Emerging from the causal drain

For over 20 years, Jaegwon Kim’s Causal Exclusion Argument has stood as the major hurdle for non-reductive physicalism. If successful, Kim’s argument would show that the high-level properties posited by non-reductive physicalists must either be identical with lower-level physical properties, or else must be causally inert. The most prominent objection to the Causal Exclusion Argument—the so-called Overdetermination Objection—points out that there are some notions of causation that are left untouched by the argument. If causation is simply counterfactual dependence, for example, then the Causal Exclusion Argument fails. Thus, much of the existing debate turns on the issue of which account of causation is appropriate. In this paper, however, I take a bolder approach and argue that Kim’s preferred version of the Causal Exclusion Argument fails no matter what account one gives of causation. Any notion of causation that is strong enough to support the premises of the argument is too strong to play the role required in the logic of the argument. I also consider a second version of the Causal Exclusion Argument, and suggest that although it may avoid the problems of the first version, it begs the question against a particular form of non-reductive physicalism, namely emergentism.     

A Review of: “Potency: Masculine Aggression as a Path to the Soul”

The wisdom of children's literature

The psychological symbiosis of child and adult merged together in a good story is the prima materia moment of the object relations theorist.

The root metaphor is one of finding a path whereby we can establish an ego in the world without developing violent body armor.

New fall releases

Omnibus review

Pushing at the boundaries of reality: the child and the dream

New books and magazines

M.a. and ph.d. programs with degree specialization in depth psychology

The secret world of drawings: healing through art. by gregg furth. boston: sigo press, 1988.

The chiron clinical series dreams in analysis

Spring 49-1989 a journal of archetype and culture

Jungian child psychotherapy: in-dividuation in childhood. edited by mara sidoli and miranda davies. London: karnac, 1988.

Children of psychiatrists and other psychotherapists. by thomas maeder. New york: harper &; row, 1989.

Analytical psychology notes of the seminar given in 1925

C. g. jung and the humanities toward a hermeneutics of culture

The father: mythology and changing roles. by arthur coleman and libby coleman. Wilmette, illinois: chiron publications, 1988.

When you're ready: a woman's healing from childhood physical and sexual abuse by her mother. by kathy evert. Walnut creek, ca: launch press, 1987.

Emotional child abuse: the family curse. by joel covitz. Boston: sigo press, 1986.

Inscapes of the child's world: jungian counseling hi schools and clinics. by john allan. Spring publications, 1988.

The plural psyche. by andrew samuels. London: routledge, 1989.     

Neither East nor West: Some Aspects of Religion and Ritual in the Indian Army of the Raj

This article examines the conversion of the Royal Pavilion estate, Brighton, Sussex, into a military hospital for Indian casualties of the Great War (1914 –1918) in order to suggest how the religious beliefs and practices of Hindu, Sikh and Muslim soldiers were provided for in the Indian Army of the Raj. The military hospital not only made arrangements for worship but also for the observance of caste rules and the performance of funeral rites. These arrangements are discussed with reference to the series ofHandbooks for the Indian Armyand to other contemporary sources. Furthermore, this article locates the Indian Army in the context of imperial ideology both in terms of the concept of the ‘martial classes ’ and the brotherhood of all soldiers of the Empire.     

Comparative concepts

Comparative concepts such as greener than or higher than are ways of ordering objects. They are fundamental to our grasp of gradable concepts, that is, the type of meanings expressed by gradable general terms, such as ??is green?? or ??is high??, which are embeddable in comparative constructions in natural language. Some comparative concepts seem natural, whereas others seem gerrymandered. The aim of this paper is to outline a theoretical approach to comparative concepts that bears both on the account of naturalness for comparative concepts and on the theory of gradable concepts. The approach is novel in that it carries some basic assumptions from Peter G?rdenfors?? conceptual spaces account of categorical concepts over to comparative concepts. The offered approach is more general than G?rdenfors?? account in that it supplies a framework of graded categorisation that includes his categorisation rule as a limiting case. Importantly, it provides also a new argument for adopting G?rdenfors?? particular model of categorisation.     

The neural correlates of statistical learning in a word segmentation task: An fMRI study

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to assess neural activation as participants learned to segment continuous streams of speech containing syllable sequences varying in their transitional probabilities. Speech streams were presented in four runs, each followed by a behavioral test to measure the extent of learning over time. Behavioral performance indicated that participants could discriminate statistically coherent sequences (words) from less coherent sequences (partwords). Individual rates of learning, defined as the difference in ratings for words and partwords, were used as predictors of neural activation to ask which brain areas showed activity associated with these measures. Results showed significant activity in the pars opercularis and pars triangularis regions of the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG). The relationship between these findings and prior work on the neural basis of statistical learning is discussed, and parallels to the frontal/subcortical network involved in other forms of implicit sequence learning are considered.     

For which side the bell tolls: The laterality of approach-avoidance associative networks

The two hemispheres of the brain appear to play different roles in emotion and/or motivation. A great deal of previous research has examined the valence hypothesis (left hemisphere = positive; right = negative), but an increasing body of work has supported the motivational hypothesis (left hemisphere = approach; right = avoidance) as an alternative. The present investigation (N = 117) sought to provide novel support for the latter perspective. Left versus right hemispheres were briefly activated by neutral lateralized auditory primes. Subsequently, participants categorized approach versus avoidance words as quickly and accurately as possible. Performance in the task revealed that approach-related thoughts were more accessible following left-hemispheric activation, whereas avoidance-related thoughts were more accessible following right-hemispheric activation. The present results are the first to examine such lateralized differences in accessible motivational thoughts, which may underlie more “downstream” manifestations of approach and avoidance motivation such as judgments, decision making, and behavior.