Philosophical Psychology ought to:

(According to philosopher Owen Flanagan)
philosophical psychology ought to answer questions such as these:

• What, if anything, are humans like deep down inside beneath the clothes of culture?

• What, if any, features of mind-world interaction, and thus of the human predicament, are universal?

• Is there any end state or goal(s) that all humans seek because they are wired to seek it (or them), or what is different, ought to seek because it is—or, they are—worthy?

• If there is a common natural orientation toward some end state(s), for example, pleasure, friendship, community, truth, beauty, goodness, intellectual contemplation, are these ends mutually consistent? If not, must one choose a single dominant end? Does our nature not only provide the end(s), but also a way of ordering and prioritizing them, as well as a preferred ratio among them that produces some sort of equilibrium?

• How conducive is following our nature to actually producing what we naturally seek, or what is different, sensibly ought to seek? Could it be that not everything we seek—not even pleasant experiences or truth—is good for us?

• What is the relation between our first nature, our given human nature, and our second nature, our cultured nature?

• Does first nature continue in contemporary worlds, in new ecologies, to achieve its original ends? If so, is first nature also well suited to achieving new, culturally discovered, or what is different, created ends

• Is second nature constructed precisely for the achievement of variable, culturally discovered or created ends that first nature is ill-equipped to achieve?

• Do different societies construct/develop second nature in order to enhance first nature and/or to moderate and modify, possibly to eliminate, certain seeds in our first nature that can work against that very (first) nature and/or against our second nature and our cultured ends, which our second nature is intended to help us achieve?

Errors in these questions of the city state or class:

• The Problem Of Universalism: One Ness vs Individual, Family, tribe, race and corporation.(Doolittle) Which is reducible to a hierarchy of desires (needs). And they cannot be equally met.

source

Talal Asad: Reflections on the Origins of Human Rights

Decline in Religion Faculty jobs

"The last academic year has been a difficult one for those seeking jobs in the field of religion. A joint report by the American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature -- released Tuesday -- found that 452 positions were listed with the two organizations during the 2013-14 academic year, down from 548 the year before. While not all religion faculty jobs are listed with the two groups, their listings are considered a good general measure of the health of the academic job market. The latest figures are well below the 652 listings in the 2007-8 year, the last one before the economic downturn hit."

from IHE

Binary Intensification (just a thought)

The use of binary discourse in the public sphere, it seems, has a tendency to intensify a position and its associated identity...

which really doesn't help; the game becomes a polemics of loyalty...

The Social Life of Money - Nigel Dodd; response: Keith Hart

Supplement: Thomas Piketty and David Graeber have a discussion here

I'm fascinated in this too...

“Throughout my academic career I have been fascinated by the capacity of holders of very strong attitudes to resist persuasive attempt at change. Public figures and ordinary folk alike often cling tenaciously to beliefs and attitudes that we, as know-it-all academics, are convinced are wrong-headed. Whether the attitudes concern life after death, gay rights, a perceived conspiracy to take over New Jersey, or whatever, we can argue until blue-faced without budging our State Representative or our Uncle Walter an inch.”

-Robert P. Abelson (1995: 25-26) 

Rodney Needham interview

source

the morality of reproducing culture

"structured structures" acting as "structuring structures" perpetuate the (implicit) biases you think you don't have. 

Heidegger and Thai Buddhist Monk Bhikku

"In the second part of the interview (read a transcript here), Bhikku Maha Mani asks Heidegger what he thinks about the contradictory Western tendency to identify people without religion as “communists” and those who live “according to religious rules” as insane. Heidegger responds that religion, in its most radical sense, simply means “a bonding-back to powers, forces and laws, that supersede human capability.” In this respect, he says, “no human being is without religion,” whether it be “the belief in science” of communists or “an atheistic religion, namely Buddhism, that knows no God.” Heidegger goes on to explain why he sees little possibility of “immediate and simple understanding” between people of different religions, philosophies, and political groups. While it may be tempting to view Heidegger’s work—and that of other phenomenological, existential, or skeptical philosophers—as working in tandem with much Eastern thought, as perhaps “the” German philosopher himself would caution, the differences are significant. In the interview above, Heidegger largely faults Germany and “all of Europe in general” for a general lack of human harmony: “We do not have any clear, common and simple relation to reality and to ourselves,” he says. “That is the big problem of the Western world.” source

learning social cues before speaking language (habitus)

A study that recently came out of University of Washington:

"Each toy had movable parts that made sounds, such as a strand of plastic beads that made a rattle when dropped into a plastic cup and a small box that "buzzed" when pressed with a wooden stick. The children watched eagerly – leaning forward and sometimes pointing enthusiastically.

Then a second person, referred to as the "emoter," entered the room and sat down on a chair near the table. The experimenter repeated the demonstration and the emoter complained in an angry voice, calling the experimenter's actions with the toys "aggravating" and "annoying."

After witnessing the simulated argument, the children had a chance to play with the toys, but under slightly different circumstances. For some, the emoter left the room or turned her back so she couldn't see what the child was doing. In these situations, toddlers eagerly grabbed the toy and copied the actions they had seen in the demonstration.

In other groups, the angered emoter maintained a neutral facial expression while either watching the child or looking at a magazine. Most toddlers in these groups hesitated before touching the toy, waiting about four seconds on average. And when they finally did reach out, the children were less likely to imitate the action the experimenter had demonstrated."

read more here

I Heart Huckabees - What happens in the meadow at dusk

*Homo duplex (How am I not myself?)

How Am I Not Myself? from Ryan Robles on Vimeo.
*this is a clip from 'I heart Huckabees' if you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it (one of my favorites).

Homo duplex is a thesis by Durkheim to discuss the duality of being a person:

On the one hand there is our individuality, and, more especially, our body that is its foundations; on the other, everything that, within us, expresses something other than ourselves.

--Emile Durkheim 2005: 37

Born into a set of conditions beyond our control...  

the specific form 'society [to which individuals have given the social element of their being] acquires its own agents and organs, which confronts the individual like an alien body with demands and obligations.

--Georg Simmel 1997: 182

Traversing across a particular space-time continuum, 

my experience of life within the floating time structure of past, present, and future cannot be experienced by anyone else.

-- Anton C. Zijderveld 1970: 13

And yet, we are

...a member of a species, a social being who plays predefined social roles which urge [us] to think and act and feel according to the rules and patterns of [our] society. That means [our] unique experience of life is simultaneously a learned experience of a social life within the traditional structures of the 'objective' time of clock and calendar.

 --Ibid.

Within this

...mixture of enforcement and personal freedom ... there is a latent potential for conflict [in that society is represented both in and by the individual as it were]. Man has the capacity to split himself into different parts and feel that one such portion is his real self, although this one part clashes with other parts and competes for the determination of his actions. This capacity often puts man - insofar as he is and feels himself to be a social being - in a conflicting relationship with impulses and interests of his self which are not related to society.

--Simmel 1997: 182-3

i.e. Freedom and obligation as a form of conflict.

--Ibid.: 185; in the 'morality of law' this is discussed in terms of 'aspiration' and 'duty'
 

The Homo duplex theorem above not only depicts the parameters of an existential/ontological question but it also points to the question about

 "the ways in which from society to society [people] know how to use their bodies."

--Marcel Mauss 1973

Some call it socialization, some call it embodiment, the psychology of learning, or the sociology of knowledge. However, the approach to investigating "Homo duplex" differs. While the psychology of learning begins with the individual and the biology of perception. During its early years, the discipline was shaped by classical and operant conditioning paradigms of learning which led to Skinner's 'Behaviourism' only to be disproven later on...

… the approach of the sociology of knowledge intentionally does not start with the single individual and his thinking ... Rather, the sociology of knowledge seeks to comprehend thought in the concrete setting of an historical-social situation out of which individually differentiated thought only very gradually emerges. Thus, it is not men in general who think, or even isolated individuals who do the thinking, but men in certain groups who have developed a particular style of thought in an endless series of responses to certain typical situations characterizing their common position.

Strictly speaking it is incorrect to say that the single individual thinks. Rather it is more correct to insist that he participates in thinking further the inherited modes of response or to substitute others for them in order to deal more adequately with the new challenges which have arisen out of the shifts and changes in his situation. Every individual is therefore in a two-fold sense predetermined by the fact of growing up in a society: on one hand he finds a ready-made situation and on the other he finds in that situation preformed patterns of thought and of conduct.

--Karl Mannheim 1936: 3

In this sense, the sociology of knowledge represents a "one-sided determinism" with  
most of the empirical studies in the area give evidence in support of this view. The principal trend in the sociology of knowledge, especially within American sociology, however, has been toward emphasizing the functional relationship between the individual mind and the environment.

--Curtis & Petras 1970: 4

 

Although sociology is defined as the science of society, in reality it cannot deal with human groups, which are the immediate concern of its research, without in the end tackling the individual, the ultimate element of which these groups are composed. For society cannot constitute itself unless it penetrates individual consciousnesses and fashions them 'in its image and likeness'.

--Emile Durkheim (Curtis & Petras 1970: 35)

...in one sense it is very true that every psychological phenomenon is a sociological phenomenon, the mental element being identified with the social one. But, in another sense, everything is reversed. The proof as to what is social can only be a mental one; in other words, we can never be sure we have fathomed the meaning and function of an institution if we are not capable of reliving its impact upon the individual consciousness. As such an impact is an integral part of institutions, any interpretation must aim to match the objectivity of the historical or comparative analysis with the subjectivity of the experience as it has been lived.

--Claude Lévi-Strauss (Moscovici 1993: 14; Cf. Lévi-Strauss 1960; Bloch (2012) has echoed this overlap and stressed the necessary relationship between anthropology and psychology)

In this regard, the subject of the sociology of knowledge or the psychology of learning - "socially informed body" - or the paradigm of embodiment must include 'cognition' as well as the various expressions of how "people learn how to use their bodies." Another term for Durkheim's Homo duplex theorem is the concept of habitus, which, according to Sam Whimster, was described by Max Weber as "the disposition to behave and view the world in a particular and distinctive manner."

--Max Weber (Swedberg 2005: 109)

Put another way, Pierre Bourdieu - in typical French fashion - described habitus as the

... systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles of the generation and structuring practices and representations which can be objectively adapted to their goals without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary to attain them and, being all this, collectively orchestrated without being the product of the orchestrating action of a conductor.

--Pierre Bourdieu 1977: 72 emphasis original

For me, investigating habitus can be done by investigating belief as a learned disposition (if you want to pull Rodney Needham back from his grave, I ain't scurred - I got him covered in chapter 2). More specifically, I argue that beliefs are the units of embodiment and cultural history (among a few other things). In other words, the beliefs that we have are the products of the particular cultural histories presented to us. The nuances between individuals are not just social/cultural but also biological in terms of our inherited genetic dispositions that are covered in the Big 5 (I understand that this is not the only model for discussing personality but it is one of the models that have generated a significant amount of evidence for the relationship between personality and genes; *genetic variation does not entail a different species! I know this is obvious to some but you'd be surprised). Moreover, there have been studies of identical twins separated at birth and raised in very different environments - the similarities between them are quite striking (see Minnesota twin study). I use the phrase "valence of affinity" to capture this sense of individuality and direction of aesthetic, taste, style, etc. etc. I arrive at these points by discussing some of the critiques of 'belief' from the anthropology of religion, epistemology, and the theory of cognitive dissonance in social psychology. In addition, I cover the literature on 'crisis' and 'religious conversion' to be more specific in the ways we can look into the study of 'belief' that constitute the "structuring structures" of our being and becoming.  

*the above was part of a preliminary 'introduction' that I eventually discarded.

William James quoting Fitz James Stephen

In William James' essay, 'The Will to Believe' he ends with reference toFitz James Stephen:

"What do you think of yourself? What do you think of the world? . . . These are questions with which all must deal as it seems good to them. They are riddles of the Sphinx, and in some way or other we must deal with them. . . . In all important transactions of life we have to take a leap in the dark. . . . If we decide to leave the riddles unanswered, that is a choice; if we waver in our answer, that, too, is a choice: but whatever choice we make, we make it at our peril. If a man chooses to turn his back on God and the future, no one can prevent him; no one can show beyond reasonable doubt that he is mistaken. If a man thinks otherwise and acts as he thinks, I do not see that any one can prove that he is mistaken. Each must act as he thinks best; and if he is wrong, so much the worse for him. We stand on a mountain pass in the midst of whirling snow and blinding mist, through which we get glimpses now and then of paths which may be deceptive. If we stand still we shall be frozen to death. If we take the wrong road we shall be dashed to pieces. We do not certainly know whether is any right one. What must we do? 'Be strong and of a good courage.' Act for the best, hope for the best, and take what comes. . . . If death ends all, we cannot meet death better."

Farah Chamma - How Must I Believe?

Poet

A Class-Divided (1985)

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/divided/

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/divided/etc/view.html