Search

This paper presents a review of the literature informed by both grounded theory and phenomenology, which explores how culture is addressed in the family therapy field with particular emphasis on Australia. The primary aim of the study is to identify the issues and relevant publications that can inform and guide Australian family therapists in working with clients from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. The secondary aim is to provide recommendations that may inform research directions and clinical practice. The results indicate that this challenge is not unique to Australia; indeed the issue is ubiquitous across the Western world. This paper attempts to provide an impetus for future dialogue and to precipitate discussion around the development of a culturally sensitive approach in the Australian family therapy field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this critical paper, we engage with a recent absolutist proposal to account for faultless disagreement — that of Jeremy Wyatt. We first introduce the phenomenon to be explained and briefly present Wyatt's account. The bulk of the paper is dedicated to spelling out objections to various aspects of the view, which are related to his adherence to semantic minimalism, the interpretation of the empirical data he relies on, and his construal of both faultlessness and disagreement. We end with a comparison of the proposal with other views on the market from the point of view of theoretical economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper analyses Francisco de Rojas Zorrilla's comedia, Lucrecia y Tarquino, in relation to the fraught body politics of an absolutist age. Diverging both from the eroticized Lucretias of Renaissance painting and from the antique Roman portrayal of Lucretia's martyrdom as a pathos‐ridden public spectacle that fueled Republican revolution, Rojas's Lucrecia is adapted to a conservative courtly milieu in which corporeal display is ridden with problematic connotations. By combining compelling performance and stringent decorum, Lucrecia embodies the ideals of an epoch marked at once by the recognition that the incitement of truculent emotion is a powerful political tool and by the belief in strict disciplining of the senses. While some have read Lucrecia's embodiment of female modesty as denoting a lack of agency, I show her to be a model of heroic action well suited to the conflicted post‐Machiavellian world where messianic idealism coexists with political pessimism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of arguments against relativism are based on the concept of majority rule. Since, the arguments allege, on relativism moral truth is founded on majority opinion, relativism entails that (a) moral progress and reform are impossible, (b) propaganda, advertising, brainwashing, and high birth rates turn mistaken moral judgments into correct ones, (c) moral horrors, if enough people believe them acceptable, are not moral horrors at all, (d) finding out what's right and what's wrong is extremely easy, (e) moral reasoning is very different from what we normally take it to be, and (f) internal criticism of a moral code is impossible. These arguments get their due in this article, which first defines and explicates relativism and then exposes, explains, and criticizes the arguments. Especially important to understand about the relation between relativism and majority opinion is the notion of a convention. Accordingly, it is discussed at some length. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political geography and geopolitics were built on the same basic postulate as political sciences and the theory of international relations: the nation-state was the relevant scale for all types of analysis. This postulate was a reasonable one at the time of the Treaties of Westphalia. This type of polity triumphed on the international scene at the time when Hobbes wrote the Leviathan. The basis of the social contract implicit in the perspective was simple: in order to achieve personal security, everybody gave up the parcel of freedom (and the associated use of violence) he was naturally endowed with, and delegated it to the Leviathan, the State. The only field where competition between human beings was legitimate at the most elementary level was that of economy. The evolution of the international scene does not only result from the evolution of weaponry or communication and transport technologies. For many persons today, renouncing any parcel of their individual freedom appears as a mutilation of their egos. There was a general agreement in the past on the scale where the analysis of political action had to be developed: it has disappeared. For a growing part of modern societies, inter-individual or local competition may take a political form and rely on the use of violence at all the levels, including the micro-scale. It means that political geography and geopolitics have increasingly to allow for the variety of scales of political action and the changing relations between the competition for power, wealth and status which are present in every society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]