L’historienne Lyndal Roper entreprend dans son ouvrage Oedipus and the Devil (1994) la reconstruction des paysages psychiques de quelques individus ayant vécu aux xvie et xviie siècles à Augsbourg. Elle y interprète de manière originale des sources provenant du Conseil municipal d’Augsbourg en ayant recours à des modèles psychanalytiques (Freud et Klein). Bien que cette méthode suscite des critiques en raison de son anachronisme, elle donne lieu à des résultats intéressants qui vont plus loin que la révélation d’obsessions (...) sexuelles. L. Roper part en effet du présupposé que la forme symbolique des fantasmes psychiques n’est pas figée. Ainsi elle entreprend l’observation de conflits intérieurs à partir de leurs représentations culturelles et détermine des différences entre hommes et femmes ancrées dans une corporalité historique. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article argues that, although psychoanalysis and history have different conceptions of time and causality, there can be a productive relationship between them. Psychoanalysis can force historians to question their certainty about facts, narrative, and cause; it introduces disturbing notions about unconscious motivation and the effects of fantasy on the making of history. This was not the case with the movement for psychohistory that began in the 1970s. Then the influence of American ego‐psychology on history‐writing promoted the idea of compatibility (...) between the two disciplines in ways that undercut the critical possibilities of their interaction. The work of the French historian Michel de Certeau provides theoretical insight into the uses of incommensurability, while that of Lyndal Roper demonstrates both its limits and its value for enriching historical understanding. (shrink)

Luther, a controversial figure during his lifetime is the subject of Lyndal Roper’s research. She responds to the ongoing fascination with Luther and his constant presence in contemporary self-fash...

Author of the acclaimed Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet, Lyndal Roper has here produced a somewhat cryptic sequel: a series of related essays, explaining why Luther was such a dominant, controv...

The compelling, widely-accepted Satisfaction-is-Truth Principle says that if S wants p, then S has a desire that's satisfied in exactly the worlds where p is true. We reject the Principle; an agent may want p without having a desire that's satisfied when p obtains in any old way. Other theorists who reject the Principle rely on contested intuitions about when agents get what they want. We instead appeal to—and shed new light on—the dispositional role of desire.

This paper examines the forms of life established through the visual governance of the Australian social security mobile app —the Express Plus Centrelink app. It is argued that the app exceeds established accounts of juridical and administrative power. The app involves a seeing that is not public, a responding that is not writing and a de-materialisation of an institution and its disciplinary apparatus. It is argued that the app creates proto-literate subjects that are required to respond to a real-time sequence (...) of images in a highly structured and circumscribed manner to become complicit in the digitalisation of their life. (shrink)

This is Not a Seminar is a multidisciplinary forum established in 2012 at Edith Cowan University in Australia to support practice-led and practice-based Higher Degree by Research students. The Faculty of Education and Arts at ECU includes cohorts of postgraduate research students in, for example, performance, design, writing and visual arts. We established the TINAS programme to assist postgraduate research students in connecting their creative practices to methodological, theoretical and conceptual approaches whilst fostering an atmosphere of rapport across creative disciplines. (...) The pilot programme conducted for six months in 2012 comprised dialogues with experienced creative researchers; critical reading sessions on practice-led theory; and workshops in journaling, ethics and copyright. This article is a reflection on the strengths and limitations of TINAS and future projections. More than an additional teaching and learning service, the programme has become a vital forum for creative dialogue. (shrink)

Do analogical models ever play an essential role in scientific explanation and confirmation, or is their role (at most) heuristic? For many years scientists and philosophers have debated this question. I argue that such models may sometimes play an essential role. My argument is based on a proposal to augment Goodman''s theory of projection in order to make it easier for novel predicates (extensions) to acquire entrenchment. The heart of this proposal is the claim that analogical models may, under certain (...) conditions, be the medium whereby entrenchment is passed from well established predicates to new and unfamiliar ones. (shrink)

The role of private food standards in agriculture is increasingly raising questions of legitimacy, particularly in light of the impacts such standards may have on food producers. While much work has been carried out at a macro policy level for developing countries, there have been relatively few empirical case studies that focus on particular food supply chains, and even fewer studies still of the impact of private standards on developed countries such as Australia. This study seeks to address this imbalance, (...) with a particular focus on examining the impact of private standards on an Australian vegetable supply food system in North Tasmania as well as tracing the impact of perceived and actual power relations among actors. Applying a governance framework and adopting a Foucauldian position we show that private standards are a “technology of power” that have risen out of a crisis discourse in the mid-1990s about on-farm food safety. Private standards have the effect of using knowledge from particular actors to establish truths about good agricultural practice (GAP), however we show that Tasmanian vegetable growers are not docile bodies and are employing alternative knowledge and technologies of power to challenge how GAP is implemented on-farm. (shrink)

Although the use of truth and reconciliation commissions (TRCs) has grown considerably over the last 3 decades, there is still much that we do not know concerning the choice and the structuring of TRCs. While the literature has focused primarily on the effects of TRCs, we examine the domestic and the international factors influencing the choice of a commission in sub-Saharan Africa from 1974 to 2003 using pooled cross-sectional time series. We find that states which adopted a TRC prior to (...) South Africa were generally repressive centralized regimes which used the truth commission as political cover. However, since South Africa’s TRC, democratizing states have been more likely to adopt a truth commission as a form of transitional justice. (shrink)

Neither question (1) nor question (2) posed on page 446 have been adequately answered in this paper. Regarding (1) we have merely given functor maps onto the object languages of physical theories and regarding (2) we have merely described the algebraic structure of observables. A more satisfactory treatment will most likely involve (1) a generalization to algebraic categories, universal algebra and model theory in such a way as to capture the full inference structure of (perhaps van Fraassen's modal) quantum logic, (...) and (2) the introduction of the category of differentiable manifolds in order to capture the full symplectic structure of (perhaps Chernoff-Marsden's) Hamiltonian dynamics. (See van Fraassen [4] and Chernoff-Marsden [5] in Other References.)Finally, the intriguing suggestion of Finkelstein that “category theory is to metaphysics what group theory is to physics” deserves serious consideration. Indeed, although the theme has not been touched on explicitly in this paper it was central in motivating the project initially. However, it is more properly to be developed in a context external to a symposium on quantum logic. (shrink)

Brian Roper refreshes our understanding of democracy using a Marxist theoretical framework. He traces the history of democracy from ancient Athens to the emergence of liberal representative and socialist participatory democracy in Europe and North America, through to the global spread of democracy during the past century.

Beginning with an analysis of the "reluctant gambler problem"—in which the notion of guiding one's life by probability seems to conflict with the preferences of rational people—we draw a distinction between rule and act probabilism. Arguing that humans are rule probabilists by default, we show that reluctant gamblers can be viewed as rule probabilists. If so viewed, their reluctance to gamble is consistent with their rational use of probability judgments to guide their lives.The distinction between rule and act probabilism suggests (...) a way to analyze the risks stemming from the September 11 terrorist attacks. Assessing the risks posed by the new reality of terrorism in the U.S. in light of the rule versus act probabilist distinction shows the risks Americans face from a terrorist attack are essentially the same as they were before September 11, 2002. Yet empirical investigation indicates Americans exaggerate their personal risks from terrorism.The perception that the risks of terrorism mushroomed on September 11 is partially explained by the 24-hour news stations' TV coverage and the current administration's "interest" in diverting attention from their own questionable practices. While the risks of terrorism are not appreciably higher than they were prior to September 11, they might be further reduced. Unfortunately, our government's strategy to reduce the risks of terrorist strikes involves weakening the Constitution. Americans face the question how much it is appropriate to pay—in diminished rights and liberties—to reduce a risk that is essentially the same as it was prior to the attacks. (shrink)

Roper, Elissa The contemporary Catholic Church is experiencing a breakthrough into a fuller stage of self-understanding, and of self-appropriation as the Body of Christ, known as 'synodality'. It is an opening to the possibility of a new experience of transformation on all levels of being Church. Synodality is being promoted and provoked by the papacy of Pope Francis, which has been accompanied by the progressive uncovering of sexual abuse within the Church, prevalent and deeply wounding. Both synodality and the (...) scandal of abuse demand the transformation of all members, processes and structures of the Church. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 62.2 (2001) 265-279 [Access article in PDF] The Physiological Sublime: Burke's Critique of Reason Vanessa L. Ryan The eighteenth-century discussion of the sublime is primarily concerned not with works of art but with how a particular experience of being moved impacts the self. The discussion of the sublime most fully explores the question of how we make sense of our experience: "Why and (...) how does this object move me?" Focusing on the perceiving subject, most critics cast the British discussion of the sublime as reflecting a gradual shift towards a Kantian focus not on the object judged, but on the judging mind. Certainly, eighteenth-century thinkers move away from understanding the sublime as a set of qualities that are presumed to be internal to a given object, and shift their attention to the mental effects of those objects. Yet the increasing interest in the perceiving subject in eighteenth-century British thought should not be understood as necessarily anticipating a Kantian perspective. In his classic work on the sublime Samuel H. Monk claims that this aspect of the British debate provides a preliminary discussion of the Kantian "autonomy of the subject" and that it constitutes a movement towards the "subjectivism of Kant." 1 This reading of British aesthetics exclusively in [End Page 265] terms of a preparation for the Kantian description of the subject obscures the differences between the British and the German traditions. It thereby fails to accommodate the reluctance of British thinkers to give up the social and ethical when faced with the sublime: instead of explaining the commonality of the aesthetic experience by positing a "disinterested" and "autonomous" subject, thinkers such as Adam Smith, John Dennis, and Edmund Burke subordinate the freedom of the individual subject in an attempt to reconcile the aesthetic affect with moral conduct.The teleological and Kantian understanding of British eighteenth-century aesthetic theory is largely the result of the central position that has been given to its most famous theorist, Edmund Burke. Although Burke's conception of the sublime differs in some points markedly from that of his British contemporaries, his treatment of the sublime in the Philosophical Enquiry (1757) has come to represent eighteenth-century British thought, and as such it is routinely compared to Kant's analytic of the sublime. Yet at the point where the British tradition seems to come closest to the Kantian, namely, in the writings of Burke, it also most clearly marks its distance from it. Burke is in some ways the least Kantian of eighteenth-century British thinkers. Whereas Kant holds that the sublime allows us to intuit our rational capacity, Burke's physiological version of the sublime involves a critique of reason. The sublime for Burke is a question not of the subject's increasing self-awareness but of the subject's sense of limitation and of the ultimate value of that experience within a social and ethical context.One of the most intransigent problems in distinguishing the strains of thought on the sublime is that the relationship between the object and its sublime effect--between the object taken to arouse heightened response and the affective quality of such a response--is so variously conceived. The sublime experience is seen as leading, on the one hand, to an overpowering of the self and, on the other hand, to an intense self-presence and exaltation, sometimes even to self-transcendence. The central question is thus not to what extent the sublime is located in the subject, but in what way the experience of the sublime affects the perceiving subject: Does the sublime enlarge us, or diminish us? 2 Does the sublime annihilate our sense of self, or does it affirm and heighten our sense of identity? These two opposing views of the effect of the sublime on the self can be seen in the contrast between Kant and Longinus, whose theories exerted an enormous influence in Britain, especially on Burke. Whereas Longinus emphasizes that the sublime overpowers and dominates the self, Kant holds that the feeling of... (shrink)