The Black Foe: Being Towards Death1

The ontology of death is universal, hence archetypal. Nowhere do we witness any organic creature escape its talons. Analytical psychology has had an intimate relationship to death for the simple fact that it contemplates the soul, the numinous, and an afterlife. From Hegel to Heidegger, Freud and Jung, death was an existential force that sustained and transformed life, the positive significance of the negative. Rather than merely a destructive phenomenon, death informs Being, the power of nothingness that dialectically drives life. In this paper, I will introduce the notion of what I call the omega principle, the psychological orientation and trajectory of our being towards death, which we may say is a universal preoccupation and recapitulation of the collective unconscious that subsumes our personal relation to death, an eternal return of the objective psyche constellated as esse in anima.     

The Epistemology of the Book of Revelation

Recent developments in Christian philosophy, in particular epistemology, need to be enriched by a study of epistemology in the Bible. This article uncovers the epistemological assumptions of the Book of Revelation (specifically related to spiritual experience, revelation, and eschatological vindication) and points out how they may advance the development of a contemporary Christian epistemology.     

The role of pitch and temporal diversity in the perception and production of musical sequences

In two experiments we explored how the dimensions of pitch and time contribute to the perception and production of musical sequences. We tested how dimensional diversity (the number of unique categories in each dimension) affects how pitch and time combine. In Experiment 1, 18 musically trained participants rated the complexity of sequences varying only in their diversity in pitch or time; a separate group of 18 pianists reproduced these sequences after listening to them without practice. Overall, sequences with more diversity were perceived as more complex, but pitch diversity influenced ratings more strongly than temporal diversity. Further, although participants perceived sequences with high levels of pitch diversity as more complex, errors were more common in the sequences with higher diversity in time. Sequences in Experiment 2 exhibited diversity in both pitch and time; diversity levels were a subset of those tested in Experiment 1. Again diversity affected complexity ratings and errors, but there were no statistical interactions between dimensions. Nonetheless, pitch diversity was the primary factor in determining perceived complexity, and again temporal errors occurred more often than pitch errors. Additionally, diversity in one dimension influenced error rates in the other dimension in that both error types were more frequent relative to Experiment 1. These results suggest that although pitch and time do not interact directly, they are nevertheless not processed in an informationally encapsulated manner. The findings also align with a dimensional salience hypothesis, in which pitch is prioritised in the processing of typical Western musical sequences.     

Employability during unemployment: Adaptability, career identity and human and social capital

Recently, Fugate et al. [Fugate, M., Kinicki, A. J., & Ashforth, B. E. (2004). Employability: A psycho-social construct, its dimensions, and applications. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 65(1), 14] defined employability as a psycho-social construct comprised of three dimensions: (i) adaptability; (ii) career identity; and (iii) human and social capital. The aim of the current paper was to empirically test Fugate et al.’s model in a sample of 416 unemployed Australians (n = 126 for longitudinal sample). Specifically, this research explored employability in relation to three aspects of unemployment: (1) self-esteem during unemployment; (2) job search during unemployment; and (3) re-employment (at a 6-month follow-up). Overall, the results of this longitudinal study provide broad support for the psycho-social construct of employability and demonstrate its applicability to the unemployment context.     

Anti-Luck Epistemologies and Necessary Truths

That believing truly as a matter of luck does not generally constitute knowing has become epistemic commonplace. Accounts of knowledge incorporating this anti-luck idea frequently rely on one or another of a safety or sensitivity condition. Sensitivity-based accounts of knowledge have a well-known problem with necessary truths, to wit, that any believed necessary truth trivially counts as knowledge on such accounts. In this paper, we argue that safety-based accounts similarly trivialize knowledge of necessary truths and that two ways of responding to this problem for safety, issuing from work by Williamson and Pritchard, are of dubious success.     

Psychosocial Genetic Counseling in the Post-Nondirective Era: A Point of View

For three decades nondirectiveness has served as the central ethos for genetic counseling. It has evolved from narrow definitions defining what should not be done to broad definitions that promote active counseling skills in support of client autonomy and informed decision making. As broad definitions have been formulated, the term nondirective has become largely irrelevant to their content; it persists primarily as a historic relic. It has thus become an impediment to creative theory and clinical practice. I propose that nondirectiveness be replaced as the central ethos, while relevant components (providing balanced information, not imposing the counselor's values) are retained as elements of practice and ethics. This raises the question of what principle(s) should be adopted as a new guiding ethos. To promote a discussion of that issue I propose that the central ethos of genetic counseling should be to bring the psychosocial component into every aspect of the work.     

Children's interpretation of generic noun phrases

Generic utterances (e.g., "Cows say 'moo'") have 2 distinctive semantic properties: (a) Generics are generally true, unlike indefinites (e.g., "Bears live in caves" is generic; "I saw some bears in the cave" is indefinite), and (b) generics need not be true of all category members, unlike universal quantifiers (e.g., all, every, each). This article examined whether preschool children and adults appreciate both these features, using a comprehension task (Study 1) and an elicited production task (Study 2). In both tasks, 4-year-old children--like adults--treated generics as distinct from both indefinites ("some") and universal quantifiers ("all"). In contrast, 3-year-olds did not differentiate among generics, "all," and "some." By 4 years of age, generics emerge as a distinct semantic device.