This book brings together the stories of biographers, novelists, scholars, and artists as they have written about the journeys (some literal, some figurative) they have made to their subjects. Contributors include Elizabeth Wood, J.J. Wilson, Leah Glasser, Jane Lazarre, and Alice Walker.

The goal of this book is to recapture the diminished roles of affect, psychological needs, and the psychodynamic mechanisms that are crucial for understanding political behavior by explaining and extending the contributions of Harold D. Lasswell, the dominant figure in political psychology in the mid-twentieth-century. Although Lasswell was best known for applying psychodynamic theories to politics, this book also demonstrates how his framework accommodated for cognitive processes and social interactions ranging from communications to policy-making. The authors use Lasswell's contributions and (...) the debates over his ideas as a springboard for examining current policy, political, and leadership issues. _Revitalizing Political Psychology_ presents and extends four aspects of Lasswell's contributions to the field: the psychodynamic mechanisms drawn from psychoanalytic theory, the use of symbol associations to understand political propaganda, the analysis of "democratic character" for both the public and the elites, and the structure of belief systems. In so doing, the authors link personality and political communication theory to democratic practice. The authors also critique leadership studies using Lasswell's concerns over the risks to democratic accountability and the current preoccupation with strengthening the roles of charismatic and transformational leaders. Intended for researchers, practitioners, and students in the areas of political and historical psychology, political strategy, and political communication, the book's emphasis on psychodynamics also appeals to psychoanalysts and the material on leadership appeals to professionals in management and industrial/organizational psychology. (shrink)

La métaphore est un instrument indispensable pour les analyses scientifiques. Mais elle nécessite un usage réflexif qui en précise le statut car celui-ci peut être divers et n’est pas sans effet sur la théorie comme sur diverses pratiques. Ainsi, les analystes et acteurs des transports ont usé – et probablement abusé – du recours à la physique des fluides pour leurs métaphores. Aujourd’hui, les développements de la physique, par exemple dans les domaines des fractales ou de la percolation, ouvrent des (...) perspectives nouvelles et prometteuses. Cette évolution montre aussi que les chercheurs en sciences sociales auraient intérêt à renouveler les métaphores qu’ils emploient et qui sont souvent assez archaïques. Ainsi, la référence à des espaces à n dimensions et à l’hypertexte permet de faire rebondir les analyses de Georg Simmel, bridées par le recours à une géométrie plane trop sommaire.Metaphors are indispensable tools for scientific investigation. They should be used in such a way that their status as metaphor is clear, however, for their various uses are not without consequence for theory and practice. In the area of transportation, analysts and practitioners have drawn metaphors from the physics of fluids, but recent developments in the theories of fractals and percolation offer promising perspectives. Generally speaking, as these developments suggest, social scientists stand to benefit from renewing their current metaphors, which are often quite archaic. Thus, Georg Simmel’s analyses – which are constrained by the reference to plan – stand to be revitalized by a reference to N-dimensional spaces and to hypertext. (shrink)

In the nineteenth century, Karl Marx wondered how it was possible for the exchange of commodities to generate so much wealth for some and so much misery for the others. A similar question now haunts our discussions of financial markets: how can the expanding trade in financial securities create such extraordinary wealth for the financiers while creating increasing vulnerability for the rest of us? Taking a leaf out of Marx’s playbook, I propose in this essay to follow Moneybags to the (...) market and consider what he finds there. In the nineteenth century, Moneybags was able to purchase labor-power at its value while somehow generating more value merely from using it; by the late twentieth century, it appears that Moneybags is similarly able, in all good conscience, to acquire other people’s probability—their ability, that is, to make promises and to be believed—while somehow becoming more credible in the process. (shrink)

El presente artículo explora los retos políticos que plantea la democracia directa. En el pensamiento político de Locke la democracia representativa consiste en el compromiso de mantener la estructura económica de laisser-faire, mientras que la democracia directa rousseauniana que demanda homogeneidad acaba por no ser muy democrática. La cuestión en juego es si puede haber un régimen político capaz de acoger tanto una participación inclusiva como la diversidad existente de los participantes. Se presentan dos respuestas diferentes a esta pregunta a (...) través de las obras de Jean-Luc Nancy y Jacques Rancière. (shrink)

Science can reinforce the healthy aspects of the politics of the policy process, to identify and further the public interest by discrediting policy options serving only special interests and helping to select among “science-confident” and “hedging” options. To do so, scientists must learn how to manage and communicate the degree of uncertainty in scientific understanding and prediction, lest uncertainty be manipulated to discredit science or to justify inaction. For natural resource and environmental policy, the institutional interests of government agencies, as (...) well as private interests, pose challenges of suppression, over-simplification, or distortion of scientific information. Scientists can combat these maneuvers, but must also look inward to ensure that their own special interests do not undermine the usefulness of science. (shrink)

Embodied Care is the first work to argue for the body's centrality to care ethics, doing so by analyzing our corporeality at the phenomenological level.

Martin Buber: The Life of Dialogue , the first study in any language to provide a complete overview of Buber's thought, remains the definitive guide to the full range of his work and the starting point for all modern Buber scholarship. As well as summarizing Buber's early intellectual development and attitudes - his mysticism, his youthful existentialism, his philosophy of Judaism and religious socialism - it focuses on the two crucial issues of his mature thought: his dialogic or I-Thou philosophy, (...) and his probing of the nature and redemption of evil. As a sensitive, intuitive and perennially fascinating account of one of the twentieth century's great spiritual teachers, and as an influential classic in its own right, Martin Buber: The Life of Dialogue reveals the implications of Buber's thought for theory of knowledge, education, philosophy, myth, history and Judaic and Christian belief. This fully revised and expanded 4th edition includes a new preface from the author, an expanded bibliography incorporating new Buber scholarship, and two new appendices in the form of essays on Buber's influence on Emmanuel Levinas and Mikhail Bakhtin. (shrink)

I prefer to put this in a letter to you instead of writing an article that would lead one to believe that I have any authority to speak on the subject of what has, in a roundabout way, become the H. and H. affair . In other words, a cause of extreme seriousness, already discussed many times although certainly endless in nature, has been taken up by a storm of media attention, which has brought us to the lowest of passions, (...) intense emotions, and even violence. I understand why people are talking about Victor Farias, who has contributed some unpublished information—with a polemical intent, it is true, that does not help one to appreciate its true value. But how has it happened that Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s book, published in 1987, was greeted by a silence that I am perhaps the first to break?1 It is because he avoids anecdotal accounts, all the while citing and situating most of the facts mentioned by Farias. He is severe and rigorous. He lays essential questions before us. 1. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, La Fiction du politique: Heidegger, l’art et la politique . I also cite Lacoue-Labarthe’s book, La Poésie comme experience , devoted to Paul Celan. Maurice Blanchot, one of France’s preeminent writers, has written, among many other books, The Last Man, Death Sentence, The Madness of the Day, and The Gaze of Orpheus and Other Literary Essays. Paula Wissing, a free-lance translator and editor, has recently translated Paul Veyne’s Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? (shrink)

"This book tries to assess Galileo's work in its historical singularity. It is constructed around a precise question: How did Galileo create the modern science of motion? Starting from this question, I shall go on to determine as accurately as I can what concepts and methods helped classical mechanics to take shape." [Preface].

The loss or absence of vision is probably one of the most incapacitating events that can befall a human being. The importance of vision for humans is also reflected in brain anatomy as approximately one third of the human brain is devoted to vision. It is therefore unsurprising that throughout history many attempts have been undertaken to develop devices aiming at substituting for a missing visual capacity. In this review, we present two concepts that have been prevalent over the last (...) two decades. The first concept is sensory substitution, which refers to the use of another sensory modality to perform a task that is normally primarily sub-served by the lost sense. The second concept is cross-modal plasticity, which occurs when loss of input in one sensory modality leads to reorganization in brain representation of other sensory modalities. Both phenomena are training-dependent. We also briefly describe the history of blindness from ancient times to modernity, and then proceed to address themeansthat have been used to help blind individuals, with an emphasis on modern technologies, invasive (various type of surgical implants) and non-invasive devices. With the advent of brain imaging, it has become possible to peer into the neural substrates of sensory substitution and highlight the magnitude of the plastic processes that lead to a rewired brain. Finally, we will address the important question of the value and practicality of the available technologies and future directions. (shrink)

In the process of psychical transmission from one generation to the next, who asks what of whom? The evocative expression of an ‘errand’ suggests that a subject is sent on a mission, sent in error, wanders away, and returns home, adversely changed. A vocative imperative is at the heart of a mission. When there is a call from an anterior Other, there must be a response. Before, there was an experience of a call and its response, then, there would be (...) an errand. Precisely, the subject is preceded by the self-same subject’s constituted and appropriated mandate from an anterior object. To upend an aberrant errand, a subject must reconfigure a posted imperative, ever altering, again and again, the call and summons of an alien and unwelcome guest turned host. Otherwise, the dissonant and unwelcome guest turned host may transform the naïve subject into a ghost, a revenant that disappears and returns to haunt the subject. Thanks to the new and public space in the clinical setting, the entity that listens to the sub-ject will come to know that reception and perception of an errand is communalised in ways where there is a constant alteration, revision and co-creation of meanings of the received and perceived phenomenon through reciprocal connection and reciprocal correction. When subject’s experiential acquisitions enter that clinical setting, a resolute upending of a retrogressive descent toward death may occur. Hence, the meaning of staying alive for an Other who is otherwise dislocated, thrown, posted into a transgenerational spiral, toward death. A toxic errand is thus potentially aborted in that new space where a new relationship for resubjectivising and sublimating the unwanted mandate happens. Resubjectivising the injected errand becomes the exit strategy so that positive change is now conceivable. (shrink)

Cette lettre de 1904 que Maurice Ajam (1861-1944), député radical et disciple de Comte, adresse par voie de presse à son confrère, le positiviste allemand Heinrich Molenaar (1870-1965), traite de la question de l’Alsace-Lorraine. Le désaccord entre Molenaar et Ajam sur les solutions envisageables reflète un point de divergence entre une vision culturaliste et linguistique de la nation, et une conception volontariste. Les deux hommes surmontent leur désaccord à travers une volonté commune d’éviter la guerre et de résister aux (...) pressions nationalistes. Ajam félicite Molenaar pour son courage, puisque son projet de restitution à la France d’une partie de l’Alsace et de la Lorraine allait évidemment à contre-courant des idées du gouvernement allemand et de l’opinion. (shrink)