June 2019 – Davood Gozli

Remaining at One’s Post

By Davood Gozli | 21/06/201921/06/2019 by Davood Gozli

Hachikō (1923-1935) was a Japanese Akita dog remembered and celebrated for his outstanding expression of loyalty. He developed the habit of picking up his master, Hidesaburō Ueno, every day at the train station after Ueno returned from work. When Ueno died, Hachi continued to wait for him at the station for the following nine years until Hachi himself died (Wikipedia). There is a statue of Hachikō near the Shibuya Station in Tokyo, and there are movies made about him. Hachi…

Memory

A Mystery

By Davood Gozli | 20/06/201923/12/2019 by Davood Gozli

The first academic conference I attended was the Lake Ontario Visionary Establishment (L.O.V.E.) of 2008. It was probably the most decisive conference in my career, even though (or because) I was a 3rd-year undergraduate student. My then mentor, Michael Chan-Reynolds, was one of the organizers and he drove us (his small lab) to the conference in Niagara Falls. It was a 2-day event, so we spent the night at the conference hotel. I shared a…

Culture metaphysics

One vs. Two

By Davood Gozli | 12/06/201912/06/2019 by Davood Gozli

One more passage from Alain Badiou’s In Praise of Love In the final analysis, religions don’t speak of love. Because they are only interested in it as a source of intensity, in the subjective state it alone can create, in order to direct that intensity towards faith and the Church and encourage this subjective state to accept the sovereignty of God. The main outcome is that Christianity substitutes devout, passive, deferential love for the combative…

critical psychology metaphysics philosophy of science

Psychology without People

By Davood Gozli | 10/06/201912/06/2019 by Davood Gozli

In a recent general critique of Psychology, Catherine Raeff (2019) follows up on Michael Billig’s (2013) analysis, pointing out that psychological science, in its currently dominant style, is a science of things and not of people. In brief, it is a science–or a collection of sciences–in which people (supposedly the primary targets of investigation) are absent. By focusing on things, e.g., traits, scores, sub-personal cognitive or neural functions, we tend to construct a rather static…

Descriptive Psychology metaphysics Popular Culture

No Longer Chance

By Davood Gozli | 04/06/201904/06/2019 by Davood Gozli

Alain Badiou on Love. Badiou takes the recognition of difference to be an essential feature of love, the recognition of two different subjects, different points of view on reality, and the subsequent construction of a new reality based on that difference. Such a difference is, in every case, new. That is why love that is real is always of interest to the whole of humanity, however humble, however hidden, that love might seem on the…