The Emotions A Philosophical Introduction By Julien A. Deonna & Fabrice Teroni Review by Robert Zaborowski, Ph.D. on Tue, Jun 18th 2013.
This book was published first in 2012 and appraised since that time as "the best introduction to the philosophy of the emotions on the market". This English version comes out from a French one Qu'est-ce qu'une émotion (2008). It is intended to provide the reader with a general introduction to the philosophy of emotions by presenting a good number of theories of emotions. It is narrated by reconstructing, so to speak, a stream of theories which connect with one another logically. In this respect the book is clear insofar as, generally, every subsequent chapter presents theories which mor Click here to read the full review!
Seeing Ezra A Mother's Story of Autism, Unconditional Love, and the Meaning of Normal By Kerry Cohen Review by Elisabeth Herschbach, Ph.D. on Tue, Jun 18th 2013.
When a babysitter warns Kerry Cohen that her one-year-old son Ezra shows signs of autism, Cohen and her family are abruptly thrust into a disorienting new reality of evaluations and interventions and diagnoses and therapies. But while experts trumpet the benefits of early detection and intervention for children with autism spectrum disorders, Cohen finds that the push for earlier and earlier intervention comes with hidden costs.
Confronting a rigid and prescriptive world of tests and treatments, Cohen becomes demoralized when she sees her affectionate, creative, playful, and expressive child Click here to read the full review!
Psychotherapist and historian Philip Cushman views person and culture abiding within one another in gradual, constant flux. In this "strange, unorthodox" and remarkable book, he relates the evolution of psychotherapy from Freud to the present in the context of social change from Victorian to post-modern culture. By the same token he portrays psychotherapy as simultaneously determined by, and influential in, the cultural milieu. This will annoy therapists who see themselves as occupying a scientific perch nicely insulated from social pressure, governed by universal, immutable truths about human Click here to read the full review!
Requiem By Lauren Oliver Review by Christian Perring on Tue, Jun 18th 2013.
Requiem is the third and final novel in Lauren Oliver's Delirium dystopian trilogy for young adults. Teenaged Lena grew up in a world where romantic love was classified as a disease. The authorities gave teenagers operations to prevent them from ever experiencing romantic love. Now she has committed herself to a revolution that will overthrow the government and its insidious interference into people's personal lives. Lena has had her own experience of romance, falling in love with two boys, and now she is living in a camp with both of them. They don't talk to each Click here to read the full review!
Calm Focus Joy The Power of Breath Awareness - A Practical Guide for Adults and Children By Heidi Thompson Review by Paola Teresa Grassi, Ph.D. on Tue, Jun 18th 2013.
With 25 years' experience in breath awareness, Heidi Thompson has designed an attention development program for children named Mindmastery. In 1983 she attended her first 10-day Vipassana Meditation retreat. For the first three days, students practiced Anapana, the Pali name of a technique meant to become calm and alert, while acutely focused -- anapanasati meaning "breathing in and breathing out the awareness". In 1996, Thompson decided to share this simple, yet effective method with young people and she presented her first Advanced Attention Development (AAD) program to several schools in Br Click here to read the full review!
Constructing the World By David J. Chalmers Review by David Wall, Ph.D. on Tue, Jun 11th 2013.
To what extent can we have knowledge of the world, what basic information would we need to begin an investigation from, and what does this tell us about concepts and the meaning of expressions and thoughts, what the world is actually like, and how the meaning of thoughts shapes the limits of our knowledge of the world? These are some of the questions David Chalmers addresses in his ambitious epistemological project Constructing the World. Chalmers argues for a range of scrutability theses, claims about what it is possible to know and understand about the world given a basic set of Click here to read the full review!
The Medication Question Weighing Your Mental Health Treatment Options By Ronald J. Diamond Review by Roger Hunt on Tue, Jun 11th 2013.
The Medication Question examines important concerns facing patients diagnosed with a particular mental illness. Unlike many texts addressing this issue, it remains neutral to the political and philosophical issues of pharmaceutical treatment, and instead explores it from a patient-centered approach. Rather than ask questions like "Is medication an effective treatment for mental illness?" or "Should the government be funding research or paying closer attention to prescription criteria?", Dr. Diamond explores whether or not medication could be an effective treatment for particular pa Click here to read the full review!
Drugs for Life How Pharmaceutical Companies Define Our Health By Joseph Dumit Review by Hennie Weiss on Tue, Jun 11th 2013.
In Drugs for Life: How Pharmaceutical Companies Define Our Health, Joseph Dumit discusses and analyzes the notion that to be normal is to have symptoms. Rather than taking medication, or visiting a doctor or physician when a person feels or falls ill, the now common notion is that the human body is sick, inherently disordered, and in need of constant medication to control or prevent such illness.
Dumit therefore describes not only how the rhetoric of health and illness has changed, but also how people's perception of being healthy or sick is now different. One of the examples that Dumit use Click here to read the full review!
The Poverty of Radical Orthodoxy Postmodern Ethics Series Vol. 3 By Lisa Isherwood and Marko Zlomislić (Editors) Review by Andrew Van't Land on Tue, Jun 11th 2013.
In the last two decades, a small contingent of postmodernist Christian theologians and philosophers have jammed their theoretical transmissions in reverse, revisiting time-trod sites of orthodoxy to re-read the classics of Christendom via a polysemous hermeneutic and the conceptual lexicon of Continental post-structuralism. This movement, dubbed 'Radical Orthodoxy' (RO), has led certain sectors of Christian theology in a postmodern return to Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, Thomas Aquinas and others, seeking to reclaim the Neoplatonic sensibilities in these figures (which have been sheared off by Click here to read the full review!
We Shall Not Be Moved The Jackson Woolworth's Sit-In and the Movement It Inspired By Michael J. O'Brien Review by E. James Lieberman, M.D. on Tue, Jun 11th 2013.
It takes a very good author to astonish readers with a 50-year-old story that they already know. Michael O'Brien does it, having spent over two decades researching and writing this version. He interviewed new sources, probed older ones, analyzed documents and photographs while engaging informants on all sides of the issue. He got to know many in the key photograph: a diverse little group sitting in at Woolworth's lunch counter in Jackson, Mississippi, on May 28, 1963, greatly outnumbered and abused by defenders of racial segregation. The bibliography includes scores of books on the historic dr Click here to read the full review!
Hit & Miss DVD By Paul Abbott (Creator) Review by Christian Perring on Tue, Jun 11th 2013.
Hit & Miss is a 6 part TV series from the UK, broadcast in 2012. Created by Paul Abbott, who is a major force in British TV and is especially well known for his work on Shameless. Although the basic premise is complicated and implausible, the show carries it off with no hesitation. Mia, (played by Chloë Sevigny) is a pre-operative transsexual who goes to live with her ex-girlfriend's children. The ex has died and the children are running wild, living on their own in the country. Mia earns her living by contract killing for a criminal who pays her well.&nb Click here to read the full review!
Saving Normal An Insider's Revolt against Out-of-Control Psychiatric Diagnosis, DSM-5, Big Pharma, and the Medicalization of Ordinary Life By Allen Frances Review by Christian Perring on Tue, Jun 4th 2013.
Reading Saving Normal, Allen Frances's book about DSM-5 is fascinating because it is so rare for members of the psychiatric establishment to be quite so frank about the arguments and policies that led to the formulation of our current psychiatric diagnostic categories. For example, there has been a great deal of discussion of the process that led to the vote for the removal of homosexual tendencies from the DSM in 1973, but the psychiatrists talked about it in scientific terms saying little about the personal events that led to their decisions. It was only in the last decade that t Click here to read the full review!
Extraordinary Beliefs A Historical Approach to a Psychological Problem By Peter Lamont Review by Gustav Jahoda, Ph.D. on Tue, Jun 4th 2013.
This is an unusual book, whose author is exceptionally well qualified to deal with the topic. He is a member of the Koestler Parapsychology Unit at the University of Edinburgh, has studied the histories of psychology, of magic, and of the paranormal. He is also a highly competent magician who does not himself believe in the paranormal. Lamont's aim is to understand those kinds of beliefs in their historical context -- mainly that of Victorian Britain, but also that of more recent controversies.
In the introductory chapters psychology is viewed as constructive and reflexive in the Click here to read the full review!
Back in 1978, John O'Keefe and Lynn Nadel, have published a book titled "The Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map" (Oxford University Press). The book is currently available online in .pdf format, since the authors have regained the copyright from OUP and decided to do so ( http://www.cognitivemap.net/ ). They both started working together in the 1960s at the McGill Psychology Department, while they were still PhD students -- John O'Keefe is currently associated with the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience & Dept. Anatomy/ University College London (UK) and Lynn Nadel, is director of the Cogniti Click here to read the full review!
Donald Davidson is an interesting figure in the canon of analytic philosophy on account of the extent of his appeal. On the one hand, there is a literature which seeks to make Davidson's theories conversant with respect to similar thinking in hermeneutics and continental philosophy (Braver 2006; Malpas 2011). On the other, there is a more problem-oriented approach in which the conceptual consequences of (for example) his truth-theoretic semantics or views on the mental are worked out, as well as evaluated in light of contemporary discussions. The most salient example of the latter kind of work Click here to read the full review!
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