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Armed with an impressive array of expert scholars in the field, this is an indispensable resource for anybody who seeks clarity on the fundamental conceptual issues and problems that are inevitably encountered in any serious study of Jungian thought. It is a meaty and engrossing book, and the chapters spark off each other.
It is one I will pick up again and again. Mills has brought together an outstanding group of scholars who have explored, developed, and interpreted Jung's concepts in new directions with philosophical and psychological rigor. This is essential reading for those who want to know what is currently being thought regarding the foundations of Jungian thought. This book breaks new ground by showing how deeply philosophical Jung's psychology was, and still is.
It is replete with concepts that should resonate with many people working in philosophy-from Jung's prospective understanding of myth, to his insistence on the psychological meaning of alchemy. At the same time, Mills' book raises difficult philosophical questions in the interpretation of Jung, for example, Jung's refusal to draw metaphysical conclusions, allied with his not-so-concealed Kantian commitments and somewhat indefensible scientism. Let us hope that at long last philosophers and students of philosophy will shed the tired prejudices against Jungian psychology and look and see what a treasure trove of ideas Jung unearthed.
Jungian psychology will only benefit from a sharpened sense of the philosophical problems and questions raised by Jungian theories. A welcome contribution to a growing field, which sets the bar high for the intellectual re-appraisal of Jungian psychology. He runs a mental health corporation in Ontario, Canada. White Jung on Myth Robert A. Segal What's the Matter-with Alchemical Recipes?
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Lifespan David Sinclair Inbunden. Jung and Philosophy av Jon Mills. As a consequence of the paucity of research on this topic in the field of moral psychology I draw on evidence outside of that domain including evidence provided by historical events. Therefore, the model I am suggesting can only be regard as a possible explanation of what constitutes an act of evil and not as an established fact.
Elsewhere I explained why philosophers had, and continue to have, a tough time defining evil Govrin, Definitions of evil are plagued by three problems. Secondly, many of the philosophical definitions of evil are quantitative in the sense that they distinguish evil merely in terms of excessive wrongdoing. Luke Russell , maintains that no philosopher has been able to creditably depict an act of evil that is qualitatively distinguishable from commonly encountered acts of wrongdoing.
The difficulty with formulating a definition of evil is that most definitions rely on classical philosophical structures. The definitions I have cited try to isolate and apply an appropriate law or rule. They attempt to locate a set of necessary and sufficient conditions that would effectively define evil.
Such theoretical accounts, they explain, view the mind as if it were a highly skillful machine able to effortlessly calculate acts of evil. The calculation is made by subjecting a given situation to a series of simple tests with an example being classified as evil only if it passes all the tests in turn.
Let us suppose that in order for an act to be classified as evil it must be massively damaging, intentional, and absent of any expression of remorse by the perpetrator.
Since then contemporary research has shown that in reality mental processes are far more complex Dreyfus, , The if-then model represents a classical structure by which an appropriate law or rule is isolated. The trouble is that most human concepts do not possess a classical structure. This doctrine, he claims, permeates our cultural heritage and hence underpins both lay and philosophical conceptions of moral life. Yet it is a doctrine that, he argues, is radically mistaken and morally incorrect.
According to Johnson it would be ethically reckless for us to believe and behave as if we had within us a universal, ethereal faculty for reasoning which is capable of generating universally accepted laws and procedures 5. Recent views of the operation of the mind support this more disorderly and more dynamic view of how judgments are formed.
In work carried out by Spivey and Dale , perception and cognition have been shown to involve continuous processes of competition, rather than successive computations. Examples showing this to be so are drawn from extensive research in visual cognition.
A better account to define moral judgment is through a class of computational approaches known as connectionism. According to this view, we do not simply test for the presence or absence of a neat list of defining features and judge the concept applicable or inapplicable accordingly.
One of the more fruitful models of this approach is theory offered by Churchland , p. According to Churchland's moral network theory Churchland, our moral knowledge is developed in a process similar to that by which we develop specific physical skills, by training the response of neuronal networks to sensory input. Such training enables us to understand and adapt to the social world in which we live. Unlike Churchland , Clark , p. Instead, Clark suggests that the critical factor involved is the statistical median of a group of exemplars.
Such a measure is computed by viewing each specific exemplar as consisting of several features that regularly appear together leading to the formation of a kind of artificial model which links the characteristics that are statistically the most significant. Thus, the archetypal pet may possess both dog and pet features, and the archetypical crime may include personal injury and loss of property.
As a result, the system will become especially adept at encoding and responding to such features. Feature that commonly occur together in the exemplars become strongly mutually associated.
Such a concept of prototype corresponds with a model of information storage in the brain called state-space representation, which draws on neuroscience Churchland, ; Clark, Churchland posits that the brain's representation of color, for example, is perceived as involving a three dimensional 3D state space in which the dimensions reveal a long-wave reflectance, b medium-wave reflectance and c short-wave reflectance. According to Churchland, each such dimension may correspond to the action of three distinct types of retinal cone.
Within such a 3D space white and black reside in diametrically opposed locations, while red and orange are quite close together. Our perceptions regarding the perceived similarity-difference relations between colors may thus be understood as mirroring distance in this color-state space.
According to Churchland, new instances are rather categorized as basically falling under a concept or category according to the perceived distance of the instance from a prototypical example. Churchland's theory has been criticized by Larson on the grounds that it fails to identify which features of moral prototypes are crucial for categorization.
Such a lie is clearly in a different category than lies that are morally wrong. Instead of thinking that perceivers of evil apply a rule-based context-free moral vision we must find what kind of fast, highly focused, context related information perceivers are considering when judging whether a moral failure is evil or just an act of severe wrongdoing. Although the categories of moral failure and evil overlap, evil tends to have greater weight and emotional response.
The tendency of philosophers to look for defining features should be replaced then by an inclination toward human moral psychology. In this paper, I wish to base the perception of evil on a prototype model. I suggest that evil is no exception. Burris and Rempel , were the first to explore evil as a prototype. They initially asked approximately students to list whatever came to mind when they thought of evil.
Students' responses were coded into possible meaningful categories. Evil is perceived as applicable to events involving intentional harm, is associated with negative emotional reaction and with religious Satan, Adam and Eve and secular symbols money, black. People apply the label evil whenever enough of these central features of the evil prototype are salient in a given situation. In my view, the traits singled out by this research are necessary but insufficient. Firstly, Gromet et al. Severe negligence resulting in death or injury can also be judged as lacking justification but is not considered evil.
Also, the perpetrator will have many justifications, considered by him to be valid, for having harmed the victim. Why, in so many cases, does the observer refuse to accept the perpetrator's explanations? Perceived lack of justification is too narrow a characterization to describe the huge cognitive discrepancy and emotional crisis between the observer and the perpetrator. Thirdly, these characterizations do not consider the power relations between the two sides and the specific traits of each one of them. An incident in which an individual suffering from a psychiatric disorder shoots someone.
Each of these cases is characterized by intentionality, harm, and lack of justification.
His interests include: alchemy, dream analysis, and he is currently exploring illumination theory. Subscribe now to be the first to hear about specials and upcoming releases. This theory emerges from a modest tradition of research according to which the foundation of morality is linked to our evolution as mammals that possess a system of attachment and an ability to feel and respond to the pain of others Bowlby, ; Churchland, ; Haidt, New York, NY: Guilford; , — New York, NY: Routledge. Large Print. Two things, therefore, need to be distinguished.
However, we cannot rule out the possibility that the observer will not classify these behaviors in the same way since in each case the relations between the two parties differ. The proposition advanced in this paper is that in every moral judgment reached the observer must assess relations between two sides. The parameters relating to evil and every moral judgment cannot in and of themselves supply us with an all-inclusive list of the traits relevant to acts of evil and the perpetrator's motives unless they are combined with a theory explaining how the observer assess the relationship between two people.
The central argument I develop is that the perception of evil must be understood thorough acquaintance with the nature of moral judgment. Elsewhere I argued that evil is not only defined by the intention of the aggressor and his wickedness, or the magnitude of the harm caused. Each of these in isolation cannot serve our purpose. Rather, we need to find the perceptual properties that guide us in recognizing and discriminating evil from ordinary wrongdoing.
Like the perception of color and sounds, this is not something we are necessarily aware of and here too we might find as in other cognitive faculties the priority of the preverbal over the verbal. The perception model of evil presented here is a particular case within a general theory of moral judgment—the attachment approach to moral judgment Govrin, , According to this theory, the core of most moral judgments is an observer evaluating a dyad. Thus, within a basic moral judgment situation three sides are involved: two conflicting parties a dyad and an observer.
This theory emerges from a modest tradition of research according to which the foundation of morality is linked to our evolution as mammals that possess a system of attachment and an ability to feel and respond to the pain of others Bowlby, ; Churchland, ; Haidt, According to this theory, common to all moral situations is a universal deep structure which infants learn to identify rapidly and effortlessly in their first year of life.
The deep structure behind every moral situation is a dyadic structure Gray et al. What activates this capacity is the interaction between the infant and the caregiver. By identifying relations between a dependent and the caregiver the infant acquires a range of expectations which are directed at the way in which a side identified as strong has to behave toward the side identified as weak.