Crutchfield and Redinger argue that consciousness-altering chemical restraints are less “liberty-intrusive” (or as we will sometimes put it, just less “intrusive”) than physical restraints. Physica...

Douglas N. Walton considers the question of whether the conventions of informal conversation can be articulated more precisely than they are at present. Specifically, he addresses the problem of the fallacy of ad hominem argumentation as it occurs in natural settings. Can rules be formulated to determine if criticisms of apparent hypocrisy in an argument are defensible or refutable? Walton suggests that they can, and ultimately defends the thesis that ad hominem reasoning is not fallacious per se. He carries (...) his analysis to the core of action--theoretic reasoning--by examining a number of specimen arguments. As suggested by the title, the conclusion of ad hominem argument is demonstrated to be relative to the arguer's position. In the appendixes of the book, articles by Gerald McAuliffe and Gordon R. Lowe illustrate vivid and powerful cases in which Walton's contentions are put to the test. (shrink)

For over twenty years Douglas Berger has advanced research and reflection on Indian philosophical traditions from both classical and cross-cultural perspectives. This volume reveals the extent of his contribution by bringing together his perspectives on these classical Indian philosophies and placing them in conversation with Confucian, Chinese Buddhist and medieval Indian Sufi traditions. Delving into debates between Nyaya and Buddhist philosophers on consciousness and identity, the nature of Sankara's theory of the self, the precise character of Nagarjuna's idea of (...) emptiness, and the relationship between awareness and embodiment in the broad spectrum of Indian thought, chapters exhibit Berger's unusually broad range of expertise. They connect Chinese Confucian and Buddhist texts with classical Indian theories of ethics and consciousness, contrast the ideas of seminal European thinkers like Nietzsche and Derrida from prevailing themes in Buddhism, and shed light on the spiritual and political dimensions of the Mughal prince Dara Shukoh's immersion into Vedantic thought. Always approaching the arguments from an intercultural perspective, Berger shows how much relevance and resonance classical Indian thought has with ancient Confucian views of ethics, Chinese Buddhist depictions of consciousness and medieval Mughal conceptions of divinity. The result is a volume celebrating the rigor, vitality and intercultural resonance of India's rich philosophical heritage. (shrink)

. This paper describes a cross-cultural and developmental research project on naïve or folk biology, that is, the study of how people conceptualize nature. The combination of domain specificity and cross-cultural comparison brings a new perspective to theories of categorization and reasoning and undermines the tendency to focus on “standard populations.” From the standpoint of mainstream cognitive psychology, we find that results gathered from standard populations in industrialized societies often fail to generalize to humanity at large. For example, similarity-driven typicality (...) and diversity effects and basic level phenomena either are not found or pattern differently when we move beyond undergraduates. From the perspective of domain-specificity, standard populations may yield misleading results, because such populations represent examples of especially impoverished experience with respect to nature. Conceptions of humans as biological kinds vary with cultural milieu and input conditions. We also show certain phenomena that are robust across populations, consistent with notions of domain-specificity. (shrink)

Arguments from popular opinion have long been regarded with suspicion, and in most logic textbooks the _ad populum _argument is classified as a fallacy. Douglas Walton now asks whether this negative evaluation is always justified, particularly in a democratic system where decisions are based on majority opinion. In this insightful book, Walton maintains that there is a genuine type of argumentation based on commonly accepted opinions and presumptions that should represent a standard of rational decision-making on important issues, especially (...) those of a personal and political nature. He shows how to judge arguments based on appeals to popular opinion in a more balanced way, identifying eleven subtypes of the _ad populum_ argument and providing a pragmatic method to evaluate each of these types. Walton has examined dozens of logic texts and drawn on a wide range of literature to reveal the many uses and misuses of popular opinion. He contrasts the traditional discussion of _ad populum _in Greek rhetoric with recent textbook treatment, then contrasts these contemporary views with his own dialectical perspective in order to clarify often confused appeals to prejudice and appeals to common knowledge. Although appeal to popular opinion has long been a powerful argumentative tactic, this is the first book to systematically describe and evaluate it as a well-defined type of argument with its own special characteristics. It enables us to deal with these often deceptive arguments in a critically balanced way and makes an original contribution to an important strand of rhetoric. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 34.2 (2001) 93-112 [Access article in PDF] Enthymemes, Common Knowledge, and Plausible Inference Douglas Walton The study of enthymemes has always been regarded as important in logic, critical thinking, and rhetoric, but too often it is the formal or mechanistic aspect of it that has been in the forefront. This investigation will show that there is a kind of plausibilistic script-based reasoning, of a kind (...) that has mainly been studied in artificial intelligence, that should have a much more important role to play in the study of enthymemes. But then curiously, as will also be shown, this plausibilistic type of reasoning was familiar in the ancient world, to the Sophists, as well as to leading philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle. By linking this ancient notion of plausibility to the modern notion used in computer science, this investigation reveals an important basis for the enthymeme that has a type of logical structure in its own right, but also has an informal aspect.An enthymeme, in current usage, is an argument that has one or more premises, or possibly a conclusion, not explicitly stated in the text, but that needs to have these propositions explicitly stated to extract the complete argument from the text. Sometimes enthymemes are described as arguments with "missing premises." That vocabulary is awkward, however, because the nonexplicit statement that needs to be added can be a conclusion, at least in a minority of cases. To make the exposition below smoother, the term nonexplicit assumption will be used to cover either the case of a nonexplicit premise or that of a nonexplicit conclusion. The problem with enthymemes is that if the nonexplicit assumptions in an argument are supposed to be propositions used by the arguer (as opposed to just the propositions needed to make the argument structurally correct, according to some standard), reasonable people can have differences of opinion on what the nonexplicit assumptions are supposed to be. The problem is that filling in the missing parts of enthymemes depends on interpreting the natural language [End Page 93] in which the argument was put forward to try to determine what the speaker meant to say.The solution to the problem comes through the recognition that enthymemes rest not only on formal (structural) criteria, but also on informal criteria. One of the most important of these informal criteria is something often called "common knowledge" (Govier 1992; Freeman 1995). But as shown below in a set of selected case studies of enthymemes, "common knowledge" is not really a kind of knowledge at all. It is really plausibility, or eikos, something well known in the ancient world and often misleadingly translated as "probability." Curiously, Aristotle's original doctrine of the enthymeme was based on this notion of plausibility. This historical fact has often been a source of puzzlement and confusion, and sometimes it has even been taken to indicate a defect or contradiction in Aristotle's treatment of the enthymeme. However, the goal of this investigation is not primarily historical. It is to work out one of the most important required steps toward a solution to the problem of enthymemes. But to do this, it is necessary to come back to the ancient notion of plausible inference. 1. The problem with enthymemes Once you have any formal theory of inference, like syllogistic, for example, you will be confronted by cases of arguments in everyday discourse that meet all the requirements for a structurally correct inference except that some part or parts, usually a premise or a conclusion, is missing. By "missing" is meant that the proposition in question has not been explicitly stated in the text of discourse, even though it may be clear enough that the speaker (writer) was relying on it, or including it, as part of the argument. The classic example is the following inference: All men are mortal; therefore, Socrates is mortal. To evaluate such an argument, surely some account of the "hidden" or "missing" assumption needs to be taken. The problem with enthymemes (Burke 1985; Gough and Tindale 1985; Hitchcock 1985) is that, if given carte... (shrink)

SUMMARYThis paper discusses the scientific instruments made and used by the microscopist Antony van Leeuwenhoek. The immediate cause of our study was the discovery of an overlooked document from the Delft archive: an inventory of the possessions that were left in 1745 after the death of Leeuwenhoek's daughter Maria. This list sums up which tools and scientific instruments Leeuwenhoek possessed at the end of his life, including his famous microscopes. This information, combined with the results of earlier historical research, gives (...) us new insights about the way Leeuwenhoek began his lens grinding and how eventually he made his best lenses. It also teaches us more about Leeuwenhoek's work as a surveyor and a wine gauger.A further investigation of the 1747 sale of Leeuwenhoek's 531 single lens microscopes has not only led us to the identification of nearly all buyers, but also has provided us with some explanation about why only a dozen of this large number of microscopes has survived. (shrink)

This article considers six types of Platonic Innatism and compares them to the nativisms of early modern writers. I first dismiss a type of innatism similar to the target of the first book of Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding and then discuss four types of innatism that might be considered “live options” for the one Plato employs in his theory of recollection: a Kantian “constructivist” innatism, a Cartesian “dispositional” innatism, a Leibnizian “content” innatism, and a Malebranchian “transcendent” innatism. Finally, in (...) closing, I discuss “condition innatism”. Though this last position is frequently referenced in Platonic scholarship, I argue that the position is incoherent. (shrink)

The multiplicity of deubiquitinating enzymes (DUBs) encoded by vertebrate genomes is partly attributable to whole genome duplication events that occurred early in chordate evolution. By surveying the literature for the largest family of DUBs (the ubiquitin-specific proteases), extensive functional redundancy for duplicated genes has been confirmed as opposed to singletons. Dramatically conflicting results have been reported for loss of function studies conducted through RNA interference as opposed to inactivating mutations, but the contradictory findings can be reconciled by a recently proposed (...) compensatory mechanism involving nonsense-mediated RNA degradation. Duplicated genes are often inactivated to become pseudogenes, and it is proposed that such is the fate of the USP15 gene of zebrafish, a commonly used model system. As it is reviewed here, these observations have implications not only for the interpretation of model system phenotypes but also for therapeutic interventions designed to target DUBs. (shrink)

Intuitive theology.--The theology of the Hebrews.--Christian theology.--Christian belief.

Discusses the journey of Buddhist ideas on awareness and personhood from India to China. Encounters of Mind explores a crucial step in the philosophical journey of Buddhism from India to China, and what influence this step, once taken, had on Chinese thought in a broader scope. The relationship of concepts of mind, or awareness, to the constitution of personhood in Chinese traditions of reflection was to change profoundly after the Cognition School of Buddhism made its way to China during the (...) sixth century. India’s Buddhist philosophers had formulated the idea that, in order for human beings to achieve perfect enlightenment, they had to produce a state of awareness through practice that they described as “luminous.” However, once introduced to the Chinese tradition, the concept of the “luminous mind” was to become a condition already found within human nature for the possibility of achieving human ideals. This notion of the luminous mind was to have far-reaching significance both for Chinese Buddhism and for medieval Confucianism. Douglas L. Berger follows the transforming path of conceptions of the luminosity of consciousness and the perfectibility of personhood in order to bring into clearer relief the history of Indian and Chinese philosophical dialogue, as well as in the hope that such dialogue will be reignited. (shrink)

This article seeks to answer why there are two different versions of Meno’s Paradox. I argue that the dilemma contained in Socrates’s version is a pre-existing puzzle, familiar to both Meno and Socrates before their discussion. The two versions of the paradox are thus different because Meno’s version is a mistaken attempt to remember the puzzle contained in Socrates’s version. Although Meno’s version is a mistaken attempt to state Socrates’s version, it is a philosophically richer puzzle that makes three interesting (...) points about inquiry and recognition. After arguing that Socrates’s version is unsound and that Meno’s version is an attempt to recollect or remember it, I analyze Meno’s version in detail. In closing, I consider the relationship between the notion of recognition, which figures prominently in Meno’s version, and the theory of recollection, suggesting that the latter may have arisen as an attempt to explain the origin of moral intuitions. (shrink)

IT is strange that the informal fallacies should strike us as such obvious breaches of thinking and advocacy, yet should have met with such little success in finding a respectable home within mature logical theory. It might seem that respectable and mature logical theory is most mature and most respectable in the theory of propositions, and that its maturity and respectability in the other logical domains rapidly diminish in inverse proportion to the susceptibility of those domains to be reduced to (...) the logic of propositions. But we are not anxious to promote so severe a view of theoretical accomplishment, and we shall suppose that, at the very least, the informal fallacies have a degree of systematicity that will at once advance our understanding of them nicely beyond the level of intuitive impressions, and also place into retirement the hopelessly inadequate accounts that litter too many otherwise admirable textbooks. (shrink)

This article examines the theory of recollection in Plato's Meno and attempts to unravel some long-standing puzzles about it. What are the prenatal objects of the soul's vision? What are the post-natal objects of the soul's recollection? What is innate in the Meno? Why does Socrates (prima facie) suggest that both knowledge and true opinion are innate? The article pays particular attention to the ana- prefix in the verbs aneuriskô, anakineô and analambanô, and suggests that they are used for two (...) distinct stages of recollection: a phenomenological stage of ‘finding again’ or ‘awakening’ our innate content, which Plato calls doxa, and an epistemic stage of ‘getting it back’ as epistêmê. Thinking of the verbs with this ‘back/again’ sense of the ana- prefix (instead of as ‘up’, in the common translation of analambanô as ‘take up’) allows us to understand why Plato would simultaneously imply that our souls had prenatal epistêmê, have post-natal innate true opinion and have the potential to analambanein epistêmê. He is not talking about ‘taking up’ epistêmê that he also calls doxa, but about ‘getting back’ the epistêmê we had prenatally. The article concludes with an examination of what this innate content is, suggesting that it is a type of ‘principle’ and ‘essential’ mental content. (shrink)

In this important new book, Douglas McDermid argues persuasively for two key claims: first, that the so-called "Neo-Pragmatist" critique of traditional epistemology is thoroughly unconvincing; second, that Rorty is guilty of taking the name of Pragmatism in vain, since there are crucial and far-reaching differences between Neo-Pragmatism and the Classical Pragmatism of James and Dewey. The Varieties of Pragmatism will take its place in the forefront of the literature on this most vital part of the American philosophical legacy.

Recent research suggests that individuals with relatively weak global precedence (i.e., a smaller propensity to view visual stimuli in a configural manner) show a reduced face inversion effect (FIE). Coupled with such findings, a number of recent studies have demonstrated links between an advantage for feature‐based processing and the presentation of traits associated with autism among the general population. The present study sought to bridge these findings by investigating whether a relationship exists between the possession of autism‐associated traits (i.e., as (...) indicated by individuals’“autism quotient” [(AQ) and the size of the FIE. Participants completed an on‐line study in which the AQ was measured prior to a standard face recognition task where half of the faces were inverted at test. The results confirmed that higher AQ levels were predictive of smaller FIEs. Implications for a common underlying factor relating to processing orientation are discussed. (shrink)

This reader-friendly book examines philosophies and philosophers using an engaging, non-condescending approach that speaks to you at your level.

There is a burgeoning scientific and ethical literature on the use of biomarkers—such as genes or brain scan results—and biological interventions to predict and prevent crime. This literature on biopredicting and biopreventing crime focuses almost exclusively on crimes that are physical, violent, and/or sexual in nature—often called blue-collar crimes—while giving little attention to less conventional crimes such as economic and environmental offences, also known as white-collar crimes. We argue here that this skewed focus is unjustified: white-collar crime is likely far (...) costlier than blue-collar crime in money, health, and lives lost. Moreover, attempts to biopredict and bioprevent blue-collar crime may entail adopting potentially unfair measures that target individuals who are already socio-economically disadvantaged, thus compounding pre-existing unfairness. We argue, therefore, that we ought to extend the study of bioprediction and bioprevention to white-collar crime as a means of more efficiently and fairly responding to crime. We suggest that identifying biomarkers for certain psychopathic traits, which appear to be over-represented among senior positions in corporate and perhaps political organisations, is one avenue through which this research can be broadened to include white-collar crime. (shrink)

Western science teaches that our beings are governed by the laws of physics and our minds play no part. There are, however, flaws in this thinking, most prominently unexplained paranormal phenomena that defy explanation by modern theories of physics. Collected by a handful of renegade scientists who call themselves parapsychologists, these data include extrasensory perception (ESP), poltergeist occurrences, and psychokinesis. Much of the current data in parapsychology and their implications for understanding the true nature of the self are examined here. (...) Beginning with a consideration of several instances of spontaneous psi, the book examines the theoretical explanations of paranormal phenomena. It also covers the hypothesis and evidence that minds contain the so-called hidden variables that determine the outcomes of the quantum process, thus interweaving parapsychology with modern physics. The minds fate upon the death of the physical body is discussed; the reader is forced to consider in detail the relationship between the conscious mind and the physical brain and the evidence that minds survive the death of bodies. (shrink)

Abstract This paper addresses the role that argumentation schemes and argument visualization software tools can play in helping to find and counter objections to a given argument one is confronted with. Based on extensive analysis of features of the argumentation in these two examples, a practical four-step method of finding objections to an argument is set out. The study also applies the Carneades Argumentation System to the task of finding objections to an argument, and shows how this system has some (...) capabilities that are especially useful. Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-23 DOI 10.1007/s10503-012-9261-z Authors Douglas Walton, Centre for Research in Reasoning, Argumentation and Rhetoric (CRRAR), University of Windsor, 2500 University Ave. W., Windsor, ON N9B 3Y1, Canada Journal Argumentation Online ISSN 1572-8374 Print ISSN 0920-427X. (shrink)

Patient autonomy, as exercised in the informed consent process, is a central concern in bioethics. The typical bioethicist's analysis of autonomy centers on decisional capacity—finding the line between autonomy and its absence. This approach leaves unexplored the structure of reasoning behind patient treatment decisions. To counter that approach, we present a microeconomic theory of patient decision-making regarding the acceptable level of medical treatment from the patient's perspective. We show that a rational patient's desired treatment level typically departs from the level (...) yielding an absence of symptoms, the level we call ideal. This microeconomic theory demonstrates why patients have good reason not to pursue treatment to the point of absence of physical symptoms. We defend our view against possible objections that it is unrealistic and that it fails to adequately consider harm a patient may suffer by curtailing treatment. Our analysis is fruitful in various ways. It shows why decisions often considered unreasonable might be fully reasonable. It offers a theoretical account of how physician misinformation may adversely affect a patient's decision. It shows how billing costs influence patient decision-making. It indicates that health care professionals' beliefs about the ‘unreasonable’ attitudes of patients might often be wrong. It provides a better understanding of patient rationality that should help to ensure fuller information as well as increased respect for patient decision-making. (shrink)

A new view of the extended mind thesis argues that a stark binary opposition between really extending and seeming to extend oversimplifies the issue.

The Self-Defeating Character of Skepticism [ABSTRACT] Douglas C. Long Philosophical skepticism arises from a Cartesian first-person perspective that initially rejects as unjustified any appeal to sense perception. I argue that, contrary to the cogito argument, when a “purely subjective” epistemology cuts one off from justified beliefs about the world in this way, it undermines justified belief about one’s own existence as an individual in the world as well. Therefore, philosophical doubt expressed in the form: “I know that I exist (...) but I cannot know about the existence of anything else,” is in fact self-defeating. Philosophers have mistakenly assumed that the subjective epistemological perspective from which philosophical doubt about the existence of material objects is expressed is indeed our ordinary first person perspective on ourselves. And we of course know that the latter perspective surely provides epistemological access to ourselves as existing active subjects of experience. However, I claim that traditional wholesale epistemological skepticism in fact attempts to mandate an importantly different perspective on ourselves that we do not and cannot have. The feature of skepticism which I believe renders it vulnerable is the assumption that each of us has a right to be certain of his own existence as a subject of conscious experience even in the face of comprehensive doubt about our empirical beliefs. (shrink)

Does cross-cultural philosophy stand in need of a hermeneutical expansion? In engaging with this question, the symposium focuses upon methodological issues salient to cross-cultural inquiry. Douglas L. Berger lays out the ground for the debate by arguing for a methodological approach, which is able to rectify the discipline’s colonial legacies and bridge the hermeneutical distance with its objects of study. From their own perspectives, Hans-Georg Moeller, Paul Roth and A. Raghuramaraju analyze whether such a processual and hermeneutically-sensitive approach can (...) indeed open up new hermeneutic horizons. Their responses shed light upon cross-cultural philosophy’s continued embedment in Euroamerican professional philosophy and how the locality of its knowledge-seeking endeavors may indeed have repercussions on attempts to bridge temporal and spatial distances. (shrink)

The Cambridge Platonists are modern thinkers and the context of seventeenth-century Cambridge science is an inalienable and decisive part of their thought. Cudworth’s interest in ancient theology, however, seems to conflict with the progressive aspect of his philosophy. The problem of the nature, however, of this ‘Platonism’ is unavoidable. Even in his complex and recondite ancient theology Cudworth is motivated by philosophical considerations, and his legacy among philosophers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries should not be overlooked. In particular we (...) will draw on the scholarship of the German Egyptologist Jan Assmann in order to reassess the significance of Cudworth’s theory of religion for later philosophical developments. (shrink)

Empathy is a necessity in our multicultural world. Modern democratic societies are home to communities with the most diverse religious, political, and moral convictions, and these convictions often directly, even perilously, contradict one another. Educational theorists differ on how empathy can be taught in the face of these contradictions. Does proper pedagogical action entail an attempt to teach students to understand the other, to see their world through the eyes of the other? Or is such an attempt doomed to fail, (...) a vain and presumptuous striving to surpass the epistemologically preordained limits of subjectivity? While theorists who promote mutual understanding traditionally look to some form of dialogue to establish their empathic pedagogies, those who doubt the possibility of mutual understanding formulate critical, often monological pedagogies in which students are encouraged to “talk back” to their others about their idiosyncratic perspectives. Theorists have thus had choose: dialogue or relativism? Using the robust educational philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, Douglas Yacek demonstrates that this is a most unsatisfactory choice, one that ignores the pedagogical complexity needed to teach students genuine empathy. He argues that Nietzsche's educational writings yield a tripartite empathic pedagogy founded on self-knowledge, foreign language learning, and experimentalism. Upon these three pedagogical pillars, Yacek problematizes Megan Laverty's recent attempt to formulate an empathic pedagogy as dialogical philosophical inquiry. Although Nietzsche would endorse much of Laverty's pedagogy, Yacek concludes that Nietzsche's pedagogy requires engagement with perspectives across the democratic curriculum and, indeed, beyond. (shrink)

This article provides a rigorous defense of innate true belief in the Meno, to my knowledge, the first of its kind. While several commentators have proposed innate true belief in the past, the position has never been defended or explained in detail. Instead, the most thorough discussions of Plato’s innatism have opted for different innate objects. I defend my proposal against these recent alternatives by showing that the passages often thought to imply innate knowledge can arguably be better read in (...) other ways. I then argue that they should be so read, because of an “awareness condition” Plato had on knowledge at the time. (shrink)

In conversation analysis, through Sacks, Schegloff, Jefferson, and others, the conceptual architecture is joined at the hip to a technical architecture of transcripts, sequence, and turn productions. That the conceptual was to be found and demonstrated in the material detail of temporal productions was central to CA’s extraordinary innovations. As with CA, an Epistemic CA has the task of giving evidence of its conceptual order in actual materials, and thus animating the materials to show them. The task and relationship are (...) emblematically reflexive: we shall find the expression ‘Oh’ indexing ‘changes of state’ or ‘inapposite inquiries’, for example, as of the account-able animations of turns and sequences of turns. Our shared attachments to sequential analysis deliver the expectation that we shall see how Epistemic order is achieved on actual occasions, through actual materials, rendered as transcript. The discussion turns to how the Epistemic Program engages and acquits this analytic expectation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 12.1 (2005) 1-7 [Access article in PDF] Clinical Practice, Science, and the Unconscious Douglas McConnell Neil Pickering Keywords psychotherapy, cognitive science, neuroscience, computational view of mind. This volume of Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology is devoted to questions about the unconscious mind. The philosophical complexities and difficulties associated with the unconscious are many and, despite widespread confusion and disagreement as to the nature of the (...) unconscious mind, it is used as a concept informing psychotherapy. It is therefore not surprising that papers in a special edition on the unconscious might be weighted heavily toward uncovering a justifiable conceptual niche for the unconscious and elaborating on some of the main conceptual connections. Although this makes for a slightly more philosophical edition of PPP than usual, those perhaps less interested in philosophy and more interested in actual psychiatric practice can incorporate the concepts and insights developed in these papers into their practice as they see fit.The three main articles take three quite distinct approaches to the unconscious. Schechtman (2005) addresses the need for a theory of personal identity to incorporate the unconscious and presents one that does so by developing some central Lockian intuitions. Church (2005) investigates whether the kinds of things happening in the unconscious can be explained by cognitive operations not normally associated with consciousness, specifically, spatial structuring of experience. McConnell and Gillett (2005) clarify some of Lacan's ontology of the mind where the language encountered and used by the subject provides the structure for their unconscious.The aim of this introduction is to ask and try to answer a question that logically precedes those raised in the articles in the light of the therapeutic use of the unconscious. When dealing with psychoanalysis or psychoanalytic concepts in an Anglo-American context, the struggle that psychoanalysis has had and continues to have in a psychiatric domain ruled by science is never far from the spotlight. Indeed Hinshelwood (2005) also picks up the importance of this conflict when replying to McConnell and Gillett. It seems to be historically true that the unconscious has fallen out of favor in scientific and psychiatric circles (it is no surprise that psychiatric training is largely based in "hard," that is, biological and biochemical science) particularly over the last 50 years or so. But is the scientific skepticism to be found about the use of the unconscious well-founded? And how does the continued utilization [End Page 1] of the unconscious by the therapist fit into current practice given this skepticism? Psychotherapy and the Unconscious In psychotherapy, the therapist and the client together construct a story that explains why the client is having some form of difficulty in his or her life. The stated aim is to enable the client to overcome this difficulty by gaining an understanding of what has generated it. Doing so may be a first step to dealing with that conflict. For example, an office worker who is scared of the boss and whose life at work is a misery as result may come to think that the boss is a reminder of some threatening figure from childhood and that the reaction is a regression to infantile behavior. Knowing this, the fear of the boss can be revisited—perhaps reconfigured, perhaps overcome—and life may improve. In the process of therapy, the relation of the figure from childhood to the boss is made conscious. But it was still operative before it was made explicit, even though the client did not realize it and some would say that the client's unconscious had somehow buried the memory from childhood or hidden from the client the relation of this memory of a threatening figure to the boss.A description of the content of the unconscious is, then, an intentional description involving the client's thought life, one made to help an individual understand otherwise unintelligible (to that individual) feelings, beliefs, desires, actions, and so on. Subjects' intentions are their normatively structured mental representations of, and attitudes toward, the world (e.g., "He is my boss"; "I am afraid of him"). An intentional unconscious description then takes an intentional form... (shrink)

If truth were a matter of correspondence with the facts, then S could justify her empirical beliefs only by directly comparing them with a denuded and unconceptualized reality and confirming that the relation of correspondence obtains.

In this article, the Bild or image of the sculptor used by Plotinus and adapted by his Christian follower Meister Eckhart forms the basis of a reflection on the religious or otherworldly dimension in ethics and on the relationship of esthetics, morality, and religion. The image of the sculptor who chips away at his sculpture exemplifies the relationship of the individual to its divine archetype. Such knowledge involves transformation of the knower, a turning back of the image to the archetype, (...) a shaping of the self that emerges from recognition of its true identity and vocation. This constitutes the dynamic dimension of Bildung in Eckhart as educere, a leading forth from attachment to particular things and a purification and reformation of the self according to its true image. The turning back is thereby a turning within to the supreme Good, the nobility and the purity of the Divine nature, which is the origin of the true self and its intrinsic dignity as image of its transcendent source. (shrink)