The Grossarth-Maticek and Eysenck Personality Types,Health-related behaviour,and indicators of transitory ill-health

The aim of this study was to scrutinize the relationship between personality type as described by Grossarth-Maticek and Eysenck, health-related behaviours, and indicators of transitory ill health in a community sample. The sample consisted of all per sons aged 40 years (45 men and 35 women) in a Swedish municipality who agreed to take part in a health examination at the primary health care centre of the municipality. The Short Interpersonal Reactions Inventory (Grossarth-Maticek and Eysenck, 1990) was used to measure personality type. Self-report data were obtained regarding seven health-related behaviours. Health was assessed in three ways; self-report (paper and pencil), self-report (interview response to physician), and measures of 36 biological variables including immune system indicators. The allocation of persons to the different personality types proved problematic using the established methods. By combining the types, according to Eysenck's personality model, and performing a cluster analysis on this combination, a ‘healthy’ and a ‘stressed’ profile were identified within both the male and the female group of subjects. Persons in the healthy personality cluster showed more favourable scores on the health-related behaviour indices and on the self-report health scales than the persons in the stressed cluster. They also tended to score lower than those in the stressed cluster on most of the biological markers known to increase during acute stress. The possibility that this implies a higher level of strain for the persons in the stressed cluster on various bodily systems is discussed.     

Agonistic Recognition in Education: On Arendt’s Qualification of Political and Moral Meaning

Agonistic recognition in education has three interlinked modes of aesthetic experience and self-presentation where one is related to actions in the public realm; one is related to plurality in the way in which it comes into existence in confrontation with others; and one is related to the subject-self, disclosed by ‘thinking. Arendt’s conception of ‘thinking’ is a way of getting to grips with aesthetic self-presentation in education. By action, i.e., by disclosing oneself and by taking initiatives, students and teachers constitute their being. The way Arendt theorizes action (vita activa) makes it essentially unpredictable and destabilizing, which does not seem to fit into what should be expected from education. In the article I will argue that it should have a place by virtue of the debate, challenge and contest it offers. But education should also be defined from a specific kind of contemplation called ‘thinking’ to become the cultivation of a faculty of judgment in education—thinking (vita contemplativa) as a common virtue in education. Arendt’s demarcation between truth and meaning does from the point of view of agonistic recognition in education call for ‘thinking’ as a qualification of political and moral meaning–the ‘taste’ to be established in the individual, by individual judgements but always judged in relation to members of a community.     

The Public Has to Define Itself

In the article texts by John Dewey, JürgenHabermas and Richard Rorty are discussed in thelight of different meanings of the Public. Thisis done by discussing foundational andnon-foundational claims on a philosophy ofpragmatism and democracy, and by looking atdifferent meanings of intersubjectivity. Onecrucial difference I am pointing at, is thatwhile Dewey's intersubjectivity is stemmingfrom philosophical arguments as well aspolitical, Habermas's intersubjectivity isrestricted to the level of (an almostscientific) philosophical abstractargumentation without any concrete language ofpolitics. When it comes to Rorty I stress thathe is far closer than Habermas to Dewey'spragmatism, especially his ambition to includethe specific individuals and to stressindividuality in a philosophy of communicationand public conduct.