Ancient Plays for Modern Minds?

Talking about freedom, freedom can have many meanings, depending on which perspective it sees. If wrong in looking, then the freedom can be legitimacy to do something that is not good. For this reason understanding freedom with proper understanding becomes very important. Freedom in the philosophical view of existentialism is interesting to be examined since this philosophy examines human beings in terms of their subjectivity so that it will provide an understanding of freedom not only philosophically which is theoretical but also in the ethical realm that really touches human life in real. The two figures whose thoughts are discussed in this study are representative of two different schools of existentialism, atheist / non-religious existence and theistic / religious existentialism. So this study will also present not only an understanding of freedom from an existentialist perspective but also to see how a concept is viewed by two contradictory beliefs. Muhammad Iqbal who built his thoughts with a firm belief in God and Jean Paul Sartre who tried to keep people from being dependent on God with their atheistic beliefs. The problem in this research, are: 1. How is human’s freedom in the philosophy of existentialism of Muhammad Iqbal and Jean Paul Sartre? 2. What are the similarities and differences of the concept of human’s freedom according to Muhammad Iqbal and Jean Paul Sartre? To answer the research problem formulation above is done library research (library research), by using comparative method. The results of the research are: 1. Existentialism Muhammad Iqbal is theistic existence of theistic. This characteristic of existentialism is very visible in the idea of “khudi” philosophy. Khudi / self in Iqbal’s view is unique, free and creative. The freedom for him is a means to achieve the existence of the ultimate self is man as niyabati divine/ representative of God on this earth. The existentialism of Jean Paul Sartre is representative of the atheistic existentialism style. Because this concept departs from the idea that human’s freedom is absolute, then if there is a God man is not free. God’s power will deprive human’s freedom. The foundation of Sartre’s concept of existentialism is that existence precedes the essence. Because man is a self-conscious existence that he is free and responsible for his freedom. 2. The thoughts of these two figures have similarities, namely a) Equally look at human’s existence from the point of view subjectivity. So according to them human’s existence is a free self and responsible for their actions. In other words, freedom is a human’s existence, b) His philosophy contains an ethical value that instills the importance of humanity. That every human being has responsibility is not only for himself but for all humans. The differences are: a) God’s existence in Iqbal’s view requires human’s existence, whereas for Sartre the existence of God eliminates the existence of man as an individual who has absolute freedom, b) Iqbal’s freedom culminates in an approach to God as the vigerence of God. While Sartre’s freedom is an absolute freedom whose goal is purely freedom itself, the freedom to determine without being attached to anything, c) The freedom of others for Iqbal is a means of achieving true freedom. Meanwhile, Sartre argues that the freedom of others is a threat to his freedom.

Intelligence and the modern world of work

A Consideration on Communication of Modern Man and Solitude - In Perspective of Jaspers’ Existential Philosophy -

Jerome Frank and the Modern Mind

Existential types are the standard formalisation of abstract types. While this formulation is sufficient in entirely statically typed languages, it proves to be too weak for languages enriched with forms of dynamic typing: in the presence of operations performing type analysis, the abstraction barrier erected by the static typing rules for existential types is no longer impassable, because parametricity is violated. We present a light-weight calculus for polymorphic languages with abstract types that addresses this shortcoming. It features a variation of existential types that retains most of the simplicity of standard existentials. It relies on modified scoping rules and explicit coercions between the quantified variable and its witness type.

It is difficult to manage terminal cancer patients with major depressive disorder in hospice palliative care. There have been still few literatures about clinical studies among terminal cancer patients with major depressive disorder. Understanding existential issues of those patients may be contributed for clinical practice. According to Heidegger's dasein hermeneutics, the texts from psychotherapies which included four terminal cancer inpatients with major depressive disorder after signing letters of informed consent were analyzed to find the existential issues. There were twenty two valid texts of all four patients. The existential issues of terminal cancer patients with major depressive disorder are death, self-awareness, dignity, meaning and meaninglessness, autonomy and choice, and relations. The results will contribute to understand and deal with terminal cancer patients with major depressive disorder.

Law and the Modern Mind, along with Courts on Trial (1949a), are the works for which Jerome Frank is best known. In Law and the Modern Mind, Frank properly ridicules writers who prefer to talk about distracted from actual court decisions. Frank does not wrestle sufficiently with potential alternatives to a decision-based, judge-centered, and predictive theory of law. One problem with a theory of law that focuses on actual official actions, especially actual judicial decisions, is that it does not have the resources to explain the idea of mistake. Frank, like many legal realists, attacks the conceptualism or philosophical realism he finds in some commentators and judges. While Frank regularly repeats that this psychoanalytic theory is offered only as a partial explanation, and Frank himself summarizes a long list of potential alternative explanations, it is the psychoanalytic explanation to which the text regularly returns.

Law and the Modern Mind: Consciousness and Responsibility in American Legal Culture. By Susanna L. Blumenthal. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. 400 pp. $45.00 hardcover.Histories of the expansion of American freedom do not dwell upon the potential downside for the newly free. But if there is a downside story to be told, maybe it is that for self-making individuals the highs are higher, and the lows, in particular, are qualitatively different. In post-civil war America, the expansion of freedoms fuelled a surging sense of individual agency. Unexpectedly, however, cases of debilitating anxiety began to appear which doctors had not previously encountered. Irrational behavior and mental unsoundness caused by much liberty were increasingly implicated in business and family legal disputes. The resulting civil capacity litigation is at the center of Susanna Blumenthal's Law and the Modern Mind: Consciousness and Responsibility in American Legal Culture. The book details the struggle of 19th century jurists to reconcile respect and liability for free choices with new scientific perspectives on the frailty of the human mind. This same high level aim, in the last decade has come to the forefront of psychologically informed approaches to policymaking, although the connection is not made explicit in the book. Well-designed laws, today's behavioral economists argue, ought to balance respect for our choices with recognition of our cognitive limitations. Their key strategy is characterized as libertarian paternalism: using law to establish generally beneficial defaults we can opt out of, or otherwise structuring choices to impede but not preclude us from making decisions unlikely to reflect our true preferences. More than a century ago jurists mulled over similar problems when confronted with litigants of uncertain mental soundness. They too converged upon the importance of default legal rules when capacity was at issue. In an important way, then, libertarian paternalism is the modern successor to the civil capacity jurisprudence chronicled in depth for the first time in Law and the Modern Mind.In the Introduction and Part One, Blumenthal sets the scene in the heady, raucous days of rapid capitalist expansion in the second half of the 1800s and turn of the 20th century. Tales of fortunes easily made loomed large in the popular imagination, as did the reality of financial ruin for the many who succumbed to market speculation mania and lost. Cases of mental unsoundness and insanity were on the rise. Social commentators suggested too much freedom was to blame for the seemingly novel mental disturbances of the day. The disorders commonly noted on asylum intake registers included dread of poverty, pecuniary concerns, stock speculations, and the like. To avoid accountability for legal arrangements ranging from contracts to illadvised marriages, an increasing number of civil litigants pleaded insanity. For the courts hearing these cases, there was no ready answer to the question of when mental deficiency ought to allow individuals to escape responsibility for their conduct. Blumenthal recounts the inadequacies of the existing common law rules on capacity and the limits of the judges' preferred methodology of introspection for settling questions of mental soundness. Sanity defied a single definition. The circumstances giving rise to capacity challenges varied too greatly.In this doctrinal vacuum, Blumenthal details the emergence of a new field of inquiry and expertise: medical jurisprudence. Lawyers and doctors worked together with the aim of integrating into the legal system medical advancements in the diagnosis and treatment of unsound minds. Medical jurists believed psychological science could improve upon traditional means of identifying persons who were non compos mentis. Common law rules on insanity and responsibility, they argued, expected too much of human nature. …

"Philosophy of Existence," by Karl Jaspers; and "Philosophy," Volume 3, by Karl Jaspers

The Traditions leading to the Philosophies of Existence

The Inobjectivity of the Philosophy of Existence

"Philosophy of Existence," by John Micallef

In the article author attempts to consider Mandelstam’s concept of “a providential interlocutor” using terminological tools developed by M. Heidegger in “Being and Time”, as well as the concept of “poetical act”, which is author’s original development. The assumption is made that the distant interlocutor is a specific way of being of the poet with the reader (Mitsein). The author reveals the inconsistency in Mandelstam’s ideas about poetry, and therefore considers the concept under study in the works of Mandelstam’s researchers, highlighting two directions: dialogical (the poet’s interlocutor is a recipient) and anti-dialogical (the interlocutor is a mental construct), and contrasting them with the idea that the distant interlocutor is the possibility of existential reader, appearing at the moment of poetical understanding. A poetical act is an event of understanding, that consists of the understanding of the poet and the understanding of the reader. The main question of the article is “what the poet’s being with the reader is?” (Mitsein), how these two existences are connected. The relevance of the problem is determined, on the one hand, by the question of the poetical act as an event of understanding (Heidegger's Ereignis), that is, by the need to develop the terminological apparatus of “Being and Time”, where the question of speech is disclosed in the field of fundamental ontology, since it is not finished. Analyzing recent studies, it should be said that the question of poetry as an event of understanding (Ereignis) is not developed in domestic publications either. Heidegger’s follower Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann devoted his book “Fundamental ontology of language” to the existential of speech (Rede). On the other hand, relevance is determined by the interest in the active role of the reader after the performative turn in the literature. Here, it is worth noting the work of Pavel Arsenyev, who, following the field of media theory, develops the concept of pragmatic poetics as poetic that is carried out in the process of reading or hearing by the reader (Arsenev, “State”, 2018), (Arsenev, “Russian Poet” 2018). Keywords: distant interlocutor, providential interlocutor, Mitsein, poetic understanding, existential reader.

Arkadij Belinkov (1921-1970) and Andrej Sinjavskij (1925-1997) were not members of one literary movement, but their works are often considered jointly as samples of “dissident criticism”. In this article I hope to argue that they can both be interpreted as successors to the Russian Formalism methodology of the 1960s. But they used the results of philological interpretations to solve the existential problem – i.e. the self-identification of a subject in the historical process. It was necessary for Belinkov and Sinjavskij because they both rejected the Soviet (and Hegelian) image of history as the teleologically aimed stream. Belinkov and Sinjavskij independently invented the new – personal and existential – justification of the history of culture.

This article presents three methodological perspectives in children’s psychotherapy: existential psychology, according to Kierkegaard’s reflections; the non-directive proposition, of Rogerian inspiration and Gestalt-therapy’s perspective. The three perspectives show some proximity regarding the psychotherapist’s attitudes and the option for the phenomenological method, which aims at comprehending the sense of playing and other of the child’s expressions. They differ, however, in relation to the concept of men that will ground their practices, since existential psychology disagrees that there is in men a tendency to totality or a force always in search of balance, notions which are pertinent to the other two. Existential psychology will be guided by a strategy of patient and indirect approach, characterizing the aid relationship defined by Kierkegaard, which allows clear approximation between philosophy and clinical psychology. In Axline’s work about ludotherapy, eight attitudes are highlighted as essential for the children’s psychotherapist’s performance. The suspension of all judgment and the unconditional acceptance of the child’s way of being, although present, sustain a non-directive practice, which makes the expression of feelings easier. Gestalt-therapy, on its turn, proposes varied techniques and attitudes also with the objective of making self-expression of the feelings experienced by the child easier, developing an awareness of him/herself and the world. Therefore, this study seeks to discuss the contributions of these three perspectives to those who intend to perform in the psychotherapy practice with children. Key words: children’s psychotherapy, humanist psychology, existential-phenomenological psychology, Gestalt-therapy.