During an Australian qualitative and empirical study looking at lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender client's experiences of counseling, and counselor's experiences of working with minority clients, a large body of unsolicited data emerged related to experiences of religious-based homophobia. Analysis of the data suggests that a lifelong process of posttraumatic recovery for many lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people follows prior experiences of religious-based homophobia. This paper discusses the sociological debate related to how counselors find themselves at the crossroad between (...) a healthy lifestyle model of homosexuality based in well established contemporary professional ethics versus long standing religious-based attitudes and constraints toward homosexuality. This intersection of conflicting beliefs generates a controversial social and political environment in which counselors must make a basic decision to either support minority clients according to ethical guidelines or to side with socially conservative constructs that, rightly or wrongly, rely largely on Western religious traditions. (shrink)

Se accettiamo l’ipotesi di Nietzsche, ampiamente sviluppata da Heidegger, che prevede l’affermarsi planetario di un’epoca in cui il senso della vita sarà completamente assente, un solo compito si offre alla filosofia e, nella sua accezione più larga, alla cultura: “DARE UN SENSO – questo il compito che resta assolutamente da assolvere”. Di là dal nichilismo, scrisse Nietzsche, la creazione di un senso permette al caos, nascosto in fondo all’uomo così come ai confini dell’universo, di trasformarsi in stella. In un testo (...) del marzo 1888, il pensatore chiede all’uomo di “costringere il suo caos a diventare forma; a diventare logico, semplice, univoco, matematica, legge. È questa qui la grande ambizione”. Il canto poetico di Zarathustra annuncerà, analogamente, l’imperativo di una cultura che dà all’esistenza la sua legge: “Riesci a costringere le stelle a ruotare intorno a te?”. E tale insegnamento è così precisato: “Bisogna che ancora si porti dentro di sé un caos per potere far nascere una stella danzante”. L’immagine della stella evoca per Nietzsche l’origine del mondo e l’esplosione della vita: ma allora, è l’oblio della stella a fondare il nichilismo. Questo termine, reso popolare da Turgenev e Paul Bourget prima di Nietzsche, deriva dal latino ne hilum, l’assenza di “ilo”, la cicatrice lasciata sul seme dalla rottura del funicolo. Questa giuntura, attraverso cui scorrono i succhi nutritivi della pianta, è fonte di vita e, metaforicamente, donazione di senso. Quando il condotto della vita è chiuso o nascosto, non è possibile nessun orientamento e la fine scompare insieme con il senso che ad essa conduceva. Se applichiamo questo termine al nostro presente malessere, possiamo vedere che il significato di una cultura è legato costantemente alla sua comparsa e al suo scopo. L’epoca della completa assenza di senso è dunque quella in cui l’origine di una cultura, nel suo abbrivio o nella sua genealogia, è sistematicamente negata, al punto da occultare il suo fine, inteso come punto d’arrivo e, insieme, come destinazione. Che si tratti di scienza, di filosofia, di politica o di arte, le attività umane e i prodotti che ne risultano abdicano, così, ad ogni pretesa di senso e si limitano, a costo di rinunciare a costruire un mondo, alla immersione nel circolo del consumo. Nel presente lavoro si tenta di definire una direzione del pensiero che consenta alla filosofia di uscire dal nichilismo. In questo senso, si vi si pone a tema quel capitolo della filosofia che va sotto il nome di “post-nichilismo”, che non è, però, da intendere come una semplice e, probabilmente, perdente avversione empirica o sentimentale al clima generale dell’“insensata” nostra epoca. Kant aveva riconosciuto a David Hume il merito di averlo risvegliato dal “sonno dogmatico”; pare necessario cogliere nel nichilismo teoretico un’occasione analoga. Il “sonno” che ha colto l’Occidente risiede nella volontaria chiusura dello sguardo di fronte alla “catastrofe” che si annuncia e che non investe solo il pensiero. La filosofia, in un ultimo risveglio, non può che tentare di mostrare il panorama che si aprirebbe alla nostra vista, se solo si avesse l’ardire di orientare lo sguardo verso la nostra originaria destinazione per illuminare il nostro apparentemente ineluttabile futuro. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Prayer for the Dead, A Prayer for the LivingVincent J. MinichielloAs a first year resident physician, I am just beginning to understand the responsibilities and the practice of medicine. I have difficulty telling people “I’m a doctor,” because I’m not sure I believe it myself. And yet within the past eight months, I have already been challenged to mediate situations that bring me to not only fully accept (...) my vocation as a physician, but also to grow on a mental level, a human level, and a spiritual level. In the following reflection, I recount one of those moments that occurred during a rotation in the medical intensive care unit.At 6 p.m. I was coming on for my night shift knowing that the family of one of the patients I would be caring for had decided earlier in the day to withdraw medical care for their dying sister. The woman had been admitted to the ICU the previous night unconscious and in multi organ system failure—heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, all failed—as a result of chronic alcoholism and most recently drinking daily for three weeks with barely any other dietary intake. She was being kept alive with mechanical ventilation and three IV drips of medications to maintain her blood pressure. She was 45 years old. After a few more hours of saying goodbye, her sister came up to me and said that the family was ready to proceed. To withdraw care. I thought a lot about this phrase we use [End Page 204] “withdrawing care” that night. This encounter was the first time I had ever been the physician entering these orders into the computer. To me, what I was doing that night was in fact the complete opposite of “withdrawing” care. I felt, instead, that I was giving even more care. How?First, by caring more for the patient. By making sure she was comfortably extubated, by helping to reposition her in the hospital bed in a way that appeared more natural, and by praying. I prayed that when we stopped the pressors and the ventilator, she would pass quietly and find peace in Heaven, when she perhaps found very little on Earth.Second, by caring more for her family. It was my responsibility to guide them through this dying process, a process that I had only encountered two or three times previously in my life. I felt unsure, frightened, and nervous, not wanting to make a mistake or be inadvertently insensitive. Once again, prayer and what I perceive to be God’s grace filled me with the love I needed to outline the process, to encourage family members to hold her hand and to speak with her while she died.Once the medications were stopped and she was breathing unassisted, her lungs gasped once … twice. Was the soul being released from the body or was the body clinging onto the soul? And then, within two minutes, silence. I left some space to pause and then when the time felt right, stepped forward for the death pronouncement. “The heart is not beating, the lungs have stopped breathing” was all I could manage to say. Why did I remove the “she” and “her”? Why could I not say, “She is dead”? At the time I could not have answered those questions. Thinking back, I believe it was easier for me to vocalize that her body had simply stopped functioning, while I quietly held on to the belief that her soul continued to exist. Should I have held back as I did? Would it have been better for the family to hear that their sister was unquestionably dead? Perhaps. Nevertheless, the family understood, they cried, they held their sister’s hand. And then let go.At this point I took a breath, left the room, and without pause stepped straight into …A 46 year old woman with a history of drug and alcohol abuse was being wheeled into the ICU on a hospital bed right in front of me as the door behind me closed. Her nose and mouth were caked with white powder and she was in the embrace of some hallucination, clawing... (shrink)

'This book is a masterpiece of theoretical thought. It anticipates the actual achievements of much of what we now call sociolinguistics.

Things and Their Place in Theories Our talk of external things, our very notion of things, is just a conceptual apparatus that helps us to foresee and ...

Purpose. The knowledge influence analysis on the formation process of new anthropological images of man in the contexts of scientific achievements and innovative technologies is the basis of this study. It involves the solution of the following tasks: 1) explication of the ontological content of knowledge in the anthropo-cultural senses of the epoch; 2) analysis of the knowledge influence on the process of forming a new type of man; 3) characteristics of the modern anthropological situation in the context of digital (...) culture; 4) substantiation of interrelation of phatic communication with post-truth society in the dimensions of anthropo-social transformations of the present. Theoretical basis. Ontological content of knowledge determines the anthropo-cultural context of the epoch by forming a system of intellectual, value, social meanings of human life. The assertion of new anthropological types of man is caused by the changes in social and cultural space in the context of the growing influence of achievements in scientific knowledge and technology. Digital revolution as the process of expanding the possibilities of informational-digital reality, the substitution of knowledge for information gives rise to Homo digitalis – the digital man. He focuses on phatic communication, which in its intellectual meaninglessness is commensurate with the anthropological dimensions of post-truth society. Originality. It is substantiated that Homo digitalis is the result of a complex set of heterogeneous effects of scientific knowledge, which in modern post-truth conditions appears as different communicative practices. A condition for the formation of a new anthropological type of man in the perspective of scientific and technological progress is the affirmation of ethical wisdom. Conclusions. Knowledge in the process of evolution of socio-cultural life acquires constitutive significance for the process of formation of anthropological situations that manifest themselves in new images of man. Today, he is commensurate with the demands of digital culture, in which human life practices are increasingly becoming information and digital clusters embedded in the reality of a post-truth society. The means of overcoming the passivity of digital man is the formation of a new anthropological type based on a rethinking of the value system. (shrink)

The purpose of the article is the analysis of the causes of the systemic crisis that hit modern civilization through the description of its main structures, identifying the relationship between its elements, assessments of their heuristic potential. This will open up opportunities for finding ways to resolve this crisis, new directions of civilizational development. Theoretical basis of the research are the systems analysis, socio-philosophical and philosophical-anthropological approaches as well as the analysis of scientific developments in the field of global studies. (...) Originality lies in the fact that this article is the first to show the connection between the main structural elements of human civilization as a system. Change in one of the parameters leads to a change in all the others, together with a change in civilization as a whole. Conclusions. The reason for the deep crisis that hit modern civilization is its imbalance as a system. The most important elements of this system are population size, resources and technology, and the core is consciousness in its individual and collective forms. The perception, processing, and use of information, which is a defining civilizational resource, as well as the stability of the entire system depend on the state of consciousness. Consciousness, based on old, obsolete principles and stereotypes, is unable to cope with the most acute challenges of time. New consciousness, since it is formed, will mark the transition to a new theoretical picture of the world and a model of human behavior, in which people will act, driven by proven knowledge, and not willfulness and prejudice. The idea of forming a productive information environment where the ideas of constructiveness and creative work will dominate rather than consumerism and destruction, as is the case at present, must become the categorical imperative of the new consciousness. (shrink)

Purpose. The article suggested for consideration is aimed at clarifying the shift in human perception from the spatial turn announced by Michel Foucault, to a performative turn. The performative turn has an anthropological footing. It is based on the all-round investigation of the body’s principal role for cultural existence, as a result of a reverse reaction to artificial conceptual gap between space and body, which basically means ignoring the embodiment theme. An example of such theoretical deformation was Edmund Husserl’s “anthropology (...) phobia” revealed and thoroughly analysed by Hans Blumenberg in his critical works. Originality of the approach applied in this research, first and foremost, demonstrates not an abstract phenomenological conception as a theoretical construct, but a phenomenological activity itself, as well as practical work expressing antepredicative experience and solving the problems arising in this complicated process. Applying the Blumenberg’s analysis also allows to peep in the sideline notes of Edmund Husserl himself, which, for their part, acquire special meaning in relation to such a practical turn. Conclusions show the following state of affairs demonstrated by the anthropological and performative shift towards the body theme: 1) absolutisation of space without mentioning its relation to body experience is unreasonable and groundless, like in Husserl’s “anthropology phobia ”; 2) since the ground itself is a metaphorical anthropology basis, anthropology can reveal the structural conditions of perception due to thematic fronting of embodiment; 3) this gives anthropology some compensational features, to avoid false culture and nature dualism; 4) so, the space and body relationship is expressed by the Vehikel-phenomenon of the body itself, by placing, arranging and depicting, and thus replacing something missing and unavailable for direct contemplation, by revealing the spatial infrastructure for object perception, creating the presence conditions and metaphorically marking the contemplation boundary; 5) the depicting arrangement is at the same time a bodily performance, a play, staging and performing, which gives an aesthetic, poetic and emphatic impact on the use of philosophy language, in our case, on the way a phenomenology philosopher works with the language. (shrink)

Purpose. The article suggested for consideration is aimed at clarifying the shift in human perception from the spatial turn announced by Michel Foucault, to a performative turn. The performative turn has an anthropological footing. It is based on the all-round investigation of the body’s principal role for cultural existence, as a result of a reverse reaction to artificial conceptual gap between space and body, which basically means ignoring the embodiment theme. An example of such theoretical deformation was Edmund Husserl’s “anthropology (...) phobia” revealed and thoroughly analysed by Hans Blumenberg in his critical works. Originality of the approach applied in this research, first and foremost, demonstrates not an abstract phenomenological conception as a theoretical construct, but a phenomenological activity itself, as well as practical work expressing antepredicative experience and solving the problems arising in this complicated process. Applying the Blumenberg’s analysis also allows to peep in the sideline notes of Edmund Husserl himself, which, for their part, acquire special meaning in relation to such a practical turn. Conclusions show the following state of affairs demonstrated by the anthropological and performative shift towards the body theme: 1) absolutisation of space without mentioning its relation to body experience is unreasonable and groundless, like in Husserl’s “anthropology phobia ”; 2) since the ground itself is a metaphorical anthropology basis, anthropology can reveal the structural conditions of perception due to thematic fronting of embodiment; 3) this gives anthropology some compensational features, to avoid false culture and nature dualism; 4) so, the space and body relationship is expressed by the Vehikel-phenomenon of the body itself, by placing, arranging and depicting, and thus replacing something missing and unavailable for direct contemplation, by revealing the spatial infrastructure for object perception, creating the presence conditions and metaphorically marking the contemplation boundary; 5) the depicting arrangement is at the same time a bodily performance, a play, staging and performing, which gives an aesthetic, poetic and emphatic impact on the use of philosophy language, in our case, on the way a phenomenology philosopher works with the language. (shrink)