Conceptual Divisions Research Articles

Unifying approaches from statistical genetics and phylogenetics for mapping phenotypes in structured populations.

In both statistical genetics and phylogenetics, a major goal is to identify correlations between genetic loci or other aspects of the phenotype or environment and a focal trait. In these 2 fields, there are sophisticated but disparate statistical traditions aimed at these tasks. The disconnect between their respective approaches is becoming untenable as questions in medicine, conservation biology, and evolutionary biology increasingly rely on integrating data from within and among species, and once-clear conceptual divisions are becoming increasingly blurred. To help bridge this divide, we lay out a general model describing the covariance between the genetic contributions to the quantitative phenotypes of different individuals. Taking this approach shows that standard models in both statistical genetics (e.g., genome-wide association studies; GWAS) and phylogenetic comparative biology (e.g., phylogenetic regression) can be interpreted as special cases of this more general quantitative-genetic model. The fact that these models share the same core architecture means that we can build a unified understanding of the strengths and limitations of different methods for controlling for genetic structure when testing for associations. We develop intuition for why and when spurious correlations may occur analytically and conduct population-genetic and phylogenetic simulations of quantitative traits. The structural similarity of problems in statistical genetics and phylogenetics enables us to take methodological advances from one field and apply them in the other. We demonstrate by showing how a standard GWAS technique-including both the genetic relatedness matrix (GRM) as well as its leading eigenvectors, corresponding to the principal components of the genotype matrix, in a regression model-can mitigate spurious correlations in phylogenetic analyses. As a case study, we re-examine an analysis testing for coevolution of expression levels between genes across a fungal phylogeny and show that including eigenvectors of the covariance matrix as covariates decreases the false positive rate while simultaneously increasing the true positive rate. More generally, this work provides a foundation for more integrative approaches for understanding the genetic architecture of phenotypes and how evolutionary processes shape it.

Discursive Practices of Serbian Cultural Intelligentsia and Production of Socio-Political Crisis Through and within the Union of Writers of Yugoslavia during 1985

In her work and on the basis of archival material, the author presents and analyzes the discursive practices of writers gathered in the Union of Writers of Yugoslavia, and articulated through the work of its governing bodies – Congresses, Assemblies, and the Presidency – throughout 1985. Namely, that year, at the 9th Congress of Writers in Novi Sad, one part of Serbian writers, gathered in the Association of Writers of Serbia, opened and actualized the so-called Kosovo issue within the Union, by constructing uniformly structured, and persistently repeated ideological narrative about the endangerment and persecution of Serbs in Kosovo, claiming that it was – genocide. The paper presents and summarizes the main features of the aforementioned congress, which indicate that the Yugoslav socio-political crisis of the early 1980s deeply affected the Union during 1985 and that it revealed deep conceptual divisions among Serbian and other writers in Yugoslavia. The dividing line was built around the rejection of the 1974 Constitution and the denial of national-cultural and republican identities and borders within Yugoslavia, on the one hand, and their defense and plea for them, on the other. The text seeks to clarify what the concept of freedom of literary creation and politicization of literature, which was advocated and defended by the Serbian cultural intelligentsia at the 9th Congress, essentially meant, as well as to point out that the period of the 1980s was marked by the ambition of writers to affirm themselves as significant socio-political factor through criticism of dogmatic and repressive political authorities of socialist selfgovernment. The author then focuses on the work of the Literary Union Presidency during 1985, and on the discursive practices of some Serbian writers, gathered in the Association of Writers of Serbia and the Association of Writers of Kosovo, articulated through The Open Letter and other letters of the UKS administration, which insisted on further opening of the so-called Kosovo issue and made serious accusations against the Albanian administration of the Kosovo Writers' Association. This encouraged the continuation of the crisis production process within the Union. She concludes that behind all of these discursive efforts was a concrete goal of recentralizing the federal literary organization, mastering the Kosovo literary association and discursively supporting the Serbian political elite, which at the same time, at the federal political level, insisted on opening and resolving the so-called Kosovo issue and the issue of unity of the Serbian federal and state unit within Yugoslavia. The author started from the hypothesis that (war) violence, specifically that in Kosovo, against Albanians, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, was conceived, among other things, in the words of the Serbian humanistic intelligentsia, which produced discursive/ideological knowledge through which interpreted the past and present of the national community and which aimed to encourage national mobilization and homogenization and put them at the service of a certain political project – the recentralization of the Yugoslav state, of Serbia, strengthening and unification of the imagined and scattered Serbian national-cultural society in Yugoslavia. Through the aforementioned discursive knowledge, a stigmatic image of the barbaric Albanian Other was built, which served to legitimize his exemption from the legal order, i.e. the imposition of a state of emergency and the normalization of violence in Kosovo throughout 1990s. Given that the aim of this paper was to give a meticulous overview of a conjuncture episodes in the work of the Union of Writers of Yugoslavia during 1985 and discursive strategies that would lead to its disintegration in the continuation of the process, and since this topic is still largely subject to politicization, the author let the sources “speak” in the text to the greatest extent possible.

Reconsidering the “Popular View” (俗覧 zokuran): Tracing Vernacular Precedents in a Modern Illustrated Hagiography of Kakuban 覺鑁 (1095–1143)

As a supplement to sermonizing, the use of images has been crucial to growing the lay Buddhist following in Japan since at least the tenth century. While it may be the case that Buddhist images, much more so than texts, have historically been better able to draw in popular audiences through their accessible means of communication, the emergence of contemporary literate audiences meant new modes of accessibility. This article explores both the textual and illustrative histories of a modern illustrated hagiography on the medieval Shingon Buddhist monk Kakuban 覺鑁 (1095–1143). By tracing earlier vernacular approaches to Kakuban’s narrative that emerged throughout the evolution of this hagiography, it becomes clear that images were merely auxiliary in their appeal to modern Japanese readers and that such an appeal had been a consideration for generations of Buddhist compilers. This example draws attention to the mutually constitutive relationship between otherwise traditionally distinct functions of text and image in Japanese Buddhist hagiography, but also common conceptual divisions between lay and monastic experiences and popular and elite reading practices.

Straddlers not spiralists: Critical questions for research on fixers, local-foreign news work, and cross-border journalism

This article challenges current trends in the study of fixers and other forms of “local-foreign news work” through discussion of questions crucial to future investigations. Responding to Kotišová and Deuze’s call to complicate the existing “repertoire of concepts, theories, and epistemic categories” now in use in scholarship on fixing (2022: 1172), we provide theoretical frameworks relevant to, but thus far unutilized by, this scholarship. Considering local-foreign news work as a process of straddling political, cultural, and epistemic boundaries allows us to interrogate the conceptual binaries operating in the relevant research, such as west/nonwest, local/foreign, fixer/journalist. By engaging the liminality of local journalistic labor, this article brings into relief dynamics often obscured in current studies, namely, the impact of race and gender identities, and the post-colonial contexts within which much local-foreign news work takes place. Attention to these dynamics challenges the conceptual divisions upon which studies of cross-border journalism often rely, while revealing the consequential – and boundary-defying – positionality of local news workers. Finally, examination of the “cosmopolitanism” of local-foreign news work, and the “situatedness” of the knowledge produced by local news workers, serves to thicken scholarship on the topic in ways that deactivate essentialisms, deepen empirical foundations, and address problematic configurations of power critical to the study of news production today. By diversifying the research queries we pose, and the theoretical perspectives we employ, future research can better account for the dynamism of local-foreign news work in the contemporary global news landscape.

Conceptualising ‘residential investment’: separating the inseparable in asset-based economies

The growth in residential real estate investment internationally since 2008 has led to an explosion of research on residential investment, across economics, sociology, housing and urban studies, geography and planning. But there remains an underlying question of what exactly is meant when we talk about ‘residential investment’. This paper analyses the way that ‘residential investment’ is used as an analytical category within different theoretical approaches to mean slightly different things, with different implications for policymakers. Further to this, we show how these different conceptualisations of investment are related to one another, in the case of the UK. The paper uses empirical material drawn from archive research on the development of the UK housing system to reflect on the vast literature on financing, financialising and investing in residential real estate. This paper makes two key contributions. Theoretically, it clarifies and questions the conceptual divisions created between different forms of residential investment. Methodologically, we demonstrate the benefits of a historical approach, which we argue reveals the path dependent nature of residential investment processes and practices.

Crossing the Binaries of Mobility Control: Agency, Force and Freedom

This article draws on qualitative data on journeys to Europe or Brazil undertaken by adults and teenagers from Sub-Saharan African countries to develop a conceptual analysis of the blurriness of the lines drawn between supposedly different types of movement via referencing the conceptual binary of forced/voluntary movement (such as asylum, trafficking, smuggling). It questions the liberal model of ‘agency’ that is employed not just by state actors, but also by many antislavery, anti-trafficking, child rights, and refugee rights activists, to construct boundaries between different ‘types’ of people on the move. Conceptual divisions between refugees and economic migrants, trafficked and smuggled persons, forced and voluntary labourers, child and adult migrants, and the idea of ‘modern slavery’, deflect attention from the structures that limit the choices open to people on the move. This article argues that the voluntary/forced binary encourages a tendency to falsely conflate choice with freedom and works to preserve the illusion that human freedom is a defining feature of liberal democratic societies rather than working to universally protect the freedoms of actual living human beings.

Causes and Effects of Division of Pentecostal-Evangelical Christian Churches

A Church is an important social institution. Historically, its significance in society has also been a face of controversies such as numerical and conceptual divisions. The Sociological Perspectives of a Religion (such as of Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Karl Marx) pointed out how religion, as a social institution, is very crucial in its role in the society as it gives meaning and purpose to life, reinforces and promotes social inequality, and focuses on ways individuals interpret religious experiences. Using the case study design, the study aims to determine and analyze the causes and effects of Pentecostal Churches in the Philippines specifically in Luna, Apayao. Participants in the study were chosen purposively using the unique selected sampling technique. The interview, documentation, and documentary materials were the primary tools used in gathering the needed data. Results revealed that the causes of divisions in Pentecostal-Evangelical Churches were due to financial, spiritual (doctrine), and personal matters. It was also found out, as the effect of these divisions, that society perceived it in two ways: generally good for the spread of churches and generally bad for the disunity it brought in the society. Church leaders and followers generally described this social situation as challenging to all social institutions. Results of this study could serve as a basis for developing relations between churches themselves and other social institutions in which it is to address church divisions for the sake of our society.

What makes AI ‘intelligent’ and ‘caring’? Exploring affect and relationality across three sites of intelligence and care

This paper scrutinises how AI and robotic technologies are transforming the relationships between people and machines in new affective, embodied and relational ways. Through investigating what it means to exist as human ‘in relation’ to AI across health and care contexts, we aim to make three main contributions. (1) We start by highlighting the complexities of philosophical issues surrounding the concepts of “artificial intelligence” and “ethical machines.” (2) We outline some potential challenges and opportunities that the creation of such technologies may bring in the health and care settings. We focus on AI applications that interface with health and care via examples where AI is explicitly designed as an ‘augmenting’ technology that can overcome human bodily and cognitive as well as socio-economic constraints. We focus on three dimensions of ‘intelligence’ - physical, interpretive, and emotional - using the examples of robotic surgery, digital pathology, and robot caregivers, respectively. Through investigating these areas, we interrogate the social context and implications of human-technology interaction in the interrelational sphere of care practice. (3) We argue, in conclusion, that there is a need for an interdisciplinary mode of theorising ‘intelligence’ as relational and affective in ways that can accommodate the fragmentation of both conceptual and material boundaries between human and AI, and human and machine. Our aim in investigating these sociological, philosophical and ethical questions is primarily to explore the relationship between affect, relationality and ‘intelligence,’ the intersection and integration of ‘human’ and ‘artificial’ intelligence, through an examination of how AI is used across different dimensions of intelligence. This allows us to scrutinise how ‘intelligence’ is ultimately conveyed, understood and (technologically or algorithmically) configured in practice through emerging relationships that go beyond the conceptual divisions between humans and machines, and humans vis-à-vis artificial intelligence-based technologies.

More Than and Not Quite: Exploring the Concept of the Human

More Than and Not Quite:Exploring the Concept of the Human Rebecah Pulsifer (bio) Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora's Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018 Megan H. Glick's Infrahumanisms: Science, Culture, and the Making of Modern Non/Personhood, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018 For several decades, scholars in fields such as feminist science and technology studies, new materialism, and posthumanism have called into question several assumptions about the concept of the human. To what extent can humans be understood as rational and autonomous beings given the contingency of our understanding, and given that both interdependence and exploitation are integral to human experience and history? To what extent can humans be understood as bounded, agential subjects when our perceptions and reactions are shaped by ostensibly nonhuman forces, such as our microbiomes, our environments, and the objects with which we interact? How can we—and should we—disentangle the human from the conceptual divisions we have inherited, such as those between non­human animals, nature, and technology? And yet, if we do not distinguish the human from other conceptual categories, how do we name human responsibility in the Anthropocene? To this rich area of inquiry, two new titles from Duke University Press add helpful terminology and provocative frameworks of analysis. In Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures, Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora argue that contemporary discourse concerning technologies of automation and artificial intelligence (AI) draws from a key dynamic of liberalism: the surrogate relation between racialized others and subjects imagined to be paradoxically sovereign and vulnerable, self­determining and innocent of their actions' effects. Technoliberalism, the authors' term for our contemporary milieu, describes "the political alibi of present­day racial capitalism that posits humanity as an aspirational figuration in a relation to technological transformation, obscuring [End Page 254] the uneven racial and gendered relations of labor, power, and social relations that underlie the contemporary conditions of capitalist production" (4). Megan H. Glick's Infrahumanisms: Science, Culture, and the Making of Modern Non/Personhood shows how beliefs about species categories, species relations, and species hierarchies form the ground from which ideas about biological essentialism, humane behavior, and dehumanization often grow. Glick argues that the infrahuman—that which is "'almost' or 'near' human"—is a malleable contrast category for "the management of the human/nonhuman boundary" and, consequently, for "the justification of biological essentialism and the naturalization of social hierarchy" (3, 10–11). Both books confirm that the human is a contingent concept: a category whose definitions and meanings owe their inheritance to cultural values regarding race, gender, nation, labor, and power. Moreover, both books illustrate how efforts to distinguish the human and the nonhuman often disguise or rationalize the positions of oppressed and exploited subjects whose humanity has rarely been recognized. Surrogate Humanity presents six chapters that illustrate how contemporary "engineering imaginaries" often rely on all­too­familiar Enlightenment paradigms of invisible labor, "universal" rights available only to some, and racialized hierarchies in which humanness is a quality to be demonstrated or achieved (13). Drawing from Saidiya Hartman in their theoretical framing, the authors argue that while we are often told that we are in the midst of one or more technological revolutions, contemporary technologies are the heirs of long­standing structures of liberal humanism by reproducing the surrogate relation between slave and master, helpmeet and complex subject. The authors also spotlight how contemporary discourses concerning automation, in particular, alternately promise liberation and threaten debasement while eliding the roles of racialized and colonial subjects in producing the technologies and materials on which automation relies. Surrogate Humanity's first chapter focuses on the mid­twentieth century, tracing how robots held appeal under the ideologies of both liberalism for their promise of docile, deracinated workers. Chapters 2 and 3 show how contemporary labor arrangements such as the "sharing economy" and Amazon Mechanical Turk accelerate the inequalities of racial capitalism while diminishing the material presence of workers. Chapter 4 clarifies one of the book's core arguments—that the concept of the human relies on the surrogate relation—through a focus on "sociable emotional [End Page 255] robots" (25...

Gender and modernity revisited: Dialogues with Joel Kahn

This article revisits theorising about the relationships between concepts of gender and modernity, drawing on long-term anthropological research on Southeast Asia. From the 1990s on, now well-known feminist critiques pointed to the profound androcentrism of much theorising about modernity, the many lacunae in such work, and the ways in which masculinity has operated as a core constitutive category of the social. Most theorising about modernity, feminists argued, was gendered both by the exclusion of women and a neglect of gender in explorations of the modern. In their turn, feminists have argued strongly for the centrality of genders and sexualities in the making of modern social and cultural forms and pointed to the crucial place of gendered imaginaries within modern social orders, with women being frequently identified and deployed as bearers of nation, ‘tradition’, and ‘civilisation’. Unpacking and challenging the received categories and paradigms – not least ‘woman’ – has proved demanding, however. Problems have been intensified by prevailing Eurocentrisms, and conceptual divisions of the world into essentialised binaries like ‘modern' and ‘traditional', ‘West' and the 'Rest', and latterly Islam and the West. With increased contests around the concept of modernity – feminist and non-feminist – some writers have argued for a pluralisation of modernity, with such concepts as multiple modernities or alternative modernities, or through conceiving of a global modernity. Engaging critically with such ideas, and grounding the discussion in empirical work on Malaysia carried out in dialogue with Joel Kahn, this article looks to possible further developments in framing debates about gender and the modern, exploring the contributions that locally based, anthropological scholarship can make to theorisations of modernity and its relationship(s) with gender.

Power and Profit at Sea: The Rise of the West in the Making of the International System

The making of the international system from c. 1500 reflected distinctively maritime dynamics, especially “gunboat diplomacy,” or the use of naval force for commercial gain. Comparisons between civilizations and across time show, first, that gunboat diplomacy was peculiarly European and, second, that it evolved through stages. For the majority of the modern era, violence was central to the commercial strategies of European state, private, and hybrid actors alike in the wider world. In contrast, large and small non-Western polities almost never sought to advance mercantile aims through naval coercion. European exceptionalism reflected a structural trade deficit, regional systemic dynamics favoring armed trade, and mercantilist beliefs. Changes in international norms later restricted the practice of gunboat diplomacy to states, as private navies became illegitimate. More generally, a maritime perspective suggests the need for a reappraisal of fundamental conceptual divisions and shows how the capital- and technology-intensive nature of naval war allowed relatively small European powers to be global players. It also explains how European expansion and the creation of the first global international system was built on dominance at sea centuries before Europeans’ general military superiority on land.

The frame as borderland: Secular gazes and believing bodies in Bani Abidi’s The Distance From Here (2010)

Abstract Is it still possible to think of some contemporary art as belonging to a religious or a secular world, where ‘world’ is understood in Wittgenstein’s sense as all that is the case? What purchase can these powerful concepts have on today’s art, especially in the realm of video and photography with their peculiar relations to reality and subjectivity? Echoing Talal Asad’s question ‘[i]s there a secular body?’, I ask whether there is a ‘secular’ or ‘religious’ gaze that belongs to this body, how it describes its own boundaries and what lies outside it. Looking at Pakistani art allows me to investigate the longer duration of culture from which some recent video practices have emerged and found a place in globalised art circuits. I claim that Bani Abidi’s video art, and specifically The Distance From Here (2010) can be seen as a sustained exploration of heterogeneous temporalities and subjective positions that are as yet not entirely taken up by their international presentation, audience and circulation, and derive from a space that is not understandable as simply divided between the secular and the religious. This remainder or intractability might indicate the possibility of encounters with forms of life that unsettle existing conceptual divisions between the secular and the religious or the local and the global. Seeing Abidi’s work in relation to a powerful tradition of allegory and of narrative deriving from the philosophy of Ibn Sina, I argue that these currents persist in popular culture and in local literary or artistic forms, even when they are not explicitly referred to. This allows me to make a case for seeing Abidi’s work in a context that is not restricted to the history of (Euro-American) art and its philosophies.

Privatizing Political Authority: Cybersecurity, Public-Private Partnerships, and the Reproduction of Liberal Political Order

Cybersecurity sits at the intersection of public security concerns about critical infrastructure protection and private security concerns around the protection of property rights and civil liberties. Public-private partnerships have been embraced as the best way to meet the challenge of cybersecurity, enabling cooperation between private and public sectors to meet shared challenges. While the cybersecurity literature has focused on the practical dilemmas of providing a public good, it has been less effective in reflecting on the role of cybersecurity in the broader constitution of political order. Unpacking three accepted conceptual divisions between public and private, state and market, and the political and economic, it is possible to locate how this set of theoretical assumptions shortcut reflection on these larger issues. While public-private partnerships overstep boundaries between public authority and private right, in doing so they reconstitute these divisions at another level in the organization of political economy of liberal democratic societies.

Institutional Experiments: Progressive Responses to the Dissolution of Autonomous Art

The paper discusses radicalised forms of new institutionalism in the field of contemporary visual arts, which has emerged since 2010. The text focuses on case studies of European institutions associated with the international coalition L’internationale, to analyse how those institutions bend conventions of the modernist institution of art. The article argues that the institutions analysed move beyond the conceptual divisions embedded in modernism, such as the distinction between high art and popular creativity, or between use-value and aesthetical value of art. In this way, radical institutions respond to the transformation of both function and understanding of contemporary art, prompted by economic and social incorporation of artistic activities. The text discusses progressive institutional models of museums 3.0, the neoliberal museums of 1%, and the nationalist museums, as contradictory responses to the underlying, structural tension, caused by the dissolution of the modernist frame of art.

Plant energetics and the synthesis of population and ecosystem ecology

Summary Historical conceptual divisions in ecology are dissolving as ecologists seek general currencies for understanding plant function, population dynamics, species interactions and ecosystem processes. Foremost among such synthetic approaches are population‐ecosystem models (PEMs), which treat the biomass dynamics of individuals as a foundation for coupled demographic and biogeochemical processes. Because plant productivity and tissue composition drive terrestrial energy and nutrient cycling, and plant growth itself is often used as a fitness proxy, PEMs predict that phenomena related to population dynamics, such as species coexistence, are associated with processes at the ecosystem level. I argue that this line of thought reflects a persistent misunderstanding of the relationship of plant growth—the creation of new structural biomass—and individual fitness. A survey of measured energetic costs of a wide variety of plant functions suggests that the majority of assimilated energy for many plants is allocated to survival rather than growth processes. This diversion of assimilate to survival—such as fighting infection, reducing potential tissue damage, or storing reserves in the face of defoliation risk—contributes to individual fitness but may not impact the flow of energy and nutrients in the environment or to other trophic levels. Synthesis. Using simple models of plant energy budgets, I demonstrate how incorporating survival allocation into PEMs using a bet‐hedging approach can decouple population and ecosystem dynamics. In revisiting what little is known about how individual plants use energy, I suggest that recasting plant strategy theory in an energetic‐demographic framework may offer a useful way forward in the drive to unify population and ecosystem processes.

Recognising debate types within the classroom – an expansion of prevailing conceptual divisions

Although much research has previously addressed elements of classroom discourse and the practices of pupils' debate and discussion, I argue there is a need to expand the framework for analysing the forms of such oral classroom activities, particularly regarding expressions of differences in opinion. Commonly applied analytical tools generally recognise just two forms, adversarial and deliberative. By operationalising a conceptual set of categories defining how differences in opinion are expressed within the classroom, I show that this is too narrow. A third form (agonistic) can be recognised based on Chantal Mouffe's theory of democracy and politics, and another form is what I call the relativistic. Thus, I propose an analytical framework with a set of four forms to address the nature of debate. By providing empirical classroom examples to support each form, this article is intended not only for researchers but also to benefit practising teachers.

Comments on "cyclical swings" by Professor Hannah Decker: The underappreciated "solid center" of psychiatry.

The history of psychiatry is characterized by some deep ideological and conceptual divisions, as adumbrated in Professor Hannah Decker's essay. However, the schism between "biological" and "psychosocial" models of mental illness and its treatment represents extreme positions among some psychiatrists-not the model propounded by academic psychiatry or its affiliated professional organizations. Indeed, the "biopsycho-social model" (BPSM) developed by Dr. George L. Engel has been, and remains, the foundational model for academic psychiatry, notwithstanding malign market forces that have undermined the BPSM's use in clinical practice. The BPSM is integrally related to "centralizing" and integrative trends in American psychiatry that may be traced to Franz Alexander, Karl Jaspers, and Engel himself, among others. This "Alexandrian-Jaspersian-Engelian" tradition is explored in relation to Professor Decker's "cyclical swing" model of psychiatry's history.

MEDIATION, RELIGION, AND NON-CONSISTENCY IN-ONE

This paper addresses the capacity of François Laruelle's non-philosophy to evade the difficulties produced by the mediation of religion. Specifically, it looks at how religion is mediated through philosophy under the heading of “philosophy of religion.; While such a heading indicates a gesture seeking to unify what is divided ; namely philosophy and religion ; it actually depends upon and thus maintains this division. The philosophical mediation of religion amounts to the division produced by the thought of religion. Conjoining this claim to a brief genealogy of the concept of religion, I argue that the modern, secular gesture of philosophizing about religion continues a much longer tradition of religion's divisive mediation. What Laruelle's non-philosophy offers, I contend, is a means of escape from the conceptual architecture on which the mediation of religion depends. This is the case specifically insofar as he enables us to conceive a One that would be outside any divisive or mediatic relation to the many. Furthermore, the fact the Laruelle's thought makes use of (what gets named as) religious material enacts a refusal of the division between religion and philosophy. In this regard, however, I argue that his use of religious material still remains imbricated in the division between Christianity and Judaism. Hence, even as Laruelle escapes the conceptual divisions that enable the mediation of religion, his peculiar use of religious material leads him to redeploy divisions central to religion's genealogy.

Unifying Psychology: Shared Ontology and the Continuum of Practical Assumptions

Critics have described psychology as a science impaired by disunity. The most recent special issue of Review of General Psychology sought to specifically address this concern, seeking perspectives from a wide range of theorists, each of whom offered their tradition's approach to how psychology as a whole may be integrated into a more unified whole. To continue this discussion, this article draws upon examples from the special issue, the disunity crisis literature, and wider writings in the philosophy of science, to explore the theoretical and conceptual divisions that foster ambiguity, confusion, and apparent irreconcilable differences between the disparate fields of psychology. The authors conclude that the majority of contemporary, scientific psychology is oriented toward a shared physical ontology, which can serve as a common grounding point from which the conceptual and theoretical differences of disparate fields may be meaningfully framed and evaluated. To this end, this article proposes that the various research traditions of psychology can be understood through their positions along a continuum of practical assumptions, which embodies the inherent conflict between two scientific priorities: metaphysical certainty (the safe end of the continuum) and practical experimental predictions (the risky end of the continuum). Three theoretical perspectives offered in the unification special issue are examined under this framework: situational realism (a distinctly safe approach), developmental evolutionary psychology (an intermediate approach), and the Tree of Knowledge unified theory (a relatively risky approach). The authors explore how the recommendations of each approach can be seen as a function of its position on the continuum of practical assumptions, and the implications of this understanding for future integrative efforts is discussed.

The Social Consequences of Dissociation: Lessons from the Same-Sex Marriage Debate

This essay explores two problematic functions of dissociation in publicly distributed, anti-same-sex marriage talking points guides. I argue that the organizations responsible for these guides use dissociation to sidestep self-identified conflicts between their values and actions and to disguise arguments based on social animus as claims about abstract concepts such as marriage. To further the study of dissociation in public discourse, I advocate a broader view: arguments that merely attempt to create the kind of fundamental, conceptual divisions for which dissociation is known—but do not succeed—can still have social consequences and warrant close study.