Toward a Fuller Human Identity


Book Description

This book is based on the thought of Gabriel Marcel and offers an introduction to the central categories of Marcel's thought, focusing on his idea of existential humanism. This study deals with the ambivalence of human existence and the concepts of being, ego and bodiliness. The author draws on examples from everyday life with a particular focus on African values and the recovery of the black self.




Staying Alive


Book Description

Judgments of personal identity stand at the heart of our daily transactions. Family life, friendships, institutions of justice, and systems of compensation all rely on our ability to reidentify people. It is not as obvious as it might at first appear just how to express this relation between facts about personal identity and practical interests in a philosophical account of personal identity. A natural thought is that whatever relation is proposed as the one which constitutes the sameness of a person must be important to us in just the way identity is. This simple understanding of the connection between personal identity and practical concerns has serious difficulties, however. One is that the relations that underlie our practical judgments do not seem suited to providing a metaphysical account of the basic, literal continuation of an entity. Another is that the practical interests we associate with identity are many and varied and it seems impossible that a single relation could simultaneously capture what is necessary and sufficient for all of them. Staying Alive offers a new way of thinking about the relation between personal identity and practical interests which allows us to overcome these difficulties and to offer a view in which the most basic and literal facts about personal identity are inherently connected to practical concerns. This account, the 'Person Life View', sees persons as unified loci of practical interaction, and defines the identity of a person in terms of the unity of a characteristic kind of life made up of dynamic interactions among biological, psychological, and social attributes and functions mediated through social and cultural infrastructure.




Outpatient Treatment of Psychosis


Book Description

This book offers a practitioner's guide to evidence-based practice in working with psychotic patients in an outpatient setting by clinicians and scholars who are internationally recognized for their work in treating severe psychopathology. Topics cover conceptual, technical, and practical considerations in the parameters of working with adult and adolescent populations that exhibit thought disorder, delusions, hallucinations, borderline organizations, trauma, and schizoid phenomena. Different theoretical models are presented from psychoanalytic traditions that introduce the student and practitioner to eclectic ways of conceptualizing and treating these challenging clinical groups. Concrete approaches to establishing a proper treatment environment, working alliance, symptom management, managing countertransference, and facilitating a therapeutic framework are provided. Various psychodynamic techniques are demonstrated by master clinicians through the extensive use of clinical case material culled from outpatient settings that illustrate how psychoanalytic perspectives enrich our understanding of the psychotic spectrum and lead to therapeutic efficacy.




Human Flourishing in a Technological World


Book Description

Human Flourishing in a Technological World addresses the question of human identity and flourishing in the light of recent technological advances. The chapters in Part I provide a philosophical-theological evaluation of changing major anthropological assumptions that have guided human self-understanding from antiquity to modernity: How did we move from a religious and mostly embodied anthropology of the person to the idea that we can upload human consciousness to computing platforms? How did we come to imagine that machines can actually be intelligent, or even learn in human fashion? Moreover, what metaphysical changes explain our mostly uncritical embrace of a technological determination of being and thus of how reality "works"? In Part II, the focus turns to the practical implications of our changing understanding of what it means to be human. Covering some of the most pressing current concerns about human flourishing, these chapters deal with the impact of technology on education, healthcare, disability, leisure and the nature of work, communication, aging, death, and the nature of wisdom for human flourishing in light of evolutionary biology. The volume includes the text of a lecutre by virtual reality engineer and computer scientist Jaron Lanier, and a discussion between Lanier and other contributors.




Discovering Our Spiritual Identity


Book Description

Each chapter in this workbook by Trevor Hudson is peppered with "holy experiments," simple practices that bring you into God's presence and help you experience life as his beloved. At the end of each chapter is a set of questions which are ideal for discussion with one or two spiritual friends or a small group. A Renovaré Resource.




From Personal Duties Towards Personal Rights


Book Description

Focusing on the concepts of popular consent, representation, limit, and resistance to tyranny as essential features of modern theories of parliamentary democracy, Monahan shows a continuity in use of these concepts across the alleged divide between the Mi




Multiple Early Childhood Identities


Book Description

Recognising multiple cultural, ethical and geographical influences which impact on the development of a child’s identity, this insightful text explores the role of early childhood practitioners and settings in nurturing and navigating the child’s sense of being and belonging. Multiple Early Childhood Identies confronts the diverse factors which influence early identity-formation to emphasise the child’s understanding of self, outsiders’ projections and the messages communicated by educators, family members and the wider community as critical to a child’s identity and wellbeing. Written to provoke group discussion and extend thinking, this text also provides opportunities for international comparison, points for reflection and editorial provocations and will help students engage critically with the concept of identity-formation and influencing factors. Chapters are divided into four key sections which reflect major influences on practice and pedagogy: Being alongside children Those who educate Embedding families and communities Working with systems Offering in-depth discussion of the diverse perspectives, experiences and practices which impact on the formation of the child’s identity, this text will enhance understanding, support self-directed learning and provoke and transform thinking at both graduate and postgraduate levels, particularly in the field of early childhood education and care, for students, educators, integrated service providers and policy makers.




Toward a Psychology of Being


Book Description

Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. In this compelling book, Professor Maslow uses studies of psychologically healthy people and of the healthiest experiences and moments in the lives of average people to demonstrate that human beings can be loving, noble and creative, that they are capable of pursuing the highest values and aspirations. A classic text in the field of humanistic psychology.




Humanism and Religion


Book Description

The question of who 'we' are and what vision of humanity 'we' assume in Western culture lies at the heart of hotly debated questions on the role of religion in education, politics, and culture in general. The need for recovering a greater purpose for social practices is indicated, for example, by the rapidly increasing number of publications on the demise of higher education, lamenting the fragmentation of knowledge and university culture's surrender to market-driven pragmatism. The West's cultural rootlessness and lack of cultural identity are also revealed by the failure of multiculturalism to integrate religiously vibrant immigrant cultures. A main cause of the West's cultural malaise is the long-standing separation of reason and faith. Jens Zimmermann suggests that the West can rearticulate its identity and renew its cultural purpose by recovering the humanistic ethos that originally shaped Western culture. In tracing the religious roots of humanism from patristic theology, through the Renaissance into modern philosophy, we find that humanism was originally based on the correlation of reason and faith. In this book, the author combines humanism, religion, and hermeneutic philosophy to re-imagine humanism for our current cultural and intellectual climate. The hope of this recovery is for humanism to become what Charles Taylor has called a 'social imaginary', an internalized vision of what it means to be human. This vision will encourage, once again, the correlation of reason and faith in order to overcome current cultural impasses, such as those posed, for example, by religious and secularist fundamentalisms.




Finding God in Troubled Times


Book Description

A professor of theology offers practical help for Christians in using faith to more effectively deal with suffering. Original.