Abstract: The term “anti-psychiatry” was coined in 1912 by Dr. Bernhard Beyer, but only popularized by Dr. David Copper (and his critics) in the midst of a widespread cultural revolt against involuntary hospitalization and in-patient psychiatry during the 1960s and 1970s. However, with the demise of the old-fashioned mental hospital, and the rise of Big…
Abstract: The aim of my article is to analyze the concepts and phenomena of diagnosis and recognition, often considered to be semantically identical. While in psychiatric practice such an identity does not necessarily have adverse effects, in the anthropological and cultural domains identification of diagnosis and recognition may cause stigmatization, or other undesirable consequences. The article attempts…
Abstract: Human consciousness is a phenomenon that occurs not only in the brain but also in an external network, a symbolic system. This symbolic system is defined as an exocerebrum. The exocerebrum is a system of artificial cultural prostheses that substitute functions the brain cannot carry out through exclusively biological means. The exocerebrum is a symbolic system…
Abstract: To the question “What are we?”, the common-sense answer is “human beings”; but many philosophers prefer to say we are “persons”. This paper argues that the philosophical use of “person” (to mean, roughly, a conscious, rational agent) is problematic. It takes us away from the sound Aristotelian idea that our biological nature is essential…
Abstract: Modernity has made “person” a problematic term. By tracing the etymology of several common words whose origin pre-dates the scientific revolution – “intend,” “know,” “moment,” “deliberate,” and “true” – we can discern some of the sensibilities upon which a systematic recovery of the personal might best be based. DOWNLOAD PDF Keywords: etymology, person, pre-scientific…
Abstract: The radical reformulation of Western philosophy proposed by Emmanuel Lévinas is the move beyond knowledge and being to ethics as metaphysics. For Lévinas this is accomplished as an escape, an evasion of being. Lévinas saw the story of Western philosophy as a tale that Being emanated, created, etc. an illusory pluralism that it will eventually…
Abstract: The following paper seeks to examine whether, from the standpoint of a transcendental idealist, it is possible to have a phenomenology that can adequately disclose the nature and activity of person. First I establish that symbols are intuitive concretizations of the activity of person/Geist, and thus symbols are available to phenom- enological description. Then I raise…
Abstract: It seems uncontroversial that persons have a particular ontology, and a temporal ontology at that. Yet attempting to “unpack” the intimate relation between the being of a person and time often leaves one frustrated and perplexed. Both Edmund Husserl and Henri Bergson are explicitly concerned with the manner in which persons experience and understand time…
Abstract: Macmurray replaces the traditional philosophical standpoint of subject-as-thinker with self-as-agent, and only persons are agents. The unit of the personal is “I-and-you”; I become “I” when I distinguish myself from “not-I”, namely, “you”. Awareness of the negative begins in babyhood, as I learns I am dependent on a relationship with an Other who can fail to fulfil my needs. The…
Abstract: Usually philosophers worry about the existence of mind, or consciousness, or persons, or other difficult-to-explain phenomena. Having posited matter or nature, or fields, they wonder where can person or consciousness originate? This kind of thinking is backward. Only persons ask such questions. Persons exist. I turn the tables on the traditional problem of person by asking whether anything…