This book explores the causes behind Trump's victory in the 2016 US Presidential election and asks how a psychoanalytic understanding of the social unconscious can help us plot a new direction for the future in US politics and beyond. It first describes the social/psychological threads that are the now of American culture. Seeds of hope are discovered through an in-depth examination of the American idea of excess as represented by Trump, its archetypal figure. Essential psychoanalytic ideas such as, the fundamental (...) human condition of living with both individual and social unconscious, the psychic feminine principal, the notion of psychic valence and more are illustrated as psychic integrations necessary for America to move towards a redemptive positive social change. This book combines feminist exploration with playful illustrative imagery and mythic story-aiming to awaken minds across generations. America's Psychological Now is key reading for psychoanalysis, psychologists, political theorists, and anyone wishing to understand better how the social and political systems could be changed for the future. (shrink)

Sartre's conflicted relationship with his theatrical audience is explained by showing how Sartre's initial theatrical venture, Bariona, created in a POW camp in December 1940, sparked an idealized conception of the audience. The particular context in which the play was produced brought its performers and audience together into an almost mystical fusion. But these virtues, derived from pre-textual “oral“ culture, lost much of their luster with Sartre's second play, The Flies. Like its predecessor, The Flies used myth to counter German (...) censorship, but in occupied Paris in front of a much more heterogeneous audience. The resulting comparative failure complicated Sartre's relationship to the mass audiences he sought in the post-war years. Theater audiences became emblematic of a wider public Sartre never fully trusted to accept or understand his ideas. Furthermore, Sartre's decision to stage almost all his plays between 1946 and 1959 at the “bourgeois“ Théâtre Antoine only made him even more mistrustful of audiences he often found himself writing “against.“. (shrink)

Brazil’s Movement of the Landless emerges from this collection as one of the great social movements of modernity. In historical chapters we see its evolution from confrontations with landowners and police in land invasions in the South of Brazil in the 1970s to become a multi-faceted movement with a presence throughout Brazil. More than a pressure group for Land Reform, it turned to mount a comprehensive challenge, on linked legal, cultural, political and economic fronts to Brazil’s dominant model of development. (...) Its ‘social movement approach’, conjoining challenge to Brazil’s massive inequalities with the formation of active citizens among the marginalised rural poor, has become a model for movements in the urban scene. We see this not just through the rich descriptive accounts of MST actions, but because the contributing editor, Miguel Carter, has pointed the action portraits with theoretical acumen, and, with other contributors, placed them in historical context. (shrink)

Carl F. H. Henry has widely been acknowledged for his contributions to evangelical social concern. What has not been fully appreciated though is theological foundations that undergirded Henry’s priority model as it relates to the relationship between the church social and evangelistic mandates. For Henry, the key to both was the doctrine of revelation, and this foundation enabled Henry to uniquely argue for both integration and prioritization. As such, Henry presents a challenge to many contemporary models of evangelism and social (...) concern that set the two on an even plane by locating them within a kingdom rubric. Despite accusations that his theological method fosters information over transformation, Henry hold forth a revelation centered approach with Augustinian roots capable of guiding the contemporary church on the elusive issue of finding a biblical approach to its mission. (shrink)

Brazil’s Movement of the Landless (MST) emerges from this collection as one of the great social movements of modernity. In historical chapters we see its evolution from confrontations with landowners and police in land invasions in the South of Brazil in the 1970s to become a multi-faceted movement with a presence throughout Brazil. More than a pressure group for Land Reform, it turned to mount a comprehensive challenge, on linked legal, cultural, political and economic fronts to Brazil’s dominant model of (...) development. Its ‘social movement approach’, conjoining challenge to Brazil’s massive inequalities with the formation of active citizens among the marginalised rural poor, has become a model for movements in the urban scene. We see this not just through the rich descriptive accounts of MST actions, but because the contributing editor, Miguel Carter, has pointed the action portraits with theoretical acumen, and, with other contributors, placed them in historical context. (shrink)

Some researchers have claimed that there is no significant correlation between students’ majors and their performance on standardized critical thinking tests. This paper provides both evidence and arguments that that claim may well be false. Besides arguments based on the correlation between students’ majors and other standardized tests, data from Baker University’s Critical Thinking and Writing Program show large differences in effect size gains relative to students’ majors.

Martin Heidegger’s 1934–1935 lectures on Friedrich Hölderlin’s hymns "Germania" and "The Rhine" are considered the most significant among Heidegger’s lectures on Hölderlin. Coming at a crucial time in his career, the text illustrates Heidegger’s turn toward language, art, and poetry while reflecting his despair at his failure to revolutionize the German university and his hope for a more profound revolution through the German language, guided by Hölderlin’s poetry. These lectures are important for understanding Heidegger’s changing relation to politics, his turn (...) toward Nietzsche, his thinking about the German language, and his breakthrough to a new kind of poetic thinking. First published in 1980 as volume 39 of Heidegger’s Complete Works, this graceful and rigorous English-language translation will be widely discussed in continental philosophy and literary theory. (shrink)

Space is a product of semiosis. It is a condition pertinent to an organism’s semiotic freedom, which is articulated by the organism as a consequence of its capacity to manipulate the world in the course of its unfolding interaction with its environment. Spatial configuration is thus the result of agency inherent in the organism-in-its-environment. Space, a consequence of social cohesion, is effected through constraints and processes of enaction which are semiotic. These processes are productive and offer architects a novel means (...) by which to configure space, which they should embrace to articulate the nature of inhabitation. The model presented identifies activity as the essential building block to the generation of form. Modelled as a form of artificial life, swarm-like components, referred to as ‘actants’, represent discrete activities and self-configure according to differences in the environment they detect, to form a body-of-swarms. Thus, depicting the spatiality of being. (shrink)

This article offers an interpretive reconstruction of Heidegger’s first reference to the “inner truth of National Socialism” in the 1934/35 lecture course, Hölderlin’s Hymns “Germania” and “The Rhine”, which has remained unknown due to an editorial error. Focusing on the distinction Heidegger draws between Greek φύσις and natural science, it examines the way Heidegger conceives politics more originally through Hölderlin and the naming force of Nature. It then contextualizes Heidegger’s specific reference to National Socialism in terms of the then contemporary (...) debate between liberalism and the racially determined “new science,” arguing that Heidegger thinks the “inner truth of National Socialism” as a φύσις-event. (shrink)

John V. Taylor was a missionary statesman, ecumenist, Africanist, onetime General Secretary of the Church Missionary Society, and later Anglican Bishop of Winchester. His work offers a theology and practice of Christian mission which is faithful to scripture while fully facing the facts of the contemporary world at the beginning of the third millennium. Does Christian evangelism promote sectarianism and violence, or can it contribute to harmony and peace in the global village? Can Christians extol the true significance of Jesus (...) Christ without demeaning others? Who is God and how does God's nature shape ours? This book tackles these and other vital issues by giving the first major account of the life and thought of one of the 20th century's greatest religious thinkers. Here is an example and tutor to any thoughtful Christian. Consistently incarnational and sacramental in his approach, Taylor seeks to live out the truths he discovers in his daily ministry as poet, priest and prophet - inviting those around him to share the way of Christ. Taylor is also author of major works such as "The Go-Between God", his book on the Holy Spirit, and "The Christlike God", where he outlines the distinctive Christian insight into God as the patient, generous, self-sacrificing love we see in Jesus. (shrink)

The concept of information has been extensively studied and written about, yet no consensus on a unified definition of information has to date been reached. This paper seeks to establish the basis for a unified definition of information. We claim a biosemiotics perspective, based on Gregory Bateson’s definition of information, provides a footing on which to build because the frame this provides has applicability to both the sciences and humanities. A key issue in reaching a unified definition of information is (...) the fundamental problem of identifying how a human organism, in a self-referential process, develops from a state in which its knowledge of the human-organism-in-its-environment is almost non-existent to a state in which the human organism not only recognizes the existence of the environment but also sees itself as part of the human-organism-in-its-environment system. This allows a human organism not only to self-referentially engage with the environment and navigate through it, but also to transform it in its own image and likeness. In other words, the Fundamental Problem of the Science of Information concerns the phylogenetic development process, as well as the ontogenetic development process of Homo sapiens sapiens from a single cell to our current multicellular selves, all in a changing long-term and short-term environment, respectively. (shrink)

The exchange of ideas between nations during the Enlightenment was greatly facilitated by cultural ventures, commercial enterprise and scientific collaboration. But how were they exchanged? What were the effects of these exchanges on the idea or artefact being transferred? Focussing on contact between England, France and Ireland, a team of specialists explores the translation, appropriation and circulation of cultural products and scientific ideas during the Enlightenment. Through analysis of literary and artistic works, periodicals and official writings contributors uncover: the (...) key role played by literary translators and how they adapted, naturalized and sometimes distorted plays and novels to conform to new cultural norms; the effects of eighteenth-century anglomania, and how this was manifested in French art; how the vagaries of international politics and conflict affected both the cultural products themselves and the modes of dissemination; how religious censorship engendered new Irish Catholic and French Huguenot diasporas, with their particular intellectual pursuits and networks of exchan≥ the significance of newspapers and periodicals in disseminating new knowledge and often radical philosophical ideas. By exploring both broad areas of cultural activity and precise examples of cultural transfer, contributors to Intellectual journeys reveal the range and complexity of intellectual exchange and its role in the formation of a truly transnational Enlightenment. (shrink)

The Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights has recently handed down its judgement in the case of three women contesting the abortion law in the Republic of Ireland, which has one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the world. Although the Court ruled that Ireland had to clarify the current law following the success of one of the three claims, the failure of the other two claims allows Ireland to continue to enforce its (...) law, which has an adverse effect on women's health. This paper, therefore, proposes an amendment to abortion legislation in the Republic of Ireland that would be compatible with safeguarding women's health, highlighting several circumstances in which the continuation of a pregnancy may have a detrimental impact on a woman's physical and/or mental health. (shrink)

It has been more than sixty years since R. D. Collison Black published his Economic Thought and the Irish Question, a book which ever since has been widely regarded as a classic in the history of e...

In Contentious Rituals, Jonathan S. Blake focuses on Protestant parades in the streets of Northern Ireland and why people choose to participate in them. Drawing on rich interviews, survey data, and ethnographic observations, Blake presents a new look at the conflict in Northern Ireland and offers findings that illuminate contested symbols everywhere.

In 2008, Samantha Newbery, then a PhD student, discovered a hitherto confidential document: ‘Confidential: UK Eyes Only. Annex A: Intelligence gained from interrogations in Northern Ireland’ (DEFE 13/958, The National Archives (TNA)). It details the British Army’s notorious interrogations of IRA suspects that led to the eventual banning of the ‘five techniques’ that violated the UK’s international treaty obligation prohibiting the use of torture and ‘inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment’. Having decided that the document – Intelligence gained from (...) should be put in the public domain, she invited me, along with the eminent lawyer, Philippe Sands and Brian Stuart, a former Secretary to the British Joint Intelligence Committee, to contribute commentaries. I concluded that even if the document was accurate in both what it stated and in what it left out, that use of the ‘five techniques’ (tantamount to torture) was unjustified, since the normalisation and institutionalisation of torture is far worse than failing to obtain the information thus gained. Whether or not this joint paper will make a difference to UK policy concerning the use of torture remains an open question; whether or not it should is not. This piece is an example of how my book on torture, deliberately written for a public readership, has made it possible for me to make interventions in practical policy, or at least to attempt to, whether in occasional writing for eg The Chartist and the web-based Open Democracy, or directly for activist groups, eg my ‘Ethical Opinion’ for Physicians for Human Rights – Israel, Report: Holding Health to Ransom: GSS Interrogation and Extortion of Palestinian Patients at Erez Crossing (2008). (shrink)