vs. consciously experienced. Implicit time is based on the constitutive synthesis of inner time consciousness on the one hand, and on the conative–affective dynamics of life on the other hand. Explicit time results from an interruption or negation of implicit time and unfolds itself in the dimensions of present, past and future. It is further shown that temporality, embodiment and intersubjectivity are closely connected: While implicit temporality is characterised by tacit bodily functioning and by synchronisation with others, explicit temporality arises with states of desynchronisation, that is, of a retardation or acceleration of inner time in relation to external or social processes. These states often bring the body to awareness as an obstacle as well. On this basis, schizophrenia and melancholic depression are investigated as paradigm cases for a psychopathology of temporality. Major symptoms of schizophrenia such as thought disorder, thought insertion, hallucinations or passivity experiences may be regarded as manifesting a disturbance of the constitutive synthesis of time consciousness, closely connected with a weakening of the underlying pre-reflective self-awareness or ipseity. This results in a fragmentation of the intentional arc, a loss of self-coherence and the appearance of major self-disturbances. Depression, on the other hand, is mostly triggered by a desynchronisation from the social environment and further develops into an inhibition of the conative–affective dynamics of life. As will be shown, both mental illnesses bear witness of the close connection of temporality, embodiment and intersubjectivity.     

Signification,Intention, Projection

Locke is what present-day aestheticians, critics, and historians call an intentionalist. He believes that when we interpret speech and writing, we aim—in large part and perhaps even for the most part—to recover the intentions, or intended meanings, of the speaker or writer. Berkeley and Hume shared Locke’s commitment to intentionalism, but it is a theme that recent philosophical interpreters of all three writers have left largely unexplored. In this paper I discuss the bearing of intentionalism on more familiar themes in empiricist reflections on language, among them the signification of things (as opposed to ideas); the signifying role of whole propositions; and the possibility of reference to an “external” world.

Temporality and embodied self-presence

Continental Philosophy Review - As Merleau-Ponty points out, our sense of time is that of passage. This demands that we think of time both as extended—that is, as including the past and the...     

Ineffability,Signification and the Meaning of Life

Abstract

There is an apparent tension between two familiar platitudes about the meaning of life: (i) that ‘meaning’ in this context means ‘value’, and (ii) that such meaning might be ineffable. I suggest a way of trying to bring these two claims together by focusing on an ideal of a meaningful life that fuses both the axiological and semantic senses of ‘significant’. This in turn allows for the possibility that the full significance of a life might be ineffable not because its axiological significance is ineffable, but because its semantic significance is ineffable in virtue of the signification relation itself being unsignifiable. I then explore to what degree this claim about signification can be adequately defended.     

Two-Valued Logics of Intentionality: Temporality,Truth, Modality,and Identity

The essay introduces a non-Diodorean, non-Kantian temporal modal semantics based on part-whole, rather than class, theory. Formalizing Edmund Husserl’s theory of inner time consciousness, §3 uses his protention and retention concepts to define a relation of self-awareness on intentional events. §4 introduces a syntax and two-valued semantics for modal first-order predicate object-languages, defines semantic assignments for variables and predicates, and truth for formulae in terms of the axiomatic version of Edmund Husserl’s dependence ontology (viz. the Calculus [CU] of Urelements) introduced by The Ontology of Intentionality I & II. It then uses the §3 results to define the modalities of truth, and §5 extends the semantics to identity claims. §6 defines and contrasts synthetic a priori truths to analytic a priori truths, and §7 compares Brentano School noetic semantic and Leibnizian possible-world semantic perspectives on modality. The essay argues that the modal logics it defines semantically are two-valued, first-order versions of the type of language which Husserl viewed as the language of any ontology of experience (i.e. of any science), and conceived as the logic of intentionality.     

Temporality and the torments of time

Immersion in time gives birth to consciousness, as well as conflict and torment. When human beings developed a sense of future, they also gained the ability to anticipate threats from nature or their fellow beings. They thereby created cultures that are bastions of survival, as well as places of poetry, art and religion where they could band together and reflect upon their common plight. The practice of psychoanalysis is in many ways a temporal process, a process of remembering, for owning and elaborating a past that gives us substance, thereby providing a basis for reflective consciousness. Stimulated by Freud's early writings, Lacan, Laplanche and their successors in particular have focussed extensively on time and psychoanalysis, and their views are a central point of this discussion. A substantial case study is offered that provides concrete examples of these perspectives. A multi‐faceted view of temporality emerges, one that is more syncopated than linear or teleological. In conclusion, I will briefly discuss recent findings in the neuroscience of memory and ‘time travel’ that underpin contemporary psychoanalytic ideas in surprising ways. It is important to remember that acceptance of the contradictory nature of temporal experience can open space for increased freedom and playfulness.     

Diabetes,Chronic Illness and the Bodily Roots of Ecstatic Temporality

This article studies the phenomenology of chronic illness in light of phenomenology’s insights into ecstatic temporality and freedom. It shows how a chronic illness can, in lived experience, manifest itself as a disturbance of our usual relation to ecstatic temporality and thence as a disturbance of freedom. This suggests that ecstatic temporality is related to another sort of time—“provisional time”—that is in turn rooted in the body. The article draws on Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception and Heidegger’s Being and Time, shedding light on the latter’s concept of ecstatic temporality. It also discusses implications for self-management of chronic illness, especially in children.

Agency, authorship, and illusion

Daniel Wegner argues that conscious will is an illusion. I examine the adequacy of his theory of apparent mental causation and whether, if accurate, it suggests that our experience of agency and authorship should be considered illusory. I examine various interpretations of this claim and raise problems for each interpretation. I also distinguish between the experiences of agency and authorship.     

Freedom, Responsibility, and Agency

This paper first distinguishes three alternative views that adherents to both incompatibilism and PAP may take as to what constitutes an agent's determining or controlling her action (if it's not the action's being deterministically caused by antecedent events): the indeterministic-causation view, the agent-causation view, and "simple indeterminism." The bulk of the paper focusses on the dispute between simple indeterminism - the view that the occurrence of a simple mental event is determined by its subject if it possesses the "actish" phenomenal quality and is undetermined by antecedent events - and Timothy O'Connor's agent-causation view. It defends simple indeterminism against O'Connor's objections to it and offers objections to O'Connor's view.     

Optimism,Agency, and Success

Does optimism lead to success? Friends of optimism argue that positive beliefs about ourselves and our future contribute to our fitness and mental health, and are correlated with good functioning, productivity, resilience, and pro-social behaviour. Sceptics, instead, claim that when we are optimistic we fail to react constructively to negative feedback, and put ourselves at risk because we underestimate threats. Thus, it is controversial whether optimistic beliefs are conducive to success, intended as the fulfilment of our goals in a given domain. According to the traditional view, optimistic beliefs lead to success when they do not involve any distortion of reality, and according to the trade-off view, they lead to success when they involve a distortion of reality, but a small one. Based on the literature about positive illusions in the perception of romantic partners and in the assessment of future health prospects, I suggest that optimistic beliefs lead to goal attainment when they support agency by contributing to the sense that we are competent and efficacious agents and that our goals are both desirable and attainable.     

Agency,communion and entitlement

In this study, the relationship between agency, communion, and the active, passive, and revenge forms of entitlement is examined. Results indicate that active entitlement was positively related to agency, negatively to communion (Study 1), and unrelated to unmitigated agency and communion (Study 2). Passive entitlement was positively related to communion (in regular and unmitigated forms) and negatively related to agency (in both forms). Revenge entitlement was positively related to agency (unmitigated and regular), and negatively related to both regular and unmitigated communal orientations. Detected relationships were independent from self‐esteem (Study 1). The findings are discussed in relation to distinctions between narcissistic and healthy entitlement, and within the context of the three‐dimensional model of entitlement.     

Signification et signifiance

Sans résumé