The "Essentials of Gestalt Theoretical Psychotherapy" offer for the first time in English an insight into the guiding ideas of this integrative psychotherapy method, which is consistently anchored in Gestalt psychology (and in this respect also differs substantially from most streams of Gestalt therapy, with which it should not be confused). The anthology includes ten contributions by authors from Austria, Italy, Germany and the USA. These deal with fundamental questions and concepts of any psychotherapy: The role and meaning of consistency (...) in practical life and in psychotherapy; the question of human epistemic possibilities and an epistemology appropriate for psychotherapy; the personality theory of Gestalt Theoretical Psychotherapy; the basic principles of therapeutic relationship and practice; the role of emotions in the example of phenomenal causality of feelings; the task of diagnostics in Gestalt Theoretical Psychotherapy; a clinical example related to anorexia; Gestalt psychological viewpoints for therapy progress; the role of relational determination in intrapsychic and interpersonal experience. (shrink)

Essays in Memory of Richard Helgerson: Laureations brings together new essays by leading literary scholars of the British and European middle ages and early modern period who have been influenced by the groundbreaking scholarship of Richard Helgerson. The contributors evince the ongoing impact of Helgerson's work in critical debates including those of nationalism, formal analysis, and literary careerism.

Academic freedom and tenure, both cherished institutions of higher education, are currently under attack by many both outside and within the academy. Richard DeGeorge argues that they can be defended on ethical grounds only if they are joined with appropriate accountability, publicly articulated and defended standards, and conscientious enforcement of these standards by academic institutions and the members of the academic community.

Objectives:Social isolation is increasing in aging societies and several studies have shown a relation with worse cognition in old age. However, less is known about the association in the oldest-old (85+); the group that is at highest risk for both social isolation and dementia. Methods:Analyses were based on follow-up 5 to 9 of the longitudinal German study on aging, cognition, and dementia in primary care patients (AgeCoDe) and the study on needs, health service use, costs, and health-related quality of life (...) in a large sample of oldest-old primary care patients (AgeQualiDe), a multi-center population-based prospective cohort study. Measurements included the Lubben Social Network Scale (LSNS-6), with a score below 12 indicating social isolation, as well as the Mini-Mental Status Examination (MMSE) as an indicator of cognitive function. Results:Dementia-free study participants (n = 942) were M = 86.4 (SD = 3.0) years old at observation onset, 68.2% were women. One third (32.3%) of them were socially isolated. Adjusted linear hybrid mixed effects models revealed significantly lower cognitive function in individuals with smaller social networks (β = 0.5, 95% CI = 0.3-0.7, p <.001). Moreover, changes in an individual's social network size were significantly associated with cognitive changes over time (β = 0.2, 95% CI = 0.1-0.4, p =.003), indicating worse cognitive function with shrinking social networks. Conclusion:Social isolation is highly prevalent among oldest-old individuals, being a risk factor for decreases in cognitive function. Consequently, it is important to maintain a socially active lifestyle into very old age. Likewise, this calls for effective ways to prevent social isolation. (shrink)

ObjectiveThe study aim was to assess the psychometric properties of the ASRS in the Czech Republic. Although this screening tool is now frequently used, its validity has not been assessed among the general Czech population.MethodsThe ASRS and WURS were administered online to the general Czech population. We performed confirmatory and exploratory factor analyses.ResultsFor the ASRS, confirmatory factor analysis showed good fit for the screening part. For the symptom list, the fit was good according to the SRMR, acceptable according to the (...) RMSEA, and slightly below acceptable according to the CFI. For the WURS, the results showed SRMR = 0.06, RMSEA = 0.07, and CFI = 0.92.ConclusionThe Czech translation of the ASRS is appropriate and has acceptable psychometric properties. However, we strongly recommend only using this tool together with clinical judgment. (shrink)

Model-theoretic concepts of saturation and categoricity are studied in the context of accessible categories. Accessible categories which are categorical in a strong sense are related to categories of $M$-sets ($M$ is a monoid). Typical examples of such categories are categories of $\lambda$-saturated objects.

History and the philosophy of science have played a very important role in dialectical materialism; their results have been destined to support the correctness of the ideas of Marxist philosophers, especially in their application in historical materialism.From this point of view, the circumstances of the origin of the works of the Marxist classics cannot be neglected: Engels wrote hisDialectics in Nature in the period of classical physics, and Lenin published hisMaterialism and Empirio-Criticism at the beginning of the 20th century when (...) our modern physics first began: shortly before the publication of Lenin's book, Röntgen and Becquerel discovered new kinds of radiation, Balmer published his ideas concerning the regularity of the hydrogen spectrum, Plank wrote his first articles about the elementary quantum and Einstein published his three famous articles (1905). (shrink)

Endurantism, as opposed to perdurantism, is supposed to be the intuitive view. But the ‘endurantist intuition’ – roughly, that objects persist through time by being numerically identical and wholly located at all times at which they exist – is behind more than just endurantism. Indeed, it plays an important role in the motivation of some theories about the passage of time, and some theories about the nature of the subject. As we shall see, the endurantist intuition is often taken in (...) these cases to be a reason, or at least a motivation, to endorse one or the other of these metaphysical theories. Sometimes, it is even said to constitute a basis for an argument in their favour. In this article, I show that such an appeal to this ‘endurantist intuition’ is misleading and wrong. I do not deny that there is an intuition of this kind, but I deny that it can play any philosophically significant role as a reason – and even less as a basis for an argument – in defending metaphysical theories such as endurantism, dualism, or the A-theory. (shrink)

The successful early acquisition of reading literacy represents a crucial learning process determining the further course of academic development (Stanovich, 2009). During this process, interactions between children and their proximal social environment are of utmost importance. Therefore, we introduce a systemic framework for the development of learning potential (e.g., Mudrak et al., 2015, 2019, 2019b; Ziegler & Stoeger, 2017) and explore the interactions between the social and motivational processes associated with reading literacy development in school-age children. We base our analysis (...) on a representative Czech sample of fourth-grade pupils involved in the Progress in International Reading Literacy study (PIRLS, Martin et al., 2016). On the basis of the systemic framework, we hypothesized hierarchical relationships among family socioeconomic status, related developmental resources (including parental support, expectations, and reading resources), children’s reading motivation (including reading engagement and reading confidence), and manifested learning outcomes (including school grades and reading competence). We implemented three structural equation models to test the hypothesized relationships. The first model tested the direct effect of developmental resources on reading competence. The second model included the motivational variables as mediators between resources and competence. The third model included school grades as mediators between resources and motivational variables. Our analyses indicated the good fit of the proposed models. The final model explained 37.8 % of the variance in children’s school grades and 46.5 % of the variance in reading literacy test scores (compared to 34.8 % in the first model). Moreover, parental socioeconomic status was strongly associated with parental expectations, which were associated with reading confidence, partially through the effect of parental expectations on children’s school grades. Reading confidence was the main predictor of reading literacy within the model, followed by the direct effects of parental resources. The results illustrate complex processes through which the family environment affects the development of learning competencies such as reading literacy by providing children with the relevant social and material resources associated with their motivation and school outcomes. We discuss some of the reasons that these relationships may take place and consider their implications for educational practice. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 8.4 (2001) 323-326 [Access article in PDF] The Tacit Dimension Thomas Fuchs Thirty years after its appearance, Blankenburg's "Psychopathology of common sense" has not lost its relevance. In my commentary I will try to illustrate the fruitfulness of his approach by pointing to some connections with the phenomenology of the body as well as with recent memory and infant research.As Blankenburg himself indicates, the (...) notion of common sense developed by a shift of meaning from the classical sensus communis and thus has its original basis in the sensual-bodily experience. By the koinè aísthesis, Aristoteles meant a central sense organ integrating all single modalities of sensation (which he localized in the heart). In German physiology and psychiatry of the nineteenth century, the sensus communis was still translated as "Gemeingefühl" ("common feeling") or "cenesthesia" (Fuchs 1995). This term denoted the inner, proprioceptive bodily sensations, but also an original unity of the senses, which has been rediscovered by recent infant research as intermodal sensory perception. The affection of the body was thus regarded as the common basis of all sensation.Looking on this track for a bodily basis of the common sense, we find it in the habitual structure of the lived-body as analysed by Merleau-Ponty (1945). The body is the primary "matter-of-course," namely, the tacitly functioning medium of our everyday being-in-the-world prior to any subject-object split. The body schema, in Merleau-Ponty's view, is not only a system of familiar units of movement or "kinetic melodies," it also incorporates the surrounding things, tools, and spaces that are familiar to us and that we "inhabit." Thus, the musician "does not only manipulate the instrument like a separate object, but lives in it like a limb and inhabits the expressive musical space it opens" (Behnke 1997). But for Merleau-Ponty, the body schema is also the basis of "intercorporeity," i.e., a prepersonal sphere of reciprocal comportment and understanding prior to any explicit consensus and symbolic communication. In this sphere of elementary contact, the "atmospheric" senses play a major role: The sense of smell (as shown, e.g., by the expression "to scent treason" or in German, "jemand nicht riechen können" [not be able to "smell" or stand someone]) as well as the sense of taste whose ambiguous meaning, mentioned by Blankenburg, points to the bodily basis of the feeling for what is suitable, decent, or aesthetically pleasing. Even the designation of homo sapiens that we give to ourselves is derived from the latin sapere (to taste/to know), and thus shows that the knowledge characteristic for man is not an explicit one, but an intuitive, implicit knowing or "feel" for his surroundings, or as Kant says, an "aesthetic rather than intellectual judgment" (cited by Blankenburg).Polanyi (1967) has analysed this knowledge at the roots of common sense as "tacit knowledge." It is based on processes of Gestalt formation that enable us to grasp unified wholes through their constituting elements without still being aware of the latter. Thus, we understand the facial expression of others immediately but cannot tell from which details. Or we know how [End Page 323] to waltz without knowing the single movements or being able to explain it. Tacit knowledge implies all the taken-for-granted that we have forgotten once it has become our second nature and part of our bodily habits. It is mainly based on the neuronal coupling of single sensori-motor units by repeated perception or action. This unconscious knowing has only recently come to be explored by psychology under the heading of "implicit" or "procedural memory" (Schacter 1987, 1996). It contains familiar styles or "melodies" of moving, perceiving, and being-with-others in which our whole bodily and emotional experience is engaged. There is an atmospheric, "felt" quality about them that cannot be analysed into single elements. Implicit knowledge may, therefore, never be wholly expressed by words—it is only realized in the concrete situation. It may only be circumscribed by expressions such as "how it feels...," "how it is...," e.g., how it is... (shrink)

During the Czechoslovak normalization era (roughly from the 1970s to the 1980s), the Czech lawyer Vladimír Čermák, who later became a Justice of the newly established Constitutional Court of the Czech Republic after the breakdown of the Communist regime, authored a monumental piece called The Question of Democracy. Although this ambitious work has no equal in the Czech context, no attention has been paid to it in the English-speaking world. The present article aims to fill this gap by analyzing the (...) most original aspects of Čermák’s political thought. First, I present Greek tragedy, Plato, and Augustine as the main influences on his thought, which was further shaped by Čermák’s experience with the First Czechoslovak Republic and the Communist era. Second, I show that the most important category permeating all of his intellectual project is the principle of polarity, combined with the concept of polémos as derived from Greek tragedy. Third, I focus on the consensually anchored value order of society, which is created through an interplay between positive and negative forces. Čermák’s idea that all law must be measured against the value order has deeply influenced the value-based jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court. Finally, I position Čermák’s thought in the context of contemporary political theory, arguing that the contrast with the work of the radical political theorist Chantal Mouffe is particularly illuminating. Even though Čermák and Mouffe share a similar attitude to democracy—in that the primacy of strife renders universal rational consensus impossible—I maintain that Čermák’s theory, due to its emphasis on the categories of good and evil, can be more usefully described as “secular Augustinianism”. (shrink)

The articles in this volume offer a fresh perspective on the important role of the concept of law (lex) in the moral and political philosophy of the 'School of Salamanca'.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 12.3 (2005) 195-198 [Access article in PDF] Implicit and Explicit Temporality Thomas Fuchs Keywords implicit/explicit temporality, embodiment, intersubjectivity, desynchronization, melancholia, schizophrenia Since Minkowski (1970), Strauss (1966), v. Gebsattel (1954), and Tellenbach (1980), temporality has been a main subject of phenomenological psychiatry. Drawing on philosophical concepts of Bergson, Husserl, and Heidegger, these authors have analyzed psychopathologic deviations of time experience, mainly from an individual point (...) of view, for example, as a slowing down or inhibition of lived time in depression or obsessive–compulsive disorder. Their analyses are still most valuable today, but may be carried further by introducing concepts such as embodied and intersubjective temporality into psychopathology. Martin Wyllie (2005), by opening up a wide scope of temporal phenomena and related concepts, makes a laudable effort to contribute to such a progress.In my commentary, I would like to propose a distinction that is suggested by much of Wyllie's analysis and may shed further light on psychopathology, namely between implicit and explicit temporality. If we look at a child while obliviously playing with his toys, lost to the world, we may assume that there is no sense of the time passing. Lived time runs with the movement of life, implicit in the child's experience of being engaged in his play and directed toward his goals. It "unfolds through the processes of bodily activity" (Wyllie 2005). Future and past do not stand out against the pure presence of "becoming." This implicit mode of temporality is retrieved every time that we are absorbed in what we are doing, and may even reach the climax of "flow experiences" (Csikszentmihalyi 1988) where the sense of time is lost in unimpeded, fluent performance.However, this changes when a gap arises between need and satisfaction, desire and fulfillment, or plan and execution. Now the future appears as a "not yet" or "yet to come," experienced as the temporality of awaiting, striving, or longing for. Time is felt as passing by and refusing the desired fulfillment; it becomes conscious or explicit. A similar gap arises between the present and something irretrievably lost, bringing the past to consciousness as a "no more." Again time is experienced explicitly, but now as moving on relentlessly and separating us from the lost object. The gap to the past may not be bridged any more: this is the temporality of missing or mourning. In both cases, explicit time arises as a negation of implicit or lived time (here my use of the term is a bit divergent from Wyllie's); it is experienced as a "not yet" or "no more," often with a component of displeasure or suffering (Fuchs 2001a, 2003)."Implicit" versus "explicit time" thus come near to another distinction well known in phenomenology, namely between the "lived" and [End Page 195] the "corporal body" (Leib versus Koerper). The first term refers to the body functioning in the tacit mode, as the medium of everyday performance. The second term points to the body as turning into the object of attention, for example, when it puts up resistance to our purposes, or is used as an instrument deliberately (Fuchs 2001b). In fact, implicit temporality and tacit performance of the body are nearly synonymous: Lived time may be regarded as a function of the lived body, opened up by its potentiality and capability. The more we are engaged in our tasks, the more we forget time as well as the body; we are, as it were, "inside time." On the other hand, in explicit temporality the body often appears in the corporal or explicit mode as well. For example, when falling ill, we experience our body no more as a tacit medium but rather as an object or obstacle, while we notice the slowing down of time and may even feel excluded from the movement of life. Thus, embodiment and temporality have a parallel background–foreground structure.I now try to carry these considerations further by including the intersubjective dimension of time. In an earlier paper, I describe the attunement of the living being to its environment as a continuous synchronization on the biological as... (shrink)

Finitary quasivarieties are characterized categorically by the existence of colimits and of an abstractly finite, regularly projective regular generator G. Analogously, infinitary quasivarieties are characterized: one drops the assumption that G be abstractly finite. For (finitary) varieties the characterization is similar: the regular generator is assumed to be exactly projective, i.e., hom(G, –) is an exact functor. These results sharpen the classical characterization theorems of Lawvere, Isbell and other authors.

The classical liberal approach to deregulation is based on the consecutive elimination of state regulatory activities and their substitution by competitive market structure. Increasing competition accompanied with decreasing arbitrary state agencies’ interventions will undoubtedly cultivate the behaviour of market agents and bring benefits to consumers.The classical liberal approach to deregulation is incompatible with the EU deregulation model, which in case of network industries is still based on the permanent existence of regulatory agencies, Third-Party-Access, public service liability, centralized control of investments (...) and the negative reciprocity. The adoption of these principals will at least delay deregulation process in transition economies but will likely preserve the cartel structure on the utility markets.Economics of regulation and implicitly economics of deregulation is a product of the Chicago School of Economics. Since current “deregulation process” leads to tighter regulation, the adequate term for it should be the reregulation.L’approche libérale classique de la réglementation repose sur l’élimination de la réglementation étatique et leur substitution par des structures marchandes concurrentielles. Une concurrence accrue et une diminution des interventions arbitraires de l’état ne pourront que modifier le comportement des agents sur le marché et engendrer des bénéfices pour les consommateurs.L’approche de la déréglementation du libéralisme classique est incompatible avec le modèle de déréglementation de l’Union Européenne : dans le cas des industries en réseau, ce dernier demeure fondé sur l’existence continue d’agences de réglementation, la responsabilité du service public, le contrôle centralisé des investissements et la réciprocité négative. L’adoption de ces principes aura pour effet au moins de retarder le processus de déréglementation dans les économies en transition et probablement aussi de préserver la structure cartellisée des marchés de services publics.L’économie de la réglementation, et par implication, l’économie de la déréglementation est une contribution émanant de l’Ecole d’Economie de Chicago. Parce que les “processus de déréglemen- tation” en vigueur induisent des réglementations plus drastiques, l’expression appropriée devrait plutôt être la re-réglementation. (shrink)

We study search problems and reducibilities between them with known or potential relevance to bounded arithmetic theories. Our primary objective is to understand the sets of low complexity consequences of theories Si2 and Ti2 for a small i, ideally in a rather strong sense of characterization; or, at least, in the standard sense of axiomatization. We also strive for maximum combinatorial simplicity of the characterizations and axiomatizations, eventually sufficient to prove conjectured separation results. To this end two techniques based on (...) the Herbrand's theorem are developed. They characterize/axiomatize Σb1-consequences of Σb2-definable search problems, while the method based on the more involved concept of characterization is easier and gives more transparent results. This method yields new proofs of Buss' witnessing theorem and of the relation between PLS and Σb1, and also an axiomatization of Σb1. (shrink)

Consistent application of dialectical materialism leads Marxism-Leninism to the assertion that matter is infinite in its properties. However, the history of physics shows that the various levels of matter possess geometric dimensions that originate at the lowest level and continue through the others. The search for absolute natural constants — which Planck called the most pleasant task of physics — shows the conviction of the physicists that there is a limit to the parameters, a limit beyond which matter is no (...) longer divisible. (shrink)

Based especially on The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) the text tries to delimitate contours of „Durkheim’s epistemology“ (i. e. relatively coherent group of assertions). It argues that the deep „objective“ of this connection is to ensure autonomy and specific field for the new-born scientific province, sociology, through the claim that this contribution can solve and actually does solve (from the French sociologist’s point of view) „traditional epistemological hardships“ into which philosophical empiricism and rationalism fall. Durkheim’s sociological deduction of (...) categories (instead of transcendental deduction), as Ernst Cassirer calls it, is presented in contrast to the „holy positivists interpretations“ of his writing, exclusively intentional conceptualizations of action and notion formation, and correspondence theory of truth. The text concludes that despite noticeable inconsistencies Durkheim’s suggestions provide inspiring material even for today’s sociological production in this field. (shrink)

Deschamps, Léger Marie,1716-1774; enlightenment; utopias; art and philosophy; philosophy, modern; 18th century.

If S, T are stationary subsets of a regular uncountable cardinal κ, we say that S reflects fully in $T, S , if for almost all α ∈ T (except a nonstationary set) S ∩ α is stationary in α. This relation is known to be a well-founded partial ordering. We say that a given poset P is realized by the reflection ordering if there is a maximal antichain $\langle X_p; p \in P\rangle$ of stationary subsets of $\operatorname{Reg}(\kappa)$ so that (...) $\forall p, q \in P \forall S \subseteq X_p, T \subseteq X_q \text{stationary}: (S We prove that if $V = L\lbrack\overset{\rightarrow\mathscr{U}}\rbrack, o^\mathscr{U} (\kappa) = \kappa^{++}$ , and P is an arbitrary well-founded poset of cardinality ≤ κ + then there is a generic extension where P is realized by the reflection ordering on κ. (shrink)