Intimate Distance: Rethinking the Unthought God in Christianity

The work of the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy shares with the thinkers of the ‘theological turn in phenomenology’ the programmatic desire to place the ‘theological’, in the broad sense of rethinking the religious traditions in our secular time, back on the agenda of critical thought. Like those advocating a theological turn in phenomenology, Nancy’s deconstructive approach to philosophical analysis aims to develop a new sensibility for the other, for transcendence, conceptualized as the non-apparent in the realm of appearing phenomena. This is why Nancy launches a project looking for the ‘unthought’ and unexpected within the Christian traditions, called deconstruction of Christianity. However, the deconstructive approach to the non-apparent differs fundamentally from that of the thinkers of the turn (1) in its being non-apologetic and non-restorative with regard to religion, because it starts from a problematization of the—typically modern, that is romantic—desire to defend and protect what would be ‘lost’ and possibly to restore this, (2) in its focus on the complex difference-at-work (différance) between religion and secularism, a difference that can be termed entanglement and complicity between these two, (3) in its hypothesis that this entanglement is essentially one between (the meaning and experience of, the rituality around) presence and absence in modern culture, (4) in its conviction that the philosophy and history of culture must join, support, complete and maybe even turn around phenomenology when dealing with the difficult task of determining what exactly would be ‘left’ of the ‘theological’ in our time. In this article, both positions are compared and confronted further, leading to an account of Nancy’s re-readings of the Christian legacy (its theology, doctrine, art, rituals etc.), and ending in a more detailed, exemplary inquiry into the tension between distance and proximity, characteristic of the Christian God.

Philosophy of Education as an Academic Discipline in Turkey: The Past and the Present

This article aims to present the past and present state and future possibilities of philosophy of education as an academic discipline in Turkey as related to teacher training programs and academic studies in higher education institutions. It takes philosophy of education as consisting of the approaches that have emerged in its history. It has come to Turkey as a part of the modernization of education. It seems that during the Republican era in Turkey before World War II, mainly due to the dominance of the German conception of educational studies, the pedagogy and the history of pedagogy courses and the textbooks for them, which were central to the curricula of teacher training schools, contained the subjects of philosophy of education in its continental form; and after World War II philosophy of education is mostly understood, primarily due to Turkey’s changing international relations and the spread of American influence, as the isms and the doctrines approaches as found in the USA between the 1940s and 1960s, while other approaches in the field have been less influential. The article identifies how the restructuring of the teacher training system and the curricula of Faculties of Education in 1998 was a serious blow to the discipline, since it excluded philosophy of education from the curricula of teacher preparation schools, and the flourishing discipline thus lost its hold and importance in the undergraduate programs, and then in graduate programs. But the 2006 revision of the curricula has given a kiss of life to the discipline. There are reasons to think that it can recover in the coming period.

Religious commitment and positive mood as information about meaning in life

Two studies examined the role of religious commitment in moderating the relationship between positive affect (PA) and meaning in life. In Study 1, Sample 1, religiosity was found to moderate the relationship between naturally occurring PA and meaning in life, showing that high levels of religiosity attenuated the effects of PA on meaning in life. In Study 1, Sample 2, religiosity similarly moderated the effects of induced mood on meaning in life. In addition, this pattern of results was shown to be unique to meaning in life compared to another life domain (life satisfaction). In Study 2, subliminally priming Christians with positive religious words (e.g., “Heaven”) was further shown to weaken the association between PA and meaning in life, whereas subliminal primes of negative religious words (e.g., “hell”) weakened the association between religious commitment and meaning in life. A competition of cues model is proposed to account for these effects.     

对子宫肌瘤患者从医心理及治疗决策的思考

子宫肌瘤是妇科最常见的良性肿瘤,发病率高、恶变率低,目前治疗方法较多,但各有利弊;众多子宫肌瘤患者从医心理复杂,甚至难以配合治疗,医生应针对不同部位、大小、症状的肌瘤及患者的不同年龄、生育需求和心理状态,制定出个体化、人性化治疗方案,以期取得患者机体和心理均满意的和谐疗效。     

小学高年级学生的学习判断绝对准确性及预见偏差

本研究以小学高年级学生为被试,选取高熟悉度的具体名词组成的联结词对为实验材料,考察不同判断模式下学习判断的准确性及预见偏差。研究发现:(1)小学高年级学生的学习判断绝对准确性存在年级差异。总体来看,小学六年级学生在即时判断和延迟判断模式下都具有较好的绝对准确性,而四年级和五年级学生在即时判断时出现显著的高估,而在延迟判断模式下具有较好的绝对准确性。具体分析正向词对和反向词对的准确性发现,在即时判断模式下,五、六年级学生的正向联结词对有较好的准确性,而四年级的正向联结词对出现高估;三个年级的学生的反向词对都出现高估。在延迟判断模式下,三个年级学生在正向词对和反向词对上都有较好的准确性。(2)小学五年级学生的学习判断开始出现预见偏差。(3)延迟判断能够提高小学高年级学生的学习判断准确性,减小甚至消除预见偏差。     

CPM领导行为模式对员工利他行为及工作投入的作用机制

通过对我国26个省市企事业单位员工的问卷调查,探讨了CPM领导行为模式对员工利他行为和工作投入的影响途径。采用潜变量路径分析的方法,对两个阶段的模型进行检验和比较,结果表明：（1）C因素和M因素通过信任上司的完全中介作用影响利他行为和工作投入,而P因素则通过信任上司的部分中介作用对它们产生影响。（2）信任上司通过情感承诺的完全中介作用影响工作投入,通过情感承诺的部分中介作用影响员工的利他行为。     

Influences of high and low variability on infant word recognition

Although infants begin to encode and track novel words in fluent speech by 7.5 months, their ability to recognize words is somewhat limited at this stage. In particular, when the surface form of a word is altered, by changing the gender or affective prosody of the speaker, infants begin to falter at spoken word recognition. Given that natural speech is replete with variability, only some of which determines the meaning of a word, it remains unclear how infants might ever overcome the effects of surface variability without appealing to meaning. In the current set of experiments, consequences of high and low variability are examined in preverbal infants. The source of variability, vocal affect, is a common property of infant-directed speech with which young learners have to contend. Across a series of four experiments, infants' abilities to recognize repeated encounters of words, as well as to reject similar-sounding words, are investigated in the context of high and low affective variation. Results point to positive consequences of affective variation, both in creating generalizable memory representations for words, but also in establishing phonologically precise memories for words. Conversely, low variability appears to degrade word recognition on both fronts, compromising infants' abilities to generalize across different affective forms of a word and to detect similar-sounding items. Findings are discussed in the context of principles of categorization that may potentiate the early growth of a lexicon.     

Shanahan on Symbolization

In his article ‘A New View of Language, Emotion and the Brain,’ Dan Shanahan claims that the post-war Cognitive Turn focused mainly on information processing and that little attention was paid to the dramatic role played by emotion in human cognition. One key argument in his defence of a more comprehensive view of human cognition rests upon the idea that the process of symbolization—a unique capacity only developed by humans—combines, right from the start, information processing and feelings. The author argues that any theory ignoring this fact would miss the whole point, just as mainstream cognitive science has done since Noam Chomsky published Syntactic Structures, exactly 50 years ago.