The Disintegration of Community analyzes the social and cultural writings of Jorge Portilla (1919−1963) and demonstrates the continued relevance of his thought to contemporary debates on the politics of social and cultural identity, the nature of community, and the political role of affect and moods. Sánchez and Gallegos address questions as timely today as they were for Portilla: What drives the impulse toward political nationalism? What sustains the myths that organize our political lives? Under what conditions do communities disintegrate? (...) An appendix offers original English translations of three of Portilla's fascinating and hitherto untranslated essays, including Portilla's 1952 essay, "The Spiritual Crisis of the United States.". (shrink)

The relationship between psychology and mysticism has gained a great deal of currency over the years. Various psychological models have provided theoretical foundations allowing the researchers to grasp profound varieties and nuances in mystical experiences across cultures and religious traditions. This has, in fact, broadened the canvass for mystical studies. The current paper attempts to carry out a psychological analysis of mystical experience of a character named Kimya in Muriel Maufroy’s novel “Rumi’s Daughter”. The study carries out an analysis of (...) how the mystic’s experience of the Divine can be translated in terms of a psychological process of personality disintegration initiated by a conflict, deconstruction of preconceived notions and beliefs and ultimately leading towards secondary integration of personality. Kazimierz Dabrowski’s theory of positive disintegration is employed as a framework to analyse her spiritual encounter. Through a minute textual analysis of the novel, the research reveals certain parallels between the process of personality development and mystical experience. It confirms the contention that the culmination of mystical union underlies psychological wellbeing and serenity on the part of mystic. The study also shows that mystics are those rare individuals who are capable of reaching the final level of personality development characterised by self-autonomy and higher level of consciousness. (shrink)

The article considers the problem of love and madness as opposite modes of human existence. Using the example of human interaction with artificial intelligence it has been analyzed from the point of view of the phenomenology of love and Ludwig Binswanger's Dasein analysis the reciprocal influence of madness and disintegration of intersubjectivity in the context of an anthropocrisis. It has been demonstrated that the full realization of a person is impossible in isolation from others, it is possible only in (...) relationships with others, the highest form of which is love. A human being is a born possibility of a "generalized We", his task is to realize this possibility in a direct meeting of "We". Only through "We" can Dasein achieve its fullest realization. Love is defined as the essential structure of the human, the "fundamental form" that structures the human being and its failure causes madness. It has been considered the hypothesis of L. Binswanger about the failure of love in a psychopathological state, in connection with the perception of others as objects and the consequent impossibility of creating "We" as being-in-the-world-together, and about the form of treatment, which consists in opening the possibility of "We". A hypothesis has been put forward that the forced external limitation of the realization of intentionality to "We" can also affect the narrowing of the world-project and lead to madness. (shrink)

Together again for the first time, Marx and Durkheim join forces in the pages of Disintegration: Bad Love, Collective Suicide, and the Idols of Imperial Twilight for a dialectical exploration of the moral economy of neoliberalism, animated, as it is not only by the capitalist chase for surplus value, but also by an immortal vortex of sacred powers. Classical sociology and psychoanalysis are reconstituted within Hegelian social ontology and dialectical method that differentiates between the ephemeral and free and the (...) eternal and fixed aspects of modern life. (shrink)

Both dilation and non-conglomerability have been alleged to conflict with a fundamental principle of Bayesian methodology that we call \textit{Good's Principle}: one should always delay making a terminal decision between alternative courses of action if given the opportunity to first learn, at zero cost, the outcome of an experiment relevant to the decision. In particular, both dilation and non-conglomerability have been alleged to permit or even mandate choosing to make a terminal decision in deliberate ignorance of relevant, cost-free information. Although (...) dilation and non-conglomerability share some similarities, some authors maintain that there are important differences between the two that warrant endorsing different normative positions regarding dilation and non-conglomerability. This article reassesses the grounds for treating dilation and non-conglomerability differently. Our analysis exploits a new and general characterization result for dilation to draw a closer connection between dilation and non-conglomerability. (shrink)

The notions of family and community disintegration, supposedly brought on by focus on children's rights, are only a form of moral panic.

The art of Simon Finn has always had a markedly temporal dynamic. Vast structures built and annihilated again and again across different media, their fragmentation across space and time simultaneously methodical and darkly chaotic. Roiling waters and eldritch surfaces held captive in their unrest. Finn’s works render cycles of construction and disintegration, of stasis and motion, in ways that shed light upon the underlying structures of our experience of time while shattering simplistic notions of linearity. This is nowhere more (...) apparent than in Instability, through which Finn allows us to explore the intertwining of personal and historical time, ancestral memory and radical futurity, artefactual form and temporal function. (shrink)

The enactive approach is becoming increasingly influential within the philosophy of cognition, to the extent that it is now one of the dominant models of embodied cognition—an umbrella term for a varied set of discourses sharing the view that our minds don’t just happen to be ‘in’ bodies, but are enabled, shaped and (at least partly) constituted by the specifics of our physicality. This chapter will argue that the rise of enactivism is particularly relevant to transhumanist discourses, and vice versa, (...) because their concerns intersect and conflict in vital ways. The discussion will use three core enactivist themes—organisational integrity, embodiment, and precarity—to draw out the kinds of tensions and intersections that enable enactivism and transhumanism to problematise one another. Enactivism defines life and cognition in terms of autonomy; that is, it posits that living systems generate and maintain themselves as porous yet bounded self-unities. This sets up a delicate balance—both for the enacting system and for enactivism itself—between the dual imperatives of adaptive self-creation and homeostasis. The system must change constantly in order to sustain itself, yet there is a limit to the system’s flexibility. Beyond a certain point, change means disintegration, and disintegration means death. This balance itself resonates within transhumanist discourses, in the tension between the promise of radical self-transformation and the concern about taking this too far. These discourses, however, also challenge enactivism’s potential to capture the full potential of the kinds of systems it describes. How do we determine the limits of morphological flexibility for cognisers as complex as ourselves? Are those limits fixed or malleable—and must integration always mean death, or can it facilitate redefinition? (shrink)

In this paper I consider a theory developed within cognitive neuropsychiatry to explain two delusions of misidentification, the Capgras and the Cotard delusions. These delusions are classified together with others in which the subject misidentifies persons, places or objects, including parts of her own body. Strictly speaking, the Cotard may not, at the level of content, be a delusion of misidentification, but I have described it as such because the theory I discuss treats it as sharing a causal and a (...) conceptual structure with the Capgras delusion. That theory, associated particularly with the work of Andy Young, raises a Wittgensteinian echo in its claim that, at the subpersonal, information-processing, level, perceptual recognition of familiar faces and scenes is laden with affect. Where affect is absent or distorted as a result of neurological damage the subject “feels” strange in the presence of familiar scenes or people. Thus Young and Leafhead in their discussion of the Cotard delusion: “What the patients often give as evidence of their nonexistence or death is that they don’t have proper feeling.”. (shrink)

Our aim here is to present a result that connects some approaches to justifying countable additivity. This result allows us to better understand the force of a recent argument for countable additivity due to Easwaran. We have two main points. First, Easwaran’s argument in favour of countable additivity should have little persuasive force on those permissive probabilists who have already made their peace with violations of conglomerability. As our result shows, Easwaran’s main premiss – the comparative principle – is strictly (...) stronger than conglomerability. Second, with the connections between the comparative principle and other probabilistic concepts clearly in view, we point out that opponents of countable additivity can still make a case that countable additivity is an arbitrary stopping point between finite and full additivity. (shrink)

This book focusses on conceptual shifts in the successive formulations of natural law theory by Aquinas, Suárez, Grotius, Pufendorf, and Finnis, and reveals the accumulation of problems, inherent in natural law and theory, which ultimately led to its demise.

Abstract‘Behavioural modernity’ isn’t what it used to be. Once conceived as an integrated package of traits demarcated by a clear archaeological signal in a specific time and place, it is now disparate, archaeologically equivocal, and temporally and spatially spread. In this paper we trace behavioural modernity’s empirical and theoretical developments over the last three decades, as surprising discoveries in the material record, as well the reappraisal of old evidence, drove increasingly sophisticated demographic, social and cultural models of behavioural modernity. We (...) argue, however, that some approaches to identifying and categorizing modernity have not kept up with this new picture. This is due to what we term ‘Rubicon expectations’: classificatory and interpretive practices which look for or assume clear demarcations in behavioural and cultural processes. We develop a philosophical account of ‘investigative disintegration’ to capture how our understanding of behavioural modernity has changed, and how Rubicon-based practices have become inadequate. Disintegration, in the form we analyse, occurs when scientists’ conception of a phenomenon shifts sufficiently to reshape an investigation’s epistemic structure. For behavioural modernity, the explanatory weight which once lay on identifying ‘switch-points’ in the innate suite of hominin cognitive capacities, lies now in understanding the social and demographic environments that were capable of sustaining and nourishing more complex material cultures. Finally, we argue that the phenomenon itself has not disintegrated to the point that we are left with no interesting explanandum: for all its mosaic, disparate nature, there are still good reasons for behavioural modernity to retain its central place in investigation of our species' origins. (shrink)

​In the wake of the extremely divisive 2016 presidential election, many US Americans are feeling deeply unsettled by the sense that the basic norms that govern life in our society are in a state of flux. How might we best describe and analyze the experience of living in a society that is so divided, a society whose very normative structure seems to be disintegrating? What problematic behaviors might arise in this situation? And how might we continue to work for positive (...) social change without further disrupting the normative order of our society? In this paper, I explore some insights into these issues that can be found in the work of Mexican phenomenologist Jorge Portilla, whose fascinating essays on cultural politics are just beginning to be translated into English. Portilla lived at a time in which his society’s normative structure was also in a state of flux. He argues that this state of normative disintegration generates a widely shared sense of zozobra—a profound anxiety that is not a psychological state but a state of existence, and that tends to provoke a number of defensive reactions that may be familiar to us today. I argue that Portilla's analysis of zozobra is a valuable resource for navigating the contemporary world.​. (shrink)

_Resumen:_ Este artículo explora los conflictos culturales que marcaron la desintegración del cristianismo bajo los desafíos de varios movimientos de Reforma. Rechazando la tradición católica, la reforma protestante propuso una nueva era basada en la liberación de la conciencia y la emancipación de la tradición. Causaría una agitación social sin precedentes, donde las nuevas libertades religiosas requerían protección por medio de la coerción secular. El posterior proceso para dotar de un carácter confesional a los territorios produjo nuevos modelos culturales con (...) pretensiones de tolerancia, pero también aumentó la probabilidad de guerra civil. Por último, los movimientos de Reforma crearían ideologías casi religiosas de naciones elegidas basadas en percepciones del tiempo inmanentes al mundo. Este ensayo termina con una reflexión sobre la ambivalencia de los fundamentos cristianos para el radicalismo colectivista e individualista de los movimientos seculares. (shrink)

The single most influential and widely accepted objection against any form of dualism, the belief that human beings are both body and soul, is the objection that dualism violates conservation laws in physics. The conservation laws objection against dualism posits that body and soul interaction is at best mysterious, and at worst impossible. While this objection has been both influential from the time of its initial formulation until present, this paper occupies itself with arguing that this objection is a fleeting (...) one, and has successful answers from both scientific and philosophical perspectives. It is to this end that I provide three groups of responses to the conservation laws objection. First, I outline responses which take the ‘laws of nature’ as the proper entry point into the discussion. Secondly, I provide an analysis of those who argue that contemporary quantum physical data requires that the objection itself involves scientifically unjustified premises. Finally, I layout a philosophically oriented answer which argues that the objection is linguistically problematic since its demands on the dualist are categorically fallacious. From these groups of answers, I conclude that while the conservation laws objection has been arguably the most widely accepted objection against dualism, the objection is without philosophical justification. (shrink)

In this paper I consider Derek Parfit’s attempt to respond to Rawls’ charge that utilitarianism ignores the distinction between persons. I proceed by arguing that there is a moderate form of reductionism about persons, one stressing the importance of what Parfit calls psychological connectedness, which can hold in different degrees both within one person and between distinct persons. In terms of this form of reductionism, against which Parfit’s arguments are ineffective, it is possible to resuscitate the Rawlsian charge that the (...) utilitarian maximizing approach to matters of distribution ignores something that is of moral relevance, viz., the difference between the degrees of connectedness that hold between different stages of the same person, and between that person and his nearest and dearest, and the lack of connectedness between that person and distant others who may be benefitted at his cost. To Parfit’s charge that reductionism sees the differences between persons as being ‘less deep’, I reply that the sense in which they are less deep is not at odds with their retaining their original moral importance, perhaps now better understood. (shrink)

A major and brilliant work of Marxist theory, admirably rigorous, clear-minded and well-researched.

Deindustrialization is a major burden on workers’ health in many countries, calling for theoretically informed sociological analysis. Here, we present a novel neoclassical sociological synthesis of the lived experience of deindustrialization. We conceptualize industry as a social institution whose disintegration has widespread implications for the social fabric. Combining Durkheimian and Marxian categories, we show that deindustrialization generates ruptures in economic production, which entail job and income loss, increased exploitation, social inequality, and the disruption of services. These ruptures spill over (...) to the field of social reproduction, generating material deprivation, job strain, fatalism, increased domestic workload, anomie, community disintegration, and alienation. These ruptures in social reproduction are sources of psychosocial stress, through which deindustrialization gets embodied as ill health and dysfunctional health behavior. We substantiate this framework through the extensive qualitative thematic analysis of 82 life history interviews in Hungary’s rust belt. (shrink)

PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION THIS work, which is now for the first time presented to the American public, was written when Existentialism had ...

Introduction. The emerging paradigm of socio- cultural development of the Russian Federation’s local communities is conditioned by the trans- formation of production and economic practices based on the concept of a multi-layered economy and multifunctionality emerging under the pressure of globalization on the development of localities. The desire to preserve and maintain socio-cultural traditions, customs, and values is an axiological guideline for developing local communities. The growing social vulnerability of communities creates certain conditions for losing identity, ability for self-identification, and (...) leads to the destruction of socio-cultural identity. The purpose of the study. The article analyzes the problem of socio-cultural evolution when modern- izing production and economic activity generating factors causing the transformation of culture and sociality of local communities, thus determining the processes of integration and disintegration of socioculture. Methods. Sociocultural analysis provides an op- portunity to reveal the main directions of sociocul- tural development of local communities, to explain the essence of interaction, mutual influence and unification of local communities into an interactive socio-cultural space with compatible formations and components. Scientific novelty of the research. The author dis- plays the models of culture and sociality transfor- mation reflecting the processes of modification of the local communities’ lifestyle that determine the transition from the paradigm of sustainable tradi- tional socio-cultural development to the paradigm of innovative transformations. Results. The problem of sociocultural integration and disintegration is associated with globalization processes that generate contradictions of globality and locality. The processes of integration/disin- tegration of the local communities’ sociocultural development are conditioned by the culture and sociality evolution of the constructing model of socio-cultural behavior. The pressure of globaliza- tion plunges the socio-cultural space into a state of diffusion, instability. Historically established traditions, norms, values are transformed into intermediate forms that help to adapt to new living conditions, neutralize the negative consequences of modernization. Territorial sociocultural formations are being formed, within the framework of which attempts are being made to preserve the tradition- al socio-cultural environment. Conclusions. The dynamics of sociocultural pro- cesses determines the emergence of multidirec- tional poles of sociocultural life: from the desire to preserve the traditional socio-cultural environment, to the full acceptance of the meaningful qualities of liberal socio-culture, which destroys the sociocul- tural identity of local communities. (shrink)

(1996). Integration and disintegration trends in European economic development. The European Legacy: Vol. 1, Fourth International Conference of the International Society for the study of European Ideas, pp. 474-478.

The spread of liberal individualism to the family is often portrayed as deeply inimical to the welfare of children and young people. In this view, the family is the bastion of the private and the antithesis of the contractual, rights-oriented model that underpins public life. This chapter examines that proposition critically.

(1996). Integration and disintegration trends in European agriculture. The European Legacy: Vol. 1, Fourth International Conference of the International Society for the study of European Ideas, pp. 479-484.

O trumpismo nos Estados Unidos, assim como outras erupções populistas ao redor do mundo, demonstra que valores fundamentais herdados pelo Iluminismo são muito menos seguros no Ocidente do que fora presumido. Estima pela racionalidade e conhecimento objetivo e o respeito pela liberdade individual vem sendo enfraquecidos pela dissolução da sociedade em facções intransigentes. O abandono de princípios centrais que por muitas gerações serviram como base comum para a civilização Ocidental, fragmentou a sociedade Ocidental em campos aparentemente irreconciliáveis, não mais sujeitos (...) a uma mente comunal compartilhada. Como pode suceder que uma sociedade governada por uma mente social compartilhada, e já estabelecida de longa data, sumariamente se fragmenta em campos, de opinião muito diferentes, claramente sob a influência de princípios discrepantes? Seriam a desintegração de ideias e a dissolução da mente, consequências inevitáveis de conteúdo mental proliferante, de entropia intelectual talvez até inerente? Guiado pela semiótica de Peirce e pela filosofia da mente, e utilizando a chacoalhada provocada pelo Trump na vida social e político dos EUA como exemplo ilustrativo de um cismo cultural profundo, considerarei algumas possíveis causas estruturais de um crescente sectarismo e abordarei as condições semióticas que explicariam a desintegração da mente social. (shrink)

Guy Debord, a key member of the avant garde movement known as the Situationist International, is best known for his concept of the society of the spectacle. Conceived in the sixties, the concept had at the time two variants, the concentrated and diffuse. Debord used these in those cold war times to describe the regimes of the image in both east and west under the same rubric. Later, he conceived of the rise of the integrated spectacle. Based on his experience (...) of France and Italy in the seventies, this concept explained regimes of the image that combined elements form both sides of the cold war divide, threading together the commodity fetishism of the west with the opaque actions of the state form the Soviet east. But what if a third period could be discerned, of what might be called the disintegrating spectacle? This concept might point the way to an analysis and critique of the image under twenty-first century conditions, where everyday life is super-saturated by the commodity, by digital media, and by the unravelling of the political form of social organization. (shrink)

The study of sleep and wakefulness can inform debates about the nature of consciousness. We argue that sleep and wakefulness fall along a multidimensional continuum and that inconsistencies and paradoxes with the accounts put forth by Merker et al. and Tononi can be understood in terms of a pervasive false dichotomy between these two states.

Benevolenski and Kortunov discuss the array of moral, ethnic, and nationalistic questions emerging after the disintegration of the Soviet Union. They suggest that the cause for the collapse was not poor economic performance, but a moral bankruptcy the people could no longer endure.

This dissertation develops and defends a conception of sexualized violence that is rooted in philosophical theories of violence, and at the same time helps us understand the way that violence is connected to various kinds of oppression, namely, the oppression of women. It argues that sexualized violence, which is typically theorized through related notions of physical violation and psychological trauma, is best understood in terms of its moral quality. Sexualized violence against women is fundamentally a moral problem insofar as it (...) disrupts victims' ability to grow and develop in relationships with others, to conceive and meet responsibilities to and emerging from those relationships, and well as the ability to challenge unjust social norms, practices and institutions that in part constitute who we are. This moral quality of violence is investigated through an engagement with the concept of moral integrity, arguing that integrity is grounded in authenticity, understood through the existential-phenomenological tradition. Integrity-as-authenticity paves the way for understanding sexualized violence as a form of moral disintegration, where the dynamism and flexibility required of authentic selfhood is frustrated. Understanding violence and victimization in this way, I argue for a robust notion of advocacy as part of our response to victims. Advocacy--giving voice--will require the development of new concepts and language adequate to the experiences of victims, it will also require the cultivation of spaces and relationships where victims can speak, and it may require that we lend our voices to and for victims. (shrink)

Scaffolded Minds offers a novel account of cognitive scaffolding and its significance for understanding mental disorders. The book is part of the growing philosophical engagement with empirically informed philosophy of mind, which studies the interfaces between philosophy and cognitive science. It draws on two recent shifts within empirically informed philosophy of mind: the first, toward an intensified study of the embodied mind; and the second, toward a study of the disordered mind that acknowledges the convergence of the explanatory concerns of (...) psychiatry and interdisciplinary inquiries into the mind. The book sets out to accomplish a dual task: theoretical mapping of cognitive scaffolding; and the application/calibration of fine-grained philosophical distinctions to empirical research. It introduces the notion of actively scaffolded cognition (ASC) and offers a taxonomy that distinguishes between intrasomatic and extrasomatic scaffolding. It then shows that ASC offers a productive framework for considering certain characteristic features of mental disorders, focusing on altered bodily experience and social cognition deficits. (shrink)

In this paper I consider a theory developed within cognitive neuropsychiatry to explain two delusions of misidentification, the Capgras and the Cotard delusions. These delusions are classified together with others in which the subject misidentifies persons, places or objects, including parts of her own body. Strictly speaking, the Cotard may not, at the level of content, be a delusion of misidentification, but I have described it as such because the theory I discuss treats it as sharing a causal and a (...) conceptual structure with the Capgras delusion. That theory, associated particularly with the work of Andy Young, raises a Wittgensteinian echo in its claim that, at the subpersonal, information-processing, level, perceptual recognition of familiar faces and scenes is laden with affect. Where affect is absent or distorted as a result of neurological damage the subject “feels” strange in the presence of familiar scenes or people. Thus Young and Leafhead in their discussion of the Cotard delusion: “What the patients often give as evidence of their nonexistence or death is that they don’t have proper feeling.”. (shrink)

This essay shows that Jean-Luc Nancy's reconceptualization of corporeality in such texts as L'Intrus and Corpus can be an important ally to feminist theories of body. I introduce Nancy's ontology and argue that his rejection of the unified, integrated body of humanist discourses in favor of dis-integrated bodies constituted by multiple alterities and his consequent reinterpretation of body as a "being-exscribed" begin the task of thinking bodies beyond traditional dualisms and their ahistorical and rationalist frameworks. I then address three potential (...) criticisms of Nancy's work and suggest that though there may be reasons to move cautiously in adopting the framework he provides, his work harbors resources directly beneficial to critiques of prevailing forms of gender normativity. (shrink)

Interdisciplinary integration has fundamental limitations. This is not sufficiently realized in science and in philosophy. Concerning scientific theories there are many examples of pseudo-integration which should be unmasked by elementary philosophical analysis. For example, allegedly over-arching theories of stress which are meant to unite biology and psychology, upon analysis, turn out to represent terminological rather than substantive unity. They should be replaced by more specific, local theories. Theories of animal orientation, likewise, have been formulated in unduly general terms. A natural (...) history approach is more suitable for the study of animal orientation. The tendency to formulate overgeneral theories is also present in evolutionary biology. Philosophy of biology can only deal with these matters if it takes a normative turn. Undue emphasis on interdisciplinary integration is a modern variant of the old unity of science ideal. The replacement of the ideal by a better one is an important challenge for the philosophy of science. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the revision of the validity of opposing the concepts of social integration as a consensus and social disintegration as a conflict. The methodological basis is the rethinking of the back-ground assumptions of influential socio-philosophical theories proposed by T. J. Bernard. It is shown that along with the understanding of social integration as order and consolidation, and disintegration as conflict and deviation, there are also other interpretations in the structure of socio-philosophical thought. In some (...) of these interpretations, social integration characterizes ideal, not real, societies and is not related to social practice, while in others, social integration immanently includes a disintegration process. (shrink)

This essay shows that Jean-Luc Nancy's reconceptualization of corporeality in such texts as L'Intrus and Corpus can be an important ally to feminist theories of body. I introduce Nancy's ontology and argue that his rejection of the unified, integrated body of humanist discourses in favor of dis-integrated bodies constituted by multiple alterities and his consequent reinterpretation of body as a "being-exscribed" begin the task of thinking bodies beyond traditional dualisms and their ahistorical and rationalist frameworks. I then address three potential (...) criticisms of Nancy's work and suggest that though there may be reasons to move cautiously in adopting the framework he provides, his work harbors resources directly beneficial to critiques of prevailing forms of gender normativity. (shrink)