The death of an alleged heretic,Richard Hunne (d.1514), explained

Abstract

On 4 December 1514, a suspect heretic named Richard Hunne died while being held in Lollards Tower, the bishop of London’s prison in Old St Paul’s. The discovery of Hunne’s body, hanged, provoked sharp dissension between Church and State while also triggering an anticlerical backlash among London’s citizenry in the years preceding the Reformation. This study will consider if Hunne’s death was murder, as John Foxe, the martyrologist, subsequently insisted, or suicide, as claimed by the church authorities and by Thomas More in his later published treatment of the affair. A definitive answer to this question has eluded historians for 500 years, but here a new explanation, judicial but bungled torture, is suggested as the key to this death in custody.     

The problem of real trauma and the future of psychoanalysis

Abstract

Contemporary psychoanalysis emphasizes the role of “real” trauma, as it is well shown by recent sociological and theoretical developments (such as Kohut's Self psychology, object relation theory, renewed interest in Ferenczi's and Sullivan's contributions, etc.). To understand more clearly these developments, the author traces again the steps laid down by Freud in building the psychoanalytic edifice. The renewed interest in the environment, in real traumas, and in the vicissitudes of object relations could be a “paradigm change” in psychoanalysis: a return to Freud's original seduction theory. This development is seen as related to the difficulties of Freud's drive theory.     

Childhood as continuity and newness: generational succession understood according to the theological logic of the gift

This article seeks to understand, in a speculative way, the relationship between a new generation and the one preceding it. After having identified two opposite extremes – the ‘continuity thesis’ and the ‘discontinuity thesis’ – the article appropriates the logic of gift exchange to map out a mediating position. The fact that the practice of gift exchange is susceptible to criticism is subsequently noted, and two major lines of philosophical criticism are considered and related to the continuity thesis and the discontinuity thesis, respectively. The article then makes use of the work done by John Milbank to show that a purified notion of gift exchange is possibly from the vantage point of Christian theology, and finally seeks to apply this notion to the relationship between generations.     

Seeing connections: reason,faith, and education

The article explores some of the congruencies of thought and resonances in phrasing in the work of Janet Erskine Stuart, John Henry Newman and Ludwig Wittgenstein. These three writers have in common their resistance to philosophers of religion who are preoccupied with proposing arguments for the existence of God and grounds for believing in God. They also share a belief in the importance of assent and that reason and faith cannot be easily separated; that faith is always there in the background. The article is concerned primarily with the interrelationship between reason and faith across human practices and the relevance to education and how we live our lives.     

You and me

Are there distinctively second-personal thoughts? I clarify the question and present considerations in favour of a view on which some second-personal thoughts are distinctive. Specifically, I suggest that some second-personal thoughts are distinctive in also being first-personal thoughts. Thus, second-personal thinking provides a way of sharing another person's first-personal thoughts.     

The Scottish Reformation was not Protestant

This article argues that the generally accepted term for the Protestant revolution of 1559–60 in Scotland, ‘The Scottish Reformation’, hides the remnant of a sectarian denominational historiography and should be abandoned. These events should be called ‘The Scottish Protestant Reformation’ while ‘The Scottish Reformation’ should be used for a ‘long reformation’ including Catholic and Protestant reform movements extending from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. This terminological change represents a new way of understanding the Scottish Reformation as a long process in the Christian culture of Renaissance Scotland. It brings historical research in line with developments in other disciplines, which have uncovered a flourishing early Scottish Renaissance. Making Christianity the primary category in the religious history of this period, rather than the polemical binary ‘Catholic/Protestant’, enables a more balanced appraisal of the various religious and cultural movements in Scotland.     

New Voices for Expressive Pragmatism: Bridging the Divide between Pragmatism and Perfectionism

This article explores the theme of moral rationality by examining two distinct philosophical approaches, those of perfectionism and pragmatism broadly construed. It does this by comparing Cora Diamond's reading of J. M. Coetzee's novel The Lives of Animals with an imaginary reading of the same novel tuned to a moral sensibility closer to Deweyan pragmatism. By comparing a real account with an imaginary one, the article intends to press Diamond's perfectionist understanding of problematic moral experience into confrontation with a pragmatist account of the same phenomenon. This reading becomes the starting point for a broader confrontation between two larger philosophical conceptions: perfectionism and pragmatism. By this comparison, the article means to extend a dialogue begun more than a century ago, showing in particular that integrating both perspectives within a common moral epistemology provides new insights into our understanding of moral experience. The general claim is that their differences notwithstanding, perfectionism and pragmatism share a common moral sensibility, although they part ways on some decisive issues that the article makes explicit.     

'A serious venture': John Rodker (1894-1955) and the Imago Publishing Company (1939-60)

John Rodker (1894-1955) was the founder of the British publishing house--the Imago Publishing Company--which undertook the republication of the complete works of Sigmund Freud in German just before World War II. Rodker, himself a writer as well as a publisher, was initially tempted by a psychoanalytic career; numerous obstacles, however, lay in his path. War, along with the complicated management of the royalties from Freud's writings, compromised the progress of what seemed to him to be 'a serious venture'. Besides Rodker, we meet numerous actors of the psychoanalytic movement: Anna Freud, Marie Bonaparte, Ernest Jones, James Strachey, all of whom had worked for the dissemination of Freud's writings. This paper shows how the English language gradually became the 'official norm' for psychoanalysts. According to the editors of the Standard Edition, at that time 'nothing new [was] being written' in German or in French. The failure of the Gesammelte Werke project signalled the end of an era in which psychoanalysis was mainly written about in German.     

Pragmatic Democracy: Inquiry,Objectivity, and Experience

This essay argues that to understand Dewey's vision of democracy as “epistemic” requires consideration of how experiential and communal aspects of inquiry together produce what is named here “pragmatic objectivity.” Such pragmatic objectivity provides an alternative to absolutism and self‐interested relativism by appealing to certain norms of empirical experimentation. Pragmatic objectivity, it is then argued, can be justified by appeal to Dewey's conception of primary experience. This justification, however, is not without its own complications, which are highlighted with objections regarding “radical pluralism” in political life, and some logical problems that arise due to the supposedly “ineffable” nature of primary experience. The essay concludes by admitting that while Dewey's theory of democracy based on experience cannot answer all of the objections argumentatively, it nevertheless provides potent suggestions for how consensus building can proceed without such philosophical arguments.     

Social Dominance Orientation and John Henryism at the Intersection of Race and Class

Three studies were conducted to explore the relationship between social dominance orientation (SDO) and John Henryism (JH). Each study was framed using an intersectionality perspective which predicted that specific combinations of social identities would impact endorsement of SDO and JH in unique ways. We hypothesized that upper‐class non‐Whites would be higher in SDO and lower in JH than any other class/race identity combination. As predicted, a Class × Race interaction emerged for both SDO and JH in Study 1 (N = 387), with upper‐class non‐Whites displaying the highest levels of SDO and the lowest levels of JH. Study 2 (N = 340) replicated these findings and also explored the impact of context‐level class on SDO and JH. Using a qualitative method, in Study 3 (N = 23) we found that upper‐class non‐Whites described their social class positions in ways highly consistent with SDO, whereas middle/working‐class non‐Whites described their experiences in ways consistent with JH.