ABSTRACT In this article, I will examine the question why it is so difficult to understand madness. First, I will examine what the third-person approach of psychosis or madness has to offer, and where its limitations lie with respect to its proper understanding. Next I will examine if and how the first-person perspective on madness contributes to our understanding. I will demonstrate that there is a stalemate between third- and first-person perspectives, which on the one hand hinders a free sight (...) on madness, but which is on the other hand exemplary of the problem that is presented by madness. This turns out to be a paradox that haunts both the concept and experience of madness itself, as well as those who try to understand it. In the fourth section, I will unpack some of the operations of the paradox as it is found both in philosophy and madness, both by their producers as by their consumers. In the fifth section, I will tentatively sketch (im)possibilities of escaping paradoxes. (shrink)

Cet article a été présenté au "Lunch Seminar" de l'Italian Academy for Advanced Studies, Columbia University, le 20 Avril 2005.

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)

Building upon the insights of scholars attuned to story, narrative, and myth, this article explores the relationship between myth, science, and religion. After clarifying the interplay of the three terms—story, narrative, and myth—and the preference for the term myth, this article will argue that myth can serve as a medium through which religion, neuroscience, and mental well‐being interact. Such an exploration will cover the role of myths in religion, the neurological basis of myth, and the practices of narrative psychology and (...) bibliotherapy. The article will conclude with suggestions for understanding and utilizing the relationship between myth and the scholarly study of the relationship between science and religion. This article ultimately suggests that myth can operate as a methodological aid to the science‐and‐religion field. (shrink)

In cognitive psychology, a false memory refers to a fabricated or distorted recollection of an event that did not actually happen. Both ‘memory-distortion’ and ‘false memory creation’ refer to the processes of recollection in which the recollected events are not actually happened. This paper has three aims: to examine Ricoeur’s analysis of memory and imagination; to explain and reinforce the constructive role of memory; to show in what manner the first two aims lead to the conclusion that the phenomena of (...) ‘distorted or false memory creation’ are reproductive because the nature of recollection is constructive in the sense of representation of past. In this regard, Ricoeur’s trajectory not only displaces the essential structure of memory and imagination behind the curtain of their distinction and connection, but also contributes to the debates in cognitive psychology. (shrink)

Although most scholars trace the Liar Paradox to Plato’s contemporary, Eubulides, the paper argues that Plato builds something very like the Liar Paradox into the very structure of his dialogues with significant consequences for understanding his views. After a preliminary exposition of the liar paradox it is argued that Plato builds this paradox into the formulation of many of his central doctrines, including the “Divided Line” and the “Allegory of the Cave” and the “Ladder of Love”. Thus, Plato may have (...) been the first to formulate the view that Graham Priest calls dialetheism, roughly, the view that some contradictions are, in an illuminating way, inescapable and true. The paper argues that Plato builds this Liar paradox into the formulation of his signature views because he holds that the attempt by finite human beings to theorize about transcendent realities results in the simultaneous necessity, and impossibility, of transgressing the limits of language—leading to the paradoxes. Finally, it is argued that the existence of these paradoxes in these Platonic doctrines is the direct result of an intrinsic hermeneutical circle in Plato’s aforementioned signature views. (shrink)

My aim in this memorial paper is to recall two essential Ricoeurean themes that underlie his entire philosophical orientation and that respond well to specific challenges today from post-modern deconstruction. At question is whether Ricoeur's account of sign in language and the living present in time can adequately respond to and meet the recent challenge from postmodern deconstruction, which radically challenges the very root of his phenomenological and hermeneutic orientation: the priority of the semantic in language and the priority of (...) the living present. Although Ricoeur and Derrida will be seen to address the same problems of decentering consciousness, their accounts, although agreeing on important issues, quickly become mutually exclusive and deconstruction becomes a challenge to Ricoeurean hermeneutics. I will turn first to the postmodern deconstruction of Jacques Derrida before turning to Ricoeur's response with a more viable view of language, sense, and lived time. (shrink)