Human existence is intrinsically community-oriented. Persons find themselves as responsible in community. This is a classical and Christian insight that is supported by significant contemporary philosophers such as Gabriel Marcel and Emmanuel Levinas. This article makes the claim that to thrive as a person is to belong; indeed, that it is the experience of belonging that satisfies the human need for meaning, value, and purpose. The article proceeds by considering the term ‘community.’ In itself, ‘community’ is a common sense term. (...) However, it is also a symbol with dimensions of meaning beyond common sense implicit within it. For the sake of a richer understanding of belonging, this article proposes to discuss some of those dimensions under three headings: Dynamism; Communion; and Consummation. ‘Dynamism’ relates to the members of a community whose mutual participation constitutes the characteristics of that community. ‘Communion’ considers the emergence of genuine community, as opposed to general association, from the prior mutual will to accommodate the Other in the self. ‘Consummation’ considers the significance of communion as both the goal and fulfilment of each person and community. Put another way, consummation is the perfection of belonging. (shrink)

A distinction between �consensual� and �critical� Conservatism would seem to provide a useful framework for analysing the intellectual approaches of conservative thinkers to the question of bureaucracy in Britain in the modern period. It is suggested here that, although in the nineteenth century there quickly emerged a dominant, liberal/conservative consensual approach to bureaucracy, there has also been a lively, countervailing and critical set of conservative ideas and concerns. This critical approach itself contains many strands; it has contributed to the vitality (...) of conservative ideas on the subject and many of the concerns of contemporary right wing critics of bureaucracy have their antecedents far back in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ideas. (shrink)

Causal and predictive learning research often employs intuitive and familiar hypothetical scenarios to facilitate learning novel relationships. The allergist task, in which participants are asked to diagnose the allergies of a fictitious patient, is one example of this. In such studies, it is common practice to ask participants to ignore their existing knowledge of the scenario and make judgments based only on the relationships presented within the experiment. Causal judgments appear to be sensitive to instructions that modify assumptions about the (...) scenario. However, the extent to which prior knowledge continues to affect competition for associative learning, even after participants are instructed to disregard it, is unknown. To answer this, we created a cue competition design that capitalized on prevailing beliefs about the allergenic properties of various foods. High and low allergenic foods were paired with foods moderately associated with allergy to create two compounds; high + moderate and low + moderate. We expected high allergenic foods to produce greater competition for associative memory than low allergenic foods. High allergenic foods may affect learning either because they generate a strong memory of allergy or because they are more salient in the context of the task. We therefore also manipulated the consistency of the high allergenic cue-outcome relationship with prior beliefs about the nature of the allergies. A high allergenic food that is paired with an inconsistent allergenic outcome should generate more prediction error and thus more competition for learning, than one that is consistent with prior beliefs. Participants were instructed to either use or ignore their knowledge of food allergies to complete the task. We found that while participants were able to set aside their prior knowledge when making causal judgments about the foods in question, associative memory was weaker for the cues paired with highly allergenic foods than cues paired with low allergenic foods regardless of instructions. The consistency manipulation had little effect on this result, suggesting that the effects in associative memory are most likely driven by selective attention to highly allergenic cues. This has implications for theories of causal learning as well as the way causal learning tasks are designed. (shrink)

Belonging presents a range of problems that have been treated thematically in the social sciences. However, belonging has rarely been explored as an explicit theme in philosophy. That said, many philosophers have implicitly considered the problem of belonging in their own way. In this paper, the work of Emmanuel Levinas is presented and considered, especially where it relates to the political. In outlining Levinas’s thought on fraternity, we are presented with a belonging that is not yet political. It is in (...) some ways, but not necessarily, pre-political. On the contrary, we begin to see how all that is meant by the political—the State, citizenship, the remit of justice—is secondary or subsidiary to the primacy of the ethical which, in its only extension beyond the Other, finds expression in fraternity or in our belonging with others. (shrink)

Belonging presents a range of problems that have been treated thematically in the social sciences. However, belonging has rarely been explored as an explicit theme in philosophy. That said, many philosophers have implicitly considered the problem of belonging in their own way. In this paper, the work of Emmanuel Levinas is presented and considered, especially where it relates to the political. In outlining Levinas’s thought on fraternity, we are presented with a belonging that is not yet political. It is in (...) some ways, but not necessarily, pre-political. On the contrary, we begin to see how all that is meant by the political—the State, citizenship, the remit of justice—is secondary or subsidiary to the primacy of the ethical which, in its only extension beyond the Other, finds expression in fraternity or in our belonging with others. (shrink)