Owen Barfield--philosopher, author, poet, and critic--was a founding member of the Inklings, the private Oxford society that included the leading literary figures C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams. Lewis, who was greatly affected by Barfield during their long friendship, wrote of their many heated debates: "I think he changed me a good deal more than I him." Simon Blaxland-de Lange's biography (the first to be published on Owen Barfield) was written with the active cooperation of Barfield himself who, before (...) his death in 1997, gave numerous interviews to the author and shared many of his papers and manuscripts. The fruit of this collaboration is a book that penetrates deeply into the life and thought of one of the most important figures of the twentieth century. It studies two pf Barfield's influences--the Romantic poet Coleridge and the philosopher Rudolf Steiner--and elaborates on his profound personal connection with C.S. Lewis. This biography also features a sketch in his own words (based on interviews with the author), describing Barfield's strong relationship with North America and his two professions as lawyer and writer. This updated edition features important new material, including Owen Barfield's own "Psychography" (1948) and four pages of color plates. (shrink)

Stern has drawn attention to the possibility of conducting research into the psychology of individual differences in a manner that treats nomothetic and idiographic approaches as being equal and complementary. Nevertheless, many psychologists, such as Strelau, strongly deny the scientific value of the idiographic approach. Jung's conception of psychological types, as presented here, has been created using the nomothetic approach, and its basic assumptions can be verified using the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Bearing in mind the fact that Adler's conception of (...) lifestyles was formulated and verified using only the idiographic method of psychography, carried out in the context of individual courses of psychotherapy, I draw attention to the possibility of using, for this purpose, my own Action Styles Questionnaire, which offers some elements essential to the idiographic approach: e.g. a bipolar structural scale of individual preferences articulated in terms of cooperation with others on the one hand, and security and self-protection on the other - one which may be considered convergent with Adler's description of creative and uncreative lifestyles. Psychometric data obtained from the students in respect of MBTI and ASQ were subjected to statistical covariation analysis. Additionally, four homogeneous types were demarcated, using statistical cluster analysis. The final results obtained indicate that MBTI attitude scales are significantly covariant with the results for persons belonging to different types along the bipolar CO-SP scale. However, there were almost no differences between the results obtained when using ASQ scales and when using the scales for the three pairs of psychological functions measured by MBTI. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to attempt a philosophical reading of M. Karagatsis’ novel Kitrinos Fakelos (1956), focusing my analysis on the passions and the emotions of its fictional characters, aiming at demonstrating their independence as well as the presentation of their psychography in Karagatsis’ novel where the description of the emotions caused by love is a dominant feature. In particular, I will examine the expression of desire, love (erôs) and sympathy in this novel – passions and emotions (...) that play an important role to moral life and human existence in general. I will be approaching these issues from the point of view of moral philosophy, analyzing the passions and the emotions expressed by the fictional characters in Kitrinos Fakelos, and in particular of the fictional character of Manos Tasakos. At the same time, I will attempt to show the philosophical influences that M. Karagatsis has received in his literary work, and especially in his novel Kitrinos Fakelos, by the philosophical thought of Friedrich Nietzsche. In addition, I will try to demonstrate the contrast between the Nietzschean moral model and that of both ancient and contemporary virtue ethical theory, in relation to the traditional interpretation of the work of Nietzsche’s that Karagatsis adopts, along with many of his contemporaries in Greece from the beginning of the 20th century until the 70’s at least. (shrink)

This volume, published to commemorate the two-hundredth anniversary of Hegel’s birth, is a collection of fifteen essays on Hegel, all in German, written by men from various European countries and with various professional backgrounds. The subject of the first two essays is Hegel the man: the essays are contributions to Hegel’s biography and psychography, and are of little philosophical interest. The subject of the remaining essays is Hegel’s work, at least that part of it which is judged by the (...) contributors to this volume to be of more than historical interest. This is primarily the practical-philosophical part of Hegel’s work. Specifically, the essays deal with Hegel’s philosophy of history ; his philosophy of religion ; and his philosophy of law. (shrink)