Friendly Criticism Research Articles

Yuri Petrovich Bocharov and Samara school

A brief biography, stages of scientific and design activity and the decisive role of an outstanding scientist, urban planner and international expert in the development of an architectural school in the city of Kuibyshev, now Samara, are considered. In the process of establishing the Faculty of Architecture, academician Yuri Petrovich Bocharov, with his high competence, professional interest, sharp and at the same time fair and friendly criticism, year after year set a high bar for the Samara School of Architecture, which the modern generation of professors and students - urban planners and architects - is trying to maintain.

Reply to My Friendly Critics

Reply to My Friendly Critics

Moral reasoning performance determines epistemic peerdom.

We offer a friendly criticism of May's fantastic book on moral reasoning: It is overly charitable to the argument that moral disagreement undermines moral knowledge. To highlight the role that reasoning quality plays in moral judgments, we review literature that he did not mention showing that individual differences in intelligence and cognitive reflection explain much of moral disagreement. The burden is on skeptics of moral knowledge to show that moral disagreement arises from non-rational origins.

Economic Growth, Happiness and Socialism: Durkheim’s Critique of Economic Reason and Beyond

ABSTRACTThe paper argues that Durkheim’s positions on happiness and socialism are relevant in today’s neoliberal and post-affluent societies. Durkheim dissociates happiness from economic progress and makes it contingent upon the relationships between the individual and society. An important component of Durkheimian happiness is the dynamic equilibrium between desires and means. Therefore, his friendly criticism of the socialist project is that it promises to fulfil the desires that were released by a disembedded market economy. Durkheim’s point helps us to understand why the social democratic promise was broken and how the neoliberal imperatives of competition and unlimited wants sow unhappiness.

Gilbert Meilaender and the Tragedy of Biological Individualism

This article provides a friendly criticism of Meilaender’s positions on the beginning of life and decision making at the end of life. It is argued that his version of the self is narrowly physicalist and individualist with no room for the essentially social and psychological parts of identity or selfhood. That in turn leads to his rigoristic or tutioristic judgments on end of life care.

Causation, Legal History, and Legal Doctrine

This short essay is my contribution to a conference on “opportunities for law’s intellectual history,” which took place at SUNY Buffalo Law School in the fall of 2014. The essay offers a friendly criticism of what I perceive to be a trend in legal history. In particular, it criticizes legal historians’ seemingly increasing reluctance to offer causal explanations of past events or current practices. While recognizing the empirical and conceptual difficulties that beset any effort to identify “causes” of historical events, I argue that legal history cannot effectively serve the critical function many historians hope for it without making controversial judgments about historical causation in particular cases. The bulk of the essay is devoted to identifying and analyzing four potentially critical types of history: Impeaching Accounts, Genealogies, Stories, and Restorative Projects. My aim in discussing each type is to show that critical histories that purport to remain agnostic as to the driving causal factors at work in the historical phenomena under examination are either insufficiently critical, insufficiently historical, or both.

Anti-Petrarchism in the <i>Decameron</i>’s <i>Proem</i> and <i>Introduction</i>

Similarities of purpose between the Proem of the Decameron and the opening sonnet of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta have been noticed by several scholars. Students of Boccaccio and Petrarch are also becoming increasingly aware that the former was willing to criticize his friend, as he did when Petrarch chose to accept Visconti patronage in Milan, the great enemy of Florence.The Proem of the Decameron, however, has not hitherto elicited comment as a text where such friendly criticism, at least of Petrarch’s poetic persona in the RVF, might be found. The present essay suggests that Boccaccio’s famous address in the Proem to fearful, lovesick and housebound women pertains as much to that Petrarcan persona as it does to those vaghe donne. Although it refers to and engages with the important debate on Boccaccio’s attitudes towards real women, the essay explores the possibility that the Decameron’s Proem slyly hints (in a way that is reinforced by the story collection’s Introduction) that the Canzoniere reveals a male poet who is himself “unmanned” by his excessive lovesickness and pursuit of solitude.

Three explanations for the Kahneman-Tversky Programme of the 1970s

This article provides a historical description of the background and development of Kahneman and Tversky's collaborative research of the 1970s and advances three explanations for their success. A first reason for the two psychologists' triumph in economics is that they provided a friendly criticism of economics based on a re-interpretation of normative and descriptive. A second reason for their success was the new type of experiments they could use. A third reason was their effective use of intuitively appealing examples, to which not only the experimental subjects but also the readers of the articles could relate.

Douglas Campbell's “The Deliverance of God": A Review by a Friendly Critic

Douglas Campbell's “The Deliverance of God": A Review by a Friendly Critic

Douglas Campbell's “The Deliverance of God": A Review by a Friendly Critic

Douglas Campbell's “The Deliverance of God": A Review by a Friendly Critic

The Equal-Regard Family and Its Friendly Critics: Don Browning and the Practical Theological Ethics of the Family; Conceiving Parenthood: American Protestantism and the Spirit of Reproduction

The Equal-Regard Family and Its Friendly Critics: Don Browning and the Practical Theological Ethics of the Family; Conceiving Parenthood: American Protestantism and the Spirit of Reproduction

Defending the Duty of Assistance?

Whereas the drive to elaborate principles and practices of global distributive justice is continuing apace in the academy, Rawls's last book The Law of Peoples rejected the very idea of global distributive justice, and recommended instead a 'duty of assistance' towards societies burdened by unfavourable conditions - a concession that was described by many critics as wholly inadequate to the task of addressing global economic injustice. Recently, though, some more friendly critics (including Samuel Freeman, David Reidy and Mathias Risse) have argued for a reappraisal. Perhaps the duty is a demanding one, which enjoys clear advantages over some accounts of global distributive justice. And relatedly, perhaps The Law of Peoples possesses greater resources for theorising issues of global economic justice than has sometimes been recognised. This paper evaluates this attempt at rehabilitation. The character of the duty of assistance is set out, and the reasons why it is held to be superior to principles of global distributive justice are briefly canvassed. The supposed advantages enjoyed by the duty are examined, and it is shown that these are far less impressive than has been suggested by both Rawls and some recent defenders of his position. The paper also considers the ways in which the account developed in The Law of Peoples is able to contribute to the theorisation of global economic injustice. Although the account does provide more resources than has sometimes been recognised, it is argued that as the duty-based account is pushed further on this issue, it becomes still less plausible to claim that it possesses appreciable advantages over various positions on global distributive justice. More pointedly, its supposed advantages turn out to be in tension with each other. As such, if the provision of an adequate position on global economic justice is the goal, the reappraisal of The Law of Peoples may ultimately demand a transcendence of at least some of its key elements.

Responses to Friendly Critics

Responses to Friendly Critics

Book Review & Note: The Equal-Regard Family and its Friendly Critics: Don Browning and the Practical Theological Ethics of the Family

Book Review & Note: The Equal-Regard Family and its Friendly Critics: Don Browning and the Practical Theological Ethics of the Family

Acritical Criticism, Critical Criticism: Reframing, Topsight and Critical Dialectics

This paper theorizes critical readings from an interactional/argumentative perspective, providing a semiotic and phenomenological analysis of the scale ranging from consonant, friendly criticism, to dissonant, confrontational or unfriendly criticism. A number of key critical theories (by theorists such as G. W. F. Hegel, Oscar Wilde, Jacques Lacan, Erving Goffman, Norman Holland, Jacques Derrida, Stanley Fish, Paul Ricoeur, Judith Fetterley, John Muller, Alan Sinfield, and H. Porter Abbott) are examined in the light of this conception of criticism, and are situated within the framework of interactional pragmatics, of the dialectics of communication, and of a semiotic theory of truth and of consciousness.

Reflections On “Citizenship, Inc.”

Although I share many of the doubts about corporate citizenship of Néron and Norman, I join in their constructive project both by offering friendly criticism and by suggesting that their approach be extended further than they carry it. I argue first that rather than attempting to reform the language of corporate citizenship, we support its use where the effects are positive; second, that we concentrate on the fifth of their candidates for assessment; and third, that we extend the discussion to consider what it means to be a good global citizen, and whether that is compatible with being a good citizen of a particular state.

Acritical Criticism, Critical Criticism

This paper theorizes critical readings from an interactional / argumentative point of view, situating them on a scale going from consonant, friendly criticism, to dissonant, confrontational or unfriendly criticism. Some key critical notions (by Oscar Wilde, Stanley Fish, Paul Ricoeur, Judith Fetterley and H. Porter Abbott) are examined in the light of this conception of criticism, and situated within the framework of interactional pragmatics.

James Laughlin, New Directions, and the remaking of Ezra Pound

Although James Laughlin (1914-1997) came from one of Pittsburgh's leading steel-making families, his passions were literary rather than industrial - he wanted to be a poet. Laughlin was a freshman at Harvard when he traveled to Rapallo, Italy, in 1933 to meet Ezra Pound (1885-1972), and he returned the following year to enroll in the poet's Ezuversity. Pound dismissed Laughlin's poetic talents, advising the wealthy young man to make himself a publisher. Laughlin did just that, founding New Directions Press in 1936. For much of the 1930s, Laughlin and Pound were friends, business associates, collaborators, student and teacher, and even at times son and surrogate father. But Laughlin's investment in Pound - and their friendship - was severely tested by Pound's wartime propaganda broadcasts for Italian state radio, his capture and abortive trial for treason, and his thirteen-year stay as a mental patient in St. Elizabeths Hospital. Following this scandal and disgrace, the reading public no longer wanted to buy Pound's books, and the critical establishment dismissed him as a Fascist crank. Laughlin and New Directions responded by marketing Pound in such a way as to convince consumers that the poet's importance needed to be judged solely on aesthetic grounds, and that his political beliefs were irrelevant to his accomplishments as a pioneering literary artist. With Pound's encouragement, and despite the poet's oft-expressed opposition to the mixture of commerce and art, Laughlin used such marketing tools as advertising, the cultivation of friendly critics, and the development of the trade paperback to enhance Pound's reputation. Drawing on a wide range of sources - including interviews with Laughlin and other New Directions staffers and unpublished materials from numerous literary archives - Gregory Barnhisel tells the story of the personal and professional relationship between one of the twentieth century's most controversial writers and his loyal and innovative American publisher - a relationship that eventually helped remake literary history and continues to shape our understanding of modernism itself.

Count No One Happy: Eudaimonia and Positive Psychology.

Some aspects of “second-generation” Positive Psychology are analyzed and their origins explored. In particular, Seligman’s importation of the concept of eudaimonia from Aristotelian ethics is critiqued and found to be problematic. This conclusion is reached through an examination of the concept of eudaimonia as it was employed in ancient philosophy. COUNT NO ONE HAPPY: EUDAIMONIA AND POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY One would have to be downright churlish to regard the Positive Psychology movement with complete disdain. After all, is not a movement comprising a group of bright, accomplished researchers doing their best to identify and promote the well-being of humanity worthy of endorsement and even praise? We certainly feel that it is. And the faintness of our praise coupled with our criticisms of various aspects of the movement should not be taken as broad advocacy of human misery or the lachrymose life of the tortured artist or creative genius. Even the Buddhists, who see suffering as inevitable and ubiquitous, give hope for a better day and a means of achieving it. What follows, rather, is intended in the spirit of friendly and constructive criticism, a contribution to the perennial and essential discussion about how we are to conceive the good life, a discussion that was given recent impetus by leaders of the Positive Psychology movement. Positive Psychology is a vigorous, well-funded, and rapidly evolving movement. So dynamic is the movement that critique becomes difficult, given the speed with which the target moves. Though the volume that introduced Positive Psychology, a special issue of the American Psychologist that appeared in 2000, gave lip service to such concepts as citizenship, love, wisdom, and courage, it seemed to be in essence about promoting those states, traits, and institutions that would foster good health and subjective well-being. Guignon’s (2002) critique of this volume indicated that important human virtues were either neglected or absent entirely, especially some central to the philosophical life, namely the important virtues of reflection or critical examina\\server05\productn\T\THE\25-1\THE107.txt unknown Seq: 2 24-OCT-05 11:25 82 Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psy. Vol. 25, No. 1, 2005 tion and honesty or truthfulness. But Positive Psychology circa 2000 was a work in progress. Within the blink of an eye Peterson and Seligman (2004) seemingly had covered all the bases with their list of 24 “Virtues in Action Strengths” that included “judgment/critical thinking” and “integrity/honesty.” So given that Positive Psychologists now are promoting all the virtues that have ever been thought to be constitutive of the good life, is there still a problem? In morphing from students of hedonism into inquirers into the broader and deeper currents of human well-being, Positive Psychologists, in all likelihood, were reacting to or anticipating the challenge that the movement sometimes comes off as a shallow “happiology” (cf. Lazarus, 2003; Woolfolk, 2002). To this end, there has been a sincere effort to add some gravitas. Notably, Seligman (2002a) has distinguished among the “pleasant life,” the “good life,” and the “meaningful life.” The pleasant life is concerned with maximizing pleasure, about creating, maintaining, and intensifying positive feelings, what we might call first-generation Positive Psychology. According to Seligman, the good life, however, is not about maximizing positive emotion, but is a life wrapped up in successfully using your signature strengths to obtain abundant and authentic gratification. (Seligman, 2002a, p. 249) The good life thus results from using one’s “highest strengths.” Seligman goes on to identify the good life with Csikszentmihalyi’s (1990) concept of “flow,” a state in which we subjectively seem to merge with the activity, losing a sense of separateness or agency. The sense of the passage of time is altered, as well, as we dissolve into the moment and time seems to stop. Participating in an activity in this fashion has a certain mystical ring to citizens of cultures predicated on Cartesian mind-body splits and individualistic, person-centered concepts of consciousness. Yet, even the most experientially fragmented Westerner can point to some experience in which something akin to a loss of boundary between self and external world seems to have occurred. Athletes talk about being in the “zone” and musicians refer to being “one with the music.” And, of course, Csikszentmihalyi and others have conducted much research on the experience of flow. Flow does seem qualitatively different from the feelings of satiation after a satisfying meal or the joy of saving money on one’s auto insurance. So far so good. Seems like we might be headed into Zen territory, an appealing and familiar destination for many Westerners seeking a better and more coherent life. But at this juncture, somewhat incredibly, Seligman goes on to identify absorption in the moment with the philosophy of Aristotle and the key concept of Aristotelian ethics, eudaimonia. Seligman gives a highly idiosyncratic interpretation of this concept from Greek philosophy: \\server05\productn\T\THE\25-1\THE107.txt unknown Seq: 3 24-OCT-05 11:25

The Rewards of APA Membership

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article From the PresidentFull AccessThe Rewards of APA MembershipMichelle Riba, M.D., M.S.Michelle RibaSearch for more papers by this author, M.D., M.S.Published Online:17 Sep 2004https://doi.org/10.1176/pn.39.18.0390003 One of the best aspects of being president of APA is having the opportunity to hear from APA members about issues affecting our patients and our profession. Many of you have e-mailed me, offering advice, support, expertise, and even some friendly criticism about what we are doing at APA. We are not a shy group! What is clear from these communications is that our members feel very much connected and part of the important work we are doing and that they care a lot about what we are trying to do.When an APA member writes to me, whether he or she is raising a clinical issue, asking about the work of an APA component, or recommending that some action be taken with regard to a particular problem, the fact that the person is a psychiatrist and a fellow APA member provides an immediate bond and connection. I make new friends among our members regularly, and I very much appreciate the time and trouble many of you are taking to let me know how you think I am doing and how APA is doing.Which brings me to the issue of APA membership. At this time in our profession, I cannot think of anything more important than our coming together and maintaining a strong APA. APA membership helps solidify our professional identity as psychiatrists; it is an honor to belong to such a great organization. The Association has certainly stood the test of time—it is the oldest medical specialty society in the United States (it was founded in 1844). Moreover, no other psychiatric organization has the depth and breadth of expertise and ability to advocate for our patients and our profession. Under the leadership of our terrific medical director, Jay Scully, M.D., we have one of the most professional and most respected medical organization staffs in the world.I have had the opportunity to meet with many resident groups in the last year, and inevitably the subject of APA membership comes up. Many residents (as do general members) affiliate with various subspecialty organizations—and that is a good thing because such organizations offer a range of valuable professional and collegial opportunities. As a result, however, many residents are confused about which organizations are most important or valuable to join. My advice to them is simple: It is critical to join APA as well as their subspecialty or professional-interest psychiatric organization.That our field has many outstanding, effective organizations is indicative of its health and the many exciting developments that have taken place over the past 20 years in research, patient care, and academia. And while becoming active members in them strengthens our ability to accomplish important goals, we cannot permit ourselves to become fragmented or have our voices diminished. We must make sure we retain a unified voice that can speak for all of psychiatry; having that unified voice makes us more effective in communicating consistent and focused messages to legislators, advocacy groups, patients, the public, and other medical groups. Moreover, being an APA member ensures that APA continues to represent a critical mass of psychiatrists whose numbers have meaning in Congress.Psychiatry needs to work hard to make ourselves heard. Stigma continues to plague our profession and our patients. State and federal budget cuts, no or limited access to care, denied care under managed care plans, and lack of parity coverage are among the problems we and our patients confront daily.To be sure, I appreciate that APA dues, medical society dues, and specialty organization dues can add up. But the value you are getting for your dollar in belonging to a world-renowned psychiatric organization and joining with your colleagues is unmistakable.We need you in other ways as well. If you want get involved in psychiatry but prefer to do so closer to home, there are many opportunities at the APA district branch and state association levels. If you are at or near retirement, we need your expertise and help more than ever.This is a big organization. We are working on many issues. Your voice is important, needed, and valued. Thank you for your continued membership in APA.▪ ISSUES NewArchived