Whose Fault? The Origins and Evitability of the Analytic–Continental Rift

This is a broad survey of the chronology of the rift between continental and analytic philosophy, starting in 1899. Whereas at that time there was no discernible divide, as the twentieth century progresses we can see a gradual parting of the ways in which philosophy was done, culminating in a period of maximum separation in 1945-68, followed by some convergence. There is one substantial historical thesis proposed, and facts are adduced from the chronology to back it up: that the divide was never absolute, never purely geographical, and above all that it was not inevitable, but was largely the product of accidental historical circumstances, of which the most crucial was the flourishing of totalitarianism in Europe and the disruption caused by two world wars.     

Fostering Students’ Appraisals of the Relevance of History by Comparing Analogous Cases of an Enduring Human Issue: A Quasi-Experimental Study

To identify the challenges that students must meet to engage in effective self-directed inquiry, a class was followed for three years, from the fourth through the sixth grades, as they engaged in a sequence of progressively more demanding inquiry activities. Students made substantial progress in understanding the objectives of inquiry, identifying questions, attending to evidence, identifying patterns, making controlled comparisons, interpreting increasingly complex data, supporting claims, and drawing justified conclusions. Retaining awareness of inquiry objectives and integrating influences of multiple variables in predicting outcomes were two areas that remained challenging. A comparison group of seventh graders who had not been involved in the program displayed strikingly different approaches to an inquiry task, indicating that the skills identified here are not ones that develop in the absence of appropriate kinds of educational experiences.     

Wilhelm Reich and Anna Freud: His expulsion from psychoanalysis

This article describes the growth of hostility towards Wilhelm Reich in the psychoanalytic community over his Marxist ideology and activism as well as disagreements over the death instinct. It brings to the fore the behind the scenes political manipulations between Ernest Jones and Anna Freud to effect the expulsion of Reich both from the Vienna and Berlin local psychoanalytic societies and from the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA). It describes Reich's reactions to these events and the pressure placed on other psychoanalysts to stop supporting him and also the revision of history about the expulsion. It discusses the use of the term "crazy" as it was used in the psychoanalytic movement. Further the article discusses personality attributes of Anna Freud leading to counter-transference possessiveness to children and women, especially patients. It briefly touches on the attitudes of both Sigmund and Anna Freud toward sex and how this furthered the clash with Reich. It discusses the similarity between Anna's actions toward the Burlingham children and what happened to the children of Reich.     

Sick? Or slow? On the origins of intelligence as a psychological object

This paper examines the first moments of the emergence of “psychometrics” as a discipline, using a history of the Binet–Simon test (precursor to the Stanford–Binet) to engage the question of how intelligence became a “psychological object.” To begin to answer this, we used a previously-unexamined set of French texts to highlight the negotiations and collaborations that led Alfred Binet (1857–1911) to identify “mental testing” as a research area worth pursuing. This included a long-standing rivalry with Désiré-Magloire Bourneville (1840–1909), who argued for decades that psychiatrists ought to be the professional arbiters of which children would be removed from the standard curriculum and referred to special education classes in asylums. In contrast, Binet sought to keep children in schools and conceived of a way for psychologists to do this. Supported by the Société libre de l'étude psychologique de l'enfant [Free society for the psychological study of the child], and by a number of collaborators and friends, he thus undertook to create a “metric” scale of intelligence—and the associated testing apparatus—to legitimize the role of psychologists in a to-that-point psychiatric domain: identifying and treating “the abnormal”. The result was a change in the earlier law requiring all healthy French children to attend school, between the ages of 6 and 13, to recognize instead that otherwise normal children sometimes need special help: they are “slow” (arriéré), but not “sick.” This conceptualization of intelligence was then carried forward, through the test's influence on Lewis Terman (1877–1956) and Lightner Witmer (1867–1956), to shape virtually all subsequent thinking about intelligence testing and its role in society.     

The Field of Science and Religion as Natural Philosophy

“Natural philosophy” is an important term from the history of science because it was used to describe the study of nature during medieval and early modern Europe. This article gives an overview of the history of natural philosophy, since the use and eventual disuse of the term helps one to understand the emergence of modern science. Following a suggestion by the historian of science Peter Dear, I argue that the term deserves to be rehabilitated because it draws attention to the complexities of scientific theorizing. The article concludes with an argument that the field of science and religion should be seen as an updated version of natural philosophy.     

How European is the European Journal of Developmental Psychology?

This paper tries to make clear why a European journal of developmental psychology makes sense. First it is explained that so-called European culture is a complicated matter: historically and culturally many fault lines are to be detected, from the borders of the Roman empire to the iron curtain. These fault lines separate different cultural areas within Europe.

Developmental thinking came into existence within the eighteenth century (Enlightenment), especially with the work of Rousseau, which offered the theoretical building blocks for Western education and for modern Piagetian developmental psychology. Empirical developmental research found its origins in Germany, especially in Jena, with the work of William Preyer. The Jena ideas were brought to the USA by Stanley Hall. And in the twentieth century the Rousseau–Piaget tradition was brought to the USA by John Flavell.

A European Society for Developmental Psychology and its flagship the European Journal of Developmental Psychology should devote itself to the study of the European roots of developmental psychology as well as contributing to European developmental psychology, which in an open, new Europe moves across the original fault lines.     

Clara and William Stern's conception of a developmental science

Clara and William Stern were two pioneers of developmental psychology who are now almost forgotten, although their works have miraculously survived war and exile. The Sterns' theoretical conception of development and their extensive empirical work were inspired by the new discipline of child psychology which had been established in the nineteenth century. In this contribution we present the Sterns' academic work in developmental psychology with the aim of setting a counterbalance to the present mainstream in this discipline. We wish to show that it is certainly worthwhile to take a look back into history, and that “old” does not necessarily mean “obsolete”.     

Probability, logic and the cognitive foundations of rational belief

Since Pascal introduced the idea of mathematical probability in the 17th century discussions of uncertainty and “rational” belief have been dogged by philosophical and technical disputes. Furthermore, the last quarter century has seen an explosion of new questions and ideas, stimulated by developments in the computer and cognitive sciences. Competing ideas about probability are often driven by different intuitions about the nature of belief that arise from the needs of different domains (e.g., economics, management theory, engineering, medicine, the life sciences etc). Taking medicine as our focus we develop three lines of argument (historical, practical and cognitive) that suggest that traditional views of probability cannot accommodate all the competing demands and diverse constraints that arise in complex real-world domains. A model of uncertain reasoning based on a form of logical argumentation appears to unify many diverse ideas. The model has precursors in informal discussions of argumentation due to Toulmin, and the notion of logical probability advocated by Keynes, but recent developments in artificial intelligence and cognitive science suggest ways of resolving epistemological and technical issues that they could not address.     

马克思思想与后现代性

马克思与后现代都致力于实现从实体主义和本质主义的思维方式向实践的和关系性的思维方式的转变,但马克思思想中蕴含的历史自我意识则与后现代主义的历史相对主义形成了一种批判性的对话。后现代性语境下的马克思思想提醒我们反思当代西方思想的人类性价值以及当代精神的过渡性状况。作为马克思核心论阈的社会与社会化的人给后现代哲学所关注的核心问题主体间性提供了一种有效的反省与治疗价值。     

Gerard Manley Hopkins on Planet Earth

Nineteenth-century Jesuit priest and poet, Gerd Manley Hopkins (1844–89), produced poems on natural themes which were not only revolutionary for their structure and style but also disctinctive and forward-looking for their treatment of the environment. In these poems, he presents nature as intrinsically (rather than instrumentally) valuable, God as concerned with the salvation not only of humans but of the environment, and humankind as responsible noy only for polluting the Earth but for participating in its salvation. Christian poets of the twenty-first century need to hees and follow Hopkin's example.