The World Is Not the Way It Is: the Twice-Told Tales of Biblical Narrative

In my paper I examine the relationship between biblical principles and modern western philosophy. I begin with various biblical passages, including the twice-told tale of the miracle of the loaves and fish from the Gospel of Matthew, the story of creation, and the story of Adam and Eve, contrasting them with what I argue are the non-tales of Plato’s Republic. I then move on to modern philosophical texts—Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, and Kierkegaard (with passing mention of Vico and Buber) in order to examine the idea that what constitutes the ‘twice’ in our modern twice-told tales is the biblical, self-reflexive recognition that it is the core of values underpinning our stories—love of neighbor—that is itself the story that we tell.     

Combining classical logic, paraconsistency and relevance

We present a logic with has both a simple semantics and a cut-free Gentzen-type system on one hand, and which combines relevance logics, da Costa's paraconsistent logics, and classical logic on the other. We further show that the logic has many other nice properties, and that its language is ideal from the semantic point of view.     

A Full Circle: Psycho-dynamic Understanding and Systems Theory

Two papers published in 1979 are reviewed, one which looked at theories of family interaction and techniques of intervention, and the other at developments of the focal approach to family therapy which has its base in a dynamic understanding of the nature of relationships, but uses a variety of systemic interventions to create change. The development of the approach is described, along with its application to work in the abuse field. A recent case where two daughters were sexually abused by the grandfather who had abused their mother is used as an illustration.