Peirce remarks on several occasions in the 1790s on affinities between his evolutionary metaphysics and Schelling's Idealism, behind which, he avers, lies ‘the monstrous mysticism of the East’. What are these affinities? Why are they affinities with Schelling rather than with Hegel? And what is the mysticism in question? I argue that Schelling, like Peirce but unlike Hegel, is committed to evolution, not only across species boundaries, but also across the boundary between the inorganic and the organic. Moreover, Schelling, like (...) Peirce but unlike Hegel, embeds this account of evolution in an account of the evolution of God through love. The monstrous mysticism of the East, I argue, is Lurianic kabbalah, to which Schelling is demonstrably indebted, and which is committed to an evolutionary theism on which is based, if not an account of natural evolution, an account of reincarnation as a mechanism by which life-forms progress from inorganic to organic bodies as they develop their consciousness. Publicized by.. (shrink)

The recent turn to discursive psychology has prompted an increasing interest in the work of Michel Foucault, particularly with relation to debates on the possibility and nature of ‘discourse analysis’. This variant of discourse analysis has generally emphasized the utility of Foucauldian insights in critiquing existent psychological practices as a manifestation of the proliferation of disciplinary forms in Western society. This utility may have been dramatically over-stated. Key concepts such as discursive practices and power are inextricably linked to theoretical frameworks (...) that radically resist any ad hoc importation into critical practice. Furthermore, they may be antithetical to the kind of reflexive critique promulgated by critical psychology itself. However, the later Foucault’s partial retreat from the disciplinary containment of subjectivity only promises to trap critical psychology in the agency/structure hiatus that has so bedevilled 20th-century sociological theory. Foucauldian critical psychology may be a dead end. (shrink)