Meaningful relationships are centrally important for human functioning. It remains unclear, however, which aspects of meaningful relationships impact wellbeing the most and whether these differ between psychiatric patients and members of the community. Information about relationship attributes and functions were collected in community members and psychiatric patients. Relationship attributes and functions were examined for differences between groups, their impact on wellbeing and symptoms, and the size of network. Community members reported fewer relationships, higher frequency of contact and less desire for (...) change when compared to the psychiatric patients. Nevertheless, both groups reported relatively high levels of fulfilled functions. Quality of the relationship and investment into the relationship was associated with both wellbeing and symptoms for both the community and the patient group. Almost all functions were associated with wellbeing and symptoms for the community group. However, for the patient group, only few functions were associated with wellbeing and no functions were associated with symptoms. Contrary to our hypotheses, the results show that psychiatric patients do not have a deficit in fulfilling relationships. Most people report a well-functioning network of meaningful, high-quality relationships. Patients benefit from meaningful, function-fulfilling relationships just as much as community members. Results are discussed with respect to how targeting relationships can be used clinically. (shrink)

In this volume specialists of medieval music and philosophy put the medieval 'musica' into the context of ideas and institutions in which it existed. The significance of 'musica' cannot be understood from a modern point of view since 'music' does not match the medieval 'musica'.

Fifteen years after the September 11th terror attacks, the United States still exists in a state of exception or state of emergency, in which the executive branch claims extraordinary powers to carry out bombing strikes or drone attacks in foreign nations and to engage in surveillance against its citizens outside the boundaries of international and constitutional law. This blog-piece argues for a restoration of the constitutional limiuts on sovereign executive powers and a cessation of the war on terrorism.

A review of Giorgio Agamben's The Mystery of Evil: Bendict XVI and the End of Days, which attempts to place Agamben's peculiar argument regarding Pope Benedict's abdication in the context of his reading of St. Paul's 2 Thessalonians 2:1-12, and, more generally, in terms of his political-theology in the Homo Sacer series. The questions, 'Who is the Antichrist?' and 'Who (or what) is the katechon?' are also explored, in the attempt to translate Agamben's obscure theology into contemporary political terms.

Many philosophers of religion are unaware of research done on comparative religions, and continue to use language and to address issues that distort the nature of human religious endeavor. Despite work by Cantwell Smith, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Wittgensteinians, and their critics, these scholars continue to confuse faith with (propositional) belief, and miss the significance of the dynamic nature of religious culture in historic context. In this paper, I defend Walter Kaufmann's view that religion addresses an essential human ontological need, on (...) the grounds that it makes sense of the immense diversity of religious expression and endeavor. (shrink)

Die Verfahrenlehre als Wegweiser für die Wissenschaften und die Kultur, von W, Heinrich. -- Zur Logik der Unbestimmtheitsbeziehungen, von A., Meyer-Abich. -- Wandlungen des Kantbildes, von M. Wundt. -- Die romantische Soziallehre im Weltbild der Gegenwart, von J. Baxa. -- Organische Wirtschaftsgestaltung? Von W. A. Jöhr. -- über die Rechtsnatur des Völkerrechtes, von J. Lob. -- Der Leistungsgedanke in der Betriebswirtschaftslehre, von K. Oberparleiter. -- Das Problem der Ganzheit im Verfahren der Rechts-und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, von R. Stanka. -- Motives of (...) economic planning, von T. Surányi-Unger. -- Die soziale Frage als Quelle der Wandlungen in der Wirtschaftstheorie in der Wirtschaftstheorie der Gegenwart, von F. A. Westphalen. -- Die geschichtliche Stellung des Kunstwerks, von G. Egger. -- Gemeinschaft und kultische Ordnung, von O. Höfler. -- Vom Ursprung der Sprache, von H. Machold. -- Die Bedeutung des ganzheitlichen Denkens für die Kunstgeschichte, von H. Riehl. -- Das Problem des Schönen. von W. Troll. -- Ganzheit und Gestalt in der Psychologie, von A. Wellek. -- Die Blüte als polare Ganzheit, von H. André. -- Ganzheitliches Denken in der Medizin, von O. Kaufmann. -- Die Bedeutung von Othmar Spann's "Kategorienlehr" für die Biologie und Medizin, von A. Müller. -- Ganzheitliches Denken und Wirken im Agrarwesen, von E. Rudroff. -- über Symmetrie und Schönheit, von K. L. und H. C. Wolf. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:BoredomWalter E. BromanBoredom, by Patricia Meyer Spacks; xii & 289 pp. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995, $24.95 paper.Scholars who have been immersed in the eighteenth century are often imbued with a penchant for common sense and develop a rich, lucid style. Professor Spacks exemplifies these qualities admirably. In spite of the sludgy title, this is a stimulating and rewarding book. Until now my only thinking about (...) boredom has happened while watching goldfish or cows and wondering if they were slowly perishing of boredom. Otherwise, boredom has been a gray experience accompanying committee meetings or reading insurance prose, but scarcely a matter for philosophy. Professor Spacks shows that there is much here for serious thought. She traces the history of boredom, mainly as manifested in novels. “This book’s project is to investigate boredom’s imaginative functions during the past two and a half centuries, mainly in England, where speakers first labeled the condition early in the second half of the eighteenth century” (p. 6). In this period the idea of boredom was still influenced by Christian thought. Thus, Johnson saw Boswell’s boredom in Scotland as a lapse in Christian morality, a lack of personal resources. Johnson felt the universal power of boredom; it invaded even “the Happy Valley of Rasselas,” but he insisted on the moral duty of opposing it with spirited effort. Women writers of the period are pictured as doing just that—heroically defeating a boredom imposed upon women by society through the vivacity and energy of language in their epistles and narration. Professor Spacks depicts the early nineteenth century as afflicting later decades with sensibility and didactic tedium and developing complex new aspects of boredom as a mode of aggression that could shrivel people, arts, and society. “To real aristocrats belongs the repudiation of feeling—passion and compassion—that constitutes boredom” (p. 201). In the twentieth century boredom becomes ubiquitous and has “enormous and essentially unalterable power” (p. ix). This century is like a fulfillment of Pope’s vision of universal dullness at the end of The Dunciad.During the course of this history we become almost convinced that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries women hunkered in a cotton-wrapped male-dominated world which went to great lengths to normalize female boredom. “Often tedium attends compliant virtue” (p. 78). This idea of [End Page 506] oppressed and suffering women is repeated in the text to the point of—well—boring the reader. From my reading in general and from this book I garnered the impression that eighteenth-century women were for the most part tough, alive, and intelligent masters of boredom. I can almost hear their spirits crying, “save the pity!”Professor Spacks fulfills the older mission of criticism to promote interest and attention, and provide insight. Like literature, this mission aims to defeat boredom. We are rewarded with a brilliant discussion of Sense and Sensibility, showing us how Austen’s subtle rhetoric guides the reader’s perception of what is interesting—to learn to find seemingly dull Elinor and Edward actually interesting, to thwart our shallower driftings. In a similar vein with moral bearings Professor Spacks manages to stir interest in a discussion of Wordsworth’s “The Idiot Boy.” We recall how Wordsworth militated against the human inclination to depend upon gross and violent stimulants. He proposed that we ought to be interested in what is moral and thereby genuinely interesting. In “The Idiot Boy” he aimed to enlarge our moral attention span to embrace the lowly and unlikely. I began to feel much less like a moral derelict when Professor Spacks admitted that she too finds “The Idiot Boy” boring.This is such a rewarding book that I feel uncomfortably churlish in pointing out that aspects of the book are irksome. In general, her sentences are beautiful, but in large tracts of the book we find an Emersonian discursiveness where the discussions are crumbly and anfractuous, tacking from this to that. We don’t get enough sustained driving down a clear track. She suggests in passing that Hannah More’s Coelebs is boring to the later nineteenth century when people become more concerned with inner conflicts and... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Adolf Meyer: Psychiatric AnarchistS. Nassir Ghaemi (bio)KeywordsMeyer, biopsychosocial model, Jaspers, pluralism, philosophy, psychiatryThey had weekly lunches in 1920s New York City: In one door stepped a stooped philosopher, with a mustache and a twinkle, perhaps ruminating on some recent Marxist theory; in the other door came the elegant Swiss physician, goateed and erudite. Every week, for a time, John Dewey (leader of American pragmatism) and Adolf Meyer (...) (dean of mid-twentieth century American psychiatry and long-time chair of the Johns Hopkins psychiatry department) lunched together and, somewhere in those conversations—one might imagine—the field of philosophy and psychiatry was born (Meyer 1948, 152).Yet pragmatism—as a proper school of philosophy—does not capture Meyer’s psychiatry. Rather, the core of his thinking, in my view, is to be found in a vague term that deserves analysis: eclecticism.EclecticismIt has been said that eclecticism is a vice in theory but a virtue in practice (Stone 1981), which highlights why so many are attracted to it. Deep down, practitioners just want to be free: They believe that their freedom of choice will tailor treatments best to patients and thus result in best outcomes. As a conceptual theory for psychiatry, eclecticism is a model that views any theory or method as potentially correct, but no theory or method as definitively incorrect. There is no way to avoid an “anything goes” practice with eclecticism: It is—to use a political analogy—an anarchism of mind.William James once remarked that the basis for all philosophies lies in the personalities of philosophers. So it was with Meyer’s eclecticism: congenial personally, he seemed congenitally incapable of disagreeing with any person. Any idea, even the most unusual, would receive a respectful hearing from Meyer. (Double brings out new, excellent documentary evidence of this extreme indecision in the drafts of Meyer’s unsent letters to the behaviorist John Watson.) Although quaint and commendable pedagogically, this excessive open mindedness left American psychiatry—so dependent on Meyer—prey to hard-headed biological radicals and psychoanalytic dogmatists. This is where his eclecticism failed us.Enabling Biological ExtremismMeyer played a key role in legitimizing extreme biological approaches. In addition to his interest in insulin coma (which Double mentions), Meyer enabled the popularization of colectomy and frontal [End Page 341] lobotomy. Psychiatric colectomy, developed by Henry Cotton, was based on the focal toxin theory of mental illness—the idea that mental illness was caused by toxins released by bacteria in the body, the specific locations of which where were the colon and rotted teeth. In one hundred case reports, with mostly short-term follow-up, published in his prominent text, The Defective Delinquent and Insane (Cotton 1921), Cotton laid out his case, which Meyer legitimized by writing a generous foreword. Meyer’s authority was powerful enough to render Cotton’s limited evidence base much more credible than it might otherwise have been. In the 1920s and 1930s, tens of thousands colectomies and full mouth teeth extractions were conducted in patients with mental illness. (Meyer himself sometimes recommended it).1The other biological extremist story is more famous. In a 1936 conference, with Meyer in attendance, the neurologist Walter Freeman presented, for the first time, cases of refractory schizophrenia treated with a new method: frontal lobotomy. Psychoanalyst attendees protested that Freeman was proposing nothing more than mutilation of the brain; yet Meyer intervened in favor of Free-man (“I am not antagonistic to this work, but find it very interesting” [El-Hai 2005]). Unfortunately, Freeman, like Cotton, was a dogmatist: Over time, he performed frontal lobotomy more and more extensively, not just as a treatment of last resort in the most ill schizophrenics (as in the first cases presented to Meyer), but later as a treatment of first resort for the mildest mood disorders. (By 1950 Freeman had personally conducted 2400 transorbital lobotomies, an “office procedure” that allowed him to lobotomize a patient in 15 minutes [El-Hai 2005]).2Lest my critique of Meyer in that era be seen as a Whiggish interpretation of history (the claim that we are so much smarter than those shrinks of the past; in fact I think... (shrink)

Analyzes the meaning expressed in music, the social and psychological sources of meaning, and the methods of musical communication This is a book meant for ...

Many assumed that the Obama administration would usher in a sea change from the previous administration by expanding NIH support for human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research and reducing the patchwork of state and federal regulations that currently governs it. This article examines the extent to which NIH’s new Guidelines are likely to accomplish these goals.

The Logic of Law Making in Islam: Women and Prayer in the Legal Tradition. By Behnam Sadeghi. Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pp. xxi + 215. $99.99, £64.99.

“Ezekiel is the Old Testament prophet who proclaims more radically than any other that no righteousness of the people called by God can stand up before God.”.

Is it fair to leave the next generation a public debt? Is it defensible to impose legal rules on them through constitutional constraints? From combating climate change to ensuring proper funding for future pensions, concerns about ethics between generations are everywhere. In this volume sixteen philosophers explore intergenerational justice. Part One examines the ways in which various theories of justice look at the matter. These include libertarian, Rawlsian, sufficientarian, contractarian, communitarian, Marxian and reciprocity-based approaches. In Part Two, the authors look (...) more specifically at issues relevant to each of these theories, such as motivation to act fairly towards future generations, the population dimension, the formation of preferences through education and how they impact on our intergenerational obligations, and whether it is fair to rely on constitutional devices. (shrink)

Based on a survey of editors, publishers and staff members of 300 newspapers, this work documents the ethical confusion in the American press in the wake of the Watergate scandal and the Pentagon Papers controversy. It provides an analytical and historical framework to show how the press reached this point and argues for an ethical audit to give publications an independent check on their moral condition.

Climate change can be interpreted as a unique case of historical injustice involving issues of both intergenerational and global justice. We split the issue into two separate questions. First, how should emission rights be distributed? Second, who should come up for the costs of coping with climate change? We regard the first question as being an issue of pure distributive justice and argue on prioritarian grounds that the developing world should receive higher per capita emission rights than the developed world. (...) This is justified by the fact that the latter already owns a larger share of benefits associated with emission generating activities because of its past record of industrialisation. The second question appears to be an issue of compensatory justice. After defining what we mean by compensation, we show that different kinds of compensatory principles run into problems when used to justify payments by historical emitters of the North to people suffering from climate change in the South. As an alternative, we propose to view payments from wealthy countries for adaptation to climate change in vulnerable countries rather as a measure based on concerns of global distributive justice. (shrink)

Much social theory takes for granted the core conceit of modern culture, that modern actors-individuals, organizations, nation states-are autochthonous and natural entities, no longer really embedded in culture. Accordingly, while there is much abstract metatheory about "actors" and their "agency," there is arguably little theory about the topic. This article offers direct arguments about how the modern (European, now global) cultural system constructs the modern actor as an authorized agent for various interests via an ongoing relocation into society of agency (...) originally located in transcendental authority or in natural forces environing the social system. We see this authorized agentic capability as an essential feature of what modern theory and culture call an "actor," and one that, when analyzed, helps greatly in explaining a number of otherwise anomalous or little analyzed features of modern individuals, organizations, and states. These features include their isomorphism and standardization, their internal decoupling, their extraordinarily complex structuration, and their capacity for prolific collective action. (shrink)

Under the influence of groundbreaking work by John Meyer and Brian Rowen, as well as Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell, over the last 30 years research in the new sociological institutionalism has focused on processes of isomorphism. I argue that this is a one-sided focus that leaves out many insights from other institutional and macrosociological approaches and does not do justice to actual social change because it overlooks the role played by divergent institutional development. While the suggestion of (...) divergent trends is not new, there have been few attempts to integrate divergence into the theoretical premises of the new sociological institutionalism. Based on the typology proposed by DiMaggio and Powell, I show that the mechanisms identified by them as sources of isomorphic change can support processes of divergent change as well. The theoretical challenge is to identify conditions under which these mechanisms push institutional change toward homogenization or divergence. (shrink)

Book review in this Article The Ethos of the Bible. By Birger Gerhardsson. The Prophets, Vol. 1: The Assyrian Period. By Klaus Koch. The Gospel according to Saint John, Vol. 3. By Rudolf Schnackenburg. The Social Setting of Pauline Christianity. By Gerd Theissen. Jewish and Christian Self‐Definition, Vol. 3: Self‐Definition in the Craeco‐Roman World. Edited by Ben F. Meyer and E.P. Sanders. The Church and Healing. Edited by W.J. Sheils. Miracles and the Medieval Mind: Theory, Record and Event, 1000 (...) to 1215. By Benedicta Ward. The Luminous Vision; Six Medieval Mystics and their Teaching. By Anne Bancroft. Astrology in the Renaissance: The Zodiac of Life. By Eugenio Garin. Lay Culture, Learned Culture: Books and Social Change in Strasbourg 1480–1599. By M.U. Umgang mil Luther. By Gerhard Ebeling. The Reformation and the English People. By J.J. Scarisbrick. Between Orthodoxy and Enlightenment: Jean‐Robert Chouet and the Introduction of Cartesian Science in the Academy of Geneva. By Michael Heyd. Richard Crashaw and the Spanish Golden Age. By R.V. Young. The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais. By Lucien Febvre, translated by Beatrice Gottlieb. History of Christianity in India, Vol. II: From the Middle of the 16th to the End of the 17th Century. By Joseph Thekkedath. The Vatican and the American Hierarchy from 1870 to 1965. By Gerald P. Fogarty. Nationalism, Positivism and Catholicism: The Politics of Charles Maurras and French Catholics 1890–1914. By Michael Sutton. George Tyrrell and the Catholic Tradition. By Ellen Leonard. The Testing of the Churches 1932–1982: A Symposium. Edited by Rupert Davies. The Old Protestantism and the New: Essays on the Reformation Heritage. By B.A. Gerrish. An Introduction to Protestant Theology. By Helmut Gollwitzer. Dialogues on Morality and Religion. By Jakob Friedrich Fries. American Catholic Social Ethics: Twentieth‐Century Approaches. By Charles E. Curran. Ethical Issues in Reproductive Medicine. Edited by Maurice Reidy. Michel Foucault: Social Theory as Transgression. By Charles C. Lemert and Garth Gillan. Last Writingson the Philosophy of Psychology. Vol. I. By Ludwig Wittgenstein. Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. By Michael J. Sandel. Free Speech: A Philosophical Enquiry. By Frederick Schauer. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. By Walter J. Ong. Bwiti: An Ethnography of the Religious Imagination in Africa. By James W. Fernandez. Selfless Persons. By Steven Collins. Understanding Jewish Mysticism: A Source Reader Edited by David R. Blumenthal. The Epistle on the Possibility of Conjunction with the Active Intellect, by Ibn Rushd, with the Commentary of Moses Narboni. Edited and translated by Kalman P. Bland. (shrink)

In Entailment, Anderson and Belnap motivated their modification E of Ackermann’s strenge Implikation Π Π’ as a logic of relevance and necessity. The kindred system R was seen as relevant but not as modal. Our systems of Peano arithmetic R# and omega arithmetic R## were based on R to avoid fallacies of relevance. But problems arose as to which arithmetic sentences were (relevantly) true. Here we base analogous systems on E to solve those problems. Central to motivating E is the (...) rejection of fallacies of modality. Our slogan here for this is, “No diamonds entail any boxes.” Form the strenge Peano arithmetic E# like R#, adding appropriate forms of the Peano axioms to Ackermann’s E.. (shrink)

Bringing together major writings on a wide range of conceptual issues underlying the theory and practice of journalism, this unique anthology covers topics such as what makes a story newsworthy, journalism and professional ethics, the right of free speech, privacy and news sources, politicsand the power of the press, objectivity and bias, and the education of journalists. Including papers by key contemporary and classical authors such as Walter Lippmann, Joshua Halberstam, Tom L. Beauchamp, Fred Smoller, Edward J. Epstein, Herbert (...) Gans, John Stuart Mill, Philip Meyer, and Theodore L.Glasser, this book introduces provocative issues in press ethics and philosophy that color or determine much of what we see and hear in today's media. (shrink)

This long-standing series provides the guild of religion scholars a venue for publishing aimed primarily at colleagues. It includes scholarly monographs, revised dissertations, Festschriften, conference papers, and translations of ancient and medieval documents. Works cover the sub-disciplines of biblical studies, history of Christianity, history of religion, theology, and ethics. Festschriften for Karl Barth, Donald W. Dayton, James Luther Mays, Margaret R. Miles, and Walter Wink are among the seventy-five volumes that have been published. Contributors include: C. K. Barrett, Francois (...) Bovon, Paul S. Chung, Marie-Helene Davies, Frederick Herzog, Ben F. Meyer, Pamela Ann Moeller, Rudolf Pesch, D. Z. Phillips, Rudolf Schnackenburgm Eduard Schweizer, John Vissers. (shrink)

The prelims comprise: The Significance of Voluntariness Ordinary and Philosophical Notions of Voluntariness Constraint and Compulsion Force and Contrariety in the NE Knowledge and Ignorance The Platonic Asymmetry Thesis Responsibility for Character References Further reading.

According to Hans Kamp and Frank Vlach, the two-dimensional tense operators “now” and “then” are ineliminable in quantified tense logic. This is often adduced as an argument against tense logic, and in favor of an extensional account that makes use of explicit quantification over times. The aim of this paper is to defend tense logic against this attack. It shows that “now” and “then” are eliminable in quantified tense logic, provided we endow it with enough quantificational structure. The operators might (...) not be redundant in some other systems of tense logic, but this merely indicates a lack of quantificational resources and does not show any deep-seated inability of tense logic to express claims about time. The paper closes with a brief discussion of the modal analogue of this issue, which concerns the role of the actuality operator in quantified modal logic. (shrink)

All states of human life are limited by time. Human personality, but also interpersonal justice therefore have a temporal dimension. Is time thus a source of normativity: a factor that every ethic must take into account? Does it make any demands on the design of our personal way of life? And must norms and rules that aim to bring about, maintain, change or end certain states of human life always have to take into account the passage of time? In this (...) book, seventeen philosophers discuss the significance of the temporal dimension of human personality and interpersonal justice for ethics and law. It becomes clear that hardly any problem applied ethics face today does not refer to the normative meaning of the temporality of our existence and the passing of time. With contributions by Dieter Birnbacher, Frank Dietrich, Michael Grossheim, Martin Hoffmann, Jan C. Joerden, Sebastian Knell, Andrea Klonschinski, Walter Mesch, Lukas H. Meyer, Andreas Mueller, Johannes Mueller Salo, Michael Quante, Michael Schefczyk, Reinold Schmücker , Niko Strobach, Timothy Waligore, Ulla Wessels. (shrink)

Constructivism claims to be a postepistemology that replaces 'traditional' concepts of knowledge. Supporters of constructivism have argued that progress requires that pre-service teachers be weaned off traditional approaches and that they should adopt constructivist views of knowledge. Constructivism appears to be gaining ground rapidly and should no longer be viewed as an exercise in radical thinking primarily aimed at generating innovative teaching. It has become an integral part of the pedagogic mainstream. Close examination of the theoretical foundations of constructivism, however, (...) reveals that the basic assumptions of constructivism are flawed. Far from being a postepistemology, constructivism simply regresses to a pre-Renaissance mindset with theology replaced with a psychologism. Constructivists should be aware that the implications of constructivism for future generations may be both profound and non-benign. (shrink)

In this paper, we shall confine ourselves to the study of sentential constants in the system R of relevant implication.In dealing with the behaviour of the sentential constants in R, we shall think of R itself as presented in three stages, depending on the level of truth-functional involvement.

A familiar interpretation of the Stoic doctrine of the πάθη runs as follows: The Stoics claim the πάθη are impulses. The Stoics take impulses to be causes of action. So, the Stoics think the πάθη are causes of action Premise is uncontroversial, but the evidence for needs to be reconsidered. I argue that the Stoics have two distinct but related conceptions of ὁρμή – a psychological construal and a behavioural construal. On the psychological construal is true, but there is strong (...) evidence that is true only on the behavioural construal. That is, when the Stoics classify πάθη as impulses they are thinking of them not as impulses to act, but as cases of action in their own right. (shrink)

L'A. étudie la concurrence entre la matière, la forme et la composition de matière et de forme, pour le titre de substance première ousia dans la «Métaphysique» Z, 3 d'Aristote. L'A. s'oppose à l'interprétation qu'en donne L. Gill dans son livre «Aristotle on Substance: The Paradox of Unity», selon laquelle l'ει~δο et la composition sont toutes deux premières. L'A. propose une explication qui s'inscrit dans le cadre métaphysique de la théorie de la recherche.