Both Bakhtin and Vygotsky, as we have seen, responded directly or indirectly to the challenge of Freud. Both attempted to account for their data without resorting to postulating an unconscious in the Freudian sense. By way of contrast, it is instructive here to recall Jacques Lacan—who, among others, has been a beneficiary of Bakhtin’s “semiotic reinterpretation” of Freud.17 Lacan’s case is intriguing, for he retains the unconscious while at the same time submitting Freudian psychoanalysis to rigorous criticism along the lines (...) of Bakhtin. By focusing attention on the dialogic word, he encourages a rereading of Freud in which the social element is crucial. As Lacan opens his essay “The Empty Word and the Full Word”:Whether it sees itself as an instrument of healing, of formation, or of exploration in depth, psychoanalysis has only a single intermediary: the patient’s Word….And every word calls for a reply.I shall show that there is no word without a reply, even if it meets no more than silence, provided that it has an auditor: this is the heart of its function in psychoanalysis.18The word is conceived as a tool not only in the external world but also of an autonomous internal world as well. And what emerges, it would seem, is a reinterpretation of the role of dialogue in the painful maturational process of the child. For Vygotsky, the child’s realization of his separateness from society is not a crisis; after all, his environment provides both the form and the content of his personality. From the start, dialogue reinforces the child’s grasp on reality, as evidenced by the predominantly social and extraverted nature of his earliest egocentric speech. For Lacan, on the contrary, dialogue seems to function as the alienating experience, the stade du miroir phase of a child’s development. The unconscious becomes the seat of all those problems that Bakhtin had externalized: the origin of personality, the possibilities of self-expression. The je-moi opposition in the mirror gives rise to that permanent for “a locus where there is constituted the je which speaks as well as he who has it speak.”19 And consequently, the Word takes on an entirely different coloration: it is no longer merely an ideological sign but a potent tool for repressing knowledge of that gap, the face in the mirror, the Other. Lacan’s celebrated inversion of Saussure’s algorithm, with the line between signifier and signified representing repression, created a powerful but ominous new role for language. The child is released from his alienating image only through discovering himself as Subject, which occurs with language; but this language will inevitably come to him from the Other. Thus speech is based on the idea of lack, and dialogue, on the idea of difference. 17. See Ivanov, “The Significance of M. M. Bakhtin’s Ideas,” p. 314.18. Jacques Lacan, “The Empty Word and the Full Word,” in Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis, ed. and trans. Anthony Wilden , p. 9.19. Lacan, from “La Chose freudienne” , quoted in Wilden, “Lacan and the Discourse of the Other,” in Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis, p. 266. Caryl Emerson, assistant professor of Russian literature at Cornell University, has translated The Dialogic Imagination, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics . She is currently at work, on a study of Boris Godunov in Russian cultural history. (shrink)

The Bakhtin we know best is something of a lyricophobe and theatrophobe. This is surprising, since he loves the act of looking. His scenarios rely on visualized, collaborative communion. He cares deeply about embodiment. Does he care about the tasks that confront the actor? Not the improvising clown of carnival (carnival is theater only in the broad sense of performance art), but the trained artist who performs a play script on stage? In discussing these questions, this essay draws on two (...) suggestive places in Bakhtin’s writing where he addresses the actor’s art. One is from the mid-1920s; the other (1944), is on Shakespearean tragedy. If Bakhtin has a theatrical imagination, it will be found here. His grasp of an actor “living in” to a role and his comments on the evolution of the European stage cast his better-known ideas of dialogue, comedy, seriousness and the sacred into unexpected perspective. (shrink)

In this essay I will argue that verbal dialogue, when realized successfully in a novel and measured by the tools appropriate to it, approximates that moment in real life we recognize as a “quickening of consciousness.”.

This essay reviews theory and research regarding the “Michelangelo phenomenon,” which describes the manner in which close partners shape one another’s dispositions, values, and behavioral tendencies. Individuals are more likely to exhibit movement toward their ideal selves to the degree that their partners exhibit affirming perception and behavior; exhibiting confidence in the self’s capacity and enacting behaviors that elicit key features of the self’s ideal. In turn, movement towards the ideal self yields enhanced personal well-being and couple well-being. We review (...) empirical evidence regarding this phenomenon and discuss self and partner variables that contribute to the process. (shrink)

Joseph Priestley, the eighteenth-century scientist who discovered oxygen, was one of the most remarkable thinkers of his time. This collection of essays by a team of experts covers the full range of his work in the fields of education, politics, philosophy, and theology, and firmly re-establishes him as a major intellectual figure.

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This paper offers a novel argument for superspace substantivalism. _Superspace_ is a modified spacetime represented formally through combining ordinary spatial dimensions with anticommuting dimensions whose coordinates are labelled in Grassmann numbers rather than real numbers. At supersymmetric worlds, physical laws exhibit _supersymmetry_—viz., a symmetry that transforms bosons into fermions and vice versa. _Superspace substantivalism_ is the thesis that, at supersymmetric worlds, among the most fundamental structures is superspace. Initially, the focus will be on a prevalent doctrine in the philosophy of (...) physics literature which I call the _mimetic ideal_. On the mimetic ideal, interpreting physical theories aims primarily at specifying their _ontology_, namely at achieving accurate _reference_ (in natural-language accounts of those theories) or _representation_ (in model-theoretic portrayals of those theories) with respect to aspects of physical reality. However, I show that the mimetic ideal doesn’t seem able to account for important aspects of physics practice (Sect. 2 ). In Sect. 3, therefore, I articulate and defend a new, _diegetic ideal_, according to which the interpretation of physical theories should aim at _perspectival coordination_ between interpreters and practising physicists. Perspectival coordination, in the context of interpreting physical theories, means that interpreters and practising physicists share a perspective or a point of view on some aspect of physical reality described by that theory. In Sect. 4, I apply this analysis to the study of supersymmetric quantum field theories (QFTs): reframing the realist framework which underlies Baker’s (2020) agnosticism, I examine the exciting upshot that superspace substantivalism is true. I conclude with some reflections on what perspectival coordination means for realism (Sect. 5 ). (shrink)

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, preschool teachers must quickly adjust to online education. During COVID-19, teachers have been forced to embrace technology. This study investigates the lived experiences and challenges of preschool teachers. Employing the Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, the findings of this study were: It was found that managing parent expectations and dealing with challenging parent behavior were among the sources of stress for preschool teachers. This fear of being judged or criticized by parents could influence their teaching practices and (...) interactions with students, leading to feelings of anxiety or insecurity. Further, preschool teachers faced challenges in implementing blended learning, including technological issues, a lack of support and resources, and difficulties creating engaging online content. However, as teachers gained more experience and knowledge about effectively using online tools and technologies for instruction, these challenges became more manageable. Also limited or unreliable internet connectivity was also a significant challenge faced by teachers and students in the transition to online learning. The digital divide and various technical, bandwidth, and security concerns exacerbated it. Internet connection was a major frustration for her during online classes as it affected her ability to communicate and teach her students effectively. Moreover, preschool teachers have had to adapt to the challenges of blended learning by implementing various strategies and making preparations to guide and support their students effectively. These strategies have included using games and other engaging activities to keep students motivated and engaged, developing online lesson plans, and using online teaching platforms and tools. However, the transition to blended learning has also been a source of stress for preschool teachers. They have had to manage additional workloads and responsibilities and deal with challenges such as supporting students with varying technology access and skills. (shrink)

Russian thought has long been a hybrid of native and imported forms—or more accurately, native values were first conceptualized and systematized according to Western European categories. This essay considers select entries in the Handbook (primarily those discussing Hegel, Solovyov, Tolstoy, and twentieth-century prose writers) not from the perspective of “pure” or abstract philosophy, arguably a Western achievement, but in the context of three traditional Russian virtues: tselostnost’ [wholeness], lichnost’ [personhood], and organichnost’ [organicity]. Each of these virtues, or values, is paradoxical, (...) easily misconstrued, and easily abused. The essay ends speculatively on two studies: the personalist implications of Paul Contino’s exploration of “incarnational realism” in Dostoevsky, and Iain McGilchrist’s work on left- and right-hemispheres of the brain as contexts for the place of Russian thought in the larger world. (shrink)

This article considers the role of beauty in Costa Rican sex work. In the context of sex tourism, beauty operates as affective labour performed by sex workers, labour that is mediated by deeply contradictory understandings of race and nation. Theorising beauty as a form of affective labour means thinking about beauty as value, as something that circulates, can be exchanged and is ultimately relational. While Costa Rica's national mythology has long focused on claims to white origins, sex tourists identify local (...) women's ‘exoticism’ and non-whiteness as particularly appealing. Commercial sex does not simply depend on an imperial male gaze, but rather requires us to consider how particular national mythologies about race are linked to ideals of attractiveness in complex ways. I also explore how women experience and manage their sexual attractiveness to foreign tourists in their daily lives and work. (shrink)

The Dutch microbiologist/biochemist Albert Jan Kluyver was an early proponent of the idea of biochemical unity, and how that concept might be demonstrated through the careful study of microbial life. The fundamental relatedness of living systems is an obvious correlate of the theory of evolution, and modern attempts to construct phylogenetic schemes support this relatedness through comparison of genomes. The approach of Kluyver and his scientific descendants predated the tools of modern molecular biology by decades. Kluyver himself is poorly recognized (...) today, yet his influence at the time was profound. Through lens of today however, it has been argued that the focus by Kluyver and others to create taxonomic and phylogenetic schemes using morphology and biochemistry distorted and hindered progress of the discipline of microbiology, because of a perception that the older approaches focused too much on a reductionist worldview. This essay argues that in contrast the careful characterization of fundamental microbial metabolism and physiology by Kluyver made many of the advances of the latter part of the twentieth century possible, by offering a framework which in many respects anticipated our current view of phylogeny, and by directly and indirectly training a generation of scientists who became leaders in the explosive growth of biotechnology. (shrink)

First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.