Launch of wikiVBP: the Values-based Practice Reference Library

"Launch of wikiVBP: the Values-based Practice Reference Library

We are delighted to announce the launch of this new resource for values-based practice

Our thanks to everyone who has contributed to the library thus far and in particular to the VBP Librarian Michael Loughlin for all his hard work on the project

The library is a wikiVBP library because we depend on your contributions to make it work

For further details including How to Use the library and How to Contribute to the Library please CLICK HERE

The Collaborating Centre for Values-based Practice in Health and Social Care
St Catherine's College
Manor Road Oxford,
Oxford
OX1 3UJ
United Kingdom"

Postscript on the bare presence of artistic intention

Wandering round the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art today there were some large bold abstract images by Roberto Juarez. The curatorial blurb, however, revealed that the abstract images were partly based on found objects and images. Further, the larger painted works were based on smaller designs which themselves had super-imposed grid lines to enable the construction of the larger works. These smaller designs, which were also on display, comprised collages including - it seemed - images from magazines and objects.

Putting this through the Scruton machinery, the existence of a feature in the larger painting was determined by a corresponding element in the smaller ‘scrap book’ as then carefully and apparently faithfully rendered in paint. Its being there was a combination of direct authorial intention in the application of brush strokes - though even here I’m sure such subsidiary elements were merely left to sub-personal motor-intentional capacities - and what had happened to present itself in magazine pages that morning (let’s assume). If on Scruton’s account, the only art in photography is the theatrical arrangement of elements, then in Juarez’ case, most of the art is in good scrap-booking.

I found that I preferred to forget all about this origin story and pretend that the finished works had fallen fully formed from Juarez’s imagination.

Holiday thoughts of life-style upgrades

I’ve never understood why but, while on holiday, I’m often drawn to thinking about how it would be possible to make the rest of my life rather better: to achieve a ‘life-style upgrade’. This is such a trope of holiday thinking that it’s hard to unpack it, to think about its conditions of possibility. But I think I can see one element this time.

There has never been much point in life-style upgrade thinking while, say, backpacking. Then, I just want to stop having to carry the rucksack or to sleep on the ground. Or, while in particularly stifling 40C temperatures in Thailand, I told Lois, crossly, that, if I ever said I had enjoyed that trip, she should remind me of how, exactly, I’d felt in *this* moment. Life-style upgrade as mere return to ordinary comfort.

So the trope attaches to a particular kind of holiday. And today it seems obvious. I holiday as an attempt to realise the Platonic ideal of an enjoyable life, which is merely poorly approached in the rest of my life. That’s the reason why a holiday might be thought - perhaps mistakenly - to speak to ordinary dwelling. It’s the reason why the holiday experience might seem so much as relevant to anything more general but also why it might have a kind of jurisdiction over the everyday, as opposed to being an irrelevant excursion from Kansas.

So here I am in Boulder, Colorado, to maximise: hiking up mountains, morning jogs along the creek, off-road running, the charms of a university city, good coffee, a ridiculous concentration of micro breweries. And in this milieu, it seems reasonable to ask: what of this should I take back to Blighty?

This thought, though, helps to clarify something about how such a thought even makes sense. I’m comparing the holiday lifestyle with the domestic. One might say that my home town Kendal is a partial and poor exemplification of the Platonic ideal that is - or is not so much beyond - Boulder. The norm of lifestyle assessment is the same: here and there. Both are towns just outside the mountains. Both have growing coffee, beer, artsy culture. It’s just that Boulder is rather better at it at the moment. But this helps rationalise something closer to home.

Kendal’s biggest recent political dispute has been the removal of long-standing informal free parking on a scruffy bit of land by the river and its replacement with an extra bit of green grass and the joining up of a cycle lane. Those supporting the retention of the carpark forced a ballot and, fearing that they would be organised and others would not be, I emailed local friends to tell them about it, simply assuming everyone would share my views on losing the ugly carpark and establishing the cycle path. Fortunately for me, the ballot proposers lost badly. But one of my friends expressed thanks afterwards for the reminder saying that had she been around at the time she would have loved to vote because it had been such a useful carpark. I replied with some practical alternatives but I realised that I could not guarantee that she would never suffer occasionally having to pay to park in Kendal.

I realised, however, that this bit of rational friction gave me an insight I’d failed to have. I wasn’t voting on practicalities at all. Rather, I was voting as a piece of groundless aspiration. I don’t know how inconvenient even for me the loss of a car park will be, nor how helpful a bit of extra cycle path might be, especially given that truly local Kendalians, as opposed to offcomers, have not really taken to cycling. The existing cycle paths are embarrassingly empty. But my correspondent was making a judgement that would seem right for any other North Western post-industrial town. One might dispute the value of carparks over parks and vote practically for a ‘really useful’ carpark. Whereas, whatever the practical utility, I want my adopted hometown to approach a Platonic ideal of a good place to live. I want it to be a Boulder while my correspondent assumes (not falsely) that it’s more of a Burnley.

The bare presence of artistic intention

The chance juxtaposition of two art galleries next door in Denver: the remarkably fine Clifford Still gallery and the modern art gallery showing an exhibition of landscape photography, forced me again to rethink photography.

So the Clifford Still gallery is a testament to the artist’s confidence in his own importance and, strangely, I came away thinking he was probably right. The confidence lay in his reluctance to sell his own work and his resistance to being included in exhibitions merely as one among many. His view was that only in single artist exhibitions was there a way to understand the art, the unifying vision etc. And hence in a strange description of his working practice on one of the gallery walls was, as a final step, that the work was rolled up for storage. Not packed off to a gallery or a private buyer. But hence there was an enormous body of work ready to be presented to any city willing to establish a gallery devoted solely to him (hence Denver).

More substantially, however, was the gallery’s case for his key role in the establishment of a distinctive form of American Abstract Expressionism. Helpful placing showed the gradual removal of realism while retaining increasingly abstract elements originally derived from, say, the human form or the sun or moon. For my point here, the key leitmotif was that everything was deliberate. Clifford Still knew what he was doing.

After a beer and now in the landscape photography exhibition of the adjacent gallery and I was baffled as to what game was being played. In one series of pictures, landscape photographs had been developed onto material (lace and burlap) and then buried in then ground for some months to decay and the results displayed. In another, radioactive soil from Fukuyama had been placed on photographic paper. In a third, ancient photographic paper had been dipped in developer in such a way as to give an impression of hills. None of this began to engage me but what seemed more embarrassing was that I seized on a large photograph of a breaking wave, frozen in time, as having something worth staying for. How mortifying to be entranced by something apparently simple in conception even if hugely difficult to achieve: photographic realism.

Roger Scruton (not a philosopher I ever otherwise cite) argues that photography isn’t art because it is not true that the reason for the presence of elements in a photograph is primarily dictated by the photographer’s intention. Elements in the picture are there primarily because they were there in the scene photographed. Hence the only art, according to Scruton, is the art of theatre in arranging or selecting the tableau to be pictured. My qualm about the experimental use of photographic material and methods seemed to be not that this freed the artists from Scruton’s criticism by injecting non-realist intention. Rather, it threw away the guidance of any vision in the process. The ethos seemed instead to be a random experiment to see what happened when, for example, photographs were buried in the ground. But who cares? The result seems to render pointless any attempt to think through the pictures akin to how I’d react if I knew the poem on a lecturer’s board simply replicated Stanley Fish’s famous aesthetic experiment.

It turns out that I cannot escape the lure of a kind of Myth of Presence, in this case, of the artist’s intention. It seems I am reassured to know that there’s something going on for a reason. I feel somewhat ashamed of this but there it is. How very pre-post-modern.

Some speculation about Piaget on schemata and Wittgenstein

One of the better aspects of academia is getting interesting emails asking questions. An ex student, John, asked me this the other day.

“Hi Tim,

I understand that Wittgenstein maintains the correct use of a word will always presuppose our ability to use it. i.e. there is no separation between concept and ability to apply it. This made me think about Jean Piaget’s ‘schema theory’ involved in child development. As infants learn to interact with their environments, they develop mental schemata which assimilate objects from the environment. A schema might be learning to grasp and, by assimilating a toy into this schema, the child is able to pick it up. Piaget was confident that the child repeats and practices schemata before their successful use in assimilation. Schemata which fail to assimilate in the intended way are subsequently revised. He also maintains that this way of learning is maintained throughout development and into maturity.

On Piaget’s account, language would classify as symbolic schemata, where a given word will have its schema as anticipatory knowledge of the external environment. Initially, this makes me think that Piaget advocates a method of empirical judgement that easily falls foul of [Wittgenstein’s] regression [of interpretations].

Trying to find compatibility between Wittgenstein and Piaget, I’d be tempted to suggest that a word-schema lacks meaning for the child (even though he/she may know the sound of it etc.) until it is correctly applied and accurately assimilates the intended aspect of experience. At this point, the correct use of the word will be simultaneous with its application, pace Wittgenstein.

Would Wittgenstein buy into this theory of learning, do you think? What status would he give to undeveloped word-schemata - perhaps as having the same standing as objective definitions i.e. without meaning until applied?

John”

Sadly Piaget isn’t one of my authors so I spent an evening looking at ‘The Origins of Intelligence in Children’ to try the following quick, but possibly wholly misguided reply.

Schemata for Piaget start with examples such as grasping and develop into more concept-like instances. It is the latter that looks the better link to Wittgenstein but the former may shed light on our options. Let’s take the idea of grasping or ‘prehension’ (a word I seldom use, to be truth). Grasping seems to be something that floats free or successful and unsuccessful cases. That is, one might equally say of an action that it was an unsuccessful attempt at grasping or a successful grasping. Both have something in common. At some philosophical risk, we might use the same word (‘grasping’) for both. If so – and to put the point needlessly paradoxically! – grasping doesn’t reach as far as the world. I mean, there’s no necessary world-involvingness of any instance of ‘grasping’ (on this way of speaking). Grasping can be characterised in terms independent of the world as a free-standing action or event.

In fact, this seems wrong to me. Grasping is a teleological action and hence I think that the root concept is world-involving. If someone were grasping, then they were grasping something and we can ask what. They might try to grasp and fail, in which case we cannot ask what they were grasping with any guarantee of an answer (they may merely might succeed in grasping the wrong thing). What is world-independent and free-standing is the muscle and finger movements that coincide with successful and unsuccessful grasping alike. That inheres in the body and stops at the outer boundary of the skin. But for the moment, let’s loosely talk of ‘grasping’ to mean this and hence in accord with the earlier suggestion that the same word can be used for successful and unsuccessful cases.

Suppose, then, that we imagine a more concept-like schema on the basis of grasping. It too will be world-independent and will be applicable to orientations towards the world of a subject (necessarily an older child) where things go well and badly, where instances fit and where they fail to fit such a concept-schema. It now makes sense to ask how well the schema fits the experiences or the bits of the world experienced by a subject. Just as a grasping action that fits a mug may not work so well with stemmed wine glass, so perhaps a concept-schema for dog fits some instances of dogs better than others. Since it seems right to say that there will be some instances that cause even an experienced language user pause, this picture seems plausible at first.

But what is the analogue of the world-independent grasping action – or the muscle and finger movements that coincide with successful and unsuccessful grasping alike – for a concept-schema? Think of any free-standing mental (or neurological) state and call that the schema, if you like. Because it is free-standing it can exist however it stands to the world so it can cope with good fit, poor fit and lack of fit.

The problem now becomes: what gives such a free-standing state any kind of fit with the world? One possibility: an interpretation. But now, what encodes the interpretation: another free-standing concept-schema?

The diagnosis is that starting with a free-standing state is fatal for an account of thought’s directedness. Hence if Piaget’s account of schemata assume that they are world-independent and brought in better and worse contact with the world then they might fit some basic actions (especially when described in non-teleogical terms) but they won’t fit concepts. It will be a bad account of the conceptual. By contrast, a concept, on a Wittgensteinian view, is all in the reach to the world. It’s not in the mind. Or: it’s no more in the mind than the relation of being on the mat is in the cat.

Phenomenology and Mental Health Network (PMH)

Phenomenology and Mental Health Network (PMH)

Understanding the diverse character of lived experience

Network Leads

• Lead: Marcin Moskalewicz, philosopher, Poznan University of Medical Sciences (Poland) & The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH)
• Co-Lead: Richard Gipps, philosopher and psychotherapist, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford
• Co-Lead: Giovanni Stanghellini, psychiatrist and psychotherapist, Università degli Studi G. d'Annunzio Chieti e Pescara (Italy)

Background and aims

Phenomenology is a rigorous philosophical method of studying the structures of consciousness and how these structures underlie and affect human experience. By undergoing a clinical turn, 20th century phenomenology became more pragmatic in seeking to understand the variety of lived experiences of patients suffering from mental disorders, often undermining a sense of a strict boundary between the normal and the pathological. Basic phenomenological themes, such as temporality, embodiment, intentionality, understanding, and intersubjectivity, thereby gained a new diagnostic and therapeutic significance. The tradition of phenomenological psychopathology became an important actor on the scene of 20th century psychiatry. The PMH network strives to promote the best of this tradition. It was launched at a workshop “Phenomenology and psychoanalysis: a dialogue” at St Catherine’s College in June 2018. The network connects philosophers, medical anthropologists, and social scientists with health care professionals – psychiatrists, psychotherapists, and caregivers, in order to bring together phenomenological expertise with actual life-world experience of the realities of mental health and illness.

Objectives The PMH network has the following objectives:

• To provide a forum for the exchange of ideas between those working in mental health care and academic researchers in phenomenology
• To explore the rich tradition of phenomenological psychopathology, its concepts, values, and critical potential
• To investigate the ways in which phenomenology informs diagnosis and treatment, and to explore how its potential could be utilized and further expanded in order to improve the care for the mentally ill persons
• To examine new (phenomenologically inspired) perspectives on mental illness in the context of diversity and plurality of human being
• To undertake research programs in applied phenomenology and facilitate collaboration between members as well as to seek collaboration with ongoing initiatives elsewhere
• To build a bridge between Central-European traditions of phenomenology and Anglo-Saxon scholarship

Members 
The network is open to all working at the intersection of phenomenological philosophy (as well as related fields of philosophy of mind and philosophical hermeneutics) and mental health. Membership is free of charge. To join please send a request to Marcin Moskalewicz at moskalewicz@gmail.com.

Meetings 
To advance our objectives, meetings and workshops will be organized regularly, some of them with an open call for papers in the conference format. The network will also support local initiatives.

Forthcoming events 
24th of October 2018, Diversity and Mental Illness (one-day workshop) at St. Catherine’s College. The workshop is a part of TORCH’s annual headline series Humanities & Identities and is co-sponsored by The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities.

Mindfulness-inspired existential nihilism

I’ve been using the Headspace webpage to practice mindfulness meditation for the last 18 months or so. So far it has been with mixed success with respect to the reliability of any transformation of how I’m feeling but the ‘vocabulary’ of processes has become familiar: the sequence of forms of attention and its opposite.

I’ve pinched the picture from here. Which suggests that ‘Mindfulness to put it simply is being fully present in the moment. It means to be aware of our surroundings and to pay attention to what we are doing’.

Cycling up a lengthy hill in Cumbria a week ago, I realised that I wasn’t enjoying the experience very much. Or rather, I was finding it actively unpleasant. And so I tried some mindfulness techniques to identify the components of the experience. On reflection, it seemed that the bodily feeling of exertion, well short of pain, wasn’t in itself unpleasant: simply a feeling of bodily effort.

What made the general experience unpleasant was an overlying atmosphere of anxiety: not that that had a specific recognisable propositional content. It was not, for example, an anxiety of not being able to reach the top of the hill (what would it matter?). But there was a feeling ‘in the vicinity’ of anxiety that could nevertheless be neutralised just by focusing instead on what was in the bodily experience in the moment. What remained had no negative valence.

That seemed a quick victory for even my feeble skills in mindfulness meditation. But then it occurred to me that whilst that got rid of what is unpleasant about cycling consistently uphill, it also threatened to remove all the pleasure too. The pleasure, it seems to me, lies not in what is immediately bodily present but rather in the anticipation of the downhills to come, a memory of previous downhills but also uphills and the realisation that one is able to continue like this in ‘steady state’ over time. Further, it’s contributed to by a realisation that the activity on any one day will tend to sustain similar activity in the future. Hence also, the bodily tiredness and soreness to come is itself positive because of its history, what it means. The same bodily experiences imposed by drugs would not ‘in themselves’ be at all pleasant. But the knowledge that they result from a day in the saddle gives them a kind of satisfied pleasure.

But now what puzzles me about the virtues of this approach to bodily sensations – focusing on what is there ‘in the moment’ – is that subsequent retreat now seems impotent to re-establish previous pleasure. If the move that does the work of removing displeasure and pleasure is removal of a kind of temporal conceptual structure, a structure of habit, for example, simply adding back in past and future moments, also, presumably, stripped of positive (or negative) valence doesn’t seem able to re-establish the pre-meditative state.

It seems to me that mindfulness meditation, as I have no doubt misunderstood it, is a kind of equivalent of a form of philosophical scepticism, in this case promoting a kind of existential nihilism.