Comparing Causality in Freudian Reasoning and Critical Realism

This article examines potential applications of the concept of cause to some central ethical concepts, views, and problems. In particular, it discusses the role of causation in the family of views known as consequentialism, the distinction between killing and letting die, the doctrine of double effect, and the concept of moral responsibility. The article aims to examine the extent to which an appeal to the concept of cause contributes to elucidating moral notions or to increasing the plausibility of moral views. Something that makes this task interestingly complex is the fact that the notion of causation itself is controversial and difficult to pin down. As a result, in some cases the success of its use in moral theory hinges on how certain debates about causation are resolved.

The concept of causality is changing as human knowledge changes. Causality as an abstract notion has been traditionally studied in the field of metaphysics in philosophy. The Greek philosophers understood the time causality as explanation in general (Aristotle, 350 B.C.). The search for causes was a search for first principles, which were meant to be explanatory. In the more recent philosophy introduced by (Newton, 1687) was causality connected with determinism. The current experimental science reveals the non-deterministic notion of cause, which has to be also taken into consideration. The introduction of probability theory into all scientific disciplines allows to formalize and mathematize the wider conceived notion of cause.

In recent years, much social scientific scholarship in sport, exercise and health (SEH) has repudiated (post) positivist research and has instead persuasively argued in favour of qualitative research from constructivist–interpretivist paradigmatic approaches. While this scholarship has enriched the field in numerous ways, this paper contends that constructivist–interpretivist assumptions elicit a modus operandi which is inimical to the accomplishment of two associated contemporary research agendas: interdisciplinarity and impact. In seeking an alternative philosophy of science, the purpose of this paper is to explore how critical realism – meta-theoretical position that has been somewhat absent to date in SEH research – might offer qualitative researchers a new conceptual framework with which greater interdisciplinarity and impact can be achieved. Two main critical realist claims are introduced: (1) the epistemic fallacy can be avoided by adopting a stratified ontology and judgemental rationality, and (2) social science would benefit from seeking causal explanations underpinned by a transformational model of social activity. By de-coupling interpretive epistemologies from constructivist ontologies, it is argued that critical realism permits greater methodological plurality and hence can help transcend persistent paradigmatic boundaries. Indeed, by adopting a realist social ontology and complex, emergent conception of causality, this paper suggests that critical realism permits and encourages impact by asking researchers to focus on explaining the enduring social relations that produce real-world problems. The paper concludes by pointing out the limitations of critical realism and highlighting other ways that interdisciplinarity and impact can similarly be achieved.

To date, B&S researchers have pursued their normative aims through strategic and moral arguments that are limited because they adopt a rational actor behavioral model and firm-level focus. I argue that it would be beneficial for B&S scholars to pursue alternate approaches based on critical realism (CR) and neoinstitutional theory (IT). Such a shift would have a number of benefits. For one, CR and IT recognize the complex roots of firm behavior and provide tools for its investigation. Both approaches also note the importance of social context and IT, in particular, points to tangible sites where changes in (and outcomes of) corporate practices can be assessed. CR also has an emancipatory ethos which harkens a role for scholars in social change, while IT provides mechanisms to ground this ethos in tangible activities that go beyond appealing to managers’ strategic or moral sensibilities.

The sense of causality is something we have inherited from our long-gone ancestors. Today we know that many higher animals, besides Homo sapiens, are capable of causal understanding. In the paper I give some examples of how birds and animals have an embodied insight in causal processes, and I discuss what we can learn from them about our own causal intuitions. Next, I argue that these intuitions determine the criteria by which we are able to decide what counts as causes in physics or biology. Hence I try to give a naturalistic account of our concept of causality. However, when it comes to explanations in the sciences I make a pragmatic distinction between causes and causal processes. I do so by holding that causes are external to a particular system whereas causal processes are internal to a particular system. But at the same time I hold that how we divide between system and sub-system depends on the research problems we are interested in and therefore on the type of explanation-seeking questions we seek to answer. Finally, I discuss emergence in connection with System biology and causation.

Informed by epistemological pluralism and state-of-the-art debate on research design in the social sciences, this volume combines conceptual elaboration with substantive research puzzles. Research Design in European Studies investigates different notions of causality and relates them to methods and techniques. Designed for use either in a course on European Union politics or in preparing projects on Europeanization, the book offers an applied perspective on research methods in specific areas of qualitative approaches to causality, as well as chapters introducing quantitative, critical realist, and discursive strategies. Substantively, the contributors tackle research issues in the domains of compliance, EU external relations, foreign policy, health care, party politics and urban governance.

This paper discusses Freud's theory in the context of the most significant redefinitions in contemporary biology. Freud's ideas in general, as well as his conception of mental illness, were deeply grounded in the paradigm of evolutionist biology, which prevailed during his lifetime. Over the last four decades, another paradigm emerged in this field and became dominant, i.e., the informational paradigm. For this reason, some of the implications of this new paradigm for resignifying Freud's concepts like repetition, death drive and anxiety will be outlined.

Dear Editor- in-ChiefWhat we know about the Burnt City civilization is unfortunately limited to archeological findings and studies. We have no knowledge about the customs and rituals, beliefs, and myths of this civilization, which has made the analysis of archeological findings difficult. Therefore, our analyses are entirely based on speculations. However, I believe that one of the best ways to understand what happened in the Burnt City is to perform analysis regardless of the deficiencies and uncertainties.The concept of causality is one of the most important concepts in human evolution. Our brain can establish a causal relationship between two relevant factors. The extent of the cause-effect relationship refers to the type of the relationship. As a result of what is called pre-logical mentality, the mentality of the primitive human established a cause-effect relationship between many topics that do not seem to be logically related (1). Examples of such relationships can be frequently found in myths of different nations. Therefore, the concept of and the entirely accidental occurrence of events did not occur to primitive human mentality. Studies show that causal thinking has deep roots in the brain which indicates the fact that throughout the evolution process, the brain has been trained to relate various phenomena to causal thinking (2). Moreover, studies have revealed that the causal understanding of simpler phenomena starts in the early ages and many processes that lead to causal understanding happen fast and automatically, and the brain understands the relationship without any conscious effort to find the causal relationship between two phenomena (3). We have partially learned the neurophysiologic bases of this phenomenon. We know that causal processing happens in the visual system automatically and unconsciously. Studies using fMRI have shown that when the brain is exposed to two stimulations with a causal relationship, specific parts of the visual system, i.e. the bilateral superior temporal sulci, the left intraparietal sulcus, and bilateral V5/MT/MST areas demonstrate a significant activity bilaterally (3). This explains that the brain is hard-wired for receiving the causal relationship between two topics. However, the point is that none of the studies state that a specific area of the brain is activated due to the absence of a relationship between the phenomena, i.e. their accidental and probable concurrence. In other words, the human brain is perhaps not scheduled to understand accidental events (issues with probable or possibly accidental nature). Pre-logical mentality establishes a causal relationship even between unrelated issues due to its special mentality (1). It means that the aforementioned areas of the brain were very active in primitive humans and their visual experience of the outside world was completely active, alive, and based on establishing different relationships.Therefore, the concept of the accidental event should be considered a later development that was achieved by the human brain following a lengthy process of evolution and gaining experience on approaching different phenomena for which the brain might have not been rewired, yet. The fact that two phenomena can be unrelated and occur accidentally is a very deep concept, which is a basis for another deep concept that considers the occurrence of a phenomenon a probability not a certainty. …

The concept of overdetermination offers a way of understanding the radical contingency of the human subject, history, and politics. Initially theorized by Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis, in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), the overdetermination of the manifest content of the dream, produced when our mind is free of conscious control, offers insights into unconscious processes in waking life. Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser took up Freud's concept in his critique of the Hegelian dialectic and economic determinism in contemporary Marxism. The theorization of these issues was developed further by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985). Their school of discourse theory, and related theoretical and empirical research drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, might be seen as the most productive contemporary fields building on Freudian and Althusserian conceptualizations of overdetermination. This ongoing theorization of overdetermination produces insights into the interplay between unconscious forces, discourse, and political change.

The Theologian's Doubts:Natural Philosophy and the Skeptical Games of Ghazālī Leor Halevi In the history of skeptical thought, which normally leaps from the Pyrrhonists to the rediscovery of Sextus Empiricus in the sixteenth century, Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad al-Ghazālī (1058-1111) figures as a medieval curiosity. Skeptical enough to merit passing acknowledgment, he has proven too baffling to be treated fully alongside pagan, atheist, or materialist philosophers. As a theologian defending certain Muslim dogmas, Ghazālī has not met what historians consider the mark of the true skeptic, a mind doubting the possibility of all systems of knowledge. But what is fascinating about him is that he brought into practical operation the tools of what I call "functional skepticism."1 He denied the claims to truth of Aristotelian physics—whose basis he showed to rest on groundless belief—then turned and argued for the possibility of the Resurrection tooth and nail. The scholarly debate on The Incoherence of the Philosophers (Tahāfut al-falāsifa) has concentrated on the extent to which Ghazālī qua Ashcarite theologian was seduced into Aristotelian philosophy despite himself.2 In my view this debate has been misguided in the attempt to distill the [End Page 19] essence of Ghazālī from the book's eclectic theology; I will argue for a different view of Ghazālī on the basis of a close reading of key passages. In the unusual sections where Ghazālī applies Aristotelian language to a world not following the ordinary laws of physics, some have found Ghazālī slipping, unconsciously perhaps, into an Aristotelian frame of mind. I will show that, as a skeptical theologian with a dialogic imagination, he was rather deconstructing Aristotelian discourse while playing a Wittgensteinian sort of language game. Natural Philosopher or Speculative Theologian? The disagreement about the extent to which philosophy infected Ghazālī is ancient. Ghazālī might have studied philosophy only in order to refute it. He himself defended his philosophizing with the claim that one cannot deconstruct a system of thought until one has understood it so deeply as to elaborate upon its fundamental principles.3 His Maqāṣid al-falāsifa was in fact received, especially in trans-Pyrenean Europe, as a philosopher's genuine summary of the object of philosophy.4 The book strikes me as suspiciously creative in its representation of philosophical discourse, but it appears in any case as an expert and surprisingly unbiased treatment.5 Arabic readers knew that Ghazālī had also written a polemical treatise against philosophy, Tahāfut al-falāsifa, but they still wondered about his engagement with the ideas he challenged. Abū Bakr Ibn al-cArabī, for example, commented that Ghazālī had been unable to extricate himself from philosophy.6 Other philosophers pondered whether or not he had been a closeted member of their charmed circle and sought in his writings traces of esoteric philosophy.7 Averroës's own sober sense of distance between philosophy and theology was partially a reaction to what he perceived as Ghazālī's dangerous and carefree mixture of the two sciences.8 He attacked Ghazālī's book in The Incoherence [End Page 20] of the Incoherence to restore philosophy's sense of purity, an aim he sought to accomplish by separating religious concerns from the philosopher's field of inquiry.9 Ironically, such a separation is precisely what Ghazālī might have wished to provoke by crisscrossing and blurring the line between religion and philosophy. The modern debate on chapter 17 of Tahāfut al-falāsifa has concentrated on defining Ghazālī as either a natural philosopher or an occasionalist theologian. In his defense of the possibility of miracles Ghazālī presented two theories of causation, one denying the logical basis of Aristotelian notions of natural causality, and the other more or less adopting these notions. Jointly, the two theories have seemed incompatible, and for this reason scholars have attempted to sort Ghazālī out of the apparent confusion. In 1978 L. E. Goodman argued persuasively that Ghazālī exploited rather than denied the philosophers' ideas of causality. In two articles Michael Marmura challenged Goodman, contending...

Aquinas’ conception of causality, especially when associated to the notions of creation and nature, grounds his cosmology as presented in the Summa contra gentiles . Two theses are central to this cosmology. The first claims that the divine causality bestows order upon the world. The second in turn maintains that the set of stars, the heaven, rules and moves the sublunar realm, which necessarily occurs due to divine causality. There is therefore an articulation conceived by Aquinas between the two theses. To show this articulation is the aim of this paper. For this, I investigate how Aquinas understands and associates the notions of causality, creation and nature in such a way that it guarantees both divine creation and the operation proper to natural beings, among which stands out the heaven, which, in virtue of continuous locomotion, sets the condition for the actualization of beings’ potentialities.

In this essay the author seeks to answer some of the criticisms of Freud's central concepts, theories, and methods that have been raised by twentieth century philosophy. He argues that many of these concepts and theories, particularly the concept of the unconscious, represent indispensable assumptions shared by the human sciences, even when they are not directly addressed by them. Further, he argues that in Freud's ideas we find one of the most advanced positions in our understanding of culture, its illusions and discontents, and a profound attempt to bridge the distance between a description of social reality and its critical appraisal.

This article aims to show how relational sociology, in synergy with critical realism, sees social change, understood as social morphogenesis, in advanced societies. The concept of morphogenesis (MG) in the social sciences can be traced back to organic system theory. This theory became problematic once research showed that social networks cannot be treated as systems. Along the way, the relational nature of MG was revealed ever more clearly. The new perspective is that of moving beyond a mechanical definition of the concepts of variety, selection, positive/negative feedbacks and the stabilization processes that go to realize MG. It is necessary to redefine these concepts from the perspective of a relational paradigm of MG. This article tries to explain and understand the production of society as a process of MG that takes place in terms of relational steering, which is characterized by recourse to relational feedbacks that generate emergent social effects.

In recent years a body of scholars and researchers working in the field of organization and management studies in Britain and elsewhere have been following academic agendas avowedly supported by realist philosophical ideas. Among other things, realist-informed researchers have investigated the configuration and reconfiguration of public and private organizations and, more broadly, the formation and re-formation of structures describingthe framework of capitalist institutions.2 Significant contributions to social science in these areas have been made, including, it will be argued here, the establishment of cumulative results. With these developments as its focus, this chapter considers systematically what makes this new work distinctive. Although philosophy has made no direct contribution to the accumulation of knowledge in these fields, it is difficult to imagine the research having taken the form it has, or having been so effective had it not been informed by knowledge of realist philosophy. In this chapter, the philosophy is considered first; and only then the theory and methods typically employed by researchers. The type of account of organizational and social change that has been produced – and which is the basis of the social science contribution of these developments – is only broadly outlined. The contribution of the chapter is that it aims to clarify how this approach to social science works, and to point to the character and role of its associated logics of scientific discovery.KeywordsGenerative MechanismManagement StudyOrganization TheoryOrganization StudyCritical RealismThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

The paper summarizes our experience from the application of the ideas of MMABP methodology in the field of Healthcare. MMABP is focused on modeling business (i.e. human-centered) systems with informatics methods, it strongly distinguishes between the ontology of the domain and goal-driven processes in the domain. This difference between causality and intentionality plays an important role especially in the healthcare domain as an essential difference between the disease causality and clinical processes. In the paper we explain the basic principles of the methodology and used models focusing on lifecycle and process models, describe the way of using MMABP in healthcare domain and introduce the concepts of disease causality and clinical processes as well as their essential relationships from the methodology point of view. With use of the practical example we discuss an essential difference between causal and intentional models together with their role in the healthcare domain.