David Levine and Mathew Bowker explore cultural and political trends organized around the conviction that the world we live in is a dangerous place to be, that it is dominated by hate and destruction, and that in it our primary task is to survive by carrying on a life-long struggle against hostile forces. Their method involves the analysis of public fantasies to reveal their hidden meanings. The central fantasy explored is the fantasy of a destroyed world, which appears (...) most commonly in the form of post-apocalyptic and dystopian narratives. Their special concern in the book is with defenses against the painful consequences of the dominance of this fantasy in the inner world, especially defenses involving the use of guilt to assure that something can be done to repair the destroyed world. Topics explored include: the formation of internal fortresses and their projection into the world outside, forms of guilt including bystander guilt and survivor guilt, the loss of and search for home, and manic forms of reparation. (shrink)

In this book, David Levine explores the unknown self. The unknown self is the self existing as a potential to become something yet to be determined. The shape our personalities and life experiences take depends on a process. At the outset of this process, the self is, in a sense, a stranger; both to us and to others. The more this is the case, the greater the openness of the process of self-formation to a kind of freedom, which (...) is the freedom from predetermination of its outcome. In exploring this process, the book considers such topics as: the nature of inner freedom and its relationship to deliberation and choice; stranger anxiety and its connection to group dynamics and social connection; the internal factors that enable us to make the decisions that shape our lives and through our actions realise the ends embedded in our decisions; how our memories shape our choices and the lives we lead that result from them; what makes it possible for us to live comfortably with and depend on people we do not know; concern for the welfare of strangers and how our welfare can be secure in a world where others do not care about us or us about them. (shrink)

Throughout the history of psychoanalysis, the study of creativity and fine art has been a special concern. _Psychoanalytic Studies of Creativity, Greed and Fine Art: Making Contact with the Self_ makes a distinct contribution to the psychoanalytic study of art by focusing attention on the relationship between creativity and greed. This book also focuses attention on factors in the personality that block creativity, and examines the matter of the self and its ability to be present and exist as the essential (...) element in creativity. Using examples primarily from visual art_ David Levine_ explores the subjects of creativity, empathy, interpretation and thinking through a series of case studies of artists, including Robert Irwin, Ad Reinhardt, Susan Burnstine, and Mark Rothko. _Psychoanalytic Studies of Creativity, Greed and Fine Art_ explores the highly ambivalent attitude of artists toward making their presence known, an ambivalence that is evident in their hostility toward interpretation as a way of knowing. This is discussed with special reference to Susan Sontag’s essay on the subject of interpretation. Psychoanalytic Studies of Creativity, Greed and Fine Art contributes to a long tradition of psychoanalytically influenced writing on creativity including the work of Deri, Kohut, Meltzer, Miller and Winnicott among others. It will be of interest to psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists, historians and theorists of art. (shrink)

What is the root cause of ethical failure? Why is preoccupation with ethics more a part of the problem than a part of the solution? What makes ethical conduct a natural expression of who we are? What enables us to be ourselves in our relations with others? Ethical failure has become a significant concern in public life, in organizations and in educational institutions. The Capacity for Ethical Conduct explores how qualities of character and personality either make ethical conduct possible for (...) the individual or foster ethical failure. David Levine discusses how ethical conduct is a special way of relating to others, one that secures respect for their integrity by assuring that what they do can express who they are. He argues that this special way of relating to others results not from knowledge of, or a stated commitment to, rules, norms and values, but from the way we experience ourselves, especially from our ability to make a positive emotional investment in being and having a self. Traditionally, emphasis on the importance of values and ethics in shaping conduct tends to be connected to the need to find fault in self and others, fostering an atmosphere where the self is put at risk in its relations to others. This means that an excessive emphasis on ethics, rather than assuring ethical conduct, tends instead to create interpersonal settings marked by emotional assault. Because of this, talk about ethics often expresses ambivalence about ethical conduct, which makes the familiar combination of preoccupation with ethics and ethical failure unsurprising. The Capacity for Ethical Conduct explores the ways in which the interpersonal world of work either fosters a feeling of safety or encourages various forms of emotional assault. Presenting case studes and applying psychoanalytic object relation theory and self psychology, this book explores the factors underlying ethical failure and the capacity for ethical conduct. It will be of interest to scholars and practioners in the fields of psychoanalysis, psychology, philosophy, sociology, organizational dynamics, management and public administration. (shrink)

Distrust of government and a sense that government has failed are central features of public life in America. Attack on Government is a psychological study of these and related features of the way we experience government in the United States. The book considers such topics as the moral standing of government, the free market ideal, and the abuse of power.

The poor seem easy to identify: those who do not have enough money or enough of the things money can buy. This book explores a different approach to poverty, one suggested by the notion of capabilities emphasized by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. In the spirit of the capabilities approach, the book argues that poverty refers not to a lack of things but to the lack of the ability to live life in a particular way. The authors argue that the (...) poor are those who cannot live a life that is discovered and created rather than already known. Avoiding poverty, then, means having the capacity and opportunity for creative living. The authors argue that the capacity to do skilled work plays a particularly important role in creative living, and suggest that the development of the ability to do skilled work is a vital part of solving the problem of poverty. (shrink)

This book explores the common thread holding together seemingly diverse tendencies in attacks on liberalism. The author argues that ambivalence about the self and about desire as an expression of the self fosters the intense animosity we observe directed toward the liberal ideal. Ambivalence arises because the self is viewed as the locus of a destructive form of desire, one that must be controlled and repressed. The author argues that speaking of ambivalence toward the self is another way of speaking (...) of ambivalence toward freedom, an ambivalence expressed in the impulse toward coercion that plays such a powerful role in the attack on liberalism. (shrink)

First published in 1997, this volume delves into the most influential theories of economic justice, which ground themselves in utilitarian or related contractarian ideas about the self. These ideas take self-interest to be transparent and unproblematic. Favoured assumptions about the self also make scarcity the primary reality with which economic justice must deal. Much is lost in consideration of the justness of economic arrangements when we take the wants and interests of the self for granted in this way, and treat (...) scarcity as a premise. In this book the author places the discussion of economic justice on a sounder foundation as regards the nature and ends of the self. The book begins with a discussion of the self as a structure, and proceeds to consider aspects of self-interest, public ends, economic welfare, needs and wants, the limits of the market, economic democracy, global inequality, and justice as the end of development. (shrink)

This book explores the way political economy understands human motivation. It is an exciting and unusual contribution, offering a novel integration of the insights of political economy, philosophy, and psychology.

This book taps the best American thinkers to answer the essential American question: How do we sustain our experiment in government of, by, and for the people? Authored by an extraordinary and politically diverse roster of public officials, scholars, and educators, these chapters describe our nation's civic education problem, assess its causes, offer an agenda for reform, and explain the high stakes at risk if we fail.

The purpose of this article is threefold: to examine the elements of an artful apology; to sequence them in a comprehensive configuration; and to use the taxonomy for assessing the effect of public apologies. The model identifies seven sequential components of an apology: revelation, recognition, responsiveness, responsibility, remorse, restitution, and reform. Also included in the model are four deflective stratagems: dissociation, diminution, dispersion, and detachment. Analysis focuses on actual offense situations rather than artificial simulated settings. Specifically, the study examines whether (...) seven well-publicized apologies conform to the proposed construct. These public figures include Alec Baldwin, Lloyd Blankfein, Jamie Dimon, Gerald Levin, Iris Robinson, Tiger Woods, and Mark Zuckerberg. The article closes with suggestions to direct future research. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:David Michael Levin ROUSSEAU'S CURSE Pretext Rousseau is the author of a text he called his Confessions. ' But neither a text nor a confession can exist without a reader, or an other. Like it or not, we readers are participants in the rite of Rousseau's confessions. Do we have anything to confess? When the reading of a confession uncovers the spelling of a curse, so that the (...) self-accused author appears to accuse his readers, the discoverers of the curse can no longer pretend their neutrality and innocence. In fact, the detectives must assume the identity of the accused. In such a special case, then, the inevitable work of textual interpretation magically doubles as the story of a mysteriously elusive "crime" and its final, or anyway presumed detection. But, as in the very best of such stories, neither the skillfully executed crime nor its invisible author—if indeed these terms denote anything at all—need be what they seem. So perhaps the only thing we can say for sure here is that the spelling of the curse is the curse of spelling. And this puts us on the track of a mystery as ancient as the art of writing itself—a mystery whose story the scholars of hermeneutics have thus far preferred to ignore. The mystery I have in mind is the secret affinity between writing and death. A careful hermeneutic approach to Plato's critique of writing, however, may give us a crucial clue. For what binds written language to the power of death is its role in mourning, its incarnation in the form of shadows: black configurations of shadows placed for visibility against the white of the paper. In Plato's Myth of the Cave, the crime of writing is dimly adumbrated. Writing is idolatry, worship of false images, shadows. Rousseau's Confessions, written near the end of his life in the shadow of death, does not escape the shadows of doubt and suspicion which we, his readers, having discovered our own selves inscribed into the darkness of the text, cannot easily refrain from casting. But as soon as we recognize in the shapes of these shadows a suspicion for which 76 David Michael Levin77 we are responsible, we must confess our fatal complicity in the closing of the hermeneutical circle. Commentary on the Text If Rousseau's Confessions does not read like the typical memoir, neither does it read like the typical confession. A final twist awaits us. We read with a certain innocence, or faith, not prepared for the transitive conclusion: the text, as it happens, will bequeath a monstrous and impossible burden. What is the reader to do? How could it be that this man, who seemed to honor us, and won our trust with the candor of his revelations, should so boldly, by one cross conceit, vanish, only to leave us double-crossed and within a labyrinth which, as he would have us believe, we ourselves have wrought? What are we to make of his work? At first, the Confessions appears to be a work of light: with dazzling clarity of mind and courage no less prismatic, Rousseau proposes to take his readers into the gloomy chasms of his soul. "My purpose," he declares, "is to display to my kind a portrait in every way true to nature, and the man I shall portray is myself" (p. 17). That this, however, is not the whole of his intention, we learn through a neighboring sentence. For he says: "Let the last trumpet sound when it will, I shall come forward with this work in my hand, to present myself before my Sovereign Judge, and proclaim aloud: 'Here is what I have done'..." (p. 17). And yet, even this does not fully disclose his design, since he concedes, somewhat later, that "it is as if, feeling my life escaping from me, I were trying to recapture it at its beginnings" (p. 31). But in the end, as in the beginning, darkness and light are one. And indeed, deep into the Seventh Book, we see that the author's light does begin to dim, and that he no longer speaks with much assurance. Nor is... (shrink)

From a pre-publication review by the late Austrian economist, Don Lavoie, of George Mason University: -/- "The book's radical re-interpretation of property and contract is, I think, among the most powerful critiques of mainstream economics ever developed. It undermines the neoclassical way of thinking about property by articulating a theory of inalienable rights, and constructs out of this perspective a "labor theory of property" which is as different from Marx's labor theory of value as it is from neoclassicism. It traces (...) roots of such ideas in some fascinating and largely forgotten strands of the history of economics. It draws attention to the question of "responsibility" which neoclassicism has utterly lost sight of. It is startlingly fresh in its overall approach, and unusually well written in its presentation. ... It constitutes a better case for its economic democracy viewpoint than anything else in the literature." . (shrink)

Is morality rational? In this book Gauthier argues that moral principles are principles of rational choice. He proposes a principle whereby choice is made on an agreed basis of cooperation, rather than according to what would give an individual the greatest expectation of value. He shows that such a principle not only ensures mutual benefit and fairness, thus satisfying the standards of morality, but also that each person may actually expect greater utility by adhering to morality, even though the choice (...) did not have that end primarily in view. In resolving what may appear to be a paradox, the author establishes morals on the firm foundation of reason. Gauthier's argument includes an account of value, linking it to preference and utility; a discussion of the curcumstances in which morality is unnecessary; and an application of morals by agreement to relations between peoples at different levels of development and different generations. Finally, he reflects on the assumptions about individuality and community made by his account of rationality and morality. (shrink)

I THE NATURE OF MAN To understand morals and politics, understand man. Leviathan , 'that mortal god, to which we owe under the immortal God, our peace and ...

Dramatic changes or revolutions in a field of science are often made by outsiders or 'trespassers,' who are not limited by the established, 'expert' approaches. Each essay in this diverse collection shows the fruits of intellectual trespassing and poaching among fields such as economics, Kantian ethics, Platonic philosophy, category theory, double-entry accounting, arbitrage, algebraic logic, series-parallel duality, and financial arithmetic.

The Logic of Leviathan The Moral and Political Theory of Thomas Hobbes.

Instead of the half-century old foundational feud between set theory and category theory, this paper argues that they are theories about two different complementary types of universals. The set-theoretic antinomies forced naïve set theory to be reformulated using some iterative notion of a set so that a set would always have higher type or rank than its members. Then the universal u_{F}={x|F(x)} for a property F() could never be self-predicative in the sense of u_{F}∈u_{F}. But the mathematical theory of categories, (...) dating from the mid-twentieth century, includes a theory of always-self-predicative universals--which can be seen as forming the "other bookend" to the never-self-predicative universals of set theory. The self-predicative universals of category theory show that the problem in the antinomies was not self-predication per se, but negated self-predication. They also provide a model (in the Platonic Heaven of mathematics) for the self-predicative strand of Plato's Theory of Forms as well as for the idea of a "concrete universal" in Hegel and similar ideas of paradigmatic exemplars in ordinary thought. (shrink)

The Sociosexual Orientation Inventory (SOI; Simpson & Gangestad 1991) is a self-report measure of individual differences in human mating strategies. Low SOI scores signify that a person is sociosexually restricted, or follows a more monogamous mating strategy. High SOI scores indicate that an individual is unrestricted, or has a more promiscuous mating strategy. As part of the International Sexuality Description Project (ISDP), the SOI was translated from English into 25 additional languages and administered to a total sample of 14,059 people (...) across 48 nations. Responses to the SOI were used to address four main issues. First, the psychometric properties of the SOI were examined in cross-cultural perspective. The SOI possessed adequate reliability and validity both within and across a diverse range of modern cultures. Second, theories concerning the systematic distribution of sociosexuality across cultures were evaluated. Both operational sex ratios and reproductively demanding environments related in evolutionary-predicted ways to national levels of sociosexuality. Third, sex differences in sociosexuality were generally large and demonstrated cross-cultural universality across the 48 nations of the ISDP, confirming several evolutionary theories of human mating. Fourth, sex differences in sociosexuality were significantly larger when reproductive environments were demanding but were reduced to more moderate levels in cultures with more political and economic gender equality. Implications for evolutionary and social role theories of human sexuality are discussed. Key Words: culture; gender; mating; reproduction; sex differences; sex roles; sexual strategies; sociosexuality. (shrink)

Here a group of philosophers, economists and political theorists discuss the work of David Gauthier, which seeks to show that rational individuals would accept certain moral constraints on their choices. The possibilities and limitations of a contractarian approach to issues of justice is analyzed.

The principle of alternate possibilities (PAP), making the ability to do otherwise a necessary condition for moral responsibility, is supposed by Harry Frankfurt, John Fischer, and others to succumb to a peculiar kind of counterexample. The paper reviews the main problems with the counterexample that have surfaced over the years, and shows how most can be addressed within the terms of the current debate. But one problem seems ineliminable: because Frankfurt''s example relies on a counterfactual intervener to preclude alternatives to (...) the person''s action, it is not possible for it to preclude all alternatives (intervention that is contingent upon a trigger cannot bring it about that the trigger never occurred). This makes it possible for the determined PAPist to maintain that some pre-intervention deviation is always available to ground moral responsibility. In reply, the critic of PAP can examine all the candidate deviations and argue their irrelevance to moral responsibility (a daunting prospect); or the critic can dispense with counterfactual intervention altogether. The paper pursues the second of these strategies, developing three examples of noncounterfactual intervention in which (i) the agent has no alternatives (and a fortiori no morally relevant alternatives), yet (ii) there is just as much reason to think that the agent is morally responsible as there was in Frankfurt''s original example. The new counterexamples do suffer from one liability, but this is insufficient in the end to repair PAP''s conceptual connection between moral responsibility and alternate possibilities. (shrink)

What makes it hard to dance? Twentieth-century phenomenologists drew attention to the importance of the lived body, and dance is the art form for which the lived body is literally central. Why then isn’t dance the easiest art form to engage in? Phenomenologists are drawn to situations where a phenomenon breaks down, which can open insights into the phenomenon itself. Here the phenomenon is the ability to dance where one might normally expect to. This paper invokes Marion Milner’s book On (...) Not Being Able to Paint. It discusses views of David Kleinberg-Levin, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, Iris Young, and others. Parallel to Heidegger’s notion of the Enframing, what causes the disappearing dimensions of animate formanimate form is the Interring. (shrink)

Spirituality and storytelling can be resources in aging successfully and in dying well given the constraints of modern day Western culture. This paper explores the relationship of aging to time and the dynamic process of the life course and discusses issues related to confronting mortality, including suffering, finitude, spirituality, and spiritual closure in regard to death. And, finally, the role of narrative in this process is taken up.

The use of remember–know judgments to assess subjective experience associated with memory retrieval, or as measures of recollection and familiarity processes, has been controversial. In the current study we had participants think aloud during study and provide verbal reports at test for remember–know and confidence judgments. Results indicated that the vast majority of remember judgments for studied items were associated with recollection from study , but this correspondence was less likely for high-confidence judgments . Instead, high-confidence judgments were more likely (...) than remember judgments to be associated with incorrect recollection and a lack of recollection. Know judgments were typically associated with a lack of recollection , but still included recollection from the study context . Thus, although remember judgments provided fairly accurate assessments of retrieval including contextual details, know judgments did not provide accurate assessments of retrieval lacking contextual details. (shrink)

A science sutra -- Non-self (Anatman) -- Impermanence (Anitya) -- Connectedness (Pratitya-Samutpada) -- Engagement, part 1 (Dukkha) -- Engagement, part 2 (Karma) -- Meaning (existential Biobuddhism?).

Through a series of essays, the author discusses the conflict between cultural and biological evolution, covering intelligent design, gender differences, and the meaning of life while offering insight into the ethical aspects of civilization.

War has broken out in the technological global economy, principally in battles over intellectual property. A particularly fierce aspect ofthis battle sets people who guard proprietary software against hackers, who want information to be free. The key challenge today is to produce an adequate conceptual lens for seeing what ethically is at stake in this battle. Toward this end, this paper uses the just war tradition to analyze differences between proponents of Free Software and proponents of Open Source Software. This (...) paper’s use of three just war criteria—Just Cause, Right Intention, and Discrimination—illustrates how the just war tradition can raise the level of ethical awareness about the intellectual property wars that continue to rage in the technological global economy. (shrink)

War has broken out in the technological global economy, principally in battles over intellectual property. A particularly fierce aspect ofthis battle sets people who guard proprietary software against hackers, who want information to be free. The key challenge today is to produce an adequate conceptual lens for seeing what ethically is at stake in this battle. Toward this end, this paper uses the just war tradition to analyze differences between proponents of Free Software and proponents of Open Source Software. This (...) paper’s use of three just war criteria—Just Cause, Right Intention, and Discrimination—illustrates how the just war tradition can raise the level of ethical awareness about the intellectual property wars that continue to rage in the technological global economy. (shrink)

The process-dissociation procedure was used to estimate the influence of spatial and form-based processing in the Simon task. Subjects made manual responses to the direction of arrows . The results provide evidence that the form and spatial location of a single stimulus can have functionally independent effects on performance. They also indicate the existence of two kinds of automaticity—an associative component that reflects prior S-R mappings and a nonassociative component that reflects the correspondence between stimulus and response codes.