From Daemonic Reason to Daemonic Imagination: Plotinus and Marsilio Ficino on the Soul's Tutelary Spirit

This article explores Marsilio Ficino's interpretation of Plotinus's notion of tutelary daemon, as found in Enneads III.4. While Plotinus considered external daemons as philosophically insignificant and described one's personal daemon as the highest part of one's soul, Ficino placed great emphasis on the existence of outer daemonic entities which continuously interact with human beings. As a consequence, for Plotinus the soul's tutelary daemon corresponded to man's capability for intellectual knowledge, that is, to his ability to become emancipated from the material world, which, from a Platonic point of view, was made of appearances. Ficino, by contrast, tends to identify the soul's daemonic power with the faculty which he saw as the gateway for the action of external entities: the imagination. The imagination – like a mirror – reflects and retains images of other levels of life and acts as the surface on which external daemons project the forms of their own imagining. Ficino provides a complex account of the relationships between the soul and various layers of daemonic interventions, in which he combines Plotinus's view on personal daemons with elements coming from later forms of daemonology, such as that of Porphyry, Iamblichus, Synesius and Proclus.     

Aristotle's De Anima: On Why the Soul is Not a Set of Capacities

Although it is common for interpreters of Aristotle's De Anima to treat the soul as a specially related set of powers of capacities, I argue against this view on the grounds that the plausible options for reconciling the claim that the soul is a set of powers with Aristotle's repeated claim that the soul is an actuality cannot be unsuccessful. Moreover, I argue that there are good reasons to be wary of attributing to Aristotle the view that the soul is a set of powers because this claim conflicts with several of his metaphysical commitments, most importantly his claims about form and substance. I argue that although there are passages in the De Anima in which Aristotle discusses the soul in terms of its powers or capacities, these discussions do not establish that the soul is a set of capacities.     

Locke,Kierkegaard and the Phenomenology of Personal Identity

Abstract

Personal Identity theorists as diverse as Derek Parfit, Marya Schechtman and Galen Strawson have noted that the experiencing subject (the locus of present psychological experience) and the person (a human being with a career/narrative extended across time) are not necessarily coextensive. Accordingly, we can become psychologically alienated from, and fail to experience a sense of identity with, the person we once were or will be. This presents serious problems for Locke’s original account of “sameness of consciousness” constituting personal identity, given the distinctly normative (and indeed eschatological) focus of his discussion. To succeed, the Lockean project needs to identify some phenomenal property of experience that can constitute a sense of identity with the self figured in all moments to which consciousness can be extended. I draw upon key themes in Kierkegaard’s phenomenology of moral imagination to show that Kierkegaard describes a phenomenal quality of experience that unites the experiencing subject with its past and future, regardless of facts about psychological change across time. Yet Kierkegaard’s account is fully normative, recasting affective identification with past/future selves as a moral task rather than something merely psychologically desirable (Schechtman) or utterly contingent (Parfit, Strawson).     

Diagrams: Socrates and Meno's slave

Abstract

When do two mental items belong to the same life? We could be content with the answer ‐just when they have certain volitional qualities in common. An affinity is noted between that theory and Berkeley's early doctrine of the self. Some rivals of the volitional theory invoke a spiritual or physical owner of mental items. They run a risk either of empty formality or of causal superstition. Other rivals postulate a non‐transitive and symmetrical relation in the set of mental items. They must allow in consequence either for joint ownership of one and the same mental item, or for incompatible simultaneous decisions by one and the same person, or for new forms of death. This makes them disquieting. Another rival invokes a transitive and symmetrical relation defined in terms of co‐consciousness. Even that allows for incongruous simultaneities. The volitional theory is free from such disadvantages.     

《心理统计学》教学内容的新探索

本文在对当前国内外主要心理统计学教材进行比较的基础上,指出与上个世纪八十年代的心理统计学教材内容相比较,在内容上的新探索主要体现在（1）由“假设检验”的内容中发展出“统计检验力”和“效果大小”的统计指标和估计方法;（2）引进一般线性模型来统合方差分析和回归分析这两种统计方法;（3）适度增加一些“多元统计分析”的内容等三个方面.本文对前两个方面的新内容作了简要评述,并对教材内容的编排方面提出了新的思路.     

组织类型与员工建言行为的关系探索：基于权力的视角

研究目的是探索中国背景下国有企业、民营企业、外资企业、政府机关四类组织中员工建言行为的差异,及员工个人权力感和权力动机的中介作用。采用问卷法对员工和管理者进行配对取样调查,通过对回收的324份有效问卷进行数据分析。结果表明,员工建言行为在四种组织类型中存在显著性差异,而员工个人权力感和权力动机在其中起到中介作用。此外,研究还发现,权力距离倾向在组织类型和个人权力感之间起到调节作用。最后,研究梳理了组织类型与建言行为的关系模型,并对未来研究做了展望。     

Bases of social power,leadership styles,and organizational commitment

Affective organizational commitment reflects the extent to which organizational members are loyal and willing to work toward organizational objectives (Meyer & Allen, 1997). In particular, affective organizational commitment holds very important implications at all organizational levels (e.g., turnover rates, performance, and citizenship behavior). Whereas previous research has evinced the positive influence of transformational and charismatic leadership styles on affective commitment toward the organization (Bass & Avolio, 1994), little is known with regard to the nature of this relationship. In line with the interpersonal power/interaction model, the present investigation aimed to investigate the mechanism at play between transformational leadership style and affective organizational commitment. Specifically, we hypothesized that transformational leadership style would increase affective organizational commitment through its effect on willingness to comply with soft bases of power. In two studies, we subjected the foregoing hypotheses to empirical scrutiny. In Study 1, the proposed mediation model was empirically supported with Italian employees in the public sector. Attesting to the robustness of our findings, Study 2 replicated the findings of Study 1 with Italian employees from the public and private sectors. In addition, Study 2 replicated Study 1 using a different measure of transformational leadership. Both Study 1 and Study 2 provided results consistent with our hypotheses. Specifically, the present paper reports empirical evidence that (1) the more participants report having a transformational leader, the more willing they become to comply with soft (but not harsh) power bases, (2) in turn, greater willingness to comply with soft (but not harsh) power bases increases one's affective organizational commitment. These findings provide additional support for the interpersonal power/interaction model and pave the way for new research directions.     

Photic Stimulation of Young Rats

Zajonc, Harrison, and their colleagues have recently conducted a series of studies demonstrating a positive, monotonic relation between frequency of “mere” exposure and liking for stimuli. Other studies have found either the inverted-U relation or a decrease in liking. It was proposed that an emphasis upon mere exposure may be somewhat misleading, and that a concern with degree of stimulus familiarity might be more fruitful. Conflicting forms of the exposure-liking relation seem to be potentially reconcilable if consideration is given to factors that influence the rate at which stimuli become familiar, or capable of being anticipated and represented in memory.

Two experiments using stimuli and procedures taken from Zajonc (23) yielded a positive, monotonic relation between frequency and liking. A third experiment, designed to produce greater attention to the stimuli and thus hasten familiarization, yielded an inverted-U relation. A fourth experiment used simpler verbal stimuli than the first three. This was designed to result in even faster familiarization. As expected, there was a negative relation between liking and exposure frequency.

The “frequency group” of investigators has explained the monotonic exposure effect in terms of the response competition hypothesis. However, the latter is incapable of handling a nonmonotonic relation. A reasonable alternative seems to be the expectancy arousal hypothesis (5): viz., that liking is maximum for stimuli that arouse moderately strong expectancies of either a “molar” or a “molecular” nature. Previous research (5, 6, 7, 8) has supported this hypothesis, although some of the studies are also amenable to the response competition hypothesis. A further experiment was designed to distinguish between predictions from the response competition and the expectancy arousal hypotheses. The results supported the latter.     

Standard Scores for the Bay Area Functional Performance Evaluation Task Oriented Assessment

This paper presents normative data for the Bay Area Functional Performance Evaluation Task Oriented Assessment using a sample of 266 patients drawn from five psychiatric in-patient hospitals in Western New York and Canada. Use of the means, standard deviations and standard scores is discussed and related to treatment planning.     

Creencias de los profesores y estrés docente en función de la experiencia profesional

Resumen

Se investigó la relación entre las creencias de los profesores, el burnout y las diferencias de edad. Participaron 165 profesores de educación secundaria. Se evaluó: actitud hacia la profesión, fuentes de estrés; burnout; eficacia docente, competencia personal, y afrontamiento. Los resultados indicaron que en el grupo de maestros entre 46 y 60 años difirieron del resto en su actitud hacia la profesión, estrategia de afrontamiento y valor de las fuentes de estrés. El burnout fue relacionado con la creencia en la eficacia de la docencia, con una percepción pobre de la propia competencia personal y con ver las condiciones laborales como una fuente importante de estrés. La conclusión fue que el burnout docente depende de una alta expectativa y motivación para enseñar, combinada con una baja percepción de la competencia personal para resolver problemas en general.