Belief In Necessity Research Articles

A expressão dos demônios de Morin

O objetivo deste texto é promover um diálogo com a autobiografia intelectual de Edgar Morin, com os três temas de maior relevância na sua obra "Meus demônios": a epistemologia, a ética e a política; e destacar a importância do pensamento complexo no processo de produzir saúde. A postura de indagação contínua faz Morin refletir sobre a provisoriedade das "verdades" e "conclusões". Sobretudo, que o conhecimento nunca é total, mas multidimensional. Propõe-se a construir um conhecimento que religa, que é inacabado e inacabável. Trabalha com o conceito de auto-ética, com a urgência de "constituição" de uma identidade humanitária, de uma consciência planetária, da idéia de terra pátria. Na política assinala a necessidade de uma consciência de resistência entre os homens, em todos os tempos e áreas, a forças mentais, ideológicas, culturais e históricas que possam suscitar erros e desta forma reforça a crença na necessidade imperiosa de repensar a política. A lógica do pensamento complexo de Morin tem iluminado muitas das discussões no campo da saúde, uma vez que nesse campo os fenômenos envolvendo o processo saúde e doença apresentam múltiplas dimensões, o que nos faz refletir sobre a complexidade do conceito de necessidades de saúde.

LAURA J. SNYDER. Reforming Philosophy: A Victorian Debate on Science and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2006. Pp. x, 386. $45.00

The Mill-Whewell debate will mean little to nonspecialists in the history of the philosophy of science; even Victorianists might not be able to summon up more than a dim impression of a tart exchange between a utilitarian Radical and an intuitionist Tory. Laura J. Snyder's impressive achievement is not only to register a significant improvement in our understanding of the technicalities of this debate over the proper method of scientific reasoning, but also to bring the debate alive in a way that illumines the whole terrain of mid-Victorian intellectual life. Snyder's principal aim is to show that John Stuart Mill and William Whewell were never as far apart as their (mostly, Mill's) shadow-boxing implied. Whewell's Toryism was of the reformist—perhaps Peelite—variety. Son of a master carpenter and Lancaster grammar school boy, he became a pillar of the natural and moral philosophy establishments and (in 1841) Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, but he was always a measured believer in the possibility of mental and moral improvement for all. Far from being a doctrinaire intuitionist, he sought a “middle way” between the epistemologies of John Locke and Immanuel Kant. He believed both in empiricism and in pure reason, as evident in his nuanced idea of “discoverers' induction.” Unlike Kant, Whewell believed that the “Fundamental Ideas” through which knowledge is made possible are “independent of the processes of the mind,” “justified by their origin in the mind of a divine creator” (pp. 44–55)—the red rag to the utilitarian bull—but that our appreciation of these Fundamental Ideas requires a progressive development largely built up from experience, until “the experiential truth has been ‘idealized’ into a necessary truth” (p. 89). For Whewell the “love of knowledge” was a pious trait, as well as a universal potential, to be developed by study both of the Fundamental Ideas and the more speculative “progressive sciences.” By the same token, his belief in moral necessity—the immanence of Moral Rules—also entailed a belief in the need for the progressive development of the moral sense, “a culture of the human mind,” for the full appreciation of those rules; morality, in Whewell's understanding, was therefore not a fixed code laid down by the status quo but rather “a living and growing body of truth” (pp. 261–262).

Benjamin Mays, Global Ecumenism, and Local Religious Segregation

Born in South Carolina in 1894 to tenant farmer parents, Benjamin Mays made the improbable rise to a distinguished career spent at the administrative helm of two black educational institutions, first, the School of Religion at Howard University during the 1930s, and then, from 1940 to 1967, at Morehouse College. From both positions, Mays became one of the most prominent and influential black theologians, educators, and public intellectuals of the twentieth century. Memories of Mays' stature have been eclipsed by the outpouring of attention to his Morehouse student Martin Luther King Jr. who claimed him as his mentor and whom Mays would later eulogize in 1968. Unlike his student, Mays was blessed with a long life that stretched from Jim Crow to black power. Mays lived out the complexities of being a southern black liberal Protestant who believed that black and white churches should function as progressive political agents, resting on the moral foundation of global Christian universalism and an enduring faith in the institution of American democracy. Mays advocated a church universal that could build a worldwide movement for social justice. At the same time, he understood the innately local nature of religious and racial policy and practice. He argued that Christianity ought to be color-blind and desegregated while at the same time he adhered to a belief in the political necessity of black controlled institutions, especially churches and colleges. Still, Mays did not believe only in the power of the sacred or of private institutions; he coupled that with a faith in an interventionist egalitarian state believing that both church and state were essential to achieving racial equality. Mays' early and eager engagement with global religious organizations provided him with opportunities to travel the world. Many other prominent politically engaged African American religious intellectuals in the pre-civil rights era came to a concept of global politics in just this way, through travels to and participation in ecumenical world gatherings. In this way, Mays' life is more emblematic than it is unusual. For that reason, our understandings of African Americans and international politics also must make way for religious universalism as one route to a compelling critique of colonialism and of the oppression of people of color around the globe. Toward the end of his life, Mays came to understand better that local churches, black and white, served not only as religious sanctuaries but as racial and political ones as well. As a whole, neither blacks nor whites wanted to sacrifice institutions with distinctive cultural, theological, and political natures; born and bred in segregation, each group's churches had grown its own separate way and neither group wanted them to be subsumed in a quest for liberal universalism or color-blind Christianity.

English curriculum against the peace

The “whole foul literature of ‘glory,’” as Bertrand Russell called it, should concern us all. His gloves‐off description contrasts starkly with more familiar descriptions of the same works as being “the best that has been thought and said,” according to Matthew Arnold, or as “what oft was thought but ne'er so well express'd,” according to Alexander Pope. Yet Russell's words also stand as a chilling gloss on Roland Barthe's claim that “imagery, like myth, transforms history into nature.” By the end of World War I, when Britain led other European nations by dominating 85% of the world's land mass, the growth of English Studies had become inextricably committed to express, bolster, glorify, and recruit for that mighty empire. The empire's enormous military power, and its expansion and maintenance, drew justification from an unshakable interpretation of Just War theory: that Justice was the equivalent of British will. English language, literature, and culture presented to the colonies, in the form of Standard Authors school editions, the “armour wherein the Empire could trust.” Certain gender, race, and class‐related concepts of heroism, courage, manliness, patriotism, and the willingness—whether expressed as a noble eagerness or a noble reluctance—to engage in war, formed the underpinnings of the empire, and of a racially pure “Englishness.” Colonial youth had to be inculcated with an almost visceral identification of colony with Mother England, and with a belief in war's glorious necessity.

Compensatory Buffers, Depression, and Irrational Beliefs

This article proposes a new explanation of the connections between depression and irrational beliefs in the light of the concept of compensatory buffers (CBs). Significant factors in some forms of depression are negative messages coming from an internal agency called the inner critic. To avoid the impact of these messages, the individual feels driven to acquire compensatory buffers, the purpose of which is to compensate for the inner critic’s disparagement of the self. When these buffers fail, the result is a feeling of lowered self-esteem and depression. Loss is thus seen to trigger depression when it is the loss of one or more compensatory buffers. Irrational beliefs are explained as beliefs in the necessity of acquiring compensatory buffers; shoulds derive their force from the fact that they prescribe the compensatory buffers to be obtained in order to ward off the pain of depressogenic punishments associated with the inner critic.

Does "grief work" work?

This article challenges the long-standing belief in the necessity of "grief work" for adjustment to bereavement. Evidence is offered from a prospective study of 30 widows and 30 widowers that indicates that grief work is not always as essential for adjustment to bereavement as theorists and clinicians have claimed. Widows who avoided confronting their loss did not differ in their depression scores from widows who worked through their grief. However, for widowers, performance of grief work was associated with better adjustment over an 18-month period. The implications of these findings for the grief work hypothesis are considered.

Inequality, the New Right and mental health care delivery in the United States in the Reagan era

This essay draws upon research on mental health treatment and provision in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1988, and is part ofa wider US-UK com parative study. The main concern is to examine the linkages between pub lic policy and inequalities in mental health care delivery in one local area. In opposition to the concept of the welfare state, a primary stance of the New Right and of the Reagan administration has been the belief in the necessity ofsocial hierarchies based on wealth. The consequences of poli cies predicated on these beliefs were studied at a local mental health sys tem, where it was found that economic factors strongly influence access to and experience in the system. Principally through drawing upon data from 42 in-depth focussed interviews with mental health professionals in the San Francisco Bay Area, I examine how the poor are excluded from treat ment, how patients are dumped from the private sector, and how a com plex triage system in both public and private treatment settings has come into being.

The Concept of Divine Necessity

My purpose in this article is (a) to consider the value and the coherence of the concept of divine necessity and (b) to offer some suggestions about the way in which divine necessity might reasonably be understood. I shall argue that there are reasons for denying the value and coherence of one notion of divine necessity but that another way of understanding it is not incoherent. Secondly, I shall defend the view that belief in divine necessity can plausibly be understood as an item of negative theology, as a way of refusing to tolerate certain positive affirmations.Some philosophers have argued that belief in divine necessity amounts to belief that ‘God exists’ is a necessary proposition. As many recent writers have pointed out, however, there is more than one kind of necessary proposition. The kind which comes immediately to mind is, perhaps, that of logically necessary propositions. These are analytic, i.e. they are coherent and their negations are incoherent. But not all necessarily true propositions are logically necessary. There are, for example, propositions which are not analytic but which seem necessarily true when we think of what is picked out by the referring expressions used in them. An example is ‘The number which is the number of the planets is necessarily greater than 6’. The number referred to here is 9, and 9 is necessarily greater than 6. But the number which is the number of the planets could have been 4.It is not, then, helpful simply to say that belief in God’s necessity is belief that ‘God exists’ is a necessary proposition. One influential view of divine necessity is, however, unaffected by this fact.

The logical and empirical bases of conservation judgements

It is argued that conservation judgements are based on a particular combination of logical necessity and empirical belief. The empirical belief is that a given transformation will not alter a particular quantity (Elkind's conservation of identity). The logical aspect is a transitive deductive argument containing an initial equivalence of two quantities and the conservation of identity belief as premises which lead to the conclusion of maintained equivalence (Elkind's conservation of equivalence). In two experiments, it is shown that conservation of identity beliefs can be manipulated in subjects who have long since developed the capacity for transitive deductive inference. Untrained 10 year olds were unaware of how sublimation acts to alter certain quantities over particular transformations of shape. And untrained adults incorrectly believed that both the area and perimeter of a closed figure would be conserved over transformations which elongated the figure. Both groups of subjects could be trained in the correct conservation of identity beliefs and this affected their conservation of equivalence judgements in predicted ways. It is suggested that the locical aspect of conservation is developmentally stable and that the empirical aspect varies widely across problems and individuals because of its dependence on relevant experience.