While Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex is concerned with psycho-sexual development, it concomitantly presents a novel historical-political imagination. This article compares the post-Oedipal self with the selves envisioned by Nietzsche and Marx, suggesting that while these 19th-century theorists constructed selves that are able to transcend the normalizing and subjugating circumstances of modernity, Freud’s theory defines a healthy self as irredeemably embedded in the prevailing culture and life-orders. In making his case, Freud spurns the quests of Nietzsche and Marx for (...) wholeness of the individual and for self-authorship, and presents the self as structurally agonistic, riven and thoroughly molded by society. (shrink)

The article presents the sociology of knowledge approach to discourse (SKAD). SKAD, which has been in the process of development since the middle of the 1990s, is now a widely used framework among social scientists in discourse research in the German-speaking area. It links arguments from the social constructionist tradition, following Berger and Luckmann, with assumptions based in symbolic interactionism, hermeneutic sociology of knowledge, and the concepts of Michel Foucault. It argues thereby for a consistent theoretical and methodological grounding of (...) a genuine social sciences perspective on discourse interested in the social production, circulation and transformation of knowledge, that is in social relations and politics of knowledge in the so-called ‘knowledge societies’. Distancing itself from Critical Discourse Analysis, Linguistics, Ethnomethodology inspired discourse analysis and the Analysis of Hegemonies, following Laclau and Mouffe, SKAD’s framework has been built up around research questions and concerns located in the social sciences, referring to public discourse and arenas as well as to more specific fields of (scientific, religious, etc.) discursive struggles and controversies around problematizations (Foucault). (shrink)

Drawing on critical theorist Herbert Marcuse’s analysis of modern technological society in his 1964 book, One-Dimensional Man, this article argues that the forces of one-dimensionality that characterize citizens under capitalism have necessarily found their way into schools, leading to what we see as an epidemic of the one-dimensional student. Where other scholars have focused on the impacts of capitalism on schooling and possible structural reform efforts through educational policy, this analysis takes seriously the role of the individual in overcoming an (...) all too easy tendency toward one-dimensional thinking. Applying Marcuse’s fundamental concepts of one-dimensionality, the authors point to the ways in which schools and society actively teach and promote one-dimensionality. Through this application of Marcuse to the field of education, the authors uncover the subtle ways that schools shape the consciousness of students, and in doing so perpetuate one-dimensional society. The article concludes with a number of solutions that reassess educational aims to be more in tune with the sharpening of critical consciousness, or what Marcuse calls negative thinking, for the sake of freedom of self and society. (shrink)

One potentially ethically relevant feature of an utterance is that utterance's influence on the likelihoods that our future discourses wind up with one Stalnakerian ‘common ground’ or body of shared information rather than another. Such likelihoods matter ethically, so the ways our utterances influence them can matter ethically, despite the fact that such influences are often unintended, and often hard to see. By offering a relatively neutral descriptive framework that can enhance our collective sensitivity to and discussion of ethically, socially, (...) and politically important features of language use, this paper contributes to the ethics of language use. It discusses ways in which utterances can influence the likelihoods of future common grounds by deploying one system of categorization rather than another, and argues that language’s effects on the evolution of discourse can affect the paths to and probabilities of different sorts of consensus. (shrink)

This article focuses on the dialectic of metapsychology and hermeneutics in psychoanalysis. By combining the causal language of the former with the intentional terminology of the latter, Freud's discourse continuously transgresses narrowly conceived boundaries of scientific disciplines and places its stakes both in the humanities and the natural sciences. The argument is made that attempts to reduce psychoanalytic theory to either causal explanation or interpretation of meaning, turn it into a closed thought-system and rob it of its vitality. Moreover, it (...) is argued that although Freud understood himself to be a scientist, by eschewing the dichotomous reductionism characteristic for both his orthodox followers and critics who try to turn psychoanalysis into either a natural-science-like discipline or a hermeneutics, Freud demonstrated that his self-understanding was far more sophisticated than either of these two groups admit to. This argument is supported by a detailed discussion of Freud's epistemological premises, his conception of science and reality, and, especially, the place which Freud allocated to metapsychology in his interdisciplinary science. It is claimed that metapsychology served Freud as a double-edged sword, both enabling creative and metaphorical thought about the mind's hidden reality, and revealing the necessary incompleteness of hermeneutics. The article concludes with the claim that psychoanalysis needs metapsychology in order to pursue this dual task. (shrink)

Because of the importance of Puritanism in its history, one of the forms taken by religious Angst at the end of the 19th century in New England was uneasiness about the psychological nature and validity of the conversion experience. Apart from William James and G. Stanley Hall, the leading psychologists who investigated this phenomenon were Edwin Starbuck and James Leuba. Each had a different personal stance with regard to the plausibility of religious belief. In practice their differences of opinion over (...) the psychology of conversion pivoted round the role of sexuality. In the first part of the 20th century their conflicting views brought to the fore themes that were eventually given full expression 40 years later in Paul Ricoeur’s account of the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’. (shrink)

This article historicises a dream analytic intervention launched in the 1930s by Scottish psychiatrist and future professor of psychological medicine at the University of Glasgow (1948–73), Thomas Ferguson Rodger (1907–78). Intimate therapeutic meetings with five male patients are preserved within the so-called ‘dream books’, six manuscript notebooks from Rodger’s earlier career. Investigating one such case history in parallel with lecture material, this article elucidates the origins of Rodger’s adapted, rapport-centred psychotherapy, offered in his post-war National Health Service, Glasgow-based department. Oriented (...) in a reading of the revealing fourth dream book, the article unearths a history of the reception and adaptation of psychoanalysis from within a therapeutic encounter and in a non-elite context. Situating Rodger’s psychiatric development in his Glasgow environment, it then contextualises the psychosocial narrative of the fourth book in relation to contrasting therapeutic commitments: an undiluted Freudianism and a pragmatic ‘commonsense’ psychotherapy, tempered to the clinical psychiatric, and often working-class, interwar Glasgow context. An exploration of pre-recorded dreams, transcribed free associations, and ‘weekly reports’ reveals that in practice, Rodger’s Meyerian attitude worked productively with Freudian techniques to ennoble the patient’s psychosocial testimony and personal wisdom. This psychotherapeutic eclecticism underpinned and made visible the patient’s concurrent faith in and resistance to psychoanalytic interpretation. Chronicling a collaborative route to psychotherapeutic knowledge within a discrete encounter, the article situates post-war treatment values in the interwar impasse of outpatient psychiatry. (shrink)

In response to the intensifying vocationalisation and instrumentalisation of education, scholars have invoked the ideal of leisure and its educational embodiment in the tradition of liberal learning. Drawing on the work of Josef Pieper, this article seeks to bring to the fore an overlooked yet fundamental aspect of leisure, that of existential rest, a state of being and a mode of engagement with the world in which the basic outlook is one of affirmation of the goodness of the world, which (...) is experienced as being in harmony with oneself and the world. The article also suggests three different approaches to cultivating existential rest in education derived from the educational visions of Pieper, Michael Oakeshott and John Dewey. (shrink)

In this essay, I survey the different uses of the concept of the symbol at play in the philosophy of religion. Considering that historically theories of the symbol have frequently had significant religious presuppositions and implications, I suggest that one might expect that the symbol would play a significant role in current research. This is not the case, however, since the very specific metaphysical, linguistic and theological premises that have traditionally informed much theorisation of the symbol tend to be unpopular (...) today. The main exception is Peircean symbolics which has recently been re-appropriated by a variety of philosophical fields, including philosophy of religion. To open up further contexts for contemporary deployments of the symbol, I look to contemporary public and legal debates concerning the right to wear religious symbols as an area of research unjustly neglected by philosophers of religion: much of the inchoate conceptual work being done in the legal cases themselves would naturally feed into academic philosophical discussion of the symbol. (shrink)

ArgumentA growing cross-disciplinary literature has acknowledged the importance of verbal-visual interaction in the creation and communication of scientific texts. I contend that the proper understanding of these texts must flow from a hermeneutic model that takes verbal-visual interaction seriously, one that is firmly grounded in cognitive constraints and affordances. The model I propose has two modules, one for perception, derived from Gestalt psychology, the other for cognition, derived from Peirce's semiotics. I apply this model to an important but largely neglected (...) text in the history of nineteenth-century science, Charles Lyell'sThe Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man, and to two accounts by well-respected historians of science, both of the same key discovery in quantum physics. In doing so, I hope to demonstrate the advisability of incorporating the exegetical practices my model entails into the everyday practices of historians of science. (shrink)

Freud (and later commentators) have failed to explain how the origins of psychoanalytical theory began with a positivist investment without recognizing a dual epistemological commitment: simply, Freud engaged positivism because he believed it generally equated with empiricism, which he valued, and he rejected ‘philosophy’, and, more specifically, Kantianism, because of the associated transcendental qualities of its epistemology. But this simple dismissal belies a deep investment in Kant’s formulation of human reason, in which rationality escapes natural cause and thereby bestows humans (...) with cognitive and moral autonomy. Freud also segregated human rationality: he divided the mind between (1) an unconscious grounded in the biological and thus subject to its own laws, and (2) a faculty of autonomous reason, lodged in consciousness and free of natural forces to become the repository of interpretation and free will. Psychoanalysis thus rests upon a basic Kantian construction, whereby reason, through the aid of analytic techniques, provides a detached scrutiny of the natural world, i.e. the unconscious mental domain. Further, sovereign reason becomes the instrument of self-knowing in the pursuit of human perfection. Herein lies the philosophical foundation of psychoanalytic theory, a beguiling paradox in which natural cause and autonomous reason — determinism and freedom — are conjoined despite their apparent logical exclusion. (shrink)

Although Freud launches a devastating critique of religion, he makes significant contributions to religious maturity. On the “manifest” level, he attacks religion as illusion; on the “latent” level, however, he is preoccupied with religion as mystery deep in the psyche. This difference is between religion as “critical” or as “postcritical” (Polanyi)—as dualistically split from, or emergent within, the psyche. Postcritical religion appears in Freud as mystery, unity, feeling, meaning, and creative agency. We see why, for Freud, the mother as matrix (...) keeps disappearing and what religious maturity is for “honest smallholders on this earth” who live within matrix as mystery. (shrink)

This article retrieves Freud’s Paul as a forgotten predecessor and untapped critic of the “return to Paul” in contemporary political theology and continental philosophy. Given that Sigmund Freud published Moses and Monotheism in 1939 having barely escaped from Vienna, the text’s reception has justly been dominated by the question of Freud’s identification with Moses and the relationship between psychoanalysis and Judaism. However, I argue that this narrow focus has obscured the more fundamental problem of the connection between religion and Freud’s (...) enigmatic notion of “historical truth,” which he works out not through Moses but through Saint Paul. To do so, I first show how Freud’s genealogy of monotheism is modeled on the pathogenesis of hysterical symptoms. I then trace how Freud deepens his investigation into the etiology of symptom-formation until he arrives at the notion of historical truth and the archaic heritage that transmits it. Lastly, I demonstrate that Freud presents himself less as a Pauline figure than he does Paul as a proto-analyst. Through this staging, I contend that Freud parochializes the claims of Christianity as symptomatic of a more archaic historical truth that psychoanalysis alone is able to access. Freud’s Paul demonstrates that it is not a question of whether but how ostensibly modern secular discourses inherit the theological traditions in which they are imbedded. Reading Freud as a philosopher of religion ultimately offers an indictment of any philosophy or emancipatory politics naively modeled on theological universalism. (shrink)

This article seeks to interrogate the intertwining of Truth and reversibility as presented in the unfinished work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty in The Visible and the Invisible. This relation raises three questions regarding the whole of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy; namely, the status it confers to truth, the place it grants to the ego, and the notion of the “flesh of the world.”.

In his discussions of life as narrative, and identity as narrative identity, Paul Ricoeur has claimed that we learn to become narrators and heroes of our own stories, without actually becoming the authors of our own lives. This idea, that we cannot be the author of our own life-story in the same way that the author of fictional narrative is the author of that story, seems at first incontestable, given that we are caught up within the enactment of the narrative (...) that is our life, unlike the author of a fictional story who also has an independent existence outside that story. This asymmetry leads Ricoeur to pronounce that an ineradicable difference exists between fictional and life narratives. But is this difference in fact ineffaceable, or is there a sense in which we can be said to be the authors of our own lives? In this article I suggest that there are more points of similarity than Ricoeur explicitly recognizes between what authors do in writing fictional narratives and what we do in figuring, prospectively, our lives. These similarities are brought to light by a revision of the naïve, received concept of author and, once acknowledged, serve to bridge the purportedly ‘unbridgeable gap’ between fictional narratives and life narratives. I then consider how bridging this gap — establishing ourselves as authors as well as narrators — has ethical implications with regard to creating our own lives: a creation which authoring implies, but which is — given the revised notion of author — limited, both by the reciprocity of the other as co-author and by those events in life which the life-author is not fully able to plot. (shrink)

This study is part of a comprehensive investigation of ethical thinking among male and female physicians and nurses. Nine women physicians with different levels of expertise, working in various wards in paediatric clinics at two of the university hospitals in Norway, narrated 37 stories about their experience of being in ethically difficult care situations. All of the interviewees’ narrations were concerned with problems relating to both action ethics and relation ethics. The main focus was on problems in a relation ethics (...) perspective. The most common themes in an action ethics perspective were overtreatment and withholding treatment. The more experienced physicians reasoned differently from the group of less experienced physicians and they coped with pressure in different ways. The less experienced physicians disclosed their professional experience yet seemed uncertain, while putting on an air of certainty, but the more experienced physicians disclosed both their professional and personal experience of caregiving and they seemed to allow themselves to feel uncertain in their certainty. Both groups emphasized a need for deep discussion between colleagues about their being in ethically difficult care situations. (shrink)

In the debate between the natural science and the phenomenological or hermeneutical approaches in the human sciences, a third alternative described by Husserl has been widely ignored. Contrary to frequent assumptions, Husserl believed that a purely phenomenological method is not generally the appropriate approach for the empirical human sciences. Rather, he held that although they can and should make important use of phenomenological analysis, such sciences should take their basic stance in the "natural attitude," the ordinary commonsense lifeworld mode of (...) understanding which cuts across the divergent abstractive specializations of natural science and phenomenology Human science in the natural attitude, shorn of its naivete by phenomenological insight, would be the field of descriptive concrete sociocultural sciences capable of taking a truly explanatory approach to their subject matter, persons and personal formations. In practice, both Weber and Freud exemplify the method recommended by Husserl. (shrink)

Christopher Southgate has made important contributions to theodicy and the theory of divine action in light of the contingency in evolution and the suffering of creation. What happens then when one thinks through the implications of contingency for Christology? One can admit that aesthetic and moral judgments are products of a contingent history and yet affirm that they really are valid. Similarly, we argue, one can acknowledge the contingency of Jesus’ existence, actions, and subsequent impact and still maintain that his (...) will was uniquely united with the divine will. Following a critical engagement with the recent work of Keith Ward, we argue that a high Christology is compatible with the actual contingencies of evolutionary and social history, without the necessity of interventionist divine action. (shrink)

This essay examines what the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur can contribute to current debates on the role of spiritual exercise, or askēsis, in philosophical life. The influential work of Pierre Hadot and Michel Foucault has sparked a widespread interest in the ancient model of philosophy, variously described as a way of life, art of living, or care of the self. Ricoeur’s potential contribution to this conversation has been overlooked, largely because he does not discuss these themes explicitly or often. However, (...) Ricoeur’s early phenomenology of embodiment in The Voluntary and the Involuntary offers valuable insights regarding the exercises of self-transformation. After a brief survey of Ricoeur’s concept of askēsis, this essay draws on Ricoeur to demonstrate the merits of physical exercise, or gymnastic, in ethical and spiritual formation. Gymnastic, Ricoeur shows, can be a form of spiritual exercise. The final section of the paper then makes a similarly counterintuitive claim: namely, that reading is an embodied practice that can facilitate the ethical formation of the lived body. (shrink)

This paper outlines a shift in the role of self-awareness from Yogācāra to tantra and connects some of the dots between Yogācāra, Pratyabhijñā, and Buddhist tantric traditions in Tibet. As is the case with Yogācāra, the Pratyabhijñā tradition of Utpaladeva maintains that awareness is self-illuminating and constitutive of objects. Utpaladeva’s commentator and influential successor, Abhinavagupta, in fact quotes Dharmakīrti’s argument from the Pramāṇaviniścaya that objects are necessarily perceived objects. That is, everything known is known in consciousness; there is nothing that (...) can be known outside or separate from consciousness. This aspect of Pratyabhijñā thought is shared with Yogācāra. While Utpaladeva drew upon Yogācāra epistemology to formulate a differential construction of objects, he departed from this theory to develop a distinctive monistic framework for the interpretation of subjectivity. By appealing to the ultimate reality of a singularly nonconceptual, transcendental subject rather than a plurality of conceptual particulars, Utpaladeva appropriated Dharmakīrti’s epistemological model while turning it on its head. That is, Utpaladeva critiqued Dharmakīrti in one context while he is indebted to him in another to establish the framework for his own absolute idealism, where everything happens in and through the absolute self that is Śiva. Utpaladeva extended the place of self-awareness in Yogācāra to formulate an absolute idealism that is the theoretic foundation for philosophical tantra. In this paper, I will chart a trajectory of this development, from Yogācāra to Pratyabhijñā, and show how a parallel development took place in tantric assimilations of Yogācāra in Tibet. (shrink)

. The time of the real: When disease is ‘actual’. Cultural Values: Vol. 2, No. 2-3, pp. 243-260.

Using the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur as an interpretive matrix, this article suggests that critical theologies may be understood as an instantiation of the concrete unity of past and present in religious symbol. The intransigence of debates between critical and counter-critical theologies is thus disclosed as an inability to account for and remain within the past-future dynamic in religious symbol. Ricoeur’s Freud and Philosophy provides the philosophical terminology for unpacking the simultaneously archaeological and teleological character of symbol. The article then (...) turns to Ricoeur’s accounts of metaphor and narrative to make the following observations: Reflecting the metaphorical capacity of language, critical theologies occur as a juxtaposition of known and unknown, here understood as a juxtaposition of past and present in religious expression; The inherently tensive character in critical theology gives way to a dialogical trajectory. Critical theologians engender Ricoeur’s reference to the pluralism of ontology in the ‘metaphorical is’; and Critical theology represents the very human capacity to create a new future out of a meaningless past by narrating the stories of the marginalized. These Ricoeurian themes are highlighted by examples drawn from the theologies of James Cone, Jürgen Moltmann, Mario Aguilar, David Tracy, and Johann Baptist Metz. (shrink)

Recent evidence from the neurosciences and cognitive sciences provides some support for a narrative theory of self-understanding. However, it also suggests that narrative self-understanding is unlikely to be accurate, and challenges its claims to truth. This article examines a range of this empirical evidence, explaining how it supports a narrative theory of self-understanding while raising questions of these narrative's accuracy and veridicality. I argue that this evidence does not provide sufficient reason to dismiss the possibility of truth in narrative self-understanding. (...) Challenges to the possibility of attaining true, accurate self-knowledge through a self-narrative have previously been made on the basis of the epistemological features of narrative. I show how the empirical evidence is consistent with the epistemological concerns, and provide three ways to defend the notion of narrative truth. I also aim to show that neuroethical discussions of self-understanding would benefit from further engagement with the philosophical literature on narrative truth. (shrink)

Rationality and the Genetic Challenge by Matti Häyry is a well-written and thoughtful book about important issues in the contemporary ethical discussion of genetics. The book is well structured around seven practical themes that the author takes to exemplify “the genetic challenge.” He also refers to them as “seven ways of making people better,” which the subtitle of the book already puts into question form: Making People Better? In the first chapter of the book, Häyry introduces these seven themes and (...) he discusses each of them in Chapters 3–9. In the remaining two chapters, 2 and 10, he describes the main normative positions analyzed in the book and clarifies his own methodology and position. He chooses six authors, or three pairs of authors, whom he takes to “represent the three normative doctrines of Western Moral philosophy” in order to demonstrate six “divergent rationalities” or “methods of genethics.” In this way, Häyry both summarizes the main prescriptive positions in contemporary bioethical debate and contrasts them with his own “nonconfrontational notion of rationality,” which aims to show that there is a variety of divergent, not mutually exclusive normative views, the justification of which “depends ultimately on the choice of worldviews, attitudes, and ideas about the foundation of moral worth”. (shrink)

This article develops the concept of experiential careers, drawing theoretical attention to the routinization and de-routinization of specific experiences as they unfold over social career trajectories. Based on interviews and ethnographic fieldwork in two religious communities, we compare the social-temporal patterning of religious experience among newly religious Orthodox Jews and converted Muslims in two cities in the United States. In both cases, we find that as newly religious people work to transform their previous bodily habits and take on newly prescribed (...) religious acts, the beginning of their religious careers becomes marked by what practitioners describe as potent religious experiences in situations of religious practice. However, over time, these once novel practices become routinized and religious experiences in these situations diminish, thus provoking actors and institutions in both fields to work to re-enchant religious life. Through this ethnographic comparison, we demonstrate the utility of focusing on experiential careers as a sociological unit of analysis. Doing so allows sociologists to use a non-reductive phenomenological approach to chart the shifting manifestations of experiences people deeply care about, along with the patterned enchantments, disenchantments, and possible re-enchantments these social careers entail. As such, this approach contributes to the analysis of social careers and experiences of “becoming” across both religious and non-religious domains. (shrink)

Male-to-female transsexualism manifests itself in the form of a discrepancy between the male sex assigned at birth and the subjective experience of belonging to the female gender, which in many cases also involves a somatic transition by cross-sex hormone treatment and genital surgery. Until now, no studies related to MtF transsexualism have been carried out within the framework of a phenomenological/existential approach. This paradigm would make it possible to better articulate the transsexual experience beyond the simplistic diagnostic criteria by which (...) it is currently defined. In this study, I will reread MtF transsexualism in the light of Ludwig Binswanger’s theories on Mannerism and Jean Paul Sartre’s remarks on the self and the body. I will do this largely by focusing on first-hand accounts of the MtF transsexual’s experience, in other words from a first-person viewpoint. Finally, I will present some considerations on the meaning of psychological intervention in this field. (shrink)

In the present paper, we focus on the role that the concept of geneticization has played in the discussion about health care, bioethics and society. The concept is discussed and examples from the evolving discourse about geneticization are critically analyzed. The relationship between geneticization, medicalization and biomedicalization is described, emphasizing how debates about the latter concepts can inspire future research on geneticization. It is shown how recurrent themes from the media coverage of genetics portray typical traits of geneticization and thus (...) contribute to the process. We look at examples of small-scale studies from the literature where geneticization of medical practice has been demonstrated. Methodological disputes about the relevance of empirical evidence for the geneticization thesis and the normative status of the concept are discussed. We consider arguments to the effect that ideas from mainstream bioethics have facilitated geneticization by emphasizing individualistic notions of autonomy and responsibility while ignoring the role of genetics in the wider social context. It is shown how a concept like geneticization, which can be used to draw the attention of philosophers, social scientists and others to challenges that tend to be neglected by mainstream bioethics, also has the potential to move people’s attention away from other pertinent issues. This may happen if researchers become preoccupied with the transformative effects of genetics, and we argue that a wider reading of geneticization should inspire critical analysis of the sociocultural preconditions under which genetics is currently evolving. (shrink)

The kind of phenomenology that can be useful to theology will be a hermeneutical phenomenology, one that takes us beyond the Cartesian/Husserlian ideal of presuppositionless intuition. It will also be a phenomenology of inverse intentionality, one in which the constituting subject is constituted by the look and the voice of another. In light of these suggestions, the phenomenology of Jean-Luc Marion is defended against three critiques, namely that it compromises the boundary between phenomenology and theology, that the theology it serves (...) is a bad one to boot, and that it has an inadequate account of the subject. At the heart of this defense is Marion's clear distinction between phenomenology as a description of possible experience, and theology as the claim that a certain kind of experience, namely revelation or epiphany, is not merely actual but veridical. Phenomenology says, If revelation occurs it will be in the form of a saturated phenomenon. Theology says, for example, the burning bush was an epiphany, or Jesus Christ is a revelation. The attentive reader should have no trouble distinguishing Marion's phenomenological analyses, which should be persuasive to believer and unbeliever alike, from his theological claims. Marion's account of the subject falls under the heading of inverse intentionality, and there are hints that vision is aufgehoben in the voice. The seer is first of all the one seen, but above all the one addressed, called forth into response-able being. (shrink)

Bruno Latour equates criticism with an iconoclastic urge that is underpinned by the project of modernity. Latour's attack on iconoclastic criticism is therefore closely linked to his rejection of the modern framework. This paper examines Latour's analysis of modernity and the ways in which he connects criticism to the project of modernity. Through our analysis of Latour's reading of an episode from U.R. Anantha Murthy's novel Bharathipura, we argue that critique is actually an integral part of a truly democratic knowledge-making (...) process as well as politics. (shrink)

This paper argues that the phenomenon of globalisation can be best understood as the secularisation and widespread extension of a particular type of life?conduct that originated in Western monasticism. This concerns not substantive content but modality and form, like the self?sustaining methodical regularisation of the everyday conduct of life in closed and partitioned space aiming at rationalisation and perfection. This type of inner?worldly asceticism was a successful response to the challenge of chaotic ?liminal periods of transition, following a wholesale dissolution (...) of order. However, the solution represents a generalisation of liminality into a permanent condition, explaining both the innovativeness and creativity of modern societies, but also their characteristic tempo of hectic change that disrupts stable human relationships and the coexistence with animals and plants, losing balance and measure. (shrink)

The scholarly enterprise known as the psychology of religion can be understood as the psychological study of religious practice, belief, and experience. With one foot in the stream of psychological theory and research and the other in the flow of religious experience and understanding, it seeks to illuminate the latter through use of the former. In other words, religion becomes the object of psychological analysis, that is, in some sense subordinated to psychology. This relative inequality raises significant methodological issues for (...) anyone attempting to study religion in this way. In particular, one is confronted with the prospect of becoming reductionistic, that is, of explaining what is in fact a complex phenomenon in terms too simple and uni-dimensional, distorting the object of study in the process. (shrink)

This essay will discuss the need for the humanities to address visual culture studies as part of its interdisciplinary mission in today's university. Although mostly unnoticed in recent debates in the humanities over historical and theoretical frameworks, the relatively new field of visual culture has emerged as a corrective to a growing disciplinary territorialism on the part of art history. A study of the theoretical purview of visual culture reveals that it in truth encompasses a continuation of art history's initial (...) interdisciplinary humanist project of cultural critique initiated by Aby Warburg and Erwin Panofsky. This article will argue that art history's inability to fully appreciate visual culture's relevance in today's research and pedagogical settings has given the humanities the opportunity to address a field which is rooted in the humanities' project of interdisciplinary inquiry. (shrink)

The kind of phenomenology that can be useful to theology will be a hermeneutical phenomenology, one that takes us beyond the Cartesian/Husserlian ideal of presuppositionless intuition. It will also be a phenomenology of inverse intentionality, one in which the constituting subject is constituted by the look and the voice of another. In light of these suggestions, the phenomenology of Jean-Luc Marion is defended against three critiques, namely that it compromises the boundary between phenomenology and theology, that the theology it serves (...) is a bad one to boot, and that it has an inadequate account of the subject. At the heart of this defense is Marion's clear distinction between phenomenology as a description of possible experience, and theology as the claim that a certain kind of experience, namely revelation or epiphany, is not merely actual but veridical. Phenomenology says, If revelation occurs it will be in the form of a saturated phenomenon. Theology says, for example, the burning bush was an epiphany, or Jesus Christ is a revelation. The attentive reader should have no trouble distinguishing Marion's phenomenological analyses, which should be persuasive to believer and unbeliever alike, from his theological claims. Marion's account of the subject falls under the heading of inverse intentionality, and there are hints that vision is aufgehoben in the voice. The seer is first of all the one seen, but above all the one addressed, called forth into response-able being. (shrink)

Abstract:This article deals with the question as to what makes bioethics a critical discipline. It considers different senses of criticism and evaluates their strengths and weaknesses. A primary method in bioethics as a philosophical discipline is critical thinking, which implies critical evaluation of concepts, positions, and arguments. It is argued that the type of analytical criticism that restricts its critical role to critical thinking of this type often suffers from other intellectual flaws. Three examples are taken to demonstrate this: premature (...) criticism, uncritical self-understanding of theoretical assumptions, and narrow framing of bioethical issues. Such flaws can lead both to unfair treatment of authors and to uncritical discussion of topics. In this context, the article makes use of Häyry’s analysis of different rationalities in bioethical approaches and argues for the need to recognize the importance of communicative rationality for critical bioethics. A radically different critical approach in bioethics, rooted in social theory, focuses on analyses of power relations neglected in mainstream critical thinking. It is argued that, although this kind of criticism provides an important alternative in bioethics, it suffers from other shortcomings that are rooted in a lack of normative dimensions. In order to complement these approaches and counter their shortcomings, there is a need for a bioethics enlightened by critical hermeneutics. Such hermeneutic bioethics is aware of its own assumptions, places the issues in a wide context, and reflects critically on the power relations that stand in the way of understanding them. Moreover, such an approach is dialogical, which provides both a critical exercise of speech and a normative dimension implied in the free exchange of reasons and arguments. This discussion is framed by Hedgecoe’s argument that critical bioethics needs four elements: to be empirically rooted, theory challenging, reflexive, and politely skeptical. (shrink)

Creating what sort of professional? Master's level nurse education as a professionalising strategy This paper reports on a detailed analysis of selected findings from a larger study of master's level nurse education. It locates some features of such education within the contemporary situation of nursing as a profession and interprets the role of master's level nurse education as a professionalising strategy. In‐depth interviews were undertaken with a purposive sample of 18 nurse lecturers drawn from eight universities in the United Kingdom. (...) The interview agenda explored participants’ perspectives of the characteristics of master's level performance in practice. Interview transcripts were interpreted by drawing upon hermeneutic methodology.The following themes emerged. (a) The credibility of the master's level nurse was of central importance. In terms of the literature of professionalisation, this may be interpreted as a factor in enhancing the legitimacy of nursing as an occupation. (b) The clinical capability attributed to the nurse is interpreted as leading to an increase in the authority commanded by the expert professional. Thus, the individual capability of the master's level nurse enhances the attribution of autonomous skill to the occupation as a whole. (c) The master's level nurse is seen to exercise influence and leadership and this strengthens the power and status of nursing.Nursing does not have the appearance of a ‘traditional’ profession, neither has it a clear stance as a ‘new profession’. Rather it appears to be especially responsive to the tide of public opinion manifest through government edicts. While nursing is employing rhetoric that espouses both positions, the direction of master's level education is anomalous. (shrink)

An inescapable feature of human growth is the toll in lives, including non-human ones, that occurs through the imperfect management of the institutions and technologies we develop. The histories of colonial and economic expansion, along with those of transportation, communications and political institutions, to name a few areas in man's recent growth, are replete with examples of violence, destruction and chapters of human suffering: part of the price for growing complexity. Since the increasing ability to engage in violence can be (...) considered a manifestation of this human growth, then it becomes equally important to examine the phenomena of violence alongside other phenomena of human growth. (shrink)