Gilbert Ryle's book The Concept of Mind was published in 1949. According to Ryle, his "destructive purpose" was to show that "a family of radical category mistakes" is the source of the "official doctrine," that is, a "double-life theory," according to which "with the doubtful exception of idiots and infants in arms every human being has both a body and a mind." By numerous examples, Ryle showed quite forcefully how psychology and philosophy at the time were misled into asking the (...) wrong kinds of questions. More than 50 years have elapsed since the original publication of Gilbert Ryle's book and, as Ullin T. Place wrote shortly before passing away, Ryle's conceptual analysis is now due, if not overdue, for a comeback. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the persistent relevance of category mistakes to current problems in the analysis of behavior. (shrink)

This article aimed at studying how the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research's intention of digitalization and specific primary goals of learning and teaching issued in 2017 could be retrieved in the overarching documents related to education in the Norwegian Armed Forces (NAF). A second aim was to investigate if digitalization and any digital tools were mentioned in the Norwegian Defence University College (NDUC) organization's study programs and subject plans for teaching, or if specific goals of digitalization was lost from (...) the NAF to the NDUC documents. Finally, a third aim was to investigate if digital tools were implemented in the new NAF Basic Officer's Education, as this would reflect the level of intention of digitalization and specific primary goals of learning and teaching. A mixed methods approach was used in the study as we first investigated documents issued from the government issued for the university and college sector in Norway, the NAF and the NDUC to see if the overall plan for digitalization from the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research could be traced. In addition, we investigated the answers that officer cadets had given to questions in three course evaluations related to the use of digital tools in their education. Our three hypotheses were the following: Hypothesis 1: Several of the original demands regarding digitalization from the Norwegian government is lost through the dissemination down through the governing documents issued from the ministry to the NAF Basic Officer's Education. Hypothesis 2: No plan has been prepared as part of the educational change process for the introduction and implementation of new digital tools in the NAF Basic Officer Education. Hypothesis 3: It is up to single individuals to introduce and implement the use of new digital tools in the NAF Basic Officer Education. Support for all three hypotheses were received. The article discusses some leadership challenges that are actualized based upon the results we found. (shrink)

Most studies on refugee populations are organized around trauma-related issues and focus on explaining pathological factors. Few studies are anchored in general developmental psychology with the aim of exploring normal age-specific developmental tasks and how the special circumstances associated with forced migration can influence how developmental tasks are negotiated. This study is part of a larger mixed method study seeking to identify resilience-promoting and resilience-inhibiting factors, on individual and contextual levels, among asylum seekers and refugees on the move and settled (...) in reception centers in Norway. A strategic sample of 20 adolescent and young adult refugees/asylum seekers during flight in Serbia and after arrival in Norway was chosen from a sample of 178 refugees interviewed in depth in Serbia and at receptions centers in Norway. The sample reflects the focus of this paper, which is to explore adolescent and young adult refugees/asylum seekers’ psychological and social needs and resources during flight to and after arrival in the host country, including how developmental tasks are negotiated. Through qualitative analysis, experiences associated with the developmental changes the participants experienced before, during, and after flight are contextualized. Their sense of self, their relationships with their families and their perceptions of their situation as adolescents or young adults in a highly unpredictable situation are presented in the light of relevant theory and findings from similar refugee studies. All the participants have fled from dangerous and intolerable situations in their home countries. They describe extreme dangers during flight in contexts that are unpredictable and where they feel lonely and unsupported. Most have unmet psychosocial needs and have received little support or help for their mental health issues during flight or after arrival in Norway. Suggestions for interventions and resilience-promoting actions are given based on the findings of the study. (shrink)

Psychoanalysis in Social and Cultural Settings examines the theory and practice of psychoanalysis with patients who have experienced deeply traumatic experiences, through war, forced migration, atrocities and other social and cultural dislocations. The book is divided into 3 main sections, covering terrorism, refugees, and traumatisation, with another 2 with specific focus transcultural issues establishing psychoanalysis in China, and on research related to themes outlined in the book. Major key psychoanalytic themes run through the work, focusing on identity and the self, (...) fundamentalism, resilience, dehumanisation, cultural differences, and enactment. Offering key theory and clinical guidance for working with highly traumatised patients, this book will be essential for all psychoanalysts and therapists working with victims of terrorism, refugees, and other deeply traumatic life events. (shrink)

This essay attempts to distinguish and discuss the importance and limitations of different ways of being wrong. At first it is argued that strictly falsifiable knowledge is concerned with simple (instrumental) mistakes only, and thus is incapable of understanding more complex errors (and truths). In order to gain a deeper understanding of mistakes (and to understand a deeper kind of mistake), it is argued that communicative aspects have to be taken into account. This is done in the theory of communicative (...) action, which adds to our knowledge of errors the notion of communicative mistakes: mistakes as obstacles for sincere communication. However, to overcome this still purely negative judgement of errors, two processes are examined in which mistakes are best regarded as developmental steps, that is, steps not only meaningful in their own right (as containing some truth), but also as necessary preconditions for further progress. This would suggest that truth is born out of errors. But if so, one has to understand the wrongness of such errors; how is it that they are erroneous if they (somehow) contain the truth? At the end of this essay, a tentative answer to this question is given. (shrink)

Today, it is becoming increasingly common for companies to harness the spirit of play in order to increase worker engagement and improve organizational performance. This paper examines the ethics of play in a business context, focusing specifically on the phenomenon of workplace gamification. While critics highlight ethical problems with gamification, they also advocate for more positive, transformative, and life-affirming modes of organizational play. Gamification is ethical, on this view, when it allows users to reach a state of authentic happiness or (...) _eudaimonia._ The underlying assumption, here, is that the ‘magic circle’ of play—a sphere that exists entirely for its own sake—should be protected in order to secure meaningfulness at work. However, we argue that this faith in play is misguided because play, even at its most autotelic, is ethically ambivalent; it does not lead inexorably to virtuous work environments, but may in fact have an undesirable impact on those who are playing. Our study thus contributes to research on the ‘dark side’ of organizational play, a strand of scholarship that questions the idea that play always points toward the good life. (shrink)

Using data generated from questionnaires containing select items from the Baylor Religion Survey, the current study proposes to examine the paranormal interests and beliefs of participants in two specific alternative spiritual movements, contemporary Paganism and the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness. The analysis will be framed by a discussion of the larger alternative spiritual milieu in which these movements are rooted, and how belief in the paranormal is correlated more with this milieu than with involvement in these NRMs.

Traumatisierte Menschen haben mit vorübergehenden oder anhaltenden Symbolisierungsschwierigkeiten zu kämpfen. Diese treten entweder in psychisch eingekapselter, umgrenzter Form in Erscheinung oder als psychische Funktionsabläufe, die sich in umfassenderer Weise auf die Lebensprojekte, politischen Einstellungen und kulturellen Normvorstellungen der Person auswirken, und zeigen sich in ihrer Körper-Welt-Beziehung, ihrer Individuum-Gruppen-Beziehung und/oder ihrer Individuum-Diskurs-Beziehung. Die Schwierigkeiten können in imaginativen und symbolischen Funktionsmodi auftreten. Gravierende Störungen der Symbolisierung lassen sich aus psychoanalytischer Sicht beschreiben als Begleiterscheinungen der paranoid-schizoiden und der autistisch-berührenden Position (Ogden), als Evakuierung (...) von Beta-Elementen in den Körper (Bion), als Verwerfung (Lacan) und als Urverdrängung (Freud). Der vorliegende Beitrag stellt einige psychoanalytisch fundierte semiotische Überlegungen vor, die dem Forschungsfeld Trauma und Psychose entstammen. Anhand von Fallbeispielen werden der Zusammenbruch der Symbolisierung, Fixierungen auf den nichtsymbolischen Modus der psychischen Repräsentation und die Re-Symbolisierung erläutert, die sich dank der kreativen transformativen Intervention des Analytikers vollzieht. (shrink)

With special emphasis on Foucault's many recently published lecture series this book provides an updated, comprehensive presentation of his most important diagnoses, his many ground-breaking analytical concepts as well as a systematic account of his unique conception of philosophy.

Since the Enlightenment, critique has played an overarching role in how Western society understands itself and its basic institutions. However, opinions differ widely concerning the understanding and evaluation of critique. To understand such differences and clarify a viable understanding of critique, the article turns to Kant’s critical philosophy, inaugurating the “age of criticism”. While generalizing and making critique unavoidable, Kant coins an unambiguously positive understanding of critique as an affirmative, immanent activity. Not only does this positive conception prevail in the (...) critique of pure and practical reason and the critique of judgment; these modalities of critique set the agenda for three major strands of critique in contemporary thought, culminating in among others Husserl, Popper, Habermas, Honneth, and Foucault. Critique affirms and challenges cognition and its rationality, formulates ethical ideals that regulate social interaction, and further articulates normative guidelines underway in the ongoing experimentations of a post-natural history of human nature. In contradistinction to esoteric Platonic theory, philosophy at the threshold of modernity becomes closely linked to an outward-looking critique that examines and pictures what human forms of life are in the process of making of themselves and challenges them, by reflecting upon what they can and what they should make of themselves. As a very widely diffused practice, however, critique may also become a self-affirming overarching end in itself. (shrink)

Responding to Guattari’s call for a ‘mutation of mentality’, the article explores unconventional horse-assisted leadership learning as promising ways of embodied learning to be affected and response-able. By drawing on and continuing the work of Guattari and posthuman feminist scholars, we aim to show that studying the affective pedagogics of opening up the senses and learning to be affected is of vital importance. We analyse a posthuman auto-ethnography of developing capabilities to live and breathe together that allow us to relate (...) in alternative ways. Experiments with affective pedagogy are conducted as they affect bodies through indeterminate and liminal contact zones and use aesthetics to evoke transformation in senses and thoughts, care and response. Since they are both domesticated and non-human, horses are promising companions in this endeavour of entrainment. However, these sensorial experiments also call for an ethics of cutting connections and, not least, of permitting refusals of refusals. (shrink)

The Anthropocene is heralded as a new epoch distinguishing itself from all foregoing eons in the history of the Earth. It is characterized by the overarching importance of the human species in a number of respects, but also by the recognition of human dependence and precariousness. A critical human turn affecting the human condition is still in the process of arriving in the wake of an initial Copernican Revolution and Kant's ensuing second Copernican Counter-revolution. Within this landscape, issues concerning the (...) human - its finitude, responsiveness, responsibility, maturity, auto-affection and relationship to itself - appear rephrased and re-accentuated as decisive probing questions. In this book Sverre Raffnsøe explores how the change has ramifications for the kinds of knowledge that can be acquired concerning human beings and for the human sciences as a study of human existential beings in the world. (shrink)

La notion de dispositif est déterminante dans I’analytique foucaldienne de la société. Et pourtant, son étude demeure négligée par la réception internationale. Après avoir discuté brièvement des difficultés rencontrées avec la traduction du terme de dispositif par Dreyfus et Rabinow dans Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, I’article développe une analytique sociale à partir de la pensée « dispositionelle » de Foucault. L’esquisse de I’histoire du terme de dispositif permettra, en outre, de mieux saisir la pertinence de son usage par Foucault.

La notion de dispositif est déterminante dans I’analytique foucaldienne de la société. Et pourtant, son étude demeure négligée par la réception internationale. Après avoir discuté brièvement des difficultés rencontrées avec la traduction du terme de dispositif par Dreyfus et Rabinow dans Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, I’article développe une analytique sociale à partir de la pensée « dispositionelle » de Foucault. L’esquisse de I’histoire du terme de dispositif permettra, en outre, de mieux saisir la pertinence de son usage par Foucault.

La notion de dispositif est déterminante dans I’analytique foucaldienne de la société. Et pourtant, son étude demeure négligée par la réception internationale. Après avoir discuté brièvement des difficultés rencontrées avec la traduction du terme de dispositif par Dreyfus et Rabinow dans Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, I’article développe une analytique sociale à partir de la pensée « dispositionelle » de Foucault. L’esquisse de I’histoire du terme de dispositif permettra, en outre, de mieux saisir la pertinence de son usage par Foucault.

This paper describes our general framework for the investigation of how human gestures can be used to facilitate the interaction and communication between humans and robots. Two studies were carried out to reveal which “naturally occurring” gestures can be observed in a scenario where users had to explain to a robot how to perform a home task. Both studies followed a within-subjects design: participants had to demonstrate how to lay a table to a robot using two different methods — utilizing (...) only gestures or gestures and speech. The first study enabled the validation of the COGNIRON coding scheme for human gestures in Human–Robot Interaction. Based on the data collected in both studies, an annotated video corpus was produced and characteristics such as frequency and duration of the different gestural classes have been gathered to help capture requirements for the designers of HRI systems. The results from the first study regarding the frequencies of the gestural types suggest an interaction between the order of presentation of the two methods and the actual type of gestures produced. However, the analysis of the speech produced along with the gestures did not reveal differences due to ordering of the experimental conditions. The second study expands the issues addressed by the first study: we aimed at extending the role of the interaction partner by introducing some positive acknowledgement of the participants’ activity. The results show no significant differences in the distribution of gestures between the two explanation methods, in contrast to the previous study. Implications for HRI are discussed focusing on issues relevant for the design of the robot’s communication skills to support the interaction loop with humans in home scenarios. (shrink)

In the final volume of his Homo Sacer series, The use of bodies, Agamben claims that for Foucault ethics never escapes the horizon of governmentality and therefore his conception of ethics is ‘strategic.’ In light of this criticism, motivated by Agamben’s Pauline conception of ‘use,’ we reassess the status and function of ethics in Foucault’s late lectures. We investigate how Foucault’s approach to ethics develops from his treatment of liberal governmentality and also how its methodological foundation is developed in an (...) interpretation of truth-telling in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. Our interpretation emphasizes the ambiguous status of ethics in Foucault’s late work: on the one hand, Agamben is right that Foucault assigns an irreducible strategic function to ethics thereby connecting it intrinsically to governmentality. On the other hand, Agamben overlooks how Foucault’s interpretation of Sophocles implies a conception of governmentality which emphasizes how ethical practices cannot be captured solely in strategic terms. Foucault’s ‘anarcheological’ approach thus articulates a dimension of ethics that remains, using Agamben’s own terms, ‘ungovernable’ and therefore also genuinely creative. Even so, Foucault’s approach to ethics remains in Agamben’s perspective on the deepest level faced with an antinomy that Agamben seeks to mediate with his Pauline conception of ‘inoperativity.’. (shrink)