Contributing to renewed scholarly interest in R. D. Laing and his circle, and in the radical therapeutic community of Kingsley Hall, London, this article offers the first article-length reading of Mary Barnes’ and Joseph Berke’s Mary Barnes: Two Accounts of a Journey through Madness. This text offers views of anti-psychiatry ‘on the ground’ that critique the 1960s utopianism of Laing’s championing of madness as a metanoic, quasi-psychedelic voyage. Barnes’ story, too, reveals tensions within the anti-psychiatric movement. Moving beyond existing criticism (...) of the text, Barnes, it is argued here, emerges as far more than an exemplary patient, victim or anti-psychiatric puppet. Particular attention is paid in this reading of Two Accounts to the following: the ways in which the spiritually inclined Barnes and the psychoanalytic Berke differ in this dual narrative text; the ways in which each differs from Laing; the metaphor of the journey; and the setting of Barnes’ story in the often conflicted, experimental household of Kingsley Hall. (shrink)

The interreligious dialogue is not a new theme in the history of Christianity, the possibility of its realization being analyzed from the early centuries. Nowadays, the way that other religions are viewed has changed essentially, the religious, political, economic and social realities, being completely different than in the beginning. However, a correct handling of interreligious dialogue cannot disregard the past, more than that, the ideas from the works of the Holy Fathers, church writers, theologians and old thinkers remain valid and (...) are used as themes in the current discussions of the interreligious dialog. Among them, an important place takes Cantemir, the Prince of Moldavia, who lived for a long time in Constantinople. His works, which deals with the history of the Ottoman Empire and the Islamic doctrine, have their basis in the personal experience and in the depth knowledge of the main Islamic sources that helped him to give to posterity the representative works for the knowledge of the Muslim religion and relations between Christianity and Islam during the development and decay of the Ottoman Empire. The way he presents the relation between Christianity and Islam, approaches him to the other Christian writers of his time which are addressing the same topic, highlighting the sadness of an era in which the great Christian empire fell under Ottoman rule and also the hopes of the Orthodox worldwide Christians to release the Christianity, having central the idea of approaching the apocalyptic time when Christianity will triumph. (shrink)

Many pages have been written about the relationship between Mircea Eliade and I.P. Culianu, but the subject is still open for the future. The master-disciple relationship they established during the time was often scattered with moments of tension. Anyway, every time we remember the name Culianu, it will stand beside his master’s name from Chicago, whose place he took after the latter’s disappearance. The way in which Christianity is analyzed in their work occupies a certain place. And thus, because along (...) with a few other situations, their visions regarding this theme seem contradictory. These pages want to be a preamble of work about the Christian values in Mircea Eliade’s thinking, which we have in progress. (shrink)

Current debates over so-called ‘scientific imperialism’, on one plausible reading, explore significant general issues about the proper boundaries between distinct disciplines. They raise questions about whether some forms of territorial expansion by scientific disciplines into other domains of inquiry are undesirable. Clearly there is a strong normative undercurrent here, as the use of the pejorative term ‘imperialism’ would indicate. However, we face a genuine puzzle here: why should we regard some forms of expansion as illegitimate? Why should any particular boundaries (...) between various disciplines be regarded as sacrosanct? In response we note that one striking feature of the examples upon which opponents of scientific imperialism focus (such as the use of economics for sociological explanations) is that that they involve cases where folk conceptions of morality and philosophical anthropology appear to be threatened. We suggest that rather than seeking a more general pluralist account of the proper boundaries between disciplines, we should consider the epistemic and normative implications of particular expansions. (shrink)

There is an extensive literature on the allocation of medical resources in many disciplines including ethics, law, medicine, psychology and sociology (Cicognani et al., 2007; Krütli et al., 2016; P...

Basándome en una metodología etnográfica de tipo multisituado, en este artículo analizo, desde la antropología social, diversas temporalidades socialmente construidas en el marco de una crisis hídrica en Sierras Chicas, Provincia de Córdoba, Argentina. Comienzo dando cuenta de la importancia social del agua como valor, en términos del trabajo acumulado (expresado por ejemplo en la infraestructura para su provisión y distribución), para luego analizar los diferentes contextos en los que se moldean creativamente diversas temporalidades que dan sentido a la relación (...) entre la sociedad y el entorno. Concluyo que estas temporalidades, basadas algunas en la experiencia cotidiana de la escasez de agua, otras en los conflictos entre el desarrollismo y la planificación espacial a largo plazo, y otras en ciertas miradas utópicas, tienen en común el operar como formas de lidiar con la incertidumbre sobre el futuro, en un presente de profundos cambios socioambientales. (shrink)

The article critically engages with the posthumanist discourse on anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism. It adopts an “integrational” approach to signs, language, and communication, as outlined in the works of Oxford linguist Roy Harris. Integrational linguistics is committed to a demythologized view of “language,” which it considers to exist only as part of the experience of human individuals and human collectivities. From an integrational point of view, language is not an “object” of scientific inquiry, but a complex of human activities that (...) make such an inquiry possible in the first place. This paper argues that posthumanists falsely ascribe language to animals and to hypothetical extraterrestrials. Based on Harris’ concept of the supercategory, it is shown that the worldviews encapsulated in science, history, and religion only make sense because they are human worldviews. No other intelligent life could grasp the various supercategorical discourses, and how they relate to each other, the main reason being that language is a uniquely integrated mode of human communication. The article thus supports a radical anthropocentrism as the only intellectually viable philosophy on which to draw in our reflections on, and inquiries into both intraspecies and interspecies communication. (shrink)

This is a constructive critique of Habermas’s account of rationality, which is central to his political theory and has sparked theoretical and empirical research across academia. Habermas and many critical theorists caricature means-ends rationality (the ability to pick good means to ends), e.g. by wrongly depicting it as egocentric. This weakens Habermas’s attempt to distinguish means-ends rationality from his hugely important and influential idea of communicative rationality (roughly, the rationality of genuine discussion). I suggest that sincerity and autonomy, rather than (...) non-egocentrism, are the key distinguishing features of communicative rationality. This shows that communicative rationality actually overlaps with means-ends rationality. Indeed, means-ends rationality is needed by critical theorists, as I exemplify by showing its use in deliberative democracy. Moreover, means-ends rationality will be present in discourse ethics, as I show with the example of moral discourse about gay marriage. My article thus challenges decades of what Habermas and critical theorists have written on means-ends and communicative rationality, but I stay broadly true to – and hopefully improve – Habermas’s account of rationality. (shrink)

Introduction; "One surely will be found one day to make an ontology with what I am telling you": the road to a post-Lacanian materialism -- Part One. Jacques Lacan: between the sacred and the secular -- 1. Conflicted matter: the challenge of secularizing materialism -- 2. Turning the sciences inside out: revisiting "Science and truth" -- 3. On deep history and psychoanalysis: phylogenetic time in Lacanian theory --Part Two. Alain Badiou: between form and matter -- 4. What matter(s) in ontology: (...) the Hebb-event and materialism split from within -- 5. Phantom of consistency: Kant troubles -- Part Three. Quentin Meillassoux: between faith and knowledge -- 6. The world before worlds: the ancestral and Badiou's anti-Kantian transcendentalism -- 7. Hume's revenge: a Dieu, Meillassoux? -- Postface: from critique to construction: toward a transcendental materialism. (shrink)

This paper provides an overview of results from an Australian Research Council-funded project "Sentiments and Risks: The Changing Nature of Human-Animal Relations in Australia." The data discussed come from a survey of 2000 representative Australians at the capital city, state, and rural regional level. It provides both a snapshot of the state of involvement of Australians with nonhuman animals and their views on critical issues: ethics, rights, animals as food, risk from animals, native versus introduced animals, hunting, fishing, and companionate (...) relations with animals. Its data point to key trends and change. The changing position of animals in Australian society is critical to understand, given its historic export markets in meat and livestock, emerging tourism industry with its strong wildlife focus, native animals' place in discourses of nation, and the centrality of animal foods in the national diet. New anxieties about risk from animal-sourced foods and the endangerment of native animals from development and introduced species, together with tensions between animals' rights and the privileging of native species, contribute to the growth of a strongly contested animal politics in Australia. © 2007 Brill Academic Publishers. (shrink)

A fair amount of recent scholarship has been concerned with correcting a supposedly wrong, but wide-spread, assessment of the consequences of the empirical falsification of Bell-type inequalities. In particular, it has been claimed that Bell-type inequalities follow from “locality tout court” without additional assumptions such as “realism” or “hidden variables”. However, this line of reasoning conflates restrictions on the spatio-temporal relation between causes and their effects (“locality”) and the assumption of a cause for every event (“causality”). It thus fails to (...) recognize a substantial restriction of the class of theories that is falsified through Bell-type inequalities. (shrink)

George McGhee’s book “Convergent Evolution: limited forms most beautiful” provides an extensive survey of biological convergence. This paper has two main aims. First, it examines the theoretical claims McGhee makes about convergent evolution—specifically criticizing his use of a total morphospace to understand contingency and his assumption that functional constraints are non-contingent. Second, it sketches a group of important conceptual challenges facing researchers interested in convergence.

This is a study of Frege's permutation argument in Part I, Section 10, of Frege's Basic Laws of Arithmetic.

We will focus on the theory of complete concept in the philosophy of Leib-niz. We will not emphasise the epistemological aspects, but rather will concentrate on the metaphysical implications of this theory. Some questions requiring an answer will be: are there two individual substances of the same kind? What is the nature of a substance that is only possible? What kind of notion has the unactualised possible? What is the nature of the relationship between individual substance and the complete no-tion? (...) In order to answer these questions, we will present in the first part of the paper the concept of individual substance, in the second part, we will focus on the problem whether the possible objects have or have not a complete concept, and in the third part we will give some additional arguments to support our answer. (shrink)

This article is an installment in an ongoing debate between me and Hägglund. Both here and throughout our exchanges, I argue on behalf of Freud and Lacan against Hägglund's Derrida-inspired critique of psychoanalysis. Prior to the appearance of Hägglund's 2012 book Dying for Time, the back-and-forth between us centered primarily around the issue of just how atheistic Freudian-Lacanian analysis really is in light of the Derridean-Hägglundian ‘radical atheism’ delineated by Hägglund's 2008 book of that title. In this piece, which focuses (...) on the final chapter of Dying for Time, I carry out two interrelated tasks. First, I highlight what I allege to be certain limitations to Hägglund's Derridean ‘chronolibidinalism’ preventing it from doing full justice to the multiple dimensions of psychoanalysis both theoretical and clinical. Second, I offer interpretations of Freud and Lacan sharply contrasting with the readings of these two figures presented by Hägglund in Dying for Time as well as his other texts engaging with analysis. Moreover, in the process, I defend my version of Freudian-Lacanian drive theory as per my 2005 book Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive in the face of Hägglund's explicit criticisms of it. (shrink)

How to theorise religion in International Relations (IR)? Does the concept of post-secularity advance the debate on religion beyond the ‘return of religion’ and the crisis of secular reason? This article argues that the post-secular remains trapped in the logic of secularism. First, a new account is provided of the ‘secularist bias’ that characterises mainstream IR theory: (a) defining religion in either essentialist or epiphenomenal terms; (b) positing a series of ‘antagonistic binary opposites’ such as the secular versus the religious; (...) (c) de-sacralising and re-sacralising the public square. The article then analyses post-secularity, showing that it subordinates faith under secular reason and sacralises the ‘other’ by elevating difference into the sole transcendental term. Theorists of the post-secular such as Jürgen Habermas or William Connolly also equate secular modernity with metaphysical universalism, which they seek to replace with post-metaphysical pluralism. In contrast, the alternative that this article outlines is an international theory that develops the Christian realism of the English School in the direction of a metaphysical-political realism. Such a realism binds together reason with faith and envisions a ‘corporate’ association of peoples and nations beyond the secularist settlement of Westphalia that is centred on national states and transnational markets. By linking immanent values to transcendent principles, this approach can rethink religion in international affairs and help revive grand theory in IR. (shrink)