In search of logotherapy

In his authoritative and extraordinarily influential book Man’s Search for Meaning, psychiatrist Viktor Frankl proposed that any individual’s life task is to find meaning, that meaning cannot be obtained without suffering, and that suffering allows meaning to be identified. He also articulated his therapeutic model—logotherapy, the so-called third Viennese school of psychotherapy. This article contemplates why logotherapy currently has seemingly little salience and suggests that the most likely reasons reflect some components being taken over by other therapies and by tenets of positive psychology articulated in recent decades.

Pragmatic patterns in Bram Stoker’s Dracula

In an influential book on literary linguistics, first published in 1981 and revised in 2007, Geoffrey Leech and his colleague Mick Short discuss linguistic methods of analysing long texts of prose fiction. This article develops their arguments in two ways: (1) by relating them to classic puzzles in the philosophy of science; and (2) by illustrating them with a computer-assisted study of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula. This case study shows that software can identify a linguistic feature of the novel which is central to its major themes, but which is unlikely to be consciously noticed by human readers. Quantitative data on the novel show that it contains a large number of negatives. Their function is often to deny something which would normally be expected, and therefore to express the protagonists’ distrust of their own senses in the extraordinary world in which they find themselves.

Body Schema and Body Image

Body schema refers to the system of sensory-motor functions that enables control of the position of body parts in space, without conscious awareness of those parts. Body image refers to a conscious representation of the way the body appears—a set of conscious perceptions, affective attitudes, and beliefs pertaining to one’s own bodily image. In 2005, Shaun Gallagher published an influential book entitled ‘How the Body Shapes the Mind’. This book not only defined both body schema (BS) and body image (BI), but also explored the complicated relationship between the two. The book also established the idea that there is a double dissociation, whereby body schema and body image refer to two different, but closely related, systems. Given that many kinds of pathological cases can be described in terms of body schema and body image (phantom limbs, asomatognosia, apraxia, schizophrenia, anorexia, depersonalization, and body dysmorphic disorder, among others), we might expect to find a growing consensus about these concepts and the relevant neural activities connected to these systems. Instead, an examination of the scientific literature reveals continued ambiguity and disagreement. This volume brings together leading experts from the fields of philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, and psychiatry in a lively and productive dialogue. It explores fundamental questions about the relationship between body schema and body image, and addresses ongoing debates about the role of the brain and the role of social and cultural factors in our understanding of embodiment.

Form and Substance in the “Private Law” of Torts

Instrumentalist ideas have long been prominent in torts scholarship. Since the rise of legal realism, discussions of deterrence, compensation, the minimization of accident costs, and the distribution of losses have dominated scholarly discourse. In the past several decades, however, wholesale rejections of instrumentalist tort theory have arisen. The most uncompromising of these views rallies around the avowedly formalist battle cry that tort is “private law”. Ernest Weinrib’s elegant and influential book, The Idea of Private Law, declares its allegiance to that thesis in its title, and the idea figures almost as centrally in Arthur Ripstein’s recent and important Private Wrongs. Theorists who rally around the banner of “private law” claim that tort law’s governing principles of right and responsibility tumble out of the field’s characteristic legal form. Law, as they understand it, is constitutive of just relations among persons, not an instrument for the pursuit of independently valuable ends. For scholars like Weinrib and Ripstein, “private law” is the Kantian idea of reason that makes our actual law of torts intelligible. The claim that torts is a law of wrongs where persons bring claims in their own names for harms that they have wrongly suffered against those allegedly responsible for those wrongful harms is powerful and persuasive. The claim that the obligations persons owe one another in tort are obligations owed among equal and independent persons is likewise compelling. But theorists of tort as “private law” overshoot the mark by both asking and making too much of form. They ask too much of form when they attempt to make sense of the private law of torts solely in terms of form—eschewing all talk of interests. We cannot understand or justify the law of torts without attending to the interests that it protects. In tort, as elsewhere, rights and the duties they ground protect important individual interests. For example, it is our interest in the physical integrity of our persons that grounds the law of negligence. Theorist of tort as “private law” make too much of form when they present the legal category as its own private fiefdom walled off from surrounding legal fields. For Ripstein and Weinrib, “private law” is its own autonomous domain, sealed off against infection by any legal field whose form identifies it as “public law”. In our law, the private law of torts cooperates and competes with public law institutions as a response to the pervasiveness of accidental harm in an industrial and technological society. It is one way of institutionalizing our interest in safety. Establishing rightful relations among free and equal persons in civil society requires that institutions protect persons’ urgent interests, not just establish their formal independence. The theoretical understanding that we need will recognize that we misunderstand even the private law of torts itself if we sever it entirely from forms of collective responsibility for avoiding and repairing accidental harm with which it competes and cooperates.

Fire and Water

This chapter begins with the author's experience when she presented her proposal of the floating pool to the Waterfront Committee on July 29, 2004. It recounts her meeting with the State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) in 1998 and how she convinced regulators that a floating pool was a water-dependent use. It also details how the author presented the concept of a floating pool to a panel at a Waterfront Center Conference in 2001 and discussed methods to open up urban riverfronts for recreation. The chapter mentions the influential book The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs, which argued that municipal governments were no longer able to govern effectively. It talks about Jacobs' recommendation of more inclusiveness in the political and administrative processes by creating a subdivision within every public agency whose portfolio affected a locality.

The Art of Ambiguity: The Karaites as Portrayed in Judah Halevi's Book of the Kuzari

On the basis of a letter preserved in the Cairo Geniza, Judah Halevi is assumed to have originally composed his influential book of religious thought, the Kuzari, as a polemical response to a Karaite convert. However, he neither perceived nor described the Karaites as heretics. In fact, his depiction of the adherents of this alternative to Rabbanite Judaism and their origins so appealed to the Karaites that some of them believed that the author had been a (crypto-)Karaite himself, and his reconstructions of the movement's history became appropriated as the founding myth of Karaism. This paper attempts to discern Halevi's attitude toward the Karaites, and his perception of their main fault. It also addresses the fundamental question of his purpose in writing the Kuzari.

Hayti, or, the Black Republic

This chapter examines the ‘communication circuit’ of the most influential book written on Haiti in the Victorian period, Spenser St John’s Hayti or the Black Republic (1884). During the ‘life-cycle’ of this book, from its research, writing, publishing, reading, and the re-writing (in its second edition), the meanings of Haiti varied. Through exploring the dynamics of this book’s communication circuit, I track the construction and rejection of certain ideas about Haiti. In the books’ text, some pre-existing ideas about the ‘Black Republic’, especially those concerning ‘Vaudoux’ and cannibalism, were consolidated whereas the more problematic notions of Haitian sovereignty were discarded. Yet, it is in the readings of the book performed by Haitians and certain political commentators across the Caribbean that counter-visions of Haiti emerge and are reinforced. In this moment, Haiti could be deployed equally as evidence in the case for expanding political agency to people of African descent in the British Caribbean.

How History Shaped the Innovator's Dilemma

In 1993, four years prior to the publication of Clayton Christensen's highly influential book, The Innovator's Dilemma, the Business History Review published an article by Christensen titled “The Rigid Disk Drive Industry: A History of Commercial and Technological Turbulence.” The article relates the theory of disruptive innovation to Alfred D. Chandler's work on large vertically integrated enterprises. It was published during a pivotal era of scholarship on innovation, management practice, and industry evolution, much of which used the history of firms, industries, and technologies to build theory. I survey the impact and critiques of Christensen's research agenda, highlighting how it illustrates where the boundaries associated with the “lessons of history” should be drawn.

The Bible

The Bible is the most influential book in Western history. As the foundational text of Judaism and Christianity, the Bible has been interpreted and reinterpreted over millennia, utilized to promote a seemingly endless run of theological and political positions. Adherents and detractors alike point to different passages throughout to justify wildly disparate behaviors and beliefs. Translated and retranslated, these texts lead both to unity and intense conflict. Influential books on any topic are typically called “bibles.” What is the Bible? As a text considered sacred by some, its stories and language appear throughout the fine arts and popular culture, from Shakespeare to Saturday Night Live. In Michael Coogan’s eagerly awaited addition to Oxford’s What Everyone Needs to know® series, conflicts and controversies surrounding the world’s bestselling book are addressed in a straightforward Q&A format. This book provides an unbiased look at biblical authority and authorship, the Bible’s influence in Western culture, the disputes over meaning and interpretation, and the state of biblical scholarship today. Brimming with information for the student and the expert alike, The Bible: What Everyone Needs to Know ® is a dependable introduction to a most contentious holy book.