Spirituality, religion and social work in recovery

This study addresses the potential role of spirituality in promoting mental health and wellbeing and argues for its utility in the helping professions. Spirituality, as a common human orientation, has long been a central notion in recovery movements. In the first part of the paper the author discusses the differences and overlaps between spirituality and its traditional form, religion. In the second part a questionnaire was used to study laypersons’, and professional helpers’ views on spirituality. The convenience sample comprised 137 persons. Professionals could find spirituality an important resource in their practice and included it in their interventions mainly when their clients had introduced the theme first. Most of the laypersons in the sample were concerned with spiritual issues and regularly practiced meditation or prayer. They conceived spirituality to cope with mental or physical illnesses.

The humorous rewriting of Orwell’s '1984'

This commentary piece offers some preliminary thoughts concerning the Greek memes produced since COVID-19 disease arrived at Greece at the end of February 2020, through identifying an analogy between the sociopolitical conditions in Greece-under-lockdown and Orwell’s Oceania in his 1984 novel. It is specifically argued that such texts constitute political humour commenting on the abrupt, yet pervasive changes attested due to state measures against the spread of COVID-19 disease. To this end, memes collected from the social media are discussed and interpreted in comparison with extracts from Orwell’s novel to point to striking similarities between the 1984 sociopolitical context and the Greek one. It is, however, suggested that there is a significant difference between the two contexts: in Orwell’s dystopia, humour seems to have no place at all; on the contrary, humour thrived in Greece-under-lockdown, especially among participants in the social media, in the form of rapidly created and disseminated memes. Memory (a central notion in Orwell’s novel) emerges as a crucial factor for the production of such humour in contemporary Greece and for its absence from Orwell’s Oceania.

Arguing about Free Will

I explore some issues in the logics and dialectics of practical modalities connected with the Consequence Argument (CA) considered as the best argument for the incompatibility of free will and determinism. According to Lewis (1981) in one of the possible senses of (in)ability, the argument is not valid; however, understood in the other of its possible senses, the argument is not sound. This verdict is based on the assessment of the modal version of the argument, where the crucial notion is power necessity (“no choice” operator), while Lewis analyses the version where the central notion is the locution “cannot render false.”Lewis accepts closure of the relevant (in)ability operator under entailment but not closure under implication. His strategy has a seemingly strange corollary: a free predetermined agent is able (in a strong, causal sense) to falsity the conjunction of history and law. I compare a Moorean position with respect to radical skepticism and knowledge closure with ability closure and propose to explain Lewis’s strategy in the framework of his Moorean stance.

Getting Structural (Ir)rationality into View

This chapter introduces the central notion of structural (ir)rationality that the book is concerned with, giving some central examples and hallmarks of the phenomenon. The author defines a lack of “fitting-togetherness” found in some combinations of mental states as incoherence. And he calls the particular kind of irrationality that incoherent states like these display structural irrationality. The author provides an initial case for a “dualist” view of rationality that distinguishes two equally genuine notions of rationality, structural and substantive. He also makes a number of clarifications about structural rationality, coherence, and the relationship between the two. Finally, he previews some of the central challenges for a theory of structural rationality.

Structural and contextual model of a concept

The central notion of the cognitive linguistics “concept” has been defined in a number of ways thus the authors suggest the unique way to treat its structure and content. The article provides the interpretation variability of a concept taking into account two approaches – lingual and cultural and semantic and cognitive one which construct cognitive and discourse vector lying in the dimension of both cognition and communication. Whereas the content of a concept is carried out via multidimensional (thinking and speaking in the first place) activity of a person the work considers its structure (imaginary, notional, axiological and adorative (secret) components being in a harmonious unity with the structure of a communicative personality (pragmatic-motivational, cognitive, verbal-semantic, transcendental levels). Concept is a coherent ethnic and mental unit possessing complex four-level structure. It implies interaction and interrelation between a concept and communicative personality, their two-side hierarchical connection particularly using spiritual halo. The following research methods were used in the work: observation, induction and deduction, analysis and synthesis, modelling method, which are necessary for the objective scientific definition of the subject in question; cognitive and discourse analysis. The article provides stratification of a concept in connection with the structure of communicative personality.

Temporal comparisons: Evaluating the world through historical time

This introduction describes the main themes of the special issue on temporal comparisons. It provides the background for individual contributions by sketching the way in which evaluations are intrinsic to conceptions of historical time. Inasmuch as different configurations of the relationship between past, present and future imply temporal comparisons between ‘now’ and ‘then’, historical time is subject to evaluations that we project onto the differences – or similarities – between the three dimensions. Practices of comparing between and across times pervade all spheres of activity: from high-level theory and historical reflection to the most trivial situations in everyday life. Tracking temporal comparisons is thus a way of exploring the broad middle ground between the consciously elaborated theories about time and the ordinary ways of dealing with time. Our introduction conveys this message in three steps. First, it provides a brief overview of the workings of historical time; second, it introduces the central notion of temporal comparisons while paying special attention to the scales in which they can be studied and their performative character; and third, it gives a quick glimpse into the main contentions of the contributions.

Education in world society: A matter of form

In his posthumously published work on education, Niklas Luhmann (1927–1998) described his approach to the sociological observation of the educational system as a formal one. Only by refraining from more substantial definitions, based on what teachers hope to convey, he claimed, can education be understood in all its historical and geographical varieties. By rereading his oeuvre as a socio-historical account of modern school education’s morphogenesis, I inspect this so-called formal approach more closely and show how it brings together different understandings of its central notion, form. The underlying theoretical movements of Luhmann’s formal approach, composed of indication and delimitation, of generalisation and re-specification, provide useful hints for the study of those forms of education which today increasingly emerge outside of its formal institutions.

Control as a Central Notion in the Discussion on Data Subject Rights

Chapter 3 establishes a bridge between (a) the general overview of the data-driven economy and the pertaining legal framework, and (b) the specific analysis of data subject control rights. Individual control represents a central notion in philosophical discussions related to people’s autonomy and freedom. In a similar manner, individual control over data plays an important role in the provisions of primary and secondary EU (data protection) law, and has two facets: the normative, meaning that control links back to the values that underpin the entire legal field; and the instrumental, which materialises through the provisions on data subject rights. Despite being a central notion in data protection law, individual control faces many challenges which are rooted in the specific characteristics of the data-driven economy.

Secondary Holiness

A desideratum for a theory of God’s primary holiness is that it be possible to offer an account of how secondary holiness—the holiness of beings other than God—derives from it. This chapter aims to sketch such an account of secondary holiness. Holiness functions in the manner of Aristotelian pros hen homonymy, in which there is an explanatorily central property and other properties called by that name are so denominated because they stand in some relevant explanatory relationship to the central notion. While there are multiple such relationships to primary holiness, the main derivative sense of holiness as applied to nondivine things consists in being an object such that intimate unity with it counts as unity with the primarily holy God.