Why "do" philosophy, if not to contribute to social consciousness (our own and those of our students and readers), to develop ideas for change, to articulate the desperations of the present and the possibilities of futures which will help people, however loosely we define "people"? This is one of the most popular objections to philosophy: that it is not practical, and therefore not really politically useful. And in todays philosophical arena, this argument is directed specifically against postmodern philosophies. However, there is another sense of the word "postmodern," which we often forget when talking about postmodernism. Lyotard wants us to think about that which resists institutionalization, homogenization, academic taxonomies, economies, and genealogies. The postmodern is the moment of ideological instability and confusion, of radical undermining of foundations and transgressing of boundaries. It is just another name for thought. In this essay, I attempt to describe a sort of postmodern praxis in terms of the Lyotardian notion of thought, discussing the work of Simone de Beauvoir, Hardt and Negri, and June Jordan.

When someone there is standing before us, we have been cautioned that he is not speaking with his own voice but speaking the language of his gender, his family, his class, his education, his culture, his economic and political interests, his unconscious drives, indeed his state of physical health and alertness. Are we then doing no more than interpreting what he says and does? Do we ever make contact with what he means for himself when he says "I"—with his visions, the story he tells himself of his life?

With this essay I would like to unite some insights from Virginia Woolf's book Moments of Being in order to elucidate the relationship between society, identity and violence. Vll begin by extrapolating from some ideas in the essay "A Sketch of the Past." The second half of the paper will explore a few ramifications of this theory, which, I hope, will lend support to the theses in Andrew J. McKennd's book Violence and Difference: Girard, Derrida, and Deconstruction, and in Eric Ganshook The End of Culture. The word "identity" will have no formal definition in this discmsion, but some characteristics of identity itself should become clear by the end.

The present paper is a reading of Jean-Pierre Jeunets recent film, A Very Long Engagement, mainly through the lenses of Jacques Lacans psychoanalytical theory of the human subject—particularly his notion of the subject's desire, which constitutes every human subject as a singular being. Moreover, for Lacan the subject faces the task of taking up his or her desire as a prerequisite for truly ethical action. The character of Mathilde in Jeunets film, it is argued, may be seen as being paradigmatic in this respect, insofar as she acts in accordance with her desire. This is demonstrated with reference to the narrative structure of Jeunet's film.

This article explores the loss of the Louisiana wetlands from an eco-psychology viewpoint. The causes of the deterioration of Louisiana's coastal wetlands include direct ones such as the building of canals, pipelines, and levee systems, and more importantly, humanity's disconnection from the voices of nature and the wilderness. This article takes the reader to the dying edge of a continent, and invites the reader to adopt a new vision of our place within the world.

This paper approaches philosophical counseling practice from the idea that philosophy itself is primarily a way of living and only secondarily a subject matter to be grasped and comprehended. Three things are shown to follow from this view: first, charging a fee for access to this practice is inimical to the practice itself; secondly contrary to scientific 'objectivity' as the means to truth-speaking this view of philosophy calls for a consciously articulated autobiographical expression or personal admission on the part of the philosophical practitioner; and, finally, an understanding of philosophical counseling practice emergesfrom this view of philosophy that is depicted as naturally occurring therapeutic interacting.

In discussing the psychiatric diagnoses, the author explores not the "formal" diagnoses of the so-called mental illnesses, but the "informal" judgments made hy psychotherapists in regard to their method or the process of their therapy. These diagnoses include transference, repression, resistance, denial, negativism, projection, and suppression. While these are not precisely the symptoms of psychopathology, they are an integral part of the language which psychotherapists use to describe and label what they see as problems in their patients. These so-called problems, which are interpreted by the therapist as existing within the patient, can be reinterpreted and largely avoided in philosophical counselling. The author argues that, when a person is observed or diagnosed by a psychotherapist as exhibiting one of these supposedly problematic traits, the therapist is in fact misinterpreting what is going on.

Over the past twenty odd years. North America has witnessed the complete medicalization of unhappiness hy transforming it into depression, which has been conceived in psychologically reductionistic terms. Many are unhappy with this state of affairs, including the contemporary American novelists. Walker Percy, Richard Ford, and Jonathan Franzen. This paper explores why they are unhappy with this trend and why they reject psychological reductionism in favor of a vision of life that is more thoroughly moral in its outlook.

Writing arouses certain sensibilities that bring about what goes on inside the body, but also, while writing, it is the process whereby self gains access to the exterior. A moment can be reached in the act of writing when one enters the flow of flesh, or the space between self and other, self and text, that is the reciprocal mirroring of the other that becomes the same, yet is always other, the incomplete self always in the process of becoming. This is the Merelau-Pontian idea of the chiasm, where being in the world, the becoming self is fleshed out of the oscillations between self and other, reading the other in touching across the text in which the distinction between word and thing, or language and experience, has not yet been made. This inscribing reveals the self as a kind of narrative yet phenomenological aspect of the becoming self. What l'm trying to explore here is writing that reflects the corporeality of the becoming self, the mimetic impulse that yields the self to the other, the oscillations on the threshold of interior/exterior, this textualizing as the fundamental way of our being.

In the 1960's and 1970's there was a brief flourishing of practical and group phenomenological work spurred by a renewed intention towards the things themselves. Despite a growing turn to phenomenology across the Humanities since the 1990's, there is still much more written about phenomenology than phenomenology performed. Ihis essay sketches a brief history of group phenomenological methods which have sought to remedy this situation and outlines a project nearing completion at the Department of Performance Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia, using a small group of trained phenomenological researchers to study the phenomenon of being in audiences.

We contend that the talk of therapy, like everyday talk, is where and how people construct their understandings and ways of living This is the fundamental insight of the social constructionist, or discursive, therapies. 'Meaning' is not some pre-given 'thing' that is communicated more or less successfully from one individual to another. Rather, meanings are negotiated or constructed in the process of communication until each party is clear that they have a grasp of what they are 'talking about'. Similarly, 'meanings' are not universal, nor necessarily arranged in a given ethical hierarchy, with some absolutely superior to others: 'meanings' are local and accountable in their locality. Yet, meanings, and actions following from them, are central to the conversations of therapy. In our view, the social constructionist or discursive therapies point to enhanced possibilities for collaborative and relevant conversations with clients. In this article we summarize themes common to contemporary discursive approaches to therapy (examples: narrative, solution-focused, social and collaborative language systems therapies).

This essay examines the similarities and dissimilarities between Freudian psychoanalysis and the form of analysis outlined by Sartre in Being and Nothingness in relation to the theory of intentionality developed hy Brentano and Husserl. The principal aim of the paper is to establish a suitable starting point for a dialogue between these two forms of analysis, whose respective terminologies with respect to consciousness and the unconscious appear to cancel one another out.

In this autobiographical fragment, the author demonstrates the call to philosophy as a quest for sophia, logos and sacred wisdom, and also as resistance to mad and brutal circumstance.