Search

Gandhi’s writings on the issue of Caturvarṇa, despite their apparent lacunas, dogmatic tones and seeming inconsistencies, are available to a convincing reconstruction. With this purpose in view, the first section of this paper will attempt to give an anti-foundational reading of Caturvarṇa—where varṇa is seen to be based neither on the different proportions of the three guṇas (sattva, rajas and tamas), nor on a system of hereditary professions, but as abstract dimensions that are not mutually exclusive—and at best serves to give an orientation to our cognition and actions. This reading, while borrowing heavily from Shri Aurobindo’s reading of Caturvarṇa, will seek to give it a more neutral and expansive direction, shorn of all associated suggestions of intransigence and empirical contingencies, in order to effect the best possible synthesis with Gandhi. The second section of this paper will concentrate on appropriate portions of Gandhi’s commentary on Gῑtā, trying to track down Gandhi’s reservations against any psychological determinism with respect to varṇa. His direct but scattered observations on varṇa and caste will be addressed in the last section—to see how far our neutral reading of Caturvarṇa can be responsibly reconciled with his distinction between varṇa and caste—indicating a way to dissolve the Gandhi-Ambedkar debate on varṇabheda and jātibheda. Overall, this paper attempts a paradigmatic reconstruction of Gandhian Caturvarṇa in the light of his approach to the notion of niṣkāma karma.

Introduction. Transformational processes in Ukraine lead to increased public demand for the spread of innovative technologies of social and cultural activity. The measuring of the effects of social and cultural activity is a necessary element of many social and cultural technologies. Formation of the competence to measure social and cultural effects of managers of social and cultural activities requires careful theoretical, methodological and methodical substantiation. Purpose and methods. The purpose of the article is to substantiate the theoretical and methodological components of the educational technology of formation the competence to measure of social and cultural effects in system of abilities of future managers of social and cultural activity. In the course of the research a set of fundamental ideas of the activity approach, general systems theory, structural analysis, social, economic and psychological determinism, as well as methods of pedagogical observation, student testing, interviewing and interrogatory, text analysis of student projects were applied. Results. The expediency of profound formation of competence to measure of social and cultural effects in the professional training of managers of social and cultural activity is revealed. The content of social and cultural influence that makes a shift in the life activity of the individual and the society is shown. The concept of social and cultural effects, which exists as a scientific term and is accessible for scientific measurement, has been clarified. Conclusions and discussion. The scientific novelty of the obtained results is the confirmed expediency of pre-emptive mastery of theoretical approaches to measuring social and cultural effects and supplementing the theory of social and cultural activity with new theoretical definitions of the concepts of “social and cultural influence”, “social and cultural effect” and “measurement of social and cultural effects”. The practical significance of the obtained results is reflected in their direct use in the process of training of managers of social and cultural activities.

Purpose This paper analyses the origin, conceptual underpinnings and consequences of the idea of management theory. It argues that despite claims to incommensurability and except for critical studies authors, management researchers come together in their quest for performativity. The search for theory has condemned management scholars to espouse structural-functional-positivist assumptions. As such, mainstream management theorists assume and promote psychological determinism. Equivocations, ambiguities, tautologies and imprecise language obscure this implication, however, hollowing out management theory of its performative quality. A century after its inception, the quest for management theory has failed. Another avenue for management scholarship exists, one in which management history is a major contributor. Design/methodology/approach This paper offers a historical and conceptual analysis, relying on relevant philosophy of science scholarship. The object of study is the concept of management theory. Findings Most commentators on management theory rely on a widespread view (of postmodern lineage) according to which incommensurable management research paradigms exist. Allowance made for critical management studies, this paper argues otherwise, namely, that current management research paradigms are merely variations on a positivist theme. It further contends that mainstream management research has failed in its quest to identify theory, even if the language used to report research findings obfuscates this fact. Research limitations/implications A notable implication of this paper is that management academics should reconsider what they do and in particular abandon their quest for theory in favour of management history. Originality/value This paper builds on arguments that philosophers of science and scholars specialising in sociological analysis have long recognised to offer a new thesis on management theory in particular and management academia in general.

This study is to seek a possibility of cooperative relationship between existential psychotherapy and pastoral counseling. As existential psychotherapy, which stemmed from existentialism, a modern philosophical stream, views a person as free from psychological determinism, pastoral counseling believes in a possibility of personal liberation from the bond of sin. Both approaches are concerned with personal meanings of life, existential psychotherapy pursuing existential concern and pastoral counseling ultimate concern, Following an outline of existentialism, this article describes the thoughts of two influential existentialist theologians, S. Kierkegaard and P. Tillich. Then it outlines the theories and methods of existential psychotherapy and compares them with existential concerns and themes contained in some major theorists of pastoral counseling. Finally A pastoral counseling case vignette is presented, which shows a cooperative work of existential and pastoral approaches for resolving a person’s existential conflicts.

At first, the research project on Bulimia nervosa 2007-2010 at University of Heidelberg is outlined, giving insight into the psychodynamic conceptualization of psychic development and symptoms. Then, aspects of oedipal guilt are highlighted in a case vignette of an 18-year-old female bulimic patient. Some leads at mass society’ influence on the way psychic development and symptom formation appear today augment a later pondering of psychological determinism. Then, some of Hassan’ cultural characteristics of modernity and postmodernity are outlined for a better understanding of how seminal a further focus on societal development may be in order to modify educational and therapeutic intervening in human developmental processes.

This paper considers the empirical evidence that we currently have for various kinds of determinism that might be relevant to the thesis that human beings possess libertarian free will. Libertarianism requires a very strong version of indeterminism, so it can be refuted not just by universal determinism, but by some much weaker theses as well. However, it is argued that at present, we have no good reason to believe even these weak deterministic views and, hence, no good reason—at least from this quarter—to doubt that we are libertarian free. In particular, the paper responds to various arguments for neural and psychological determinism, arguments based on the work of people like Honderich, Tegmark, Libet, Velmans, Wegner, and Festinger.

This article focuses critically on realism as an International Relations (IR) theory (family). It argues that realist theories share a particular view of human nature and that this view of human nature is flawed in several important respects. I begin by discussing the quality of human nature assumptions in realism and the way they are employed. The following section then argues that, in addition to its gloomy assumptions concerning the motives for human (and state) action, realism relies strongly on an assumption of rationality. This move splits descriptive from prescriptive realism and renders the paradigm both internally inconsistent and compatible in important respects with its rival paradigm of liberalism. I then turn to a critique of the neo-realist approach in particular, showing that and why in spite of claims to the contrary it cannot escape the foregoing critique. In conclusion, it emerges that the status of realism in the field of IR theory would likely sustain serious damage from a systematic examination of the nature and use of its claims about human nature. The paradigm is, in short, infused with a paradoxical psychological determinism that will not stand up to scrutiny.

I argue in this essay that belief/desire explanations are not logically true and not causal, and further that the antecedent of a true belief/desire conditional cannot be strengthened in such a way as to transform it into a true causal statement. I also argue that belief/desire explanations are not dispensable: they are presupposed in our justifications of scientific claims. The proposal is not that psychological determinism is false, but that some at least of our activities are not describable in causal terms. These arguments prepare the ground for a puzzle. If all human intentional behaviour is caused, then all actual linkages between psychological states and behaviour should be expressed in causal statements. But neither the action of asserting a causal statement nor the action of justifying the assertion can be described as the result of a cause. Therefore if one accepts that scientific claims can be justified, not all linkages between psychological states and subsequent action are expressible in causal statements. I do not offer a solution to this puzzle.

This article briefly examines biological determinism in the context of research on human differences, and outlines how this orientation has historically functioned to legitimise social inequality. It is then argued, in contradiction to the “received view” in contemporary psychology, that “extra-scientific” factors shape and inform all aspects of scientific inquiry. An historicist-contextualist perspective is subsequently used to highlight the “justificatory function” of psychological research. It is concluded that an unreflective adherence to traditional positivist-empiricist theories of science, and a refusal to admit “consequence” arguments into scientific discourse has contributed to a situation where social research has persistently served to reinforce and reify normative social values as natural and immutable.

This paper is concerned with a specific point concerning the implications of psychological determinism for legal sanctions of behaviour. One hears it argued sometimes that, insofar as the concept of moral responsibility is predicated on the assumption of self‐determinism or voluntarism, determinism, in denying the coherence of the concept of moral responsibility, entails a nihilistic approach to legal sanctions of behaviour. It will be argued that whilst determinism indeed renders the concept of moral responsibility vacuous, determinism itself entails no policy on the punishment (or reward) of certain behaviours.

There are arguments which purport to rebut psychological determinism by appealing to its alleged incompatibility with rationality. I argue that they all fail. Against Davidson, I argue that rationality does not preclude the existence of psychological laws. Against Popper, I argue that rationality is compatible with the possibility of predicting human actions. Against Schlesinger, I claim that Newcomb's problem cannot be invoked to show that human actions are unpredictable. Having vindicated the possibility of a rationally-based theory of action, I consider the form it might take.

In the Grassfields monarchies, the containers are politically as well as psychologically invested and, they constitute the basic instruments of the production and maintenance of a social and political hierarchy. When deciding to write, three chapters dealing respectively with the shaping of the subjects, and their identifications to their skin and to their house, the author was aware that he could be suspected of psychological determinism. Yet the author chooses to take this risk, his aim began to better resist potential misconceptions and therefore articulate his answers in more convincing terms. To sum up, the rationale of his argument is this: the praxeology of containers and substances can be assessed as a sensori-motor culture of which all subjects living in the Grassfields partake and which is fully mastered by them all.Keywords: containers; Grassfields monarchies; political hierarchy; psychological determinism

The article studies three aspects of Freedom: if it exists ( an sit in Latin), why it is ( cur sit ), what it is ( quid sit ). Psychological Determinism has objected the an sit . While Logical Positivism questions the possibility of knowing the reason ( cur sit ) of Freedom. Finally, the essence of Freedom ( quid sit ) has been obscured by some particulars forms of Freedom (as autonomy and liberation).

Sociological explanations both of social life in general and of sport in particular have failed to take seriously the task of finding an analysis which integrates ‘social structure’, ‘social relations’ and the ‘emotions’. There are a number of reasons why this should have been the case and these will be discussed in due course. But for now I am more concerned to spell out the value that a sociological theory of emotions can be to the study of social life, sport and leisure. Two main advantages spring to mind. The development of a sociological theory of emotions will arguably help to ensure that human beings are studied ‘in the round’, capturing them as ‘whole selves’ and not as isolated physiological or psychological units who happen to live their lives out in ‘society’ (Goudsblom et al., 1979). It will be argued here that there is an urgent need to study people ‘in their totality’, be it in a ‘sports setting’ or, indeed, elsewhere. The idea of viewing people ‘in the round’ stands in stark opposition to the dominant conception of ‘sports-people’ provided by the sports sciences, and indeed, by the mainstream of the disciplines on which that group of subjects draws (Maguire, 1991). It seeks to avoid decomplexifying human beings by eschewing both biological and/or psychological determinism. But in doing so, it does not intend to replace one form of determinism by another. Cultural determinism can be just as misleading in the problem under investigation.

Commonplace phrases, expressions frequent and familiar in the common vernacular, may appear so repetitively in a patient's discourse that they lose significance and so evade analytic scrutiny. These phrases are so trite and shopworn that their function as conveyors of meaning disappears. Speaker and listener quickly habituate to these expressions and automatically exclude them from consideration. Their use illustrates a process whereby a small segment of behavior becomes engorged with frozen meaning and is then maintained by the unwitting collaboration of speaker and listener, both of whom fail to recognize them as meaningful and fail to subject them to scrutiny required of the believer in psychological determinism. I will here give case illustrations of these phenomena and explore such materials for evidence of their importance and significance in the individual's psychic economy. I will compare certain of the mechanisms that support these constructs to those of other psychic phenomena, and will offer some explanation to explain their exemption from analytic scrutiny.

Traditional compatibilists contend that free action is not without its determining causes; it is caused by the desires, the beliefs, and ultimately by the character of the agent. Internal causation by psychological factors is distinguished from external causation or compulsion, and only the latter is held to be incompatible with freedom and responsibility. In his article, 'Freedom, Spontaneity and Indifference',' and more recently in his book, Will, Freedom and Power,2 Anthony Kenny defends a quite different sort of compatibilism. Unlike traditional compatibilists, he is prepared to concede that a certain measure of unpredictability is essential to freedom of action; and he contends that freedom is incompatible with psychological determinism. But that does not, in his view, settle the issue with regard to physiological determinism. The 'sophisticated compatibilist', he argues, will distinguish between 'levels of description and explanation' (WFP, p. I49). Specifically, he will distinguish between the concepts and vocabulary of physiology and those that are employed in the everyday description and explanation of human behaviour. Since it is only actions described in the latter terms that anyone claims to be free, Kenny thinks we can, without contradicting ourselves, claim to be free at the level of human action without prejudicing the issue with regard to the truth or falsity of determinism at the physiological level.I do not think this version of compatibilism is very plausible. Kenny's distinction between levels of description and explanation does not, I believe, enable him to make any advance over the traditional compatibilist position or to sidestep its leading problem: the analysis of the 'can' of human action. In what follows I hope to show that Kenny's attempt to demonstrate the compatibility of freedom and physiological determinism leads him to suggest an analysis of the 'can' of human action which makes freedom equally compatible with psychological determinism. Let us begin with the distinction between levels of description of an action-i.e., with the distinction between an event considered simply as a physical movement subject to physiological explanation and that same event considered as an action subject to explanation in terms of human conventions and purposes. Kenny makes a great deal of the fact that what is true of an action qua physical movement need not be true of that same action qua action and vice versa. From the fact that an event is causally determined under one description (a physiological one) it

Much contemporary urban and regional studies literature contains an inadequate understanding of why people do what they do. This paper attempts to redress this situation by examining the implications of sociobiology and social psychology for urban and regional analysis. It is argued that these areas of theory can indeed make a significant contribution to urban and regional studies. However, this can only be achieved if biological and psychological determinism is abandoned and if we combine an understanding of the innate bases of behaviour with the cultures which societies self-consciously construct for themselves. This argument is illustrated with reference to two issues of central concern to urban and regional studies: home life and community relations between adolescents and older people. This paper also suggests that urban and regional studies could profit by returning to older (and now frequently dismissed) forms of urban analysis, particularly the Chicago School of urban sociology.

other hand that freedom is apparently quite circumscribed. Indeed, many realistic appraisals of human existence leave one in grave doubt concerning the actuality of this freedom. The most satisfactory interpretations of this paradoxical character of man have been those which do not attempt to resolve the tension but propose a dialectical interpretation of human being. The classical Christian expression of the dialectical account is Augustine's which sought to avoid the twin dangers of Manichean determinism and Pelagianism. These two threats to the Christian understanding of man have persisted through the ages. First one and then the other has assumed predominance. While many would contend that the current threat in this "Freudian century" is psychological determinism, others are equally convinced that this battle is virtually over and that the live threat to the dialectical understanding of man is a new Pelagianism of which Sartre's brand of existentialism is typical. It is my purpose here to suggest that neither the deterministic interpretation of Freud nor the Pelagian interpretation of Sartre is wholly justified. And that the virtue of each may be seen against the backdrop of Kierkegaard, the modern representative of the Augustinian understanding of man. Far from suggesting some kind of synthesis of Freud and Sartre, or that we must choose between the two, I wish to suggest that each has a proper place upon the "stages on life's way" which Kierkegaard sets forth. In order to support this thesis we shall investigate, in each of these interpretations, (1) the function of choice in the fall from original being, (2) the status of choice in man's fallen condition, and (3) the function of choice in the restoration of

The conception of tragedy in Tess of the d’Urbervilles rests on an assumption of inevitability. ‘The best tragedy — highest tragedy in short’, Hardy thought, ‘is that of the WORTHY encompassed by the INEVITABLE.’1 Throughout Tess of the d’Urbervilles Hardy invokes several discrete yet interrelated forms of determinism to make his heroine’s fate seem inevitable. Heredity is the most obvious of these. Tess’s ability to see or hear the d’Urberville Coach of the legend and her resemblance to the d’Urberville women of the portraits in the farmhouse at Wellbridge (‘her fine features were unquestionably traceable in these exaggerated forms’ [xxxiv; p. 277]) suggest that she has the fateful blood of the ancient d’Urbervilles in her veins. A somewhat different form of determinism is in Hardy’s use of the laws of Nature, particularly in the great pastoral scenes in which Angel and Tess first discover and resist their love for each other. ‘All the while’, we are told, ‘they were converging, under an irresistible law, as surely as two streams in one vale’ (xx; p. 165). Tess, with her sensuousncss, is an embodiment of the principle in Nature of irresistible sexual attraction. Her flower-red mouth, her pretty face, her fine figure, and her unselfconscious affinity with all that is natural suggest how Nature is a force in her character and determinant of her fate.

While not totally inflexible, attitudes are a remarkably stable part of the habitual pattern of life. The concept of habit, as developed by social psychologists seeking some compromise between a fully independent rational free will and an extreme psychological determinism, went beyond the everyday use of the word. Habits were acquired predispositions which guided behaviour, but did not completely control it. Habit was the line of least resistance, the preference for the familiar over the novel. In a sense habit was a concession to indolence, yet without reliance on habitual maxims that had worked in the past life would be too burdensome altogether.1 This is an important consideration. It is easy to dwell on the inaccurate, the perverse, or the grotesque character of some habitual behaviour, especially in the performance of religious or political rituals long after the disappearance of their original meaning or justification. But this is a misplaced emphasis. We could not survive if our habitual pattern of attitudes did not provide a reasonably good guide to reality. We are able to depend on our habits because we have learned from experience that most of the time they serve us well. We can abandon habits when a change in either circumstances or in the external environment renders them unreliable.2

ACCORDING to the traditional view of man, what distinguishes him from animals is his freedom to choose between one course of action and another, his freedom to seek good and avoid evil. The animal has no freedom, but is determined by physical and biological laws; like a machine, the animal responds whenever the appropriate stimulus is present. But because man has free will, we cannot hope to explain his behavior merely in terms of causes. Man cannot be bound by physical or biological laws. While divergent views have gained some recognition, for example, the idea that man is a machine, or the idea that all of nature is purposive, the prevailing view has been one that implies that man somehow transcends the deterministic laws of nature. Two developments of the present century have challenged this traditional view of man and nature: quantum mechanics, which suggests that physics is not deterministic, and psychoanalysis, which suggests that man is not free. In response to these developments there has been a resurgence of interest in the determinismfreedom problem, especially among philosophers and physicists. Psychologists, however, have been strangely quiet about the problem, even though they are deeply implicated in it. I will indicate here the position I believe has been assumed, usually implicitly, by experimental psychologists today regarding determinism and freedom, and I will spell out some of the implications of this position for the problem of morality. In discussions of free will and determinism tlere are often a number of issues in question.' The present discussion will be concerned with just one issue: the predictability of behavior. Some men, who will be called indeterminists, contend that human behavior is not entirely predictable from antecedent conditions, so that by the power of his will a man is free to controvert the determining efficacy of prior experience and conditioning. The indeterminist has the advantage of tradition on his side of the argument, but does he have any evidence to support his position ? Let us see.