International Synergies to Address Climate Change: Participatory Community Organizing in Toronto and the Baixada Fluminense, Brazil

This research was supported by the International Development Research Centre, grant numbe

Climate Justice Partnership Linking Universities and Community Organizations in Toronto, Durban, Maputo and Nairobi

This paper describes a project based at York University in Toronto, funded through the Climate Change Adaptation in Africa program of the International Development Research Centre and the UK Department for International Development (DFID), which is working to increase the participation of marginalized groups, especially women, in urban water governance.Students and faculty members from the University of Nairobi, Kenya; Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo, Mozambique; and the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa are working with civil society organizations in the three cities and with York University researchers to show how organizing in local communities can help the vulnerable to deal with climate change.As people in marginalized communities begin to address collectively the impacts of climate change, this summons political attention and allows those with direct experience to influence government policy. Civil society organizations, with support from local and international faculty and students, facilitate and focus this activism. University students help to document the NGOs’ work during internships with the NGOs. They also learn community development skills and make contacts. Faculty members publish and disseminate ideas about grassroots climate change adaptation and resulting political responses through presentations, publications and the project’s website (www.ccaa.irisyorku.ca)This research was supported by the International Development Research Centre, grant numbe

In praise of professional judgement

Magic thinking seems common in healthcare and nowhere is this more apparent than when it comes to the workforce. Employers and policy makers continue to search for a solution to the intractable challenge of how we can deal with more complex demand with a deficit of both hands and skills. We’d argue that they don’t always understand the problem they are trying to solve

A Moralist in an Age of Scientific Analysis and Skepticism: Habit in the Life and Work of William James

In this chapter I will review how James got from his earlier position, which so readily fit the scientific and skeptical tenor of his age, to his later position, and I will indicate how the views he began to articulate by the mid-1870s became central to the doctrines he presented in his magisterial Principles of Psychology (1890) and in his subsequent work in psychology and philosophy. Along the way I will make it clear that even before 1872, when he was attending lectures and doing physiological research in Harvard\u27s Medical School, James was a deeply engaged advocate of philosophy, which he was determined to advance through a thorough yet critical understanding of the biological foundations of human thought, feeling, and action. He viewed this scientifically oriented yet analytical approach to philosophy as a means of clarifying not just what is the case in human life, but also what should be life\u27s outcome. Morality, in short, was always interpolated in his thinking, teaching, researching, and writing. Although he took a biological view of cognition, and embedded it within a Darwinian selectionist framework (which he extended all the way up from the level of sensation through perception to cognition and beyond), his naturalist approach was not meant to eliminate consideration of struggling with temptation or the identification of the sources and targets of true moral energy, as he put it in Are We Automata? 5 Quite the contrary

Visions and Values: Ethical Reflections in a Jamesian Key

The purpose of this article is to provide a quick survey of William James\u27s views on the plurality of visions that humans have regarding reality, as a background for more extensive discussions of his views on the plurality of values that orient human thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, as well as his views on the enactment of those values through active resistance to the ways things are and the risk-taking involved in striving to improve the human condition. Consonant with pluralism itself, I intend this discussion to open up rather than close off further considerations of James\u27s views on ethics

Immanuel Kant and the Development of Modern Psychology

Few thinkers in the history of Western civilization have had as broad and lasting an impact as Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). This Sage of Konigsberg spent his entire life within the confines of East Prussia, but his thoughts traveled freely across Europe and, in time, to America, where their effects are still apparent. An untold number of analyses and commentaries have established Kant as a preeminent epistemologist, philosopher of science, moral philosopher, aesthetician, and metaphysician. He is even recognized as a natural historian and cosmologist: the author of the so-called Kant-Laplace hypothesis regarding the origin of the universe. He is less often credited as a psychologist, anthropologist, or philosopher of mind, to use terms whose currency postdated his time.1 Nonetheless, the thesis of this essay is that Immanuel Kant laid the foundation for later developments in the broad field of inquiry that had already been labeled psychology

William James on the Self and Personality: Clearing the Ground for Subsequent Theorists, Researchers, and Practitioners

The fundamental basis of William James\u27s psychology - the rock-bottom foundation on which it is constructed - is the stream of thought or the stream of consciousness. 1* The first and preeminent characteristic of our flowingly continuous experience of thought or consciousness, James (1890/1983d) said, is that it is personal (pp. 220-224). Every thought, every psychological experience, is mine, or hers, or his, or yours. For this reason, he suggested, the personal self rather than the thought [or consciousness] might be treated as the immediate datum in psychology (p. 221).2 Indeed, James was strongly convinced that no psychology ... can question the existence of personal selves. The worst a psychology can do is so to interpret the nature of these selves as to rob them of their worth (p. 221)

Authentic Tidings : What Wordsworth Gave to William James

It is widely recognized that William James had a profound and pervasive impact upon literary writers, works, styles, and genres, not to mention upon the encompassing frameworks of modernism and post-modernism, throughout the 20th century. Much less recognized is the impact of literature upon James’s life and work, whether in psychology or philosophy. This article looks at the influence of one particular author, William Wordsworth, primarily through his long 1814 poem The Excursion, from which James drew “authentic tidings” that helped him weather some early storms and create his distinctive way of thinking about the human mind and its place in nature

Metaphors in the History of Psychology

Metaphors in the History of Psychology describes and analyzes the ways in which psychological accounts of brain functioning, consciousness, cognition, emotion, motivation, learning, and behavior have been shaped--and are still being shaped--by the central metaphors used by contemporary psychologists and their predecessors. The contributors to this volume argue that psychologists and their predecessors have invariably turned to metaphor in order to articulate their descriptions, theories, and practical interventions with regard to psychological functioning. By specifying the major metaphors in the history of psychology, these contributors have offered a new key to understanding this critically important area of human knowledge. This theme has become an issue of central concern in a variety of disciplines ranging from linguistics and literary studies to cognitive science, psychology, and philosophy. Through the identification of these metaphors, the contributors to this volume have provided a remarkably useful guide to the history, current orientations, and future prospects of modern psychology.https://scholarship.richmond.edu/bookshelf/1169/thumbnail.jp

The Missing Person in the Conversation: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., and the Dialogical Self

Wiley (2006) has argued for a relationship between pragmatism and the dialogical self, noting that both are rooted in the thought of William James and Charles S. Peirce. This commentary delves into the possible connection between James’s and Peirce’s ideas as well as the probable influence of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., on the development of dialogical conceptions of the self