Online research in philosophy

The work of Herbert Marcuse, unlike that of certain of his colleagues at the Institut für Sozialforschung, is most often maligned as being excessively positive and identitarian. His work on Freud, for example, is criticized for being grounded in a crude biological determinism which points towards an ultimate reconciliation of both psychic and social conflict. This essay will attempt to counter such readings by critically juxtaposing Marcuse’s concept of non-repressive sublimation with Cornelius Castoriadis’s understanding of psychic socialization. It will be suggested that the affinities between Marcuse and Castoriadis’s appropriations of Freudian metapsychology reveals the degree to which the former can be read as a radical democratic thinker affirming the values of autonomy and creativity. This reading demonstrates that Marcuse has much to contribute to contemporary debates on the role of the aesthetic and the sensuous in democratic theory.

By the late nineteenth century, science was well established in the public mind as the primary method by which useful knowledge of the material universe is obtained. Surely, it was thought, if science can discover cathode rays and radio waves, then it should easily authenticate a phenomenon that is far more widely experienced: the supernatural power of the human mind. Non-physical, “psychic” energy appeared to be everywhere, as an integral part of human experience. Indeed, psychic forces are seemingly built into the cores, the souls, of each of us. It should be just a matter of securing the evidence with the hard cement of scientific procedure. At least this was the view of many Victorian scientists, and so was begun a program to verify psychic phenomena scientifically, a task that has continued without success until the current day. By the time the fourth decade of the twentieth century was underway, the search for psychic energy had stalled. The huge database of anecdotal human testimony proved too unreliable, too easy to explain away as subjective desire, fakery, or delusion. Whenever serious attempts were made to gather objective data under controlled conditions, plausible explanations such as trickery or simple coincidence were readily found--if not by the investigators, then by their critics. Although these plausibilities were not always conclusively proven, they were never conclusively ruled out. And, as long as ordinary explanations for reports of suggested psychic phenomena..

Reports of psychic phenomena are as old as human history. Experimental tests of psychic phenomena are almost as old. According to Herodotus, the ancient Greek historian, King Croesus of Lydia dispatched several of his men to test seven oracles to see if any of them could divine what he, the king, was doing on the day of the test. Only Pythia, priestess of Apollo at Delphi, was able to divine correctly that the king was making a lamb and tortoise stew in a bronze kettle.

This article interprets the state of "subjection," which Foucault took to be characteristicof the modern subject of power/knowledge, as an abiding psychic dispositionanalogous to Heidegger's "inauthentic self-understanding." Theauthor begins by arguing, against prevailing orthodoxy, that in Discipline andPunish, Foucault is already centrally concerned with the power effects of formsof psychic self-relation. He then argues that the psychic state of subjectionshould not be understood as a constellation of ideas, beliefs, or other "representations"but along de-essentialized Heideggerian/Aristotelian lines as a "habit"of the soul—the effect of training and technology rather than ideology. Key Words: ethics • subjectification • panopticism • technology • understanding.

In order to assess the tenacity of psychoanalysts in continuing to use a concept of psychic energy, it is advisable to consider whether, as they sometimes claim, the concepts of energy, force, and work in psychoanalysis are akin to those in the natural sciences. Strong disanalogies suggest that the psychoanalytic concepts are quite different and used equivocally even within psychoanalysis. However, they may not be subject to the objections which certain critical psychoanalysts have raised.

The paper highlights the need to clarify the definition of “psychic capacities” and the difficulty in distinguishing between improved capacity and improved functioning. Before considering whether it is legally permissible to undertake an intervention on psychic capacities, and if so under what conditions, it is necessary to consider whether such an intervention is ethically appropriate. If the intervention is ethically appropriate, whether it is legally permissible according to the instruments of the Council of Europe will depend on the person's status (for example, whether the person is an adult or a child, or able or not able to give consent), the type of intervention proposed, and in certain cases the type of material used in the intervention. The paper discusses the regulations that are relevant to these different situations.

Public policy decisions concerning embryos and fetuses tend to lack reasoned argument on their moral status. While agreement on personhood is elusive, this concept has unquestioned moral relevance. A stipulated usage of the term, the psychic sense of ‘person’, applies to early human prenatal life and encompasses morally relevant aspects of personhood. A ‘person’ in the psychic sense has (1) a minimal psychology, defined as the capacity to retain experiences, which may be nonconscious, through physiological analogs of memory; and (2) the potential to become a person in the full sense. Psychic personhood merits attribution of moral personhood because (1) the experience of a ‘person’ in the psychic sense has continuity with the experience of a full person; and (2) this experience begins to determine the development of the personal psychological characteristics of that individual. Psychic personhood is a rationally defensible boundary for invasive research involving human embryos and fetuses. Lacking precise empirical knowledge, policy makers could attribute psychic personhood at the time of earliest brainstem activity, that is, during the seventh week of fetal development. Keywords: personhood, fetal moral status, fetal psychology, potential person, human experimentation CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this?

Drawing on The Psychic Life of Power (Butler 1997), this essay sketches the outline of Butler's project of bringing Foucault (politics) and Lacan (psychoanalysis) together. In addressing the psychic life of power, Butler tries to unravel the dynamic interplay of the psychic and the social with the subject as the intersection of both.

Why do so many people believe in psychic phenomena? Because they have psychic experiences. And why do they have psychic experiences? Because such experiences are an inevitable consequence of the way we think. I suggest that, like visual illusions, they are the price we pay for a generally very effective relationship with a massively complex world.