Self-understanding is to a great extent defined by narrative: who we are as human beings is determined by the stories we, and others, tell about ourselves. Yet many are unable to compose coherent personal narratives, as their experiences do not fall within the scope of an accepted conceptual framework. Survivors of trauma are particularly apt to fall into this “narrative rift,” where there can be no words to describe, and hence can be no assimilation of, their experiences. Using the example (...) of child sexual abuse, and drawing on the work of Bass, Spence, Schafer, and Guignon, I propose an examination of the nature of narrative fragmentation itself. Philosophical counselling may succeed where psychoanalysis might not: for where the latter has theoretical commitments to specific narratives, the former, through its reluctance to force epistemological or metaphysical assumptions on the narrator, may well facilitate a more comprehensive self-understanding. (shrink)

Non-ecumenical Christian bioethics will seem a strange category for many. The category relies on the recognition that bioethics mediates morality and ethics in healthcare. As such bioethics will have particular content. It is the content of a moral vision that both divides and unites. The enterprise of non-ecumenical Christian bioethics explores how Christians are both divided and united on the issues of bioethics. Non-ecumenical Christian bioethics is opposed to a facile ecumenism that reduces the content of Christian morality to the (...) lowest common denominator. (shrink)

This essay delineates points of agreement and disagreement between Plato and Nietzsche with respect to the original Heraclitean argument that the underlying dynamic connective structure of the whole is ‘strife’. Also discussed is the issue of how each philosopher understands life itself, as a general process, to be related to the wider processive whole. The paper analyses how the Heraclitean understanding of the natural whole influences each philosopher's interpretation of the political structures of man. The analysis attempts to demonstrate why (...) for Nietzsche, on one hand, the value forms of the traditional polis are more in accord with human nature and nature in toto than is philosophy and why for Plato, on the other hand, when the value forms of the polis are superseded by those of philosophy it is a natural process rather than contrary to nature. (shrink)