How to Stand for Something: Toward a Genealogy of Exemplars

This paper responds to the focus issue on exemplarity that includes contributions by Kyle Lambelet, Brian Hamilton, and Gustavo Maya. The paper calls attention to ancient, medieval, and modern precedents that ought to inform our thinking about the ethical and political significance of exemplars.     

Wilhelm Reich Revisited: The role of ideology in character analysis of the individual versus character analysis of the masses and the Holocaust

Abstract

One of the most controversial members of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and Freud’s intimate for many years, Reich is known not only for his seminal contributions to therapeutic and social psychoanalysis in his 1933 classic Character analysis, but also for his notoriety as a discoverer of an energy he named orgone. This paper is devoted to Reich the psychoanalytic sociologist and reformer, with special prominence given to his other, now somewhat forgotten, 1933 book The mass psychology of Fascism.     

Capability as Opportunity: How Amartya Sen Revises Equal Opportunity

Although the concept of equal opportunity has received scant attention from theological ethics, it attracts widespread approval in the U.S. popular culture and has been examined extensively by contemporary moral philosophy. Amartya Sen's conception of capabilities as "freedom" or "real opportunity" corrects deficiencies in both popular and philosophical conceptions of equal opportunity that ignore interpersonal variations in mental, physical, and psychological abilities beyond agents' control. Recent theologically informed conceptions of love and common grace affirm and revise Sen's conception of equal capability as equal opportunity. The resulting understanding of equal opportunity is quite different from some uses of this concept and could be an important criterion for a just society.     

Attentional focus effects on joint covariation in a reaching task

Adopting an external focus of attention (EF) has been found beneficial over internal focus (IF) for performing motor skills. Previous studies primarily examined focus of attention (FOA) effects on performance outcomes (such as error and accuracy), with relatively less emphasis on movement coordination. Given that human movements are kinematically and kinetically abundant (Gefland & Latash, 1998), FOA instructions may change how motor abundance is utilized by the CNS. This study applied the uncontrolled manifold analysis (UCM) to address this question in a reaching task. Healthy young adults (N = 38; 22 ± 1 yr; 7 men, 31 women) performed planar reaching movements to a target using either the dominant or nondominant arm under two different FOA instructions: EF and IF. Reaching was performed without online visual feedback and at a preferred pace. Joint angles of the clavicle-scapula, shoulder, elbow, and wrist were recorded, and their covariation for controlling dowel endpoint position was analyzed via UCM. As expected, IF led to a higher mean radial error than EF, driven by increases in aiming bias and variability. Consistent with this result, the UCM analysis showed that IF led to higher goal-relevant variance among the joints (V_ORT) compared to EF starting from the first 20% of the reach to the end. However, the goal-irrelevant variance (V_UCM)—index of joint variance that does not affect the end-effector position—did not show FOA effects. The index of stability of joint coordination with respect to endpoint position (ΔV) was also not different between the EF and IF. Consistent with the constrained action hypothesis, these results provide evidence that IF disrupted goal-relevant joint covariation starting in the early phases of the reach without affecting goal-irrelevant coordination.