Christless Christianity

1912 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 423-473 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin B. Warfield
Keyword(s):  

The Christ Myth by Arthur Drews was published early in 1909, and before the year was out its author was being requisitioned by dissidents from Christianity of the most incongruous types as a promising instrument for the general anti-christian propaganda. Few more remarkable spectacles have ever been witnessed than the exploitation throughout Germany in the opening months of 1910 of this hyper-idealistic metaphysician, disciple of von Hartmann and convinced adherent of the “Philosophy of the Unconscious,” by an Alliance the declared basis of whose organization is a determinate materialism. As, under the auspices of the Monistenbund, he made his progress from city to city, lecturing and debating, he drew a tidal-wave of sensation along with him. A violent literary war was inaugurated. It seemed as if all theological Germany were aroused.

Author(s):  
Frances L. Restuccia
Keyword(s):  

Agamben only sporadically alludes to psychoanalysis and invokes psychoanalytic concepts. He does so most prominently in Stanzas, where he dedicates Part III to ‘geniisque Henry Corbin et Jacques Lacan‘ (S 61); refers to ‘the Lacanian thesis according to which […] the phantasm makes the pleasure suited to the desire’, in order to elaborate a point in Plato about desire and pleasure relying on images in the soul (S 74); and takes up melancholia and fetishism – both of which, it is important to note, circumvent lack. But Agamben is by no means ‘psychoanalytic’. He presents and employs melancholia and fetishism as paradigms for accessing the inaccessible (perhaps we can say that he plays with them). Melancholia, in Agamben, becomes an ‘imaginative capacity to make an unobtainable object appear as if lost’ so that it ‘may be appropriated insofar as it is lost’ (S 20), a strategy for saving the unsavable that evolves into his conception of the messianic. And, although Agamben is preoccupied with ‘a zone of non-consciousness’, he underscores that it is ‘not the fruit of a removal, like the unconscious of psychoanalysis’ (UB 64)


1971 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-56
Author(s):  
Paul Peachey

With Marx's assertion that social existence determines the consciousness of men rather than the reverse, the ancient debate concerning freedom and necessity entered a new phase. Yet another dimension was added when Freud discovered the unconscious powers of the psyche. Subsequently, although thought has vacillated between the sociological and the psychological modes of analysis, both have underscored the deterministic sources of human behavior. Meanwhile, as if this were not enough, the assimilation of human behavior to nature, and thus also to the empirical methods of science and technology, has assured the total triumph of determinism.


Author(s):  
G. D. Gagne ◽  
M. F. Miller

We recently described an artificial substrate system which could be used to optimize labeling parameters in EM immunocytochemistry (ICC). The system utilizes blocks of glutaraldehyde polymerized bovine serum albumin (BSA) into which an antigen is incorporated by a soaking procedure. The resulting antigen impregnated blocks can then be fixed and embedded as if they are pieces of tissue and the effects of fixation, embedding and other parameters on the ability of incorporated antigen to be immunocyto-chemically labeled can then be assessed. In developing this system further, we discovered that the BSA substrate can also be dried and then sectioned for immunolabeling with or without prior chemical fixation and without exposing the antigen to embedding reagents. The effects of fixation and embedding protocols can thus be evaluated separately.


2010 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 76-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin M. Monti ◽  
Adrian M. Owen

Recent evidence has suggested that functional neuroimaging may play a crucial role in assessing residual cognition and awareness in brain injury survivors. In particular, brain insults that compromise the patient’s ability to produce motor output may render standard clinical testing ineffective. Indeed, if patients were aware but unable to signal so via motor behavior, they would be impossible to distinguish, at the bedside, from vegetative patients. Considering the alarming rate with which minimally conscious patients are misdiagnosed as vegetative, and the severe medical, legal, and ethical implications of such decisions, novel tools are urgently required to complement current clinical-assessment protocols. Functional neuroimaging may be particularly suited to this aim by providing a window on brain function without requiring patients to produce any motor output. Specifically, the possibility of detecting signs of willful behavior by directly observing brain activity (i.e., “brain behavior”), rather than motoric output, allows this approach to reach beyond what is observable at the bedside with standard clinical assessments. In addition, several neuroimaging studies have already highlighted neuroimaging protocols that can distinguish automatic brain responses from willful brain activity, making it possible to employ willful brain activations as an index of awareness. Certainly, neuroimaging in patient populations faces some theoretical and experimental difficulties, but willful, task-dependent, brain activation may be the only way to discriminate the conscious, but immobile, patient from the unconscious one.


2010 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 193-201 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisabeth Norman

A series of vignette examples taken from psychological research on motivation, emotion, decision making, and attitudes illustrates how the influence of unconscious processes is often measured in a range of different behaviors. However, the selected studies share an apparent lack of explicit operational definition of what is meant by consciousness, and there seems to be substantial disagreement about the properties of conscious versus unconscious processing: Consciousness is sometimes equated with attention, sometimes with verbal report ability, and sometimes operationalized in terms of behavioral dissociations between different performance measures. Moreover, the examples all seem to share a dichotomous view of conscious and unconscious processes as being qualitatively different. It is suggested that cognitive research on consciousness can help resolve the apparent disagreement about how to define and measure unconscious processing, as is illustrated by a selection of operational definitions and empirical findings from modern cognitive psychology. These empirical findings also point to the existence of intermediate states of conscious awareness, not easily classifiable as either purely conscious or purely unconscious. Recent hypotheses from cognitive psychology, supplemented with models from social, developmental, and clinical psychology, are then presented all of which are compatible with the view of consciousness as a graded rather than an all-or-none phenomenon. Such a view of consciousness would open up for explorations of intermediate states of awareness in addition to more purely conscious or purely unconscious states and thereby increase our understanding of the seemingly “unconscious” aspects of mental life.


1997 ◽  
Vol 42 (8) ◽  
pp. 721-722
Author(s):  
Rafael Art. Javier
Keyword(s):  

1972 ◽  
Vol 17 (5) ◽  
pp. 288-289
Author(s):  
JUDITH WINTER
Keyword(s):  

1973 ◽  
Vol 18 (9) ◽  
pp. 405-407
Author(s):  
MICHAEL T. MCGUIRE
Keyword(s):  

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