For centuries, humanists have celebrated and cherished the limitless potential of humankind and its irrepressible spirit. For its efforts to develop rational solutions to human problems rather than invoking supernatural intervention, humanism has been rewarded with a rich and distinguished heritage whose contributors include many of the brightest minds of intellectual history. Advocating reason, critical intelligence, free and objective inquiry, democratic institutions, and moral values based on human experience, humanism stands in steadfast opposition to the moral, political, and social oppression (...) perpetrated by all who would have us swear unquestioned allegiance to authoritarian power, be it temporal or divine. But if humanism is to remain fresh and vibrant, alert and ever vigilant, it must continuously assess and evaluate its goals in light of new experience. In The Question of Humanism, 23 contributors investigate the meaning of humanism today, its range of perspectives, and how humanists can deal with the challenges of contemporary life and those it will face as the new century approaches. This absorbing collection of original essays examines the abundant variety of historical and contemporary humanist philosophies, with special emphasis on the work of Thomas Aquinas, Immanuel Kant, Soren Kierkegaard, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Michel Foucault. Focusing on the need for an awareness of humanist tradition, these essays offer blunt, progressive self-appraisals to illustrate how humanism will continue to grow as a vital and compelling intellectual force. Featured are essays by Cecil Abrahams, Zygmunt Adamczewski, Samuel Ajzenstat, Martin Andic, Allan Booth, Richard Brown, Michael Cardy, Kenneth Dorter, Richard Francis, David Goicoechea, Danny Goldstick, Calvin Hayes, Marsha Hewitt, Monica Hornyansky, Paul Kurtz, James Lawler, John Luik, Robert McLaughlin, Graeme Nicholson, Zaid Orudjev, Robert Perkins, Charles Scott, and Edward A. Synan. The challenges of the past have served to strengthen humanists' resolve. Humanism, in all of its variations, is now ready for a new era. (shrink)

In men, high levels of endogenous testosterone (T) seem to encourage behavior intended to dominate other people. Sometimes dominant behavior is aggressive, its apparent intent being to inflict harm on another person, but often dominance is expressed nonaggressively. Sometimes dominant behavior takes the form of antisocial behavior, including rebellion against authority and law breaking. Measurement of T at a single point in time, presumably indicative of a man's basal T level, predicts many of these dominant or antisocial behaviors. T not (...) only affects behavior but also responds to it. The act of competing for dominant status affects male T levels in two ways. First, T rises in the face of a challenge, as if it were an anticipatory response to impending competition. Second, after the competition, T rises in winners and declines in losers. Thus, there is a reciprocity between T and dominance behavior, each affecting the other. We contrast a reciprocal model, in which T level is variable, acting as both a cause and effect of behavior, with a basal model, in which T level is assumed to be a persistent trait that influences behavior. An unusual data set on Air Force veterans, in which data were collected four times over a decade, enables us to compare the basal and reciprocal models as explanations for the relationship between T and divorce. We discuss sociological implications of these models. (shrink)

In 1975, Colwyn Trevarthen first presented his groundbreaking explorations into the early origins of human intersubjectivity. His influential model dictates that, during intimate and playful spontaneous face-to-face protoconversations, the emotions of both the 2–3-month-old infant and mother are nonverbally communicated, perceived, mutually regulated, and intersubjectively shared. This primordial basic interpersonal interaction is expressed in synchronized rhythmic-turn-taking transactions that promote the intercoordination and awareness of positive brain states in both. In this work, I offer an interpersonal neurobiological model of Trevarthen’s intersubjective (...) protoconversations as rapid, reciprocal, bidirectional visual-facial, auditory-prosodic, and tactile-gestural right brain-to-right brain implicit nonverbal communications between the psychobiologically attuned mother and the developing infant. These co-constructed positive emotional interactions facilitate the experience-dependent maturation of the infant’s right brain, which is in an early critical period of growth. I then address the central role of interpersonal synchrony in intersubjectivity, expressed in a mutual alignment or coupling between the minds and bodies of the mother and infant in face-to-face protoconversations, as well as how these right brain-to-right brain emotional transmissions generate bioenergetic positively charged interbrain synchrony within the dyad. Following this, I offer recent brain laterality research on the essential functions of the right temporoparietal junction, a central node of the social brain, in face-to-face nonverbal communications. In the next section, I describe the ongoing development of the protoconversation over the 1st year and beyond, and the co-creation of a fundamental energy-dependent, growth-promoting social emotional matrix that facilitates the emergence of the highly adaptive human functions of mutual play and mutual love. In the final section, I discuss the clinical applications of this interpersonal neurobiological model of intersubjectivity, which has a long history in the psychotherapy literature. Toward that end, I offer very recent paradigm-shifting hyperscanning research that simultaneously measures both the patient and therapist during a psychotherapeutic interaction. Using the Trevarthen’s two-person intersubjective model, this research demonstrates changes in both brains of the therapeutic dyad and the critical role of nonverbal communications in an emotionally-focused psychotherapy session. These studies specifically document interbrain synchronization between the right temporoparietal junction of the patient and the right temporoparietal junction of the clinician, a right brain-to-right brain nonverbal communication system in the co-constructed therapeutic alliance. Lastly, I discuss the relationship between the affect communicating functions of the intersubjective motivational system and the affect regulating functions of the attachment motivational system. (shrink)

“Technological determinism” is predominantly employed as a critic’s term, used to dismiss certain classes of theoretical and empirical claims. Understood more productively as referring to claims that place a greater emphasis on the autonomous and social-shaping tendencies of technology, technological determinism is a valuable and prominent perspective. This article will advance our understanding of technological determinism through four contributions. First, I clarify some debates about technological determinism through an examination of the meaning of technology. Second, I parse the family of (...) claims related to technological determinism. Third, I note that constructivist and determinist insights may each be valid given particular scope conditions, the most prominent of which is the scale of analysis. Finally, I propose a theoretical microfoundation for technological determinism—military–economic adaptationism—in which economic and military competition constrain sociotechnical evolution to deterministic paths. This theory is a special case of a general theory—sociotechnical selectionism—which can be regarded as also including constructivist theories as special cases. Greater understanding of, respect for, and engagement with technological determinism will enhance the study of technology and our ability to shape our sociotechnical systems. (shrink)

In this article, I discuss the structural domination of whiteness as it intersects with the potential of individual critique and reflexivity. I reflect on my positioning as a white nurse researcher while researching international nurse migration. I draw on two large qualitative studies and one small focus group study to discuss my reactions as a white researcher to evidence of institutional racism in the British health services and my growing awareness of how racism is reproduced in the British nursing profession.

In this paper, we develop an analysis of unrealistic fiction that captures the everyday sense of ‘unrealistic’. On our view, unrealistic fictions are a species of inconsistent fictions, but fictions for which such inconsistency, given the supporting role we claim played by genre, needn’t be a critical defect. We first consider and reject an analysis of unrealistic fiction as fiction that depicts or describes unlikely events; we then develop our own account and make an initial statement of it: unrealistic fictions (...) are those that invite us to believe something false. We further develop this account and restate it in terms of the notion of “import-export inconsistency.” That is, unrealistic fictions invite us to import certain propositions true in the actual world then invite us to export propositions entailing the negation of those imported. Finally, we consider whether for fiction being unrealistic is always an aesthetic flaw. (shrink)

Consciousness is explored as a living stream of lucid experience composed of the essence of the moments of our lives. Grounded in Ken Wilber's model, consciousness is explained from many points of view: its historical evolution, its growth in the individual, its mystical dimensions, and the meaning of enlightenment"--Provided by publisher.

In the spirit of William James, we present a process view of human consciousness. Our approach, however, follows upon Charles Tart’s original systems theory analysis of states of consciousness, although it differs in its reliance on the modern sciences of complexity, especially dynamical systems theory and its emphasis on process and evolution. We argue that consciousness experience is constructive in the sense that it is the result of ongoing self-organizing and self-creating processes in the mind and body. These processes follow (...) a broad developmental agenda already described by psychologists such as Jean Piaget. Similar constructive transformations of consciousness appear to have occurred across the course of human history. In this sense, phylogeny indeed recapitulates ontogeny. Finally, modern developmental research suggests that the most advanced levels of human growth transform consciousness in the direction of increasing selflessness and spirituality, rather than simply toward greater intelligence. (shrink)

This article questions the aptness of ‘discourse analysis’ as a label for our field, and prefers the less reductionist concept of ‘Discourse Interpretation’. It does this through drawing on ideas from the field of philosophical hermeneutics – the theory and practice of interpreting texts. It operationalizes and adapts the construct of the Interpretive Arc from the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur in order to address issues that are central to discourse work, including that of how we warrant the validity of our (...) textual interpretations. The Interpretive Arc consists of six inter-linked phases, which the article presents and exemplifies through discussion of a single text – the story of Babel. Phase 1 of the arc defines readers as being in a state of Estrangement before the text because of the distancing created by its written or technological form. Phase 2 is that of Pre-view, the state of opinion or knowledge that readers bring to a text. At phase 3, a first reading forms readers’ Proto-understanding, their initial ‘guess’ at what the text means. Then processes of Analysis test and evidence the validity of alternative readings, limiting the interpretations which can plausibly be taken from a text. Three byways of interpretive analysis are challenged and discarded: the dominance of author intention, structuralist analysis and limitless polysemy. Analysis then leads into 5, the phase of informed Understanding of the matter or injunction of the text, of what is disclosed or unfolded before the text. The Interpretive Arc is completed in phase 6, Ownership. Here, through processes of critique of their own and the text’s ideologies and of fresh listening, readers are led to a new self formed by the matter of the text. There is a dialectic amongst Analysis, Understanding and Ownership, with each informing and modifying the other. The approach emphasizes interpretation as the heart of discourse work. The 3000-year-old narrative of Babel is a subject as well as an object here. It contributes to the matter of the article and its interpretation is interwoven with the theoretical substance. The story is shown to be an integrated narrative abounding in sophisticated linguistic techniques which show a delight in language. The traditional Christian and Western interpretation of Babel – as an affront to God which results in the curse of multilingualism – is challenged. A re-constructed interpretation informed by intertextual evidence reads the fault of Babel to be the people’s refusal to spread through the earth. Babel can be interpreted as a manifesto against the monolingual and monocultural impetus of empires ancient and contemporary. The multilingual outcome is a positive affirmation of sociocultural and linguistic diversity. (shrink)

The account of marriage Kant presents in the Rechtslehre strikes most readers as cold, legalistic and obsessed with sex. It seems to ignore at least nearly all of the morally valuable aspects of marriage. Consequently, most have felt that this is a feature of Kant 's theory best ignored. Against this view, this article argues that Kant 's focus is appropriate, that his understanding of marriage is much more romantic than is commonly thought and that it presents a thought-provoking alternative (...) to the picture of marriage found in the modern law. (shrink)

ArgumentThroughout his career as a writer, Sigmund Freud maintained an interest in the evolutionary origins of the human mind and its neurotic and psychotic disorders. In common with many writers then and now, he believed that the evolutionary past is conserved in the mind and the brain. Today the “evolutionary Freud” is nearly forgotten. Even among Freudians, he is regarded to be a red herring, relevant only to the extent that he diverts attention from the enduring achievements of the authentic (...) Freud. There are three ways to explain these attitudes. First, the evolutionary Freud's key work is the “Overview of the Transference Neurosis”. But it was published at an inopportune moment, forty years after the author's death, during the so-called “Freud wars.” Second, Freud eventually lost interest in the “Overview” and the prospect of a comprehensive evolutionary theory of psychopathology. The publication of The Ego and the Id, introducing Freud's structural theory of the psyche, marked the point of no return. Finally, Freud's evolutionary theory is simply not credible. It is based on just-so stories and a thoroughly discredited evolutionary mechanism, Lamarckian use-inheritance. Explanations one and two are probably correct but also uninteresting. Explanation number three assumes that there is a fundamental difference between Freud's evolutionary narratives and the evolutionary accounts of psychopathology that currently circulate in psychiatry and mainstream journals. The assumption is mistaken but worth investigating. (shrink)

Goodness, rational permissibility, and the like might be gruesome properties. That is to say, they might not well suit causal-explanatory purposes. Or at least, these properties are gruesome for all their normative concepts tell us by themselves. Perhaps hedonists are right and such properties are anything but gruesome, but perhaps instead, the most gruesome-minded ethical pluralists are right—normative concepts by themselves don’t settle the issue. At the end of his marvelous commentary, John Hawthorne depicts the morass of dank possibilities that (...) a “moral realist” must enter when he tries explaining how normative words and thoughts could lock on to some particular causally gruesome property that constitutes being good. Right, I say, and expressivists can direct us around the morass. Then he asks why I avoid the questions that lead moral realists into this morass. But I don’t avoid them; I offer an answer. (shrink)

This essay shows that truth cannot be divorced from human experience and an individual’s world view, his or her weltanschauung. There exist different weltanschauungen that favour alternative truths. Thus, loosely speaking, truth is determined by context. It may be socially acceptable to prefer one among the alternative truths as truly true, but this goal necessarily involves taking an ideological perspective on what is perceived and accepted as the sole truth. In other words, it is prejudiced. The truth value assigned to (...) the proposition God exists starkly illustrates this claim, but in the course of this essay I demonstrate that alternative truths are widespread and that conflicting truths can co-exist within a community even when they create dissension. A hegemonic group will assert a preference for one truth over its alternatives, but that does not eliminate the existence of alternative truths. Alternative weltanschauungen need to be managed somehow, and the recognition that alternative truths exist is one step in their management. (shrink)

The invisibility of nursing work has been discussed in the international literature but not in relation to learning clinical skills. Evans and Guile's (Practice‐based education: Perspectives and strategies, Rotterdam: Sense, 2012) theory of recontextualisation is used to explore the ways in which invisible or unplanned and unrecognised learning takes place as newly qualified nurses learn to delegate to and supervise the work of the healthcare assistant. In the British context, delegation and supervision are thought of as skills which are learnt (...) “on the job.” We suggest that learning “on‐the‐job” is the invisible construction of knowledge in clinical practice and that delegation is a particularly telling area of nursing practice which illustrates invisible learning. Using an ethnographic case study approach in three hospital sites in England from 2011 to 2014, we undertook participant observation, interviews with newly qualified nurses, ward managers and healthcare assistants. We discuss the invisible ways newly qualified nurses learn in the practice environment and present the invisible steps to learning which encompass the embodied, affective and social, as much as the cognitive components to learning. We argue that there is a need for greater understanding of the “invisible learning” which occurs as newly qualified nurses learn to delegate and supervise. (shrink)

We argue that the rapid eye movement dream experiences owe their structure and meaning to inherent self-organizing properties of the brain itself. Thus, we offer a common meeting ground for brain based studies of dreaming and traditional psychological dream theory. Our view is that the dreaming brain is a self-organizing system highly sensitive to internally generated influences. Several lines of evidence support a process view of the brain as a system near the edge of chaos, one that is highly sensitive (...) to internal influences. Such sensitivity is due to several factors. First, the dreaming brain normally gates out external input and thus operates without the stabilizing influences of external feedback. Second, the pre-frontal cortex is only minimally activated during REM sleep, and hence the brain operates with weakened volition, reduced logic, and diminished self-reflection. Third, because the neuromodulatory inhibition mechanism is turned off during REM, the brain responds spontaneously to the least provocation. In addition, the dreaming brain is also subject to powerful intermittent cholinergic stimulation which may stimulate creative patterns of dream activity. (shrink)

There is a philosophical puzzle about blaming people for their attitudes that arises because we lack direct voluntary control over our attitudes. The fact that we lack direct voluntary control over our attitudes suggests that we are not responsible for them. Defenders of blaming people for their beliefs have appealed to various senses in which we are responsible for our beliefs, despite our lacking direct voluntary control over them. In this paper, I pursue a different strategy. I argue that it (...) is something fitting to be ashamed of your beliefs, or, to put this another way, that it is sometimes fitting to feel shame for believing something. I articulate an account of shamefulness, on which the shameful is a species of legitimate expectation violation. By contrast with blameworthiness, shamefulness does not entail responsibility. For this reason, the fittingness of shame for beliefs (i.e. doxastic shame), unlike the fittingness of blame for beliefs (i.e. doxastic blame), is orthogonal to questions of responsibility. Independent of whether we are responsible for our beliefs, doxastic shame can be fitting. (shrink)

This volume offers recent developments in pragmatics and adjacent territories of investigation, including important new concepts such as the pragmatic act and the pragmeme, and combines developments in neighboring disciplines in an integrative holistic pragmatic approach. The young science of pragmatics has, from its inception, differentiated itself from neighboring fields in the humanities, especially the disciplines dealing with language and those focusing on the social and anthropological aspects of human behavior, by focusing on the language user in his or her (...) societal environment.This collection of papers continues that emphasis on language use, and pragmatic acts in their context. The editors and contributors share a perspective that essentially considers language as a system for communication and wants to look at language from a societal perspective, and accept the view that acts of interpretation are essentially embedded in culture. In an interdisciplinary approach, some authors explore connections with social theory, in particular sociology or socio-linguistics, some offer a political stance, others explore connections with philosophy and philosophy of language, and several papers address problems in theoretical pragmatics. (shrink)

Dream reports were collected from normal subjects in an effort to determine the degree to which dream reports can be used to identify individual dreamers. Judges were asked to group the reports by their authors. The judges scored the reports correctly at chance levels. This finding indicated that dreams may be at least as much like each other as they are the signature of individual dreamers. Our results suggest that dream reports cannot be used to identify the individuals who produced (...) them when identifiers like names and gender of friends and family members are removed from the dream report. In addition to using dreams to learn about an individual, we must look at dreams as telling us about important common or generic aspects of human consciousness. (shrink)

Incarcerated persons have suffered a disproportionate burden of SARS-CoV-2 infection compared to the general population, with heightened risk for adverse...

(1993). The Evolution of consciousness: A theory of Historical and personal transformation. World Futures: Vol. 38, Theoretical Achievements and Practical Applications of General Evolutionary Theory, pp. 43-62.

The descriptions in the literature of mystical experience and psychedelic experience, such as that induced by LSD, are usually written by persons who have actually experienced only one or perhaps neither of the two states. Because many of the most important effects can be understood by direct experience but only partially described in ordinary language, such lack of direct experience is a major drawback. Since there is disagreement over the question of whether mystical experience and LSD experience can be ‘the (...) same’, it would be helpful if an individual who has experienced aspects of both states would compare them. One of the authors describes his experience with both states. A particular form of mystical experience, cosmic consciousness , occurred spontaneously; no mind altering drugs were used. ALS later took LSD on 12-15 occasions. Both states of consciousness involved alterations in time sense, subject/object boundary, cognition, mood and perception. However, the changes with CC were qualitatively and quantitatively different from those of LSD. The authors conclude that CC and LSD can be quite different states of consciousness, although we cannot completely rule out the possibility that psychedelics might sometimes induce the same kinds of mystical experiences that occur for non-drug reasons. (shrink)

Introduction; A.Hazlett Quantification, Naturalness, and Ontology; R.P.Cameron Two Problems of Composition in Collective Action; S.R.Chant Another Look at the Reality of Race, By Which I Mean Racef; J.Glasgow Bringing Things About; N.Judisch Interpretation: Its Scope and Limits; U.Kriegel Empirical Analyses of Causation; D.Kutach Brutal Individuation; A.Hazlett Ghosts in the World Machine? Humility and Its Alternatives; R.Langton& C.Robichaud Is Everything Relative? Anti-Realism, Truth, and Feminism; M.Mikkola Minimalism and Modality: The Nature of Mathematical Objects; K.Miller Are There Fundamental Intrinsic Properties?; A.Ney On (...) the Very Idea of an Ecosystem; J.Odenbaugh The Prince of Wales Problem for Counterfactual Theories of Causation; C.Sartorio Index. (shrink)

How nursing as a profession is valued may be changing and needs to be explored and understood in a global context. We draw on data from two empirical studies to illustrate our argument. The first study explored the value of nursing globally, the second investigated the experiences of overseas trained nurses recruited to work in a migrant capacity in the UK health care workforce. The indications are that nurses perceive themselves as devalued socially, and that other health care professionals do (...) not give nursing the same status as other, socially more prestigious professions, such as medicine. Organizational and management structures within the NHS and the independent care home sector devalue overseas nurses and the contribution they make to health care. Our conclusions lead us to question the accepted sociocultural value of the global nursing workforce and its perceived contribution to global health care, and to consider two ethical frameworks from which these issues could be discussed further. (shrink)