The Phenomenology of Everyday Life presents results from a rigorous qualitative approach to the psychological study of everyday human activities and experiences. This book does not replace scientific observation with humanistic analysis, but provides an additional perspective on significant human questions. The qualitative approach this book employs is grounded in the philosophical traditions of existentialism and phenomenology, which use dialogue as their major method of inquiry. These traditions are especially well adapted to encompass and describe human events and activities. In (...) addition, such events can be properly investigated only on the basis of a method sensitive enough to articulate the nuances of human experience and reflection. In this latter regard, it is important to note that insights deriving from literature and the humanities are equally as revealing of the human world as those from experimental psychology, biology or medicine. (shrink)

Obwohl Leibniz' Lehre von der Trägheit im Lichte der klassischen Mechanik verworren erscheinen mag, gewinnt sie Plausibilität, wenn man sie im Kontext seiner „neuen Wissenschaft der Dynamik“ betrachtet. Die vorliegende Arbeit vertritt die These, daß die Leibnizsche Trägheitskraft zwar nicht in das Newtonsche Schema paßt, sich aber trotzdem sinnvoll aus Leibniz' Ablehnung der herkömmlichen Trägheitslehre in der Physik ergibt und eine wichtige Ableitung seines metaphysischen Passivitätsbegriffes darstellt.

Marxist historiography has always claimed to be "conceptually" rooted in the natural sciences and has therefore been concerned with the function of laws, the structure of theories, and the logical relations between hypotheses and empirical data. Minimal criteria for the identification of a scientific research program as developed by Lakatos and Laudan include: a negative heuristic; explanatory or predictable scientific theories; a central model or paradigm; identification and solution of internal problems; self-conscious awareness by researchers of a common tradition; and (...) the internal dynamics of conflict and convergence. Less than a generation ago, Marxist scholarship seemed to offer the most innovative methodologies in history. More recently, however, Marxist scholarship seems to be reliving old glories while other approaches have advanced more innovative research programs. (shrink)

Laing is a psychoanalyst who "is engaged in research on schizophrenia and on the family at Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, London," while his collaborator, Cooper, "is a psychiatrist at Shenley Hospital, Hertfordshire, concerned with research on families and on groups." Both men are strongly impressed by the importance of Sartre's most recent major works: Saint Genet, Search for a Method, and Critique de la Raison Dialectique, which they see as major landmarks in modern intellectual history. Sartre, they say, is.

Hisashi Nasu, Lester Embree, George Psathas, and Ilja Srubar (eds.), Alfred Schutz and His Intellectual Partners; Sandra P. Thomas and Howard R. Pollio, Listening to Patients, A Phenomenological Approach to Nursing Research and Practice; Matthew Ratcliffe, Rethinking Commonsense Psychology: A Critique of Folk Psychology, Theory of Mind and Simulation.

Hisashi Nasu, Lester Embree, George Psathas, and Ilja Srubar (eds.), Alfred Schutz and His Intellectual Partners; Sandra P. Thomas and Howard R. Pollio, Listening to Patients, A Phenomenological Approach to Nursing Research and Practice; Matthew Ratcliffe, Rethinking Commonsense Psychology: A Critique of Folk Psychology, Theory of Mind and Simulation.

This paper begins with a brief description and analysis of Harcum's "Behavioral Paradigm for a Psychological Resolution of the Free Will Issue" focusing on issues concerning first-person and third-person perspectives in psychological research and theory. This consideration is expanded to cover a variety of related issues including "unconscious processes" and philosophical discussions of free will. Two studies, similar to Harcum's original study, but analyzed from a first-person perspective, are reported and contrasted with Harcum's work. Results of these studies reveal that (...) different individuals provide different meanings for the same actions, e.g., sitting in one or another seat in a college classroom. The significance of these findings for psychological research concerning the experience and concept of free will are discussed in light of an alternative, existential-phenomenological approach to psychology. (shrink)

The chapter introduces and characterizes the notion of fittingness. It charts the history of the relation and its relevance to contemporary debates in normative and metanormative philosophy and proceeds to survey issues to do with fittingness covered in the volume’s chapters, including the nature and epistemology of fittingness, the relations between fittingness and reasons, the normativity of fittingness, fittingness and value theory, and the role of fittingness in theorizing about responsibility. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of issues to (...) do with fittingness that aren’t covered extensively by the volume’s chapters in order to indicate avenues for further research. (shrink)

The present study applies a new method for investigating dynamic unconscious processes. The method consists of selection of words from patient interview and test protocols that in the clinicians' judgments capture the patients' conscious symptom experience and the hypothetical unconscious conflict related to the symptom, subliminal and supraliminal presentation of these words, signal analysis of event-related potentials obtained to the word presentations. Eight phobics and three patients suffering from pathological grief reactions served as subjects. A time-frequency ERP analysis revealed that (...) subjects' ERPs classified the unconscious conflict words better subliminally than supraliminally, while the reverse was true for the conscious symptom words = 2.82, p = .011). The relationship between frequency and latency revealed a similar mirror image pattern for the unconscious conflict and conscious symptom words . This method demonstrated that objective, brain-based evidence for unconscious conflict can be obtained. (shrink)

"Mr. Bloch has attempted to establish what he calls a 'literary anthropology.' The project is important and ambitious. It seems to me that Mr. Bloch has completely achieved this ambition." –Michel Foucault "Bloch's Study is a genuinely interdisciplinary one, bringing together elements of history, ethnology, philology, philosophy, economics and literature, with the undoubted ambition of generating a new synthesis which will enable us to read the Middle Ages in a different light. Stated simply, and in terms which do justice neither (...) to the density nor the subtlety of his argument, Bloch's thesis is this: that medieval society perceived itself in terms of a vertical mode of descent from origins. This model is articulated etymologically in medieval theories of grammar and language, and is consequently reflected in historical and theological writings; it is also latent in the genealogical structure of the aristocratic family as it began to be organized in France in the twelfth century, and is made manifest in such systems of signs as heraldry and the adoption of patronymns.... It is an ingenious and compelling synthesis which no medievalist, even on this side of the Atlantic, can afford to ignore." –Nicholas Mann, Times Literary Supplement. (shrink)