The reflection undertaken here aspires to understand human emotion by joining Aristotle’s and Heidegger’s descriptions of emotion in a thoughtful confrontation(Auseinandersetzung). In his 1924 Aristotle lectures, Heidegger carries out a phenomenology of being-in-the world which illuminates the “structures” of emotion.Aristotle’s descriptions of emotions in the Rhetoric serve to enrich the structures delineated by Heidegger. Although millennia separate the two thinkers and their civilizations, what they say together about emotion is meaningful today. Their philosophical projects may seem to subordinate consideration of (...) emotion to rhetorical or ontological purposes, but they actually serve to enrich our understanding by recognizing the intertwining of speech, world, and emotion. (shrink)

In the psychotherapist-patient relationship, the therapist-fiduciary must deal with ambiguity, assume risks, and make decisions without final appeal to psychiatric theory. Ambiguity regarding patient autonomy poses treatment paradoxes. Caregiving that aims at autonomy can end up undermining it. Additionally, pursuit of autonomy can put the patient’s well-being at risk.

Wall Street and Main Street have become opposing icons in narratives of boom and bust that endeavor to account for the financial meltdown in fall 2008 and the Great Recession that followed. In many such narratives, Wall Street denizens are said to have brought on the economic collapse in which ordinary Main Streeters became collateral damage. Economic analysis and political advocacy are carried on in a metaphorics which implicates the fate of Main Street in the rituals of Wall Street. Metaphors (...) can enlighten and mislead, and likely these do both. The present effort aims to go behind the metaphors in order to understand the worlds of Wall Street and Main Street mobilizing the conceptual resources of Schutzian phenomenology. (shrink)