THE TOTALITARIAN STATE OF MIND

The paper describes the development of Dynamic Interpersonal Therapy for use with complex depression (DITCC), and a pilot study testing DITCC’s effectiveness. The pilot found large pre-post improvements in well-being and distress; moderate rates of reliable improvement and clinically significant change; and curvilinear declines in depression and anxiety. Treatment completers and near-completers (N= 19) showed a significant curvilinear decline in symptoms of depression (PHQ-9) and anxiety (GAD-7). The results provide preliminary evidence that DITCC can be used as an effective treatment approach for complex depression. However, further research is needed to test its effectiveness in different settings with a larger sample size, using appropriate comparison groups under controlled conditions to further elaborate the short-term and long-term effects.     

Place and Philosophical Topography: Responding to Bubbio,Farin and Satne

ABSTRACT

Diego Bubbio, Ingo Farin and Glenda Satne have advanced a range of comments, questions and challenges relating to the ideas and arguments set out in the new edition of my Place and Experience (2018). Rather than address each of my interlocutors separately, my responses here are organized around four main topics: the relation between space and place, including the nature of space; the relation between place and subjectivity, and the foundational role of place; the relation between place and conceptuality; and the relation between place and normativity.     

SPECTERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: Charles Taylor and the Problem of Historicism

This paper identifies and analyzes the problem of historicism in Charles Taylor's work overall, but with particular emphasis on his most recent publication, A Secular Age. I circumscribe the problem of historicism through reference to the nineteenth‐century German philosophical tradition in which it developed, in particular in the thought of Wilhelm Dilthey. I then trace the structural similarities between the notions of history to be found in the thought of Taylor and Dilthey and how these structural similarities raise worries associated with the problem of historicism. I argue that the structural aporia of historicism evident in Taylor's work brings to light a live philosophical problem that is basic to theoretical debates in the study religion.     

The simple constitutivist move

A common feature of all versions of constitutivism is the “simple constitutivist move” to the effect that engagement in any enterprise requires respecting the constitutive standards of the enterprise on pain of failing to engage in it. The move is both trivial and powerful in addressing skeptical challenges. I argue that this move only helps transmitting the robust authority of standards that are externally grounded, even when applied to functional items or constitutive aims. This is not a problem for modest versions of constitutivism, but more ambitious constitutivists seems to require supplementation to ground robust or authoritative normativity. Unfortunately, the usual appeal to inescapability is at best a defensive move. Ambitious constitutivism needs to look elsewhere in its search for a positive explanation of the source of robust normativity. The simple constitutivist move, even when combined with inescapability, is indeed too simple.     

Lived religion and the religious field

ABSTRACT

In the study of lived religion, the focus on laypeople as religious agents can result in the simplistic juxtaposition of religion-as-practised by individuals and religion-as-prescribed by institutions. This perspective leads to analyses that over-emphasize agency and overlook the embeddedness of religious persons in intricate power relations that expand beyond the institution(s) closest to them. I propose that Pierre Bourdieu’s social theory, particularly as related to the religious field, offers tools for tackling this issue. While Bourdieu’s work has been criticized for relegating the laity to the status of passive consumers of religious goods, his theorizations can also be employed to produce nuanced micro-level accounts that prioritize laypeople’s practical knowledge of the field and the positions they take within it. Based on my case study of older Finnish women’s normative assessments related to religion, I demonstrate how scholars can investigate the role which their informants’ histories and investments within the religious field play in their religion-as-lived. The women in my study, lifelong members of Orthodox or Lutheran churches, defended their positions in the increasingly individualistic Finnish religious field through an emphasis on childhood socialization as the foundation of ‘proper’ religion.     

Ginsborg on a Kantian-Brandomian View of Concepts

ABSTRACT

According to a Kantian-Brandomian view of concepts, we can understand concepts in terms of norms or rules that bind those who apply them, and the use of a concept requires that the concept-user be sensitive to the relevant conceptual norms. Recently, Ginsborg raises two important objections against this view. According to her, the normativity Brandom ascribes to concepts lacks the internalist or first-person character of normativity that Kant’s view demands, and the relevant normativity belongs properly not to concepts as such, but rather to belief or assertion. The purpose of this paper is to defend a Kantian-Brandomian view of concepts against these objections.     

Participatory action research: towards (non-ideal) epistemic justice in a university in South Africa

ABSTRACT

The paper explores the possibilities for promoting epistemic justice in a South African university setting through a participatory action-based photovoice research project in which university researchers worked alongside undergraduate students with no prior experience of doing research. The student voices are employed to understand how learning as capability development and agency expansion can advance epistemic justice in a university setting of hierarchical relationships that make participatory action research challenging. The paper considers how, in this project, spaces of epistemic democracy intersected with the expansion of multidimensional functionings, resulting in more epistemic justice for the student-researchers. The paper considers the possibilities for change through a participatory project toward promoting epistemic justice at the individual level. It also explores some criticisms of the limits of such individual development in the face of structural challenges.     

Place and World: On Jeff Malpas’ Second Edition of Place and Experience

ABSTRACT

Jeff Malpas’ book Experience and Place has become a significant landmark in philosophy. I take the publication of the revised and extended second edition of the book in 2018 as an opportunity to reflect on some key issues in Malpas’ thought. After briefly outlining Malpas’ commitment to topophilia and topoanalysis, I address, in the first part of my essay, the relation of place to subjectivity and normativity, pointing out certain shortcomings or ambiguities in Malpas’ account. I also critically discuss the omission of an account of migration, or, rather, immigration, which seems called for, especially if we realize that the inhabited place always comes with its limit or border, which implies that there is also a view from outside, and that we have moral obligations to the stranger and/or immigrant coming into our place from outside. In the second part of my essay, I engage Malpas’ argument according to which Heidegger ‘derived’ space from time. By an analysis of relevant texts in Heidegger, I show that this argument does not hold.