In the second half of the 19th-century, a group of psychiatric experts discussed the relation between brain malfunction and moral misconduct. In the ensuing debates, scientific discourses on immorality merged with those on insanity and the brain. This yielded a specific definition of what it means to be immoral: immoral and insane due to a disordered brain. In this context, diverse neurobiological explanations for immoral mind and behavior existed at the time. This article elucidates these different brain-based explanations via five (...) historical cases of immoral persons. In addition, the article analyses the associated controversies in the context of the period’s psychiatric thinking. The rendering of the immoral person as brain-disordered is scrutinized in terms of changes in moral agency. Furthermore, a present immoral person is discussed to highlight commonalities and differences in past and present reasoning. (shrink)

This paper introduces the special issue dedicated to ‘Psychology and its Publics’. The question of the relationship between psychologists and the wider public has been a central matter of concern to the historiography of psychology. Where critical historians tend to assume a pliant audience, eager to adopt psychological categories, psychologists themselves often complain about the public misunderstanding of them. Ironically, both accounts share a flattened understanding of the public. We turn to research on the public understanding of science, the public (...) engagement with science and communications studies to develop a rich account of the circuitry that ties together psychological experts and their subjects. (shrink)

Following Max Horkheimer, I will first attempt to reconstruct an anthropology that essentially wants to be understood as critical social research. I will then pursue the question of humanism in critical theory. In doing so, I want to show that a reference to a normatively substantive humanism does actually exist in critical theory. On the other hand, I want to show that this humanism is anything but unambiguously and systematically formulated but has been reflected and articulated differently by different representatives (...) of critical theory. The two examples I will refer to here are Theodor W. Adorno and Erich Fromm. I will define Adorno’s humanism as ‘dialectical humanism’, whereas Fromm’s humanism could be described as ‘emphatic humanism’. My reading, however, attempts to interrogate the two positions as to their complementarity. Not ‘Adorno or Fromm’, but ‘Adorno and Fromm’ is the motto that guides me. Finally, I will relate this complementary reading of both approaches in such a way that the possibility of a ‘Critical Humanism’ can be derived from it, which above all also wants to be understood as a sociological research program. (shrink)

Axel Honneth and Hans Joas claim that Helmuth Plessner’s philosophical anthropology is problematically ‘solipsistic’ insofar as it fails to appreciate the ways in which human persons or selves are brought into being and given their characteristic powers of reflection and action by social processes. Here I review the main argument of Plessner’s Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch: Einleitung in die philosophische Anthropologie with this criticism in mind, giving special attention to Plessner’s accounts of organic being, personhood, language, sociality, (...) and historicity in that text. I argue that Honneth and Joas’s criticisms understate the extent to which Plessner takes sociality to be a constitutive condition of human forms of life within the structure he calls ‘ex-centric positionality’. This reading of Plessner also provides resources for answering a more common criticism of his philosophical anthropology – namely, that it is problematically ‘essentialist’, paying insufficient heed t.. (shrink)

This article presents the notions of ethos and eidos as field level concepts for the sociology of morality and the anthropology of ethics. This is accomplished in the context of Bourdieuan social theory and, therefore, from the broad standpoint of practice theory. In the first instance these terms are used to refer to the normative structures of social fields and are conceived so as to represent the way in which such structures fall between two planes, that of the implicit and (...) the explicit. Subsequently, they are used to further understand a distinction between morality—roughly, the implicit moral order of a social field—and ethics—the more explicit and often codified elements of a social field’s normative structure. When presented in relation to academic philosophical inquiries into the ethical issues in healthcare and the life sciences—meaning the disciplines of applied ethics in general and applied ethics in particular—the analytic perspective these terms facilitate enables us to represent the fundamental conditions required for academic enquiry; taken together the ethos and eidos of an intellectual field constitute the requisite background of its normative epistemic and methodological commitments, thereby providing the structures of disciplined intellectual practices. Seen in this light it not only becomes possible to grasp applied ethics as a socially structured practice but to understand it in terms that can also be used to frame our everyday moral practices. In this way applied ethics can be acknowledged as a relatively unique part of our contemporary moral culture. (shrink)

The word “emotion” has named a psychological category and a subject for systematic enquiry only since the 19th century. Before then, relevant mental states were categorised variously as “appetites,” “passions,” “affections,” or “sentiments.” The word “emotion” has existed in English since the 17th century, originating as a translation of the French émotion, meaning a physical disturbance. It came into much wider use in 18th-century English, often to refer to mental experiences, becoming a fully fledged theoretical term in the following century, (...) especially through the influence of two Scottish philosopher-physicians, Thomas Brown and Charles Bell. This article relates this intellectual and semantic history to contemporary debates about the usefulness and meaning of “emotion” as a scientific term. (shrink)

K. Danziger, Marking the Mind: A History of Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 305 pp. £24.99. ISBN: 978-0-521-89815-7 (hdbk) and 978-0-521-72641-2 (pbk).

The Correspondence between Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes, edited and translated by Lisa Shapiro. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Xxiii + 246 pp. ISBN 0-226...

This article takes a genealogical approach to the problem of affective communication that we find coalescing around the phenomenon of ‘affective transfer’ identified in experiences such as voice-hearing, telepathy and hypnotic suggestion. These experiences breach the boundaries between the self and other, inside and outside, and material and immaterial, and make visible some of the central issues that are important in re-thinking affect, relationality and embodiment. The article will attempt to re-engage the problematic of subjectivity by asking what a turn (...) to affect entails within such technologies of listening and attention. This is particularly important when such turning or opening to affect engenders a conversation with traumatic memories, albeit a conversation that does not occur primarily in a verbal register. The key focus will be on the marginalized status of telepathic modalities of affective transfer throughout the histories of the development of the psychological sciences. The article uses this as a platform to consider the connections between what is occluded or excluded from the psychological sciences, and what is being silenced within work on affect taking form across the humanities. Taking us back to the practice of telepathy in the 19th century and the problem of hypnotic suggestion in the mid 20th century (the Macy Conferences), the article discloses how both function as carriers of what is being overlooked and silenced in the engagement by many affect scholars with the knowledge-practices of the psychological and neurosciences. (shrink)