Peter Homans offers a new understanding of the origins of psychoanalysis and relates the psychoanalytic project as a whole to the sweep of Western culture, past and present. He argues that Freud's fundamental goal was the interpretation of culture and that, therefore, psychoanalysis is fundamentally a humanistic social science. To establish this claim, Homans looks back at Freud's self-analysis in light of the crucial years from 1906 to 1914 when the psychoanalytic movement was formed and shows how these experiences culminated (...) in Freud's cultural texts. By exploring the "culture of psychoanalysis," Homans seeks a better understanding of what a "psychoanalysis of culture" might be. Psychoanalysis, Homans shows, originated as a creative response to the withering away of traditional communities and their symbols in the aftermath of the industrial revolution. The loss of these attachments played a crucial role in the lives of the founders of psychoanalysis, especially Sigmund Freud but also Karl Abraham, Carl Jung, Otto Rank, and Ernest Jones. The personal, political, and religious losses that these figures experienced, the introspection that followed, and the psychological discovery that resulted are what Homans calls "the ability to mourn." Homans expands this historical analysis to construct a general model of psychological discovery: the loss of shared ideals and symbols can produce a deeper sense of self (psychological structure-building, or individuation) and can then lead to the creation of new forms of meaning and self-understanding. He shows how Freud, Jung, and other psychoanalysts began to extend their introspection outward, reinterpreting the meanings of Western art, history, and religion. In conclusion, Homans evaluates Freud's theory of culture and discusses the role that psychoanalysis might play in social and cultural criticism. Throughout the book, Homans makes use of the many histories, biographies, and psychobiographies that have been written about the origins of psychoanalysis, drawing them into a comprehensive sociocultural model. Rich in insights and highly original in approach, this work will interest psychoanalysts and students of Freud, sociologists concerned with modernity and psychoanalysis, and cultural critics in the fields of religion, anthropology, political science, and social history. (shrink)

The teikei movement is a Japanese version of the alternative food movement, which emerged around the late 1960s and early 1970s. Similar to now well-known Community Supported Agriculture, it is a farmer-consumer partnership that involves direct exchanges of organic foods. It also aims to build a community that coexists with the natural environment through mutually supportive relationships between farmers and consumers. This article examined the history of the teikei movement. The movement began as a reaction to negative impacts of mechanized (...) and chemically intensive agriculture promoted by the Japanese government. The movement experienced a rapid expansion in the early 1980s, and then gradually declined thereafter. The organic market expansion and certification system intersected with both cultural and gender role changes, impacting the teikei movement negatively. Consequently, the membership of teikei consumer groups has shrunk. Furthermore, the March 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident caused unprece dented damage to organic farmers in the affected regions. Despite the scientific uncertain about the safety level of radiation exposure, the organic farmers and the teikei consumer groups managed the situation and found a way to inspect radiation contamination. They did so with the support by networking with other teikei-related actors. This response to the nuclear power plant accident suggests that although the level of embeddedness presumably varies among teikei actors, ethics guided by the teikei principles are effective in forging a resilient partnership between farmers and consumers and in keeping the teikei system alive as an agent for social change. (shrink)

A Hermeneutics of Poetic Education: The Play of the In-Between provides an account of poetic education as an alternative to aesthetic education. Drawing on philosophical hermeneutics and philosophy of play, Homan argues that rather than the cultivation of taste, education is the cultivation of formation and a learning to listen.

An autonomous agent in the real world should learn its own sensor-motor coordination through interactions with the environment; otherwise the behaviors can not be grounded and they can easily be inappropriate in the variety of the environment. The sensor-motor signals are usually complex time sequence, therefore the cognitive action system of the agent has to handle them.In this paper, we propose a computational model of the cognitive action system that consists of a sensor space HMM-SOM, a motor space HMM-SOM and (...) connection mapping between the two HMM-SOMs. A HMM-SOM can be recognized as a set of HMMs that are placed in a SOM space. It can model a set of complex time series signal in a self-organizing manner.We apply this HMM-SOM based cognitive action system on vision-motion and auditory-articulation signals. The experimental results show that this system is basically capable of constructing sensor-motor coordination structure in a self-organizing manner, handling complex time series signals. (shrink)

the view of spinoza as a scion of the mathematico-mechanistic tradition of Galileo and Descartes, albeit perhaps an idiosyncratic one, has been held by many commentators and might be considered standard.1 Although the standard view has a prima facie solid basis in Spinoza's conception of the physical world as extended, law-bound, and deterministic, it has come under sustained criticism of late. Arguing that, for Spinoza, numbers and figures are mere beings of reason and mathematical conceptions of nature belong to the (...) imagination rather than the intellect, recent commentators have cast doubt on the applicability of mathematics to natural science in Spinoza and challenged the association of him with the Galilean and... (shrink)

The question permeating much of Eugen Fink’s work is whether a nonmetaphysical thinking of the world is possible. Fink views metaphysics as understanding the world merely from the side of beings and as a container of things. A nonmetaphysical thinking would be cosmological; it would think the world as a totality, as the origin of being, of beings, of time, and of space. This thinking requires a radical way of thinking that which cannot be thought: the nothing that allows being (...) and beings to come to appearance at all. My analysis aims to articulate more clearly what Fink means by thinking cosmologically by tracing his understanding of world, earth, and cosmos and the interplay of being and nothing at stake in each. I clarify how Fink both inherits and goes beyond the philosophies of Kant, Husserl, and Heidegger to provide a way of thinking through that which resists articulation. (shrink)

Ben shu ji shu le ri ben xian xian er gong zun de de si xiang he shi ji,Nei rong bao kuo:er gong jia de shi fa,Fu bu jia de shi fa,Ying ding de shi fa,Qing mu cun de shi fa,Wu shan de shi fa,Xiao tian yuan shi fa,Xiang dou di qu de shi fa,Xia guan shi fa deng.

In this paper, we propose an annotated logic program called aVALPSN to dealwith defeasible reasoning. We propose a translation from Billington’s defeasible theory into VALPSN and clarify the relation between them based onthe translation.

A dialectical contradiction can be appropriately described within the framework of classical formal logic. It is in harmony with the law of noncontradiction. According to our definition, two theories make up a dialectical contradiction if each of them is consistent and their union is inconsistent. It can happen that each of these two theories has an intended model. Plenty of examples are to be found in the history of science.

Little is known about how certain patient characteristics can affect the timing of an ethics consultation, which has been hypothesized to affect patient length of stay. This study assessed how specific patient characteristics affect the timing of an ethics consultation, namely, age (over 65 years), race, Medicaid status, the presence of a living will, the presence of a health care proxy, and the absence of decisional capacity. Moving beyond the typical case-series evaluation of an ethics consultation service, this study used (...) an innovative approach to model how predisposing, enabling, and need factors affect health behavior and subsequently affect health outcomes for patients who received an ethics consultation at a Catholic health care system in Oklahoma. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn answering the circularity charge, Descartes consistently distinguished between truths whose demonstrations we currently perceive clearly and distinctly and truths whose demonstrations we merely remember having perceived clearly and distinctly. Descartes uses C-truths to prove God’s existence, thus validating R-truths. While avoiding one form of circularity, this introduces another circle, for Descartes believes that God’s existence validates R-truths even when itself an R-truth. I consider Newman and Nelson’s grounds enhancement strategy according to which this problem is solved when God’s existence (...) is rendered axiomatic. I argue that since it is still possible to doubt axioms when not directly apprehending them, this strategy cannot work; having to reproduce the argument for God’s existence in face of sceptical doubt is unavoidable. Drawing both on Newman and Nelson’s notion of grounds enhancement and on repr... (shrink)

This book interrogates the ontology of mathematical entities in Spinoza as a basis for addressing a wide range of interpretive issues in Spinoza’s epistemology—from his antiskepticism and philosophy of science to the nature and scope of reason and intuitive knowledge and the intellectual love of God. Going against recent trends in Spinoza scholarship, and drawing on various sources, including Spinoza’s engagements with optical theory and physics, Matthew Homan argues for a realist interpretation of geometrical figures in Spinoza; illustrates their role (...) in a Spinozan hypothetico-deductive scientific method; and develops Spinoza’s mathematical examples to better illuminate the three kinds of knowledge. The result is a portrait of Spinoza’s epistemology as sanguine and distinctive yet at home in the new Cartesian and Galilean scientific-philosophical paradigm. (shrink)

Analyses of the role of technological development in agriculture are central to an understanding of social change in agri-food systems. The objective of this paper is to contribute to the formation of a broader perspective of how farmers are positioning themselves with respect to controversial agricultural technologies through an empirical analysis of Washington State farmers’ willingness or unwillingness to try Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) technology on their farms. The use of this type of biotechnology in farming has been criticized for (...) its potential harmful effects on natural environments and socio-cultural systems, while proponents highlight the possibilities for increasing production with minimal use of other inputs. An analysis of the extent of farmers’ expressed willingness to use GMOs provides an opportunity to better understand how their diverse thoughts about controversial agricultural technologies are shaped not only by their own experiences but also by social context. The present study does this by analyzing data from a farm survey conducted on a random sample of farmers from across Washington State. The results show that the production practices farmers utilize and the market strategies they employ may be at least as useful as farmers’ socio-economic characteristics in explaining what types of farmers appear to be more or less interested in potentially using this technology. Furthermore, the relationship between level of formal education and willingness to use GMOs is not straightforward. It may hide differences between farmers with respect to where and how they received their formal education as well as the type(s) of knowledge they gained. It is argued that future research should recognize the diversity that exists in farmers’ interests vis-á-vis particular technologies and should also explore how these interests are shaped by farmers’ past and present social networks and life experiences. (shrink)

全国各地で活躍した近江商人の優れた経営手腕や活動の根底には、仏教があった。近江商人と成功に導いた、特有の生活態度を考察する。.

There is a pressing need for a theological approach to community organizing that addresses two key problems: burnout among organizers and an unwillingness of ecclesial institutions to commit to authentic structural change. What is needed is a new, practical theology that spiritually sustains organizers and convinces decision-makers of the centrality of community organizing for the life of the Church. The authors propose a reinterpretation of St. Ignatius of Loyola’s meditation on the call of the eternal king in the Spiritual Exercises, (...) in which Jesus invites all to join the social project of the Reign of God. This call comes not just to individuals but to a communion of saints whose efforts throughout history contextualize current actions within the broader synodal march of the People of God toward integral liberation. (shrink)

The obligation to inform and obtain the consent of human subjects is axiomatic in social and medical research. Yet educational researchers are often reluctant to inform their subjects: class teachers and headteachers, for example, are often used as gatekeepers, and investigators sometimes do not so much seek consent as assume it. This chapter discusses the principle of informed consent, in particular that of children. It proposes guidelines for gatekeepers who may be called upon to authorise research and to grant to (...) investigators access to children in their care. (shrink)

Central to Eugen Fink's distinctive understanding of the context of ethical engagement is his way of thinking about being in the world. From Fink's perspective we can see that Western metaphysics, and contemporary philosophical ethics, has forgotten the world. In its attempt to achieve objectivity, metaphysics has sought a vantage point that could be a view from nowhere. If the world is remembered, it is misconstrued to be a mere frame or container for objects and experiences. This has led to (...) a conception of the ethical subject as a rational, autonomous individual who merely happens to be in the world. In failing to consider the meaning of being in the world, philosophy has rendered ethics nihilistic. Fink seeks .. (shrink)

Since modes of the attribute of thought are ideas of the modes of all the other attributes in Spinoza, the scope of thought appears to be equal to that of all the other attributes combined. This suggests that thought is exceptional, and threatens to upset Spinoza’s doctrine of parallelism, according to which thought is just one among an infinity of attributes each expressing the divine essence in its own unique way. After providing an overview of attempts to solve the problem (...) of thought’s scope in the literature, I outline two reasons why the problem is not the problem it has been taken to be: (1) quantitative comparisons have no place between attributes, and (2) with knowledge of only two attributes, it is impossible to speak of norms and anomalies. I also explain how my view undercuts debate about where Spinoza lies on the idealism–dualism–materialism spectrum, and refocuses attention on the identity of the order and connection of causes regardless of the attribute under consideration. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.4 (2003) 50-58 [Access article in PDF] Evolution in Qualitative Factors Used to Evaluate Japanese Students [Tables] Introduction Two basic viewpoints are typically taken in the evaluation of achievement in Japanese schools: either the focus is primarily on "field-content-basedevaluation" or on "ability-concept-based evaluation." I have compared the qualitative factors encompassed by these two viewpoints as reflected in the permanent school records of Japanese students. (...) These recordsinclude classes taken, grades earned, and school-related information. Kanten (in Japanese) has become a key word in the evaluation of academic achievement in Japan. It represents the qualitative factors that should be considered when evaluating a student's learning achievements. In this essay, I review how these qualitative factors have evolved, both for general subjects and for fine arts.From the beginning of the educational system (1872) to 1938, the "assessment" [Hyoutei] of a student depended on the comprehensiveness of the student's achievement in each subject. (Overall assessments are now usually made using a three-point scale; 1-3, a five-point scale; 1-5, or an ABC scale.) However, it was not clearly specified how scholastic ability and learning accomplishment should be assessed or which qualitative factors should be considered.Starting in 1941, teachers were required to evaluate, comprehensively assess, and record the student's learning, consideration, dealing, application, skill, appreciation, practice, and learning attitude through his or her daily learning and activity. 1 The factors seem to be basically equivalent to those recently used as "interest/aspiration/attitude," "thinking," "judgment," [End Page 50] and "expressive power." After 1941, the point of view in the area of fine arts gradually changed from focusing on the "field-content-based factor" to the "ability-concept-based factor" in both the educational content and in evaluation.This report focuses on the evolution in the qualitative factors used in evaluations in the postwar era. From 1949 to 1991 "Understanding," "attitude," and "skill" were specified as factors that shouldbe considered when evaluating a student's learning achievements in 1949. For a few years, these factors were considered independently in the non-referenced evaluation of five-point ratings. The two basic viewpoints, "field-content-based factor" and "ability-concept-based factor," coexisted in the course of study in the early 1950s, according to a tentative plan published in 1951. "Attitude" and "habits" carried the same weight as "understanding" and "skill." These factors received minimal attention at the elementary school level. Evaluations thus evolved from simply an overall assessment of the student's achievement in a subject to an assessment of these specific factors. For instance, at the elementary school level, drawing and handicrafts both had factors related to "field content difference" (for example, drawing, color, and pattern) and to "ability concept difference" (for example, attitude and habit). At the junior high level, the factors were represented by a double-layer structure (Table 1). The elements underlined in Table 1 reflect on the "ability concept difference" (for example, expression activities and understanding activities) instead on the "field content difference." Following the revision of the permanent cumulative records in 1955, students were evaluated based only on an overall assessment of their individual [End Page 51] performance in each subject (Japanese language, mathematics, social studies, music, and drawing and handicrafts). There were three main reasons for this change.The effort it takes to evaluate each factor analytically. The difficulty of evaluating "attitude." The demand by schools at the next level for a comprehensive and uniform evaluation for each student for each subject. 3Furthermore, although "interest" was added as one of factors to be considered in the evaluation, it was not to be dealt with analytically in the evaluation of what the student learned. Consequently, evaluations became clearer and more comprehensive, although the weights of the factors, referred to as the "affective domain," took a step backward. In 1961, the factor "interest/attitude toward fine arts" was added. At the same time, "interest" was given more weight. However, the higher weighting of the factor was short-lived because intangible factors such as... (shrink)

This paper contributes to a better understanding of Cartesian irresolution by clarifying its relation to akrasia and wantonness. It argues that irresolution (qua passion) is the same as neither akrasia nor wantonness, but is, like them, a kind of weakness of soul. If akrasia consists in having what Descartes calls ‘firm and decisive judgments’ (F&D judgments) but failing to act on them, and wantonness consists in not having any F&D judgments at all, but acting completely at the behest of the (...) passions, then irresolution can be understood as a state between akrasia and wantonness: the irresolute lacks F&D judgments (like the wanton) but (unlike the wanton) actively strives to attain them. (shrink)

Despite criticism's collusion with Eliot, there are a number of incongruities between Wordsworth's ideas and Eliot's texts that do not seem to be simply differences, scenes and passages that Eliot invites her readers to find Wordsworthian while she indicates a significant pattern of divergence from Wordsworthian prototypes. The brotherly instructions that Eliot is most generally concerned at once to follow and to deny are contained in Wordsworth's wish, in the verse "Prospectus" to The Recluse, to see "Paradise, and groves/Elysian" be (...) "A simple produce of the common day" . But when she follows this wish literally, her "common day," the intensely social world of her novels, tests far more strenuously the adaptability of the paradisal vision than does anything Wordsworth wrote. The generic incompatibility between a poet's vision and the form of the novel may account for some of the obvious differences, yet, as I will try to suggest later, it may be that Eliot's choice of the realistic novel as the form for her vision is in part an effect, not a cause of her ambivalent divergences from Wordsworth .Margaret Homans, an assistant professor of English at Yale University, is the author of Women Writers and Poetic Identity: Dorothy Wordsworth, Emily Bronte, and Emily Dickinson. She is currently at work on a book of feminist criticism of Romanticism and Victorian fiction. (shrink)

Spinoza’s mind-body thesis states that the mind is the idea of the body. At the same time, Spinoza is clear in affirming that we have ideas of external bodies. There is a question, therefore, of how to reconcile two contending objects of perception: the human body qua object of the mind, on the one hand, and the myriad bodies external to ours, on the other. After evaluating various commentators’ attempts to address the issue, I make two primary claims: the object (...) of sense perception in Spinoza is the human body only ; and the tension in Spinoza’s account of representation stems from its relationship to his doctrine of the attributes. (shrink)

Ethical codes have been widely put in place by professional associations, universities and other organizations. They observe common standards and procedures which are applied and adapted to local or specialist needs. The early codes such as that of Nuremberg exclusively addressed the rights of participants. This article detects a shift in emphasis. The argument relies on a distinction between morality and ethics and it is contended that ethical codes legitimize kinds of practice that are morally unprincipled. In modern formulations of (...) research ethics there is a tendency to abdicate responsibility for the protection of rights and interests and to pass it from researchers to participants or subjects. The concern is rather more for the security of investigators than for that of participants. It is recognized that codes are here to stay but suggestions are made to recover the spirit of Nuremberg. (shrink)

Continental Rationalism Continental rationalism is a retrospective category used to group together certain philosophers working in continental Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, in particular, Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, especially as they can be regarded in contrast with representatives of “British empiricism,” most notably, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. Whereas the British empiricists held that … Continue reading Rationalism, Continental →.

This lecture from 1946 presents Eugen Fink’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s metaphysics. Fink’s aim here is twofold: to work against the trend of psychologistic interpretations of Nietzsche’s work and to perform the philosophical interpretation of Nietzsche he finds lacking in his predecessors. Fink contends that play is the central intuition of Nietzsche’s philosophy, specifically in his rejection of Western metaphysics’ insistence on being and presence. Drawing instead from Heraclitus, Nietzsche argues for an ontology of becoming characterized by the Dionysian as the (...) temporalization of time and the Apollonian as temporalized in time. The play of becoming is thus the cosmic coming to be and passing away of appearance. Playing, as the creative projection of such a play-world of appearing and concealing, is central to understanding the Nietzschean theme of the will to power as the revaluation of values. (shrink)

In this article, we develop a non-rights-based argument based on beneficence (i.e., the welfare of individuals and communities) and justice as the disposition to act justly to promote equity in health care resource allocation. To this end, we structured our analysis according to the following main sections. The first section examines the work of Amartya Sen and his equality of capabilities approach and outlines a framework of health care as a fundamental human need. In the subsequent section, we provide a (...) definition of health equity based on the moral imperative to guarantee that every individual ought to have the freedom to pursue health goals and well-being. In the later part of the article, we outline a non-right approach to health care based on three pillars: (1) human flourishing, (2) justice as a disposition not a process, and (3) solidarity. (shrink)