During the 1890s, animal development became associated with glandular activity, with profound implications for pediatric nosology and treatment. The significance of this endocrinological turn of developmental physiology and pathophysiology in part hinges on an often-overlooked continuity with ubiquitous early modern medical thought concerning semen as a recrementitious (reabsorbed) nutrient or stimulant. Mid-19th-century interests in adult sexual physiology were increasingly nerve-centered and antihumoral. Scattered empirical, particularly veterinarian, interests in gonadal developmental functions failed to moderate these explanatory trends. While Brown-Séquard’s rejuvenation experiments (...) still offered no clear starting point for a developmental endocrinology, in 1892 Gaston Variot and Paul Bezançon more explicitly deduced a testicular developmental endocrinological function from various observations on testicular ectopy and a local form of animal “demi-castration.” Ensuing interest in the thyroid, the thymus and in the testicles led to various working conceptions of their respective and putatively reciprocal developmental properties, including the idea of a thyroid–testis axis. From 1896, the pubertal affliction of chlorosis became the subject of multiple opotherapeutic approaches, providing an experimental basis for theories of ovarian internal secretion. Polyglandular therapy, piloted for divergent developmental conditions, remained routine until the 1930s despite the biological inefficacy of many endocrine products. (shrink)

Using testosterone alone as a measure of dominance presents problems, especially when dominance is loosely defined to include a range of behaviors that may arise from multiple causes. Testosterone should be examined in relation to other hormonal and neurotransmitter factors, such as serotonin. Various hypotheses about the relationship between high and low levels of testosterone with serotonin and with impulse control are suggested for future study.

_Secret Passages_ provides a theoretical and clinical exploration of the field of psychoanalysis. It looks at the pivotal relationship between analyst and client and its importance to the psychoanalytic process. Offering a uniquely global perspective, Bolognini considers the different trends in contemporary psychoanalysis, charting a course between the innovative and traditional. Divided into three parts, areas of discussion include: plurality and complexity in the internal world the complex nature of psychoanalytic empathy from the transpsychic to the interpsychic. Drawing on (...) vivid clinical examples throughout, _Secret Passages_ will be of great interest to all psychoanalysts, in particular those with an interest in gaining a more global theoretical perspective. (shrink)

All disciplines have their histories in addition to their theories. In general, the history of a set of problems is treated separately from the nature of the problems themselves. The axioms of a given discipline may be the object of external inquiry but are not usually subject to historical examination. In this way, psychoanalysis has been investigated, even challenged, by a variety of other disciplines: biology, linguistics, history, philosophy, literature, and so forth. One may ask whether psychoanalysis can also become (...) its own object, effectively distancing itself from itself. Will historical scrutiny provide criticism from within and thereby alter the nature of psychoanalysis?It has been our observation that the history of the creation of psychoanalysis and of the psychoanalytic movement suggests deficiencies and omissions within psychoanalytic theory. This implies something far beyond the simple idea that no serious examination of theoretical problems can occur without an understanding of their history. Not only the past but the future of psychoanalysis, both as a theory and as a clinical practice, may well depend on the conscious assessment and assimilation of its own history. “The Secret of Psychoanalysis: History Reads Theory” is intended in part as an introduction to Nicolas Abraham’s “Notes on the Phantom” which will, in turn, illuminate the theoretical and practical scope of this essay.A history of Freudian psychoanalysis could be written based on the voices of dissenting insiders, without including schismatics such as Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, Wilhelm Stekel, and others who eventually developed independent systems of thought. The detailed interpretation of such firsts is already a consecrated approach to psychoanalytic history. But much remains to be learned from the internal criticism of those who have participated in Freud’s movement or have sought sympathetically to understand the birth and progress of Freudian psychoanalysis. Most of the disagreements concern theoretical and clinical issues or the clocked access to documents that are essential to the history assessment of psychoanalysis. This is Ludwig Marcuse’s case as he writes to Ernest Jones on 10 October 1957.1 1. Ludwig Marcuse is the author of Freud und sein Bild vom Menschen [Freud and his image of man] . Nicholas Rand, assistant professor of French at the University of Wisconsin—Madison, is completing a book on the notion of hiding in literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. Maria Torok is the author of The Wolf Man’s Magic Word , recently published in translation. “The Secret of Psychoanalysis” is part of a book-length study Rand and Torok are writing on Freud and psychoanalytic theory. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 33.1 (2003) 60-79 [Access article in PDF] The Secret Power of Suggestion Scipio Sighele and the Postliberal Subject Suzanne R. Stewart-Steinberg He experiments one by one with about thirty young men. [...] Almost all of them respond immediately to his power of fascination by turning stiff throughout their bodies; their faces become contracted, terrified, sometimes cadaverous; they are at the mercy of the fascinator and follow his movements (...) like a magnet. [...] There is something pitiful, spasmodic in their features, something macabre in their gestures. [...] Donato has them all in his power, he attracts them in threes, in sixes, ten at a time, simply by rapidly staring into their eyes, even against their firm will and their obstinate efforts to resist his suggestion. [...] Donato, in the process, never speaks: he thinks, he wants and points. [...] —an eyewitness account, L'Italia (1886) Young male bodies that turn stiff despite their efforts to do otherwise—such were the events to be seen on the stage of the Teatro Scribe in Turin in 1886, events performed under the direction of "Donato" (the Belgian-born Alfred d'Hont), the new theatrical magnetizer of crowds. Enrico Morselli, one of Italy's leading psychiatrists of the period,1 assisted and himself succumbed to the fascination of Donato. In his important 1886 study on animal magnetism and hypnotic states, Morelli provided a rather positive portrait of the man. Donato, in his opinion, was not a vulgar man. First soldier, then state employee, journalist, novelist, poet, and finally student and apostle of animal magnetism, Donato had revolutionized hypnotic practice through his discovery of a phenomenon called "fascination." Donato was blessed with uncommon physical strength, quick and insistent eyes, a great agility of movement and much spirit. He had exchanged the magician's cap for the more sober tuxedo—quite appropriately, for he [End Page 60]rejects fluids, rejects the power and transmission of will; nor does he trade in somnambulist lucidity, in sight without eyes, in divination. He does not claim to have special secrets or gifts. Instead he claims that it is his quick and insistent "gaze" that produces a rapid and sudden shock to the nervous system of sensitive individuals. Where there is no "orgasm," he told me—but more accurately he should have said "predisposition"—his method does not work. [Morselli, Il magnetismo animale 281] What was then so revolutionary about Donato's method? Why were the spectacles at the Teatro Scribe perceived to be so radically new? And above all, why, as Morselli claims, did these shows come close to producing a political crisis right at the center of Europe [Magnetismo 271]?James Braid's discovery in 1842 that hypnotic sleep could be induced by the simple fixation on a luminous object had revolutionized magnetic theory and practice. Braid's was to prove an important discovery, for it made possible the shift from the putative supernatural powers of the hypnotist—based on the theory of the transmission of magnetic fluids or electric currents—to an analysis of characteristics thought to inhere in the hypnotized subject him- or herself. The real cause of hypnosis, its very effectivity, was to be found, as Morselli remarks, not in the magnetizer but in his subject [Magnetismo 32]. A rethinking, within the late-nineteenth-century literature on hypnotism, of what drives the subject, of what makes him act appears predicated then on a very peculiar form of interiority, of self-causation within the subject himself. At the end of its historical trajectory this rethinking would first result in the idea of auto-hypnosis or auto-suggestion, and then, by the beginning of the new century, it would found the psychoanalytic subject, traversed as he is by conflicting desires and topographically split between ego and superego. In both instances, however, obedience is exacted as a result of an internalized command and—and here lies the peculiarity and utter novelty of this subject—for that reason the subject ceases to be master of his own house.In the remarks that follow, I will leave aside Freud's own contributions... (shrink)

This collection of aphorisms and thoughts gathers 30 years of observations about the external world and on the nature of our internal selves. Compiled from scraps of paper dating from the early 1970s, these bits of wisdom include notes about the world around us that are often thought, but not often said; sightings of internal vistas and omens; and observations on music, the passage of time, America, the body, domesticity, and intimacy.

Human right-handedness does not originate in vocalisation as such but in selection pressures for structuring complex sequences of digital signals internally, as if in a vacuum. Cautious receivers cannot automatically accept signals in this way. Biological displays are subjected to contextual scrutiny on a signal-by-signal basis – a task requiring coordination of both hemispheres. In order to explain left cerebral dominance in human manual and vocal signalling, we must therefore ask why it became adaptive for receivers to abandon caution, processing (...) zero-cost signals rapidly and on trust. (shrink)

It is frequently noted that a “crisis in language” accompanied the profound changes in human consciousness everywhere evident near the turn of the century. As the nature of reality itself became problematic—or at least suspect, distrusted for its imposition of limits upon individual imagination—so, necessarily, did the relationship of language to reality. Thus in the later nineteenth century, the adequacy of an essentially standardized form of “classical” writing was increasingly questioned as an effective vehicle for artistic expression: even though often (...) in “elevated” form, such writing bore too close a connection to ordinary discourse. Indeed, it was precisely the mutually shared, conventional aspects of language that came to be most deeply distrusted for their failure to mirror the more subjective, obscure, and improbable manifestations of a transcendent reality or, rather, realities—the plural reflecting an insistence upon the optional and provisional nature of human experience. Language in its normal manifestations—with its conventionalized vocabulary and standardized rules for syntactical combination—proved inadequate for an artistic sensibility demanding, in Friedrich Nietzsche’s words, “a world of abnormally drawn perspectives.”This dissatisfaction with “normal” language received its classic statement through Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos. Writing in 1902, Hofmannsthal conveys through the figure of the aristocratic Chandos the loss of an encompassing framework within which the various objects of external reality are connected with one another and integrated with the internal reality of human feelings. Chandos’ world has become one of disparate, disconnected fragments, resistant to the abstractions of ordinary language. It is a world characterized by “a sort of feverish thought, but thought in a material that is more immediate, more fluid, and more intense than that of language.” Chandos longs for a new language in which not a single word is known to me, a language in which mute objects speak to me and in which perhaps one day, in the grave, I will give account of myself before an unknown judge.”2 The content and forms of art thus shifted away from exterior reality, which no longer provided a stable, “given” material, toward language itself—to “pure” language in a sense closely related to the symbolists’ “pure” poetry. “No artist tolerates reality,” Nietzsche proclaimed.3 And Gustave Flaubert’s farsighted advice to himself was that he should write “a book about nothing, a book dependent on nothing external, which would be held together by the internal strength of its style.”4 2. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Ein Brief,” Gesammelte Werke, ed. Bernd Schoeller with Rudolf Hirsch, 10 vols. , 7:471-72; my translation. All further translations are my own unless otherwise indicated.3. Friedrich Nitzsche, Complete Works, ed. Oscar Levy, 18 vols. , vol. 15, The Will to Power, trans. Anthony M. Ludovici, p. 74.4. Gustave Flaubert, Flaubert to Louise Colet, 16 Jan. 1852, The Letters of Gustave Flaubert 1830-1857, ed. and trans. Francis Steegmuller , p. 154. Other passages in this letter are equally remarkable for their “modernist” tone. Flaubert argues that from the standpoint of l’Art pur, “one might almost establish the axiom that there is no such thing as subject—style in itself being an absolute manner of seeing things” . Further:The finest works are those that contain the least matter; the closer expression comes to thought, the closer language comes to coinciding and merging with it, the finer the result. I believe the future of Art lies in this direction. I see it, as it has developed from its beginnings, growing progressively more ethereal …. Form, in becoming more skillful, becomes attenuated, it leaves behind all liturgy, rule, measure; the epic is discarded in favor of the novel, verse in favor of prose; there is no longer any orthodoxy, and form is as free as the will of its creator. This progressive shedding of the burden of tradition can be observed everywhere: governments have gone through similar evolution, from oriental despotisms to the socialisms of the future. [P. 154] Robert P. Morgan, professor of music at the University of Chicago, is currently writing a history of twentieth-century music and working on a study of form in nineteenth-century music. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are “On the Analysis of Recent Music” and “Musical Time/Musical Space”. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to address the recently renewed debate pertaining to esotericism, secret messages encoded within writings from antiquity, especially in the writings of Plato. The question of esotericism has assumed a prominent role within debates concerning the history of political thought. Ever since Leo Strauss offered his suspicion that there were secrets ‘buried in the writings of the rhetoricians of antiquity’, the idea that philosophers deliberately concealed their true beliefs in a way that few could detect (...) has been fiercely debated. More recently, the research of J.B. Kennedy has made international headlines for discovering a musical pattern embedded within Platonic writings, a pattern that Kennedy insists is evidence of Plato’s Pythagorean allegiance. The theses proffered by Strauss and Kennedy are empty doctrines of esotericism, or empty esotericisms. These doctrines insinuate the presence of secret or coded writing within Platonic dialogues but reveal no actual secret. These theses of esotericism falsely represent Plato as hyper-cryptic.Without actually providing substantive content, these notions of esotericism compel the reader to merely negate the exoteric writings of Plato, which actually render his already heterodox writings as commonplace and orthodox. (shrink)

"There is always an atheism to be extracted from a religion," Deleuze and Guattari write in their final collaboration, What Is Philosophy? Their claim that Christianity "secretes" atheism "more than any other religion," however, reflects the limits of their archive. Theological projects seeking to engage Deleuze remain embedded within Christian theologies and intellectual histories; whether they embrace, resist, or negotiate with Deleuze's atheism, the atheism in question remains one extracted from Christian theology, a Christian atheism. In Sufi Deleuze, Michael Muhammad (...) Knight offers an intervention, engaging Deleuzian questions and themes from within Islamic tradition. Even if Deleuze did not think of himself as a theologian, Knight argues, to place Deleuze in conversation with Islam is a project of comparative theology and faces the challenge of any comparative theology: It seemingly demands that complex, internally diverse traditions can speak as coherent, monolithic wholes. To start from such a place would not only defy Islam's historical multiplicity but also betray Deleuze's model of the assemblage, which requires attention to not only the organizing and stabilizing tendencies within a structure but also the points at which a structure resists organization, its internal heterogeneity, and unpredictable "lines of flight." A Deleuzian approach to Islamic theology would first have to affirm that there is no such thing as a universal "Islamic theology" that can speak for all Muslims in all historical settings, but rather a multiplicity of power struggles between major and minor forces that contest each other over authenticity, authority, and the making of "orthodoxy." The discussions in Sufi Deleuze thus highlight Islam's extraordinary range of possibilities, not only making use of canonically privileged materials such as the Qur'an and major hadith collections, but also exploring a variety of marginalized resources found throughout Islam that challenge the notion of a singular "mainstream" interpretive tradition. To say it in Deleuze's vocabulary, Islam is a rhizome. (shrink)

The Republic’s noble lie is widely read as an endorsement of political difference that opposes the democratic ideals of its Athenian setting. Once the text’s exclusionary political realities and rhetorical structure are attended to, however, the passages no longer appear as the template for an essentialist politics or the act of political deception they are typically taken to be. What they do is lay bare the ‘artifice’ (mēchanē) by which regimes – including classical Athens – produce membership status as a (...) ‘natural’ category. Plato presents the regulatory fiction that one’s political ‘kind’ (genos) expresses a pre-given status as an open secret. Given the privileged awareness he affords the reader, the noble lie may be fruitfully read as revealing – not concealing – that the ‘natural’ distinctions of an exclusionary citizenship politics are the effects of willful political power. This narrative strategy takes on specific significance in the context of the blood-based membership politics of Athens, which had its own noble lie. Accordingly, Plato’s text is shown to provoke insights into questions of democratic difference usually assumed beyond its purview. The Republic is read as exposing the workings of an essentialist politics it is typically thought instead to originate and prescribe. (shrink)

Learn mystical methods for clearing and uplifting the energy in your home! Space clearing is the art of cleansing and harmonizing the energy within an environment. This ancient practice has the power to not only make your home feel good but also help those within to feel more positive and energetic, to bring balance to relationships, and to remove blocks for increased abundance, creativity, and well-being. In this comprehensive guide to space clearing, internationally best-selling author Denise Linn distills more than (...) 50 years of experience as a leading authority in energy healing to guide you through sacred ceremonies and modern techniques for regaining control of the energy in any environment, including your home and your body. You'll learn how to transform any space using feng shui, clutter clearing, prayer, crystals, essential oils, mystic mudras, holy water, pendulums, and more! (shrink)

It is argued that Kant’s claimed reconciliation of politics and ethics in the Appendix to ‘Perpetual Peace’ founders on an irreducible element of secrecy that no amount of ‘publicity’ could ever dissipate. This shows up figuratively in images of veiling, and more especially in the paradoxical ‘very transparent veil’ associated with British politics in a footnote to ‘The Contest of Faculties’. This figure suggests that the structure of the ‘public’ itself involves a kind of transcendental secrecy that cannot be ‘publicly’ (...) overcome, and that public space therefore cannot become fully visible to itself. This structural problem, it is claimed, prevents Kant from securing his proposed distinctions between the ‘moral politician’ and the ‘political moralist’, and between ‘political prudence’ or expediency and ‘political wisdom’. A similar problem reappears in the supplementary ‘Secret Article’ that Kant includes in the second edition of ‘Perpetual Peace’, which specifies, ‘secretly’, that heads of state should take secret counsel from the open and public discussions of philosophers. In giving away this secret, even as he declares it to be a secret, Kant essentially repeats the gesture of revealing the violent origin of the state, shown in the ‘ Rechtslehre’ to be illegal, and in so doing condemns the philosopher at best to a kind of exile with respect to political time and space, a marginal place that is here aligned with the place of ‘ ius aequivocum’ addressed in the Appendix to the Introduction to the ‘ Rechtslehre’, where appeals to equity on the one hand and the right of necessity on the other are described as being inaudible in the system of public right. It is suggested that these marginal and equivocal places all show up an internal frontier in the transcendental account of public space, and that this frontier zone, the very place of politics, sets a limit to the prospects of Enlightenment itself. In conclusion, it is proposed that thinking through these problems would require less a turn toward ethics than a rereading of the concept of nature, on the basis of its Heraclitean penchant for hiding or veiling itself. (shrink)

Modern philosophy presents us with amalgams which testify to its vigour and vitality, but which also have their dangers for thespirit. A strange mixture of ontology and anthropology, of atheism and theology. A little Christian spiritualism, a little Hegeliandialectic, a little phenomenology (our modern scholasticism) and a little Nietzschean fulguration oddly combined in varying proportions.We see Marx and the Pre-Socratics, Hegel and Nietzsche, dancing hand in hand in a round in celebration of the surpassing of metaphysics and even the death (...) of philosophy properly speaking. (Deleuze, NP, 195). (shrink)

This essay interprets the much-neglected Second Part of The Conflict of the Faculties, entitled “An old question raised again: Is the human race constantly progressing?”, by showing the close relationship between the themes it deals with and those Kant addresses in the Supplements and Appendices of Perpetual Peace. In both works, Kant portrays the philosopher as having the duty to promote a “secret article”, without which his vision of a lasting international peace through the agency of a federation of states (...) is bound to fail. Both works identify this article as involving the necessity of publicity as a transcendental condition for peace, and call for philosophers to engage politicians and lawyers in a creative attitude towards lawmaking. Kant’s visionary program has failed to reach its goal up to now, not because it is too idealistic, but because philosophers have failed to take up the challenge. (shrink)

Exploitation of the executive exercise of covert operations has presented a dilemma, but Colby maintains that even in peacetime a "democratic society must have and respect some secrets.".

Words can mean different things to different people. This can be problematic, mainly for those working together in a bureaucratic institution, such as the secret service. Shared, certified, explicit and codified definitions offer a counter to subjective, solitary and/or culturally dominant definitions. It’s true that codified secrecy terms for secret services can be seen to involve a number of political, cultural, subcultural “languages”, but if words come from unclassified or declassified files, memorandums and/or records, one needs a deep understanding of (...) the secret services. A remarkable feature of this bureaucratic language is the evolving nature of, certain “keywords” as important signifiers of historical transformation. Thus, the changes in the language of the secret services depends at least as much on the internal changes of the secret services as on the transformation in the external political-social environment. In spite of the confusion of Hungarian secret services in the revolutions of 1918–1919 and the disintegration of the Austrian-Hungarian Monarchy, in the early 1920’s became a stable system. Between the two World Wars, the Hungarian State Police directed by the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Military Intelligence and Counter-Espionage directed by the Ministry of Defence, and the Hungarian Royal Gendarmerie directed by both of the Ministries had their own operational service. This structure existed unchanged until 1945. Simultaneously with the forward advance of the soviet troops, government began to re-establish the former system of the secret services in the eastern part of the country. After WWII, in 1946, the “State-protection Department” as political police became independent from the police. However, from the beginning, they remained under the control of the Communist Party. After 1950, the State Security Authority provided special services for the MIA and the Military Political Directorate of the MoD. After quashing the revolution in 1956, in the spring of 1957, the MIA Political Investigation Department was established which—with slight modifications—kept the structure created during the “state protection era”. The MIA III. The State-Protection General Directorate was established in 1962. The reorganization was finalized in the middle of the 1960’s, which resulted in the new system, which—with the structure of Directorates—became the ultimate structure of the state secret police until the abolishment of the MIA General Directorate III in January 1990. These organizational transformations were largely the result of exogenous historical-political changes. Moreover, each new period had a major impact on the organizational communication, language use and vocabulary of the secret services. This study seeks to interpret these historical transformations. (shrink)

– develop self-knowledge [Socrates] – cultivate internal harmony [Plato] – foster virtue through habit [Aristotle] – cultivate and appreciate true friendship [Cicero] – recognize what is and is not in your control [Epictetus].

In her target article “Shared health governance” (AJOB 11(7): 32-45, 2011) and in her book Health and Social Justice (2009), Jennifer Prah Ruger defends an original model of governance dubbed “Shared Health Governance” (SHG). This model borrows elements from many other models of governance, and one may wonder what is the secret sauce that holds together these diverse ingredients. In response, Ruger would perhaps ultimately turn to public moral norms. My comment raises some concerns about the function and content of (...) these norms in her model and their connection to her claims about shared sovereignty within SHG. (shrink)

In the text we approach the trajectory of the Peruvian thinker Aníbal Quijano and how he came to the formulation by which he is known, the explanatory pair modernity / coloniality. We propose a problematizing reading of his intellectual itinerary, recovering a recurrent and highly suggestive metaphor in his approach, the explanatory allegory of the knot. We consider that this figure has multiple potentialities, both in the epistemic-philosophical and political-cultural dimension.

Abstract This article examines major methodological issues in Gramsci?s writings that are relevant for re?thinking contemporary political relationships, by considering his use of the ?particular?. It draws on Gramsci?s notes on Chesterton?s Father Brown stories, including his contrast between ?old? Catholic Europe and ?new? Protestant, positivist America, and discusses Gramsci?s critique of positivism and populism with reference to his writings on the palaeontologist Cuvier and the criminologist Cesare Lombroso. It links Gramsci?s use of details and fragments from diverse sources, Father (...) Brown?s methods, and the practice of psychoanalysis. Gramsci?s criticism of Conan Doyle is contrasted with Freud?s admiration for him. It examines the tensions involved in interrogating seemingly unimportant, ?everyday? material and in engaging with the innate conservatism of popular ?common sense? beliefs, whose ?good sense? is nonetheless the necessary point of departure for mass politics. At the same time it argues that in addressing major social and political issues, the ?general?, universal or hegemonic cannot be derived from the ?particular?. It connects these themes to contemporary questions about the status and objectives of different kinds of knowledge and the split between politics and people. It suggests that Gramsci?s aim to go beyond the dichotomy between rationalism and irrationalism has profound implications both for understanding his writings and for their use in contemporary political analysis. (shrink)

This is a Belarusian translation of an essay interpreting the much-neglected Second Part of Kant's book, Conflict of the Faculties, entitled “An old question raised again: Is the human race constantly progressing?”, by showing the close relationship between the themes it deals with and those Kant addresses in the Supplements and Appendices of Perpetual Peace. In both works, Kant portrays the philosopher as having the duty to promote a “secret article”, without which his vision of a lasting international peace through (...) the agency of a federation of states is bound to fail. Both works identify this article as involving the necessity of publicity as a transcendental condition for peace, and call for philosophers to engage politicians and lawyers in a creative attitude towards lawmaking. Kant’s visionary program has failed to reach its goal up to now, not because it is too idealistic, but because philosophers have failed to take up the challenge. (shrink)

International law evolved to end and prevent armed conflict as much as for any other reason. Yet, the law against war appears weaker today than ever in its long history, evidenced by raging armed conflicts in which people are killed, injured, and forcibly displaced. The environment is devastated, and the planet impoverished. These consequences can be traced to the dominant ideology of realism. In 1946, Hersch Lauterpacht challenged that ideology by contrasting it with the idea of international law, composed of (...) natural law, positive law, and process theory. The Art of Law in the International Community revives his vision, rebuilding the understanding of why international law binds, what its norms require, and how courts are the ideal substitutes for war. The secret to the renewal of international law lies in revitalizing the moral foundation of natural law through drawing on aesthetic philosophy and the arts. (shrink)

World War II broke out as the result of an alliance between Germany and Soviet Union with the aim to conquer and partition Poland. Having broken off the treaty of friendship and co-operation, Germany attacked the USSR in 1941, forcing the Soviet Union to change sides from that of a German ally to the ally of the anti-German coalition. In 1943, following the German discovery of the graves of Polish officers murdered by Soviet forces in Katyń, Stalin declared that the (...) crime had been committed by the German army and broke off diplomatic relations with the Polish Government-in-Exile in London which had requested that an official investigation be launched by the Red Cross committee in Geneva. Some one hundred German officers were sentenced to death for the Katyń massacre as the result of Stalin’s prosecution trials. 50 years later, the world was rocked by the discovery of a document signed by Stalin ordering the execution of Polish officers in Katyń.In a secret meeting in 1943 in Teheran, President Roosevelt and Stalin agreed on the plan to annex Poland’s eastern territories.The decision to stage an independent fight for independence during the Warsaw Uprising was justified by the inevitable approach of the Red Army, the fear of German reprisal actions for disobeying the order to participate in fortification works, the fear of a spontaneous uprising fuelled by a Soviet radio broadcast in Polish which appealed to the people of Warsaw to put up a fight against the oppressor.Stalin’s decision to withhold the Soviet offensive and ban American and British planes carrying humanitarian aid for Warsaw from landing in Soviet airports contributed to the downfall of the Uprising. The Warsaw Uprising was a cue for the civil outbreaks that followed in Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Paris and Prague. The halt on the Soviet Army’s offensive, which enabled the German forces to eliminate the Polish centre of political command subordinate to the Government-in-Exile in London, limited the European territory that fell subject to Soviet supremacy. The memory of the heroic fight put up by the entire population of Warsaw deterred the Soviet Union’s ambitions to curtail Poland’s sovereignty. (shrink)

As Malinowsky states, myth is closely related to rite, presenting the social and moral values that rite asserts in each cyclical repetition. Rite marks the threshold between the sacred and profane, allowing access to myth as an art form, as a narrative expression both of the sacred – in the extension of meaning Emile Durkheim introduced with the term ‘collective consciousness’ – and of the ‘collective unconscious’ as Jung defined it. If it is true that the rite of passage to (...) the adult world, the initiation rite, is one of the most archaic rites in aiming to protect society against the risk of cultural innovation inherent in the younger generations, then it is legitimate to ask what our new myths are regarding education. When technology accelerates the mechanisms eroding collective memory, which rites renew educational myths in everyday practice? When technology dematerializes the devices on which rite and its inherent techniques of control are based, what new forms does mythological narration assume? What roles do new media play in creating a direct channel between the collective consciousness and individual experience, between the nervous system and our environment, enveloping individuals in the telematic embrace Roy Ascott described in 2003, and which not only explains the concept of the Global Village that Marshall McLuhan introduced in 1966, but also delineates the space – time of students in contemporary learning processes? Reading the contemporary educational system through the lens of myth and rite, where new technologies play a central role, allows us to follow a path that traces the progressive impact of media on cognitive processes from the initial emergence of the concept ‘collective consciousness’ onwards, and that offers one of the most interesting interpretations of the ‘open school’ experience in Derrick de Kerkhove’s concept of ‘connective intelligence’ (analysed in my Ph.D. thesis). But myth also allows us to observe those cracks, breaks and discontinuities that mark the places in which contemporary knowledge is created, which is why we find Nietzsche (who dedicated much of his work to myth), Michel Foucault and Ivan Illich at the centre of International Debate on Education for the last decade due to their critical approach to institutions. (shrink)

. The article is based on the analysis of the works of the famous Ukrainian thinker from Canada, Yuriy Mulyk-Lutsyk, who in the mid-twentieth century. deeply considered the state of the Ukrainian diaspora, its search for a strategy of its development abroad within the limits of ethnic particularism and international universalism. His thoughts have not lost their relevance today, as new waves of migration pose the same questions to Ukrainians: whether to remain or dissolve as a national community among a (...) multiethnic and multicultural world. The migrants, diasporans, whose grandchildren have lost their connection with their historical homeland and are part of other multinational states, are particularly disturbed by those outside Ukraine. The main problem of the migrants and diasporas of that time, according to Mulyk-Lutsyk, was that they did not distinguish between ethnic particularism and interethnic universalism, identifying or substituting one another. This led to radical one-sidedness: the Ukrainians cared for one or the other in themselves. The main reason for this imbalance according to the thinker was that Ukrainians intellectually were not ready to migrate. They did not have time to realize their ethnic identity, their uniqueness, as they got into millstone universalism, which led them to "spiritual turmoil, gypsyism". Instead of meeting with other worlds, Ukrainians experienced a cultural trauma. It is possible to overcome the latter by realizing the equality of the universal and the specific, the universal and the ethnic, which are two "natural signs of one and the same". The Ukrainians should understand that they/he are/is human, because he has such physical and spiritual attributes that are common to all people; at the same time he is a member of this ethnic community because it contains such features that are not present and cannot be found in other ethnic communities. Although universal and specific are opposite to one another, however, in the person they exist in combination both as a physical indivisible unity and as a spiritual one. Yu.Mulyk-Lutsyk realized that integration into a multidimensional space, sometimes so alien, but to be friendly for himself, is very difficult. He insisted on fostering within himself both national and universal, where the particular was affirmed through the universal and the universal manifested in the particular. Eventually the thinker urged: if the ethnic community understands what the essence of its ethnicism is, that is, it realizes the secret connection between ethnic content and ethnic form and learns the absolute, natural boundaries of ethnicism, which are not free to artificially, illegally, unnaturally, contraband; and if the ethnic community at the same time understands the essence of its universalism, that is, it realizes the secret connection between human content and human form, and learns the absolute, natural limits of humanity, in which it is not free to artificially, illegally, unnaturally, contraband if and only then the ethnic community in general and each of its constituent units in particular will form a unity on a natural basis - national unity. Knowledge of the experience gained by the Ukrainian diaspora in Canada may be of use to those who wish to migrate to other countries and other cultural worlds. (shrink)

Can managers detect honest people’s lies in a handwritten message? In this article, I will briefly discuss graphology and a basic model of interpersonal communication. I will then develop a fundamental theoretical framework of eight principles for detecting lies based on the basic communication model, handwriting analyses, and the following assumptions: For most people, it is easier to tell the truth than to tell lies. This applies to handwritings also. When most honest people lie, they try to hide their stressful (...) emotions in the encoding process. As a consequence, they deviate from their own normal writing and violate their own personal moral standards. Interestingly enough, the art or science of detecting a lie in a handwritten sample is to focus not on what they write, but on how they write it. These 24 exhibits (cases) written in 11 languages—used in different parts of the world—help managers apply this important theoretical framework of interpersonal communication, understand the encoding process, pinpoint these sudden emotional changes, decode handwritten messages, unlock the secrets, reveal the message’s true meanings, and detect people’s lies. (shrink)

William Wood’s study, Blaise Pascal on duplicity, sin, and the fall, is an in-depth exploration of Pascal’s views of sin, human fallenness, and self-deception. While Wood is a tutorial fellow in Theology at Oriel College, Oxford University, his book engages work in analytic philosophy, as well as historical theology. Concisely put, according to Pascal, sin is a kind of idolatry, with some created thing replacing God as the sinner’s highest good. This replacement involves a turning away from the truth, as (...) God is the source of truth or even identical with it. As sin involves choosing a lesser good over the greatest good, it involves self-deception on the part of the sinner. One deceives herself in choosing the lessor good, and so sin is a fall into duplicity and an on-going adoption of a false self-image. Presenting this false self-image to others, one deceives other people and even oneself. As Woods puts it:... having spontaneously imagined a false, but alluring, interpretation of his m .. (shrink)