metaphysics – Davood Gozli

Untying Knots: Nietzsche’s Dance

By Davood Gozli | 05/03/202005/03/2020 by Davood Gozli

I recommend reading Pam Weintraub’s article on Nietzsche and Dance. What is crucial about this perspective is that it views dancing not as doing, as much as undoing, unraveling, untying. Here is, to me, the most significant passage: … those who dance are not burdened by ressentiment, or need for revenge. They have the sensory discernment needed to resist pernicious applications of the ascetic ideal. In Twilight of the Idols (1889) and The Antichrist (1895), dance appears as a discipline for…

book review General Psychology metaphysics philosophy of science Teaching Theoretical Psychology

Video Series on Brian Haig’s (2014) Book

By Davood Gozli | 11/09/201911/09/2019 by Davood Gozli

I am making a video series (“study guide”) about Brian Haig‘s Book, Investigating the Psychological World: Scientific Method in the Behavioral Sciences. We are reading the book with my students in the course, Systems & Theories in Psychology. Most of the students in that class are in their final year and are doing a final-year research project. I will be going through the book chapter by chapter, devoting two videos to each chapter. Feel free…

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 | 10/06/201909/08/2024 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…