DEFENDING SPIRIT,SPIRITUALIZING MATTER: NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRENCH ACADEMIC PHILOSOPHY AND THE MEDICAL SCIENCES

This review essay discusses Larry Sommer McGrath's Making Spirit Matter: Neurology, Psychology, and Selfhood in Modern France (2020), a history of the philosophical current known as “spiritualism.” The book covers the long nineteenth century, focusing especially on the first part of the Third Republic (1870–1914), and studies how French academic philosophers confronted the discourses about human cognition and behavior that were produced by physicians—namely, physiologists and pathologists, phrenologists, neurologists, alienists, and psychiatrists. It describes how, while engaged in this confrontation, French philosophy took a peculiar shape, eventually influencing the development of some sciences—namely, psychology, which emerged progressively as a discipline at the crossroads of medicine and philosophy. In the second part of the essay, starting from a terminological analysis of a series of terms dealing with “spirit,” I consider the formation of spiritualism by adopting an approach that diverges slightly from the ones proper to history of philosophy and intellectual history. I inscribe the philosophical discourses in their contexts of emergence, paying particular attention to institutional macrostructures and their inertia. This provides another perspective on “spiritualism,” which may no longer be conceived as a current or a school; rather, it should be conceived as the effect of the conditions of possibility of academic philosophy in France. It seems to me that, starting from the beginning of the nineteenth century, because of the organization of the educational institutions, the French philosophers’ agenda consisted mainly in opposing all forms of materialism, mechanism, and determinism and in defending the legitimacy of their discipline.     

Candid Lying and Precocious Storytelling in Victorian Literature and Psychology

By comparing Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess (1905) with contemporaneous psychology and canonical literature, this article suggests that children’s literature complicates our understanding of nineteenth-century discourse about precocity. In much canonical literature of the Victorian period, the precocious child is an agent in a narrative of adult redemption. In Victorian child psychology, childhood storytelling was associated with lying and with moral insanity; adult stories are, implicitly, true by contrast. Both discourses thus reduce the precocious child to the role of agent in the tacit truth of adult stories; many such nineteenth-century scientific and literary studies of precocity are therefore, more essentially, studies of the adult reflected in the precocious child. A Little Princess, in contrast, is concerned with the experiences and perspective of its precocious child protagonist, Sara Crewe. Through this focus on the child herself, A Little Princess suggests that the position of the precocious child in contemporary discourse is a result of the threat she represents to the adult, and to the supposed truth of adult stories. Sara Crewe obviates the moral difference between adults’ stories and children’s stories, and between truth and deceit, upheld in contemporary psychology. She therefore undermines the difference between adult and child which informed debate about precocity in canonical fiction and psychology of the Victorian period. In A Little Princess, this transgression of boundaries is a productive, enabling, and even moral act.     

基于消费者行为分析的区域旅游市场规划方法研究

本文尝试从旅游者消费需求分析角度入手,探讨区域旅游市场规划的方法论创新。本论文引入了动机--行为投射模型,通过对建立在专题旅游市场调查基础上的消费行为数据库的深度剖析,论文揭示了旅游目标市场群体常见的三类消费心理趋向模式(补偿型需求、均衡型需求、超越型需求)以及相对应的旅游产品选择偏好规律。在此基础上提出了区域旅游目标市场群体的心理定位策略,以及相对应的从结构性旅游功能规划到旅游产品、旅游服务供给链连续递进的规划流程体系。即"行为分析(Behavior)-定位(Postioning)-旅游供给(Supple)",简称旅游市场规划的BPS方案。     

Captivating thoughts: nocturnal pollution,imagination and the sleeping mind in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries

ABSTRACT

Medieval attempts to understand nocturnal emissions – involuntary bodily excretions during sleep which were identified as morally ambiguous – became extensive explorations of the unique and problematic features of sleep and the mental state it produced. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, nocturnal pollutions became the object of an intensive scrutiny of sleep as a site of moral concern. Causal explanations often centred on human psychology, in particular the unusual status of the sleeping mind, in an attempt to understand the intricate ways in which mind, body and soul were uniquely bound together in sleep. The mental states before, during and after sleep were understood to interact with one another in complex ways which centred on questions of culpability and its lack. A comparison of medical, natural-philosophical, theological and canon law materials discussing nocturnal pollution reveals a preoccupation with the sleeper’s mind as exceptional, uncontrollable and problematic.     

Notes on Contributors

By the end of the century, and under pressure from new scientific theories of minds and emotions, the languages in which the Victorians understood the relationship between inner feeling and moral action came under great pressure. At the same time, the established association between aesthetic and moral value was being challenged by aestheticism's espousal of ‘art for art's sake’. This essay examines one very distinctive response to these issues: Vernon Lee's development of the concept of ‘empathy’. Lee offers empathy as a scientifically verifiable process which explains why beauty matters to us. She also seeks to use it to mediate a new position capable of acknowledging the power of aestheticism's critique of Victorian moralism, while re-establishing moral action as central to aesthetic experience.     

中国书画鉴定的心理机制探索

书画鉴定,其目的在于辨真伪、明是非.鉴定是一种主体化的反应心理,是心灵与心灵的悄然交流,是鉴定者与创作者的悄然对话.书画鉴定者在鉴定的过程中,其心理机制和书画创作者应该是基本一致的.书画鉴定的心理机制包括心理特征、心理图式、心理倾向、心理定势和心理结构中的潜感觉等问题,对这些问题的探讨有望令书画鉴定由经验走向科学探索路...     

Darwinism — The political implications

In his De tragoediae constitutione (1611) Heinsius rearranged the text of Aristotle's Poetics, and built on it a new general theory of drama, literature and speech. The new system was designed to render Christian exemplars and Christian theories of internalisation, pedagogy and motivation impossible to maintain, and thereby sidestep one of the most divisive issues in the intellectual debates of the Reformation. Irenicist secularisation is a major cause of Heinsius's impact on German, English and French literary theory.     

解读1948年“杨妹事件”始末

1948年4月,重庆女子杨妹“九年不食”的报道见诸报端。随之,全国各地相继有自称不食者出现,社会各界及政府对此异常关注,全国范围内一度掀起了为期数月关注杨妹的热潮。“杨姝事件”的发生及其影响得以迅速扩大是当时国统区恶劣的经济环境及生存条件之下民众心理与关切的集中反映。人们对“杨妹不食”的极大兴趣及杨妹等不食者“不食反为食”的矛盾心态及动机,无不从一特定角度描绘出国统区民众当时真实的生活及心理状态。     

Nerven‐Saiten‐Stimmung. Zum Wandel einer Denkfigur zwischen Musik und Wissenschaft 1750–1850

‘Stimmung’. The Career of a Concept in Music and Science between 1750 and 1850. The German word ‘Stimmung’ originally refers to the musical praxis of tuning instruments. Whereas the English concepts of ‘tonus’ and ‘atunement’ used to describe the physical status of the body developed independently from the psychological ‘mood’, ‘Stimmung’ was used metaphorically in both physiology and psychology in the discussed period. This leads to various interrelations between the areas of knowledge involved. The paper investigates these on a synchronic and diachronic level. By concentrating a) on the analogy between musical strings and nerve fibres within the framework of a mechanistic conception of the body and b) on the metaphoric use of ‘Stimmung’ as a psychological concept describing the general mood of an individual, it becomes evident that the different metaphorical adaptations do not only have consequences within the specific area of knowledge, but also lead to distinct interpretations of musical effect. The second half of the paper concentrates on the diachronic development of ‘Stimmung’ in physiology and analyses the shifts within the semantic field of the metaphor occurring during the transformation from a mechanical to an organic conception of the body. On a theoretical level the emphasis lies on the conceptual potential of vague metaphors and the function of marginal metaphors in periods of theory change. In this context the results question Thomas Kuhns theory of an abrupt, gestaltlike change of theory by emphasizing the importance of continuous shifts within the semantic fields of vague metaphors.     

“We Seem to Have Always Spoken in Prose . . .” Policy Analysis Is a Clinical Profession: Implications for Policy Analysis Practice and Instruction

The purpose of this article is (i) to propose the concept of policy analysis as a clinical profession, (ii) to relate to the clinical intellectual processes involved in policy analysis, and (iii) following studies in other clinical disciplines, to infer implications for policy analysis and policy analysis instruction. The article will highlight notions of clinical reasoning and clinical cognitive processes relevant to policy analysis and will address reasoning errors associated with bounded rationality and uncertainty in the clinical analytic process. The article seeks to promote awareness of clinical notions and of their relevance for policy analysis practice and instruction.