Dr. Bergler has written eighteen books already on psychological/psychiatric themes. The present work, in which he refers back frequently to the earlier ones, is not very deep and a fairly easily read exposition of some of the author’s favourite themes. He is particularly attached to the notion that the human mind seeks to hurt itself, and takes pleasure in so doing. This is called ‘psychic masochism’, or the seeking of pleasure–in–displeasure. The difficulty with the terminology of analytic authors is that (...) sometimes they extend a technical term so widely that it ceases to be helpful. Maybe something like this has happened in this work. There seems to be no doubt about our psychic masochistic tendencies, or the pleasure–in–displeasure phenomenon. But what are we to make of the author’s assertion that the “basic neurosis” is psychic masochism based on oral regression, or that “psychic masochism takes first place among all possible inner defences”? The present work is unlikely to achieve a permanent place in analytic literature, but it does shed a helpful ray of light here and there in the darkness of the unconscious mind. (shrink)

The first of these two small works contains the text of the Riddell Memorial Lectures, while the second contains the text of the Twelfth Eddington Memorial Lecture. There is no doubt that Sir Russell Brain is on the side of the angels, at any rate in intention, in both these works. The professional philosopher will be slightly embarrassed however at the prospect of more and more scientists taking their stand with the angels for the wrong reasons. Both these works are (...) concerned with the epistemological problem, and also therefore with the psychological problem, of perception. The first assumes that the sensory qualities of normal perception, such as colours, sounds, smells and touches, are generated by the brain of the percipient and are unlike those external events which constitute the states of objects by which they are caused. “The facts of physics and physiology show that perception is the end–result of a series of physical events, the last of which, a state of activity of the brain of the percipient, differs so completely from the events occurring in the object perceived that the qualitative features of a percept can have no resemblance to the physical object which it represents”. By Galileo out of Berkeley. Is leor nod don eolach! (shrink)

Tom Dougherty argues that culpably deceiving another person into sex is seriously wrong no matter what the content about which she is deceived. We argue that his explanation of why deception invalidates consent has extremely implausible implications. Though we reject Dougherty’s explanation, we defend his verdict about deception and consent to sex. We argue that he goes awry by conflating the disclosure requirement for consent and the understanding requirement. When these are distinguished, we can identify how deceptive disclosure (...) invalidates consent. This alternative explanation also allows for a response to Neil Manson’s recent criticisms of Dougherty’s argument. (shrink)

Book Reviews STEPHEN R. L. CLARK, Religious Studies, FirstView Article.

Consent, on a standard theoretical framework, is a way of giving permission or waiving a right. Dougherty’s book is about the ‘scope’ of consent: which acts are permitted by a given act of consent? Along the way, Dougherty offers a view about what consent consists in and why it does its morally transformative work. The book is an exemplar of careful analytic philosophy. Philosophers working on consent in that tradition will find it essential reading. Following are more specific (...) reactions that will, I hope, convey a more specific sense of the book, and also engage and critique it and the tradition it exemplifies. (shrink)

"Augustine's City of God is not a treatise of political or social philosophy." So begins Christian Tornau's section on political philosophy in his entry on Augustine for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Evident in this remark is the ambivalence with which historians of philosophy have generally treated the political philosophy of the great late antique philosopher of northern Africa. Despite its suggestive title and its extended apologetical attacks on the Earthly City, the City of God is decidedly not a work (...) of political philosophy in the traditional sense: it does not reason about the best form of government; it only rarely functions as a mirror for Christian princes; it recommends no real social or... (shrink)