The methodological underpinnings of studies into early specialization have recently been critiqued. Previous researchers have commented on the variety of, and over-simplified, methods used to capture early specialization. This exploratory study, therefore, suggests a new direction for how early specialization can be conceptualised and measured. We aim to create an index approach whereby early specialization is measured as a continuous variable, in line with commonly used definitions. The continuous variable for degrees of (...) early specialization is calculated from a questionnaire which captures the four key components of early specialization; 1) intensity, 2) year-round training, 3) single sport, and 4) commencing age 12 or younger. The proposed index approach is illustrated in a sample of 290 Swedish aesthetic performers aged 12-20 years (M = 15.88), whose descriptive statistics are used to discuss the suitability and usability of the measure. The proposed index approach functions as a guideline to future researchers. We hope that introducing a new index approach we will encourage further discussion around the measurement of early specialization. Additionally, we hope to pave the way for future research to explore more complex research questions. (shrink)

AimsSport specialization is an actual trend in youth athletes, but it can increase injury risk. The aim was to determine the eventual correlation between sports specialization and injury risk in various sports, using a biopsychosocial approach.Methods169 sport-specialized athletes completed [; overall,, ] a self-reported questionnaire regarding sociodemographic, physical-attitudinal, injuries and psychological-attitudinal To analyze data univariate and correlate analyses were used.ResultsOf 169 athletes enrolled, 53% were single-sport specialized. In team sports a high risk of having to remain at rest (...) for up to 1 month because of overuse was observed. Males who suffered direct trauma in the team group were more exposed to that type of injury, and also the type of specialization figured significantly. In addition, interoceptive awareness correlates with injury. This study shows that, even though young athletes seem to be at a high risk of becoming injured, early team sport specialization and a high performance level cannot be considered to be the only risk factors. (shrink)

In this paper, I propose a counterexample to the proposed advantage of specialization in research. My counterexample is developed after assessing the claim that the early twentieth century essayist and editor Dora Marsden imitated Nietzsche in one of her periodicals: The New Freewoman.

This article challenges the long-standing belief that Plato is an early proponent of the division of labor on account of the political proposals advanced in the Republic. In contrast, I contend that the Republic offers a radical critique—rather than any endorsement—of job specialization and its accompanying psychological orientation toward acquisitiveness. The article begins with a methodological section that attempts to explain the origin of the common misreading of Plato's works and forwards an interpretive framework for situating arguments raised (...) in the Platonic dialogues in their dramatic and dialogic contexts. Having established these hermeneutic principles, the article proceeds to analyze the shifting significance of job specialization within the imaginary cities that are considered in the Republic and concludes that the dialogue ultimately critiques job specialization insofar as it prevents individuals from harmonizing their souls and hinders their ability to philosophize. (shrink)

Place-based policies tackle grand socio-economic challenges through differentiated, context-sensitive interventions. However, they often run the risk of under- or mis-performing. This work studies how grand challenges translate from policy to cross-sector partnerships through place. By focusing on the place-based policy of regional smart specialization (RIS3), I investigate how the setup of science and technology parks mediates the practices of the actors in the translation chain: a transnational policymaker (macro), a regional broker (meso), and a local partnership which served as (...) prototype for the regional policy (micro level). I document two types of practices—emplacement and space configuration—enacted at each level, and show how their interplay transformed the grand challenge from a cautious ideal at the macro level which balances risk and responsibility, to an optimistic and risk-prone approach at the partnership level. The study contributes to the policy and cross-sector partnerships literatures by documenting a two-sided effect of place-based policy and a consequent risk of ethical reversal, from an early attractor bringing partners together to a later accomplice keeping the partners together despite evident signs of failure. By adopting a strong multimodal approach, I also distinguish four types of multimodal outcomes—ideal type, prototype, virtual model, and lived artifact—which perform the two-sided effect and bring about the risk of reversal. Practical implications include a redistribution of the burden of failure from the CSPs implementing the grand challenges to the institutional fields in which these are bred. (shrink)

The renowned Christian theologian Bernard Lonergan was also a professor, teaching courses on theological method at universities in Canada, the United States, and Italy. This volume records his lectures and teaching materials, thus preserving and elucidating his intellectual development between the publication of Insight in 1957 and Method in Theology in 1972. The present volume contains a record of the lectures delivered in 1962, 1964, and 1968. This is the most 'interactive' volume yet published in the Collected Works series. The (...) audio recordings of the 1962 and 1968 lectures are now available on the website www.bernardlonergan.com, as are PDF files of original papers from his 1964 institute at Georgetown. These lectures help to elucidate the development of Lonergan's ideas on such key notions as horizon, conversion, and meaning, as well as his evolving opinion on how best to divide theology into fields of specialization. (shrink)

In the Italian universities, there was traditionally a strong alliance between natural philosophy and medicine, which however was all to the advantage of the latter; its teachers were better regarded and better paid than others in the faculty of Arts and Medicine, and this led to career paths that sought out the teaching of medicine as soon as possible. This article examines a reversal of this trend observable in sixteenth-century Bologna and some other Italian universities , leading to careers concentrating (...) on natural philosophy and on the interpretation of Aristotelian works. It appears that financial incentives were part of the context leading to specialization in philosophy. An appendix listing the careers of nearly 200 teachers of natural philosophy in Bologna between 1340 and 1600 illustrates the developments. (shrink)

The renowned Christian theologian Bernard Lonergan was also a professor, teaching courses on theological method at universities in Canada, the United States, and Italy. This volume records his lectures and teaching materials, thus preserving and elucidating his intellectual development between the publication of Insight in 1957 and Method in Theology in 1972. The present volume contains a record of the lectures delivered in 1962 (Regis College, Toronto), 1964 (Georgetown University), and 1968 (Boston College). This is the most 'interactive' volume yet (...) published in the Collected Works series. The audio recordings of the 1962 and 1968 lectures are now available on the website www.bernardlonergan.com, as are PDF files of original papers from his 1964 institute at Georgetown. These lectures help to elucidate the development of Lonergan's ideas on such key notions as horizon, conversion, and meaning, as well as his evolving opinion on how best to divide theology into fields of specialization. (shrink)

To better understand the work of pre-Darwinian British life researchers in their own right, this paper discusses two different styles of reasoning. On the one hand there was analysis:synthesis, where an organism was disintegrated into its constituent parts and then reintegrated into a whole; on the other hand there was palaetiology, the historicist depiction of the progressive specialization of an organism. This paper shows how each style allowed for development, but showed it as moving in opposite directions. In analysis:synthesis, (...) development proceeded centripetally, through the fusion of parts. In palaetiology, development moved centrifugally, through the ramifying specialization of an initially simple substance. I first examine a community of analytically oriented British life researchers, exemplified by Richard Owen, and certain technical questions they considered important. These involved the neurosciences, embryology, and reproduction and regeneration. The paper then looks at a new generation of British palaetiologists, exemplified by W.B. Carpenter and T.H. Huxley, who succeeded at portraying analysts' questions as irrelevant. The link between styles of reasoning and physical sites is also explored. Analysts favored museums, which facilitated the examination and display of unchanging marine organisms while providing a power base for analysts. I suggest that palaetiologists were helped by vivaria, which included marine aquaria and Wardian cases. As they became popular in the early 1850s, vivaria provided palaetiologists with a different kind of living and changing evidence. Forms of evidence, how they were preserved and examined, and career options all reinforced each other: social and epistemic factors thus merged. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Philosophy’s Second Revolution: Early and Recent Analytic Philosophy by D. S. Clarke, and: The Rise of Analytic Philosophy ed. by Hans-Johann Glock, and: Early Analytic Philosophy: Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein. Essays in Honor of Leonard Linsky by William W. TaitCharles LandesmanD. S. Clarke. Philosophy’s Second Revolution: Early and Recent Analytic Philosophy. Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company, 1997. Pp. xii + 232. Cloth, $42.95. Paper, $19.95.Hans-Johann Glock, (...) editor. The Rise of Analytic Philosophy. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997. Pp. xiv + 95. Paper, $19.95.William W. Tait, editor. Early Analytic Philosophy: Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein. Essays in Honor of Leonard Linsky. Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company, 1997. Pp. viii + 291. Cloth, $54.95. Paper, $26.95.A remark once made by a justice of the Supreme Court about pornography may also apply to analytic philosophy: one can’t define it, but one knows it when one sees it. Can one do better than this? For D. C. Clarke, Western philosophy has undergone two revolutionary breaks with its past: the first initiated by Descartes directed against classical philosophy and the second initiated at the turn of this century that came to be known as analytic philosophy. (Continental philosophy is barely mentioned. Heidegger is briefly referred to as a bad example of a philosopher who “employs vacuously general language better designed for expressing attitudes than for advancing claims vulnerable to criticism” [192].) A revolutionary shift of framework, for Clarke, eliminates a whole set of problems. Even though the problems discussed by analytic philosophers seem similar to many of those discussed by Plato and Descartes, in fact the relation is tenuous, and current problems have new meanings (190).Clarke offers little help in defining analytic philosophy for “we find today the clear sense of purpose of analytic philosophy which flourished forty years ago being replaced by a variety of programs sharing no easily discernible common thread” (xi). It looks as if the revolutionary élan has been replaced by business as usual. Clarke’s volume is not, however, a history of analytic philosophy but a survey intended for students and the general reader of the views of analytic philosophers on a selected group of problems: approaches to language, the relation of mind to body, the nature of belief, knowledge, and understanding, the relation between philosophy and science, ethics, and philosophical method. Clarke discusses each issue with clarity and insight and argues for his own views, which are always interesting. He criticizes the current tendency in analytic philosophy toward excessive specialization and argues that the special task of philosophy is to search for a framework capable of integrating various aspects of culture. He emphasizes the importance of the study of the history of philosophy: “The central concepts of any integrating framework are few.... The history of philosophy is an indispensable aid in providing such understanding in choosing those [End Page 481] concepts that can serve this function in the present” (191). This book can be recommended for courses in analytic philosophy and in the history of philosophy in the twentieth century.Most of the essays in the volume edited by Glock are concerned to advance ways of characterizing analytic philosophy. Most of them reject Dummett’s claim that analytic philosophy is distinguished by its concern with explaining thought by giving an account of language. In his essay, Dagfinn Føllesdal recognizes the difficulty of constructing any useful classification of intellectual trends. Because analytical philosophy cannot be characterized by reference to doctrines or problems, he proposes to distinguish it by reference to its approach to philosophical problems: “analytic philosophy is very strongly concerned with argument and justification. An analytic philosopher asks: what reasons are there for accepting or rejecting this position?” (7). The interest in language is merely an offshoot of this more fundamental concern. It follows that “the analytic/non-analytic distinction runs across other divisions.... Whether one is an analytic philosopher depends on what importance one ascribes to argument and justification” (14). Thus Aquinas and Descartes, among others, count as analytic philosophers but not Heidegger or Derrida because “they predominantly make use of rhetoric” (12). Føllesdal thinks that there are ethical reasons for being an analytic philosopher... (shrink)

Trends and issues in the dissemination of knowledge are discussed in terms of current trends. The general trends include the rapid rate at which new journals and documents are produced and increasing specialization in the field. Among the issues discussed are the optimum information hypothesis, optimum conceptual size of information, vividness and propitiousness of the information, and orientations to knowledge of subcultures within a professional field. The field of early childhood education is used as the example of each (...) trend and issue. (shrink)

To better understand the work of pre-Darwinian British life researchers in their own right, this paper discusses two different styles of reasoning. On the one hand there was analysis:synthesis, where an organism was disintegrated into its constituent parts and then reintegrated into a whole; on the other hand there was palaetiology, the historicist depiction of the progressive specialization of an organism. This paper shows how each style allowed for development, but showed it as moving in opposite directions. In analysis:synthesis, (...) development proceeded centripetally, through the fusion of parts. In palaetiology, development moved centrifugally, through the ramifying specialization of an initially simple substance. I first examine a community of analytically oriented British life researchers, exemplified by Richard Owen, and certain technical questions they considered important. These involved the neurosciences, embryology, and reproduction and regeneration. The paper then looks at a new generation of British palaetiologists, exemplified by W.B. Carpenter and T.H. Huxley, who succeeded at portraying analysts' questions as irrelevant. The link between styles of reasoning and physical sites is also explored. Analysts favored museums, which facilitated the examination and display of unchanging marine organisms while providing a power base for analysts. I suggest that palaetiologists were helped by vivaria, which included marine aquaria and Wardian cases. As they became popular in the early 1850s, vivaria provided palaetiologists with a different kind of living and changing evidence. Forms of evidence, how they were preserved and examined, and career options all reinforced each other: social and epistemic factors thus merged. (shrink)

According to Marin Cureau de La Chambre—steering a middleway between the Aristotelian and the Cartesian conception of the soul—everything that lives cognizes and everything that cognizes is alive. Cureau sticks with the general tripart distinction of vegetative, sensitive, and intellectual soul. Each part of the soul has its own cognition. Cognition is the way in which living beings regulate bodily equilibirum and environmental navigation. This regulative activity is gouverned by acquired or by innate images. Natural cognition (or instinct) is cognition (...) by innate images only. Cureau develops a highly originel theory of natural (or 'specialized') instinct. His theory attempts to explain five features of instinct (innateness, specialization, species-specifitiy, coerciveness, teleological nature). According to my interpretation, Cureau proposes a species of what is called a 'teleosemantic theory' of innate cognition. (shrink)

Religion and science dialogues that orbit around rational method, knowledge, and truth are often, though not always, contentious. In this article, I suggest a different cluster of gravitational points around which religion and science dialogues might usefully travel: philosophical anthropology, ethics, and love. I propose seeing morality as a natural outgrowth of the human desire to establish and maintain social bonds so as not to experience the condition of being alone. Humans, of all animals, need to feel loved—defined as a (...) compassionate present-with in dynamic dyadic relation such that one experiences the sense of mattering—but that need has an equally natural tendency to be met by creating biased us-and-them distinctions. A “critical” natural ethics, then, is one in which we become aware of and work to undermine our tendency to reify in-group distinctions between “us” and “them.” Religious communities that work intentionally on this can be seen, to some extent, as laboratories of love—or as sites for co-creating knowledge in perilous times. (shrink)

This article reads Derrida's Archive Fever as a sustained reflection on the influence of psychoanalysis on deconstruction. It examines the text's deployment of two financial figures — debt and inheritance — as contrasting ways of coming to terms with the intellectual legacy of psychoanalysis. Derrida's reading of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi's Freud's Moses exposes the historian's reliance on a ‘classical’ concept of the archive as the depository of a self-identical past, a concept which underpins Yerushalmi's thesis of Freud's unpaid debt to (...) Jewish culture. This conception gives rise to several aporias identified in Derrida's analysis of Yerushalmi's methodological procedure. A more positive and productive notion of inheritance characterizes Derrida's exploration of his own relationship to Freud, allowing him to move beyond the burden of a calculable indebtedness to the past towards an incalculable inheritance for the future. Deconstruction inherits from Freud's theoretical legacy, reaffirming and transforming psychoanalytic insights in its own account of our collective mal d'archive, our feverish desire both to preserve and destroy the archive. (shrink)

Abstract:Although best known to English-speaking readers as the general editor of the Dictionary of Untranslatables, the work of French philologist and philosopher Barbara Cassin is eclectic, encompassing literary studies, ancient philosophy, rhetoric, translation theory, psychoanalysis, politics, and more. From Presocratic philosophy to more recent reflections on Big Tech and democracy, Cassin's work is rooted in "sophistics," an approach that emphasizes the primacy of language in shaping our interactions with the world. Situating this sophistical approach vis-à-vis classical philology (Bollack) and the (...) philosophical tradition (Heidegger, Derrida), this essay explores the contribution of "sophistical reading" to our understanding of philosophical and literary texts. Showing how Cassin uses rhetorical theory to problematize any simple opposition of the latter, the essay concludes with a critical evaluation of Cassin's reading of Helen, Euripides' most sophistical play. (shrink)

This book offers a detailed account of the importance of psychoanalysis in Derrida's thought. Based on close readings of texts from the whole of his career, including less well-known and previously unpublished material, it sheds new light on the crucial role of psychoanalysis in shaping Derrida's response to a number of key questions. These questions range from the psyche's relationship to technology to the role of fiction and metaphor in scientific discourse, from the relationship between memory and the archive to (...) the status of the political in deconstruction. Focusing on Freud but proposing new readings of texts by Lacan, Torok and Abraham, Laplanche and Pontalis, amongst other seminal figures in contemporary French thought, the book argues that Derrida's writings on psychoanalysis can also provide an important bridge between deconstruction and the recent materialist turn in the humanities. Challenging a still prevalent 'textualist' reading of Derrida's work, it explores the ongoing contribution of deconstruction and psychoanalysis to pressing issues in critical thought today, from the localizing models of the neurosciences and the omnipresence of digital technology to the politics of affect in an age of terror. (shrink)

This article takes as its point of departure the episode from Confessiones 4 in which a mature Augustine questions his earlier distraught reaction to the death of a friend. In order to place Augustine’s account of this episode within a broader context, I discuss, in the first part of the article, Augustine’s teaching on love of neighbor in De doctrina christiana. The second part of the article proposes an analogy between Augustine’s views of how one ought to be related to (...) one’s neighbor, and his views of how one ought to be related to the sacraments, and particularly to the Eucharist. By seeking to reconcile Augustine’s treatment of how we ought to love our neighbors with his treatment of the Eucharist, and of the Eschaton, I suggest how the reader might understand love of neighbor in Augustine’s thought as having both a temporary aspect and a lasting aspect. (shrink)

This article argues that theological pacifism is best evaluated when situated in a network of practices, beliefs and biblical reading strategies that support a critique of Empire, and when mapped onto this world open up a space for living that is non-territorial and non-sacrificial, the grammar of which is governed by a political understanding of love.