This chapter explores some understudied affinities between the essay and psychoanalysis as practices of living and writing. Pointing to a shared commitment to living a more ‘real’, or more vivid life, and the developmental task of coming to face reality for oneself, the chapter focuses on the way the ‘middle group’ of psychoanalysts in twentieth-century Britain – which included D.W. Winnicott, Marion Milner, and Masud Khan – drew on the resources of the essay form, and the literary culture of Romanticism, in order to develop a particularly essayistic mode of psychoanalytic writing and practice. The chapter makes the case that the essay is particularly suited to exploring just what is distinctive about psychoanalytic therapeutic experience. It concludes with a more extended study of the career of Milner in the context of the development of the British welfare state, as she transitioned from essay writing to clinical practice.

Clinicians and patients have varying degrees of comfort in discussing prognosis. Patients can swing between worry or understanding that death is near and hope or optimism that lets them live life. This prognostication awareness pendulum may require a clinician negotiate the discussion over time. The cognitive roadmap for prognosis discussion is ADAPT (Ask what they know about their medical condition, Discover what they want to know about prognosis, Anticipate ambivalence, Provide information about what to expect, and Track emotion and respond with empathy). Some patients want prognostic information, some don’t, and some are ambivalent. While respecting their wishes, exploring why in each of these scenarios may be helpful to understand their concerns and how best to address them. Be aware that patients and their family members may have different prognostic information needs. Having separate conversations (with permission) may be in order. When they are concerned about destroying hope or prognosis is uncertain, using the frame of “hope and worry” can be helpful. Finally, when patients or family members don’t believe our prognosis, be curious as to why and focus on the relationship.

This essay examines the link between eros and metaphysics in “The Seducer’s Diary.” It argues that Johannes approaches seduction as a performative rather than strategic medium, in which the goal is not conquest but a way of playing with reality. The diary, on this reading, allows us to explore the erotic structure of our most fundamental experiences of mediation and serves as a key to understanding the spiritual dimensions of aesthetic existence.

This chapter discusses the absence from Longus of institutionalised community religion and of one of its central elements, priests, who (like priestesses) are found in the other four novels. A reason for this might be that some rural cults ran themselves and thus differed from polis-based religion. The only character within the story eligible for description as a holy man is Philetas: he has a very close relationship with Eros, who watches over him. The story’s narrator, however, relates in the preface how a shadowy exegetes explained the paintings in the Nymph’s grove: yet this exegetes, on whose say-so the novel’s four books are offered, lacks authority. Longus reverses the novelistic trope of supporting his story by a Beglaubigungsapparat: instead his exegetes’ interpretations of the painting’s scenes leave the reader quite uncertain about the reality of their world.

This chapter surveys literary criticism during the high phase of modernism with special focus on major critics’ conflicting attitudes toward reality. I show that the word reality is of central importance in our understanding of the era’s literary culture. Critics largely agreed that reality is the best touchstone to test the worth of a literary work, but they disagreed over what made some literary works more real than others. Their contrasting definitions of reality resulted in different ways to construct the literary canon.

Rooted in automatism, surrealism spawned a new kind of autobiographical writing, beginning in 1924 with the publication of the Manifesto of Surrealism. This new style of autobiographical writing sprang from a desire to identify a lived experience that comprised both waking life and the rich world of unconscious dreams and images. Functioning like Dorothea Tanning’s mirror-door, her preferred metaphor for painting, surrealist autobiographical writing is rooted in everyday reality, within which surreal experiences may surge. Only the autobiographical mode could encompass the multiple voices of surrealism and provide readers with the chance to discover surrealist principles as the surrealists discovered them themselves. This chapter presents a short history of surrealist autobiographical writing, from Robert Desnos’s Mourning for Mourning (1924) and Liberty or Love! (1927), to Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant (1926), André Breton’s Nadja (1928) and Mad Love (1937), Michel Leiris’s Manhood (1939), Leonora Carrington’s House of Fear (1938), The Oval Lady (1939), and Down Below (1944), Tanning’s Birthday (1986), and Kay Sage’s unfinished China Eggs (1955; published in 1996). These texts show artists and writers seeking self-realization through self-knowledge in the hope of fulfilling Rimbaud’s injunction to ’change life’.

This chapter compares Heidegger’s transcendental approach to social ontology with that found in Husserl. I argue that Husserl and Heidegger are united by the idea that ’the world’ or ’transcendence’ constitutes the most basic form of intersubjectivity, but that their different understandings of the concept of the world lead to divergent conceptions of both subjectivity and intersubjectivity. In short, Husserl takes the world to involve irreducible references to others since perceptual objects can only appear as real or as transcendent if we assume that they possess an inexhaustive number of unperceived aspects that are, in principle, available to other (transcendental) subjects. Heidegger, on the contrary, rejects both Husserl’s interest in objectivity and his notion of the transcendental subject. Instead, he claims that Dasein’s relation to the world must be understood in terms of practical and affective engagement within a field of possibilities, that is, in terms of existential projections. Accordingly, the most basic form of intersubjectivity is found in the transcendental necessity that the same field of entities can be subjected to a multitude of existential projections.

What do we mean when we say that something is real? What ought we to mean? I offer the following definition, in the interest of making an operational notion of reality: an entity is real to the extent that there are operationally coherent activities that can be performed by relying significantly on its existence and its properties. Reality (in the sense of real-ness) conceived in this way is a matter of degrees, and it is domain-dependent. Real entities (or, realities) are mind-framed, and crafting better realities is an achievement of conceptual engineering. When we take ontology in the context of practices, ontological pluralism no longer appears absurd: there are different sets of realities operative in different systems of practice. I illustrate these points with a range of examples drawn from the history of the physical sciences. The traditional picture of physical objects constituted as mereological sums of immutable building-blocks is unwarranted and creates undue hindrance to practice-based ontology.

‘Scientific realism’ has somehow come to designate a fundamentally unrealistic doctrine claiming for humans an ability to gain true knowledge about an ultimately inaccessible kind of reality. This unrealistic notion actually does harm by setting science an impossible task, inviting disappointment and challenges to its authority. This book offers an operational ideal of scientific inquiry inspired by the tradition of pragmatism: thinking about what we do in real practices offers ways of reconceiving the very notions of truth and reality so that they become achievable ideals and provide guidance for real scientific progress.

There is a tendency, at least among secular readers, to bracket off Dante’s faith as something no longer true, something to which we no longer subscribe. Yet that would seem to miss not just an aspect of the Divine Comedy, but its central point. The episodes in the Inferno this volume focuses on, paradigmatic for the whole work, point to a problem of faith – lack of a shared belief, misreadings of important stories, failed allegiance, and broken promises. But it is the choice of Virgil as a guide, lost because of his belief in “false and lying gods,” that teaches us how to read ancient books whose culture we no longer share. How indeed can we believe in them?

The COVID-19 pandemic brought significant changes to student experiences. A sudden switch to an online learning mode may serve as a natural experiment for the educational system. In this chapter, we test four "promises" of online education, which were widely discussed before the pandemic. Based on survey data of 5,464 undergraduate students from eight Russian universities, we compare the expectations to the reality of online learning. As the results show, the massive forced transition to online learning gave students more time to sleep, but they are not less tired than in traditional educational formats. Students find it difficult to ask questions, focus their attention when an instructor delivers material and find a comfortable place for studying. Consequently, the majority of students estimate their learning as ineffective. Relying on these results, we formulate lessons learned from this natural experiment.

This chapter on Wuthering Heights (1848) explores the work carried out by the verbs in the novel. Emily Brontë’s style makes evocative use of imperatives, and of active and passive verb forms. A distinction is drawn between the predominant verb forms of the first and second parts of the novel, so that the second half seems more passive and reactive, and therefore to indicate suffering. The imperative often calls an action into being, all the more so when compliance with an imperative is then assumed rather than narrated, as it frequently is in the novel. In this way, the imperative is like fiction itself, bringing into existence an imagined state of affairs; in this analysis, the style of Wuthering Heights starts to seem conversant with the novel’s shifts between its own imagined world and the reality of ours or its first readers to which it appeals.

Many have difficulties understanding what Kuhn meant when he spoke of “world change” due to revolutions. I reconstruct the historical path in which the idea emerged that reality is not something purely object-sided. The path starts with Copernicus’ new planetary system. The motions of the Sun and the planets, previously seen as purely object-sided, were now seen as containing genetically subject-sided contributions. A similar process, also at the center of the constitution of modern science, was the introduction of secondary qualities in the seventeenth century. In these historical processes, the reality status of something, whose reality seemed beyond doubt, changed dramatically. Philosophical reflection of such processes culminates in Kant’s critical philosophy. Ever since, this kind of “post-Copernican thinking” has been an indispensable part of the Western intellectual tradition, and it surfaced in the development of special relativity and quantum mechanics. I argue that Kuhn is continuing this tradition. Understanding this genealogy may make Kuhn’s metaphysics accessible to those realists who maintain that talk of genetically subject-sided contributions to reality is utterly inconsistent.

This chapter explores Wallace Stevens’s understanding of the secular condition and the terms he cultivated to describe it. Familiar words from Stevens’s lexicon—“reality,” “imagination,” “the earth,” “repetition”—are linked to his vision of secularity. Mutter argues that this vision of the secular is highly dramatic: though Stevens viewed secularity as a condition of both deprivation and liberation, he transforms loss into a tragic theater in which the self is thrown into hostile territory and must depend on its own resources. The chapter suggests that while Stevens was enticed by the secular model of the real as a domain of neutral, impersonal fact, as his career progressed he increasingly recognized that secular reality was itself an imaginative construal. This recognition is linked to Stevens’s effort to rehabilitate, for his secular anthropology, the imaginative human capacities that historically generated religious ideas. Finally, the chapter elaborates Stevens’s understanding of play as a central mode of his secularism. Play reconciles the secular values of freedom and sensuousness with the discordant necessity of the world. Mutter concludes by observing an ongoing tension in Stevens’s view of desire between the good of immanence and the need for transcendence.

This chapter explores the submerged yet generative relationship of influence between the poetries of Louis MacNeice (1907-63) and Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) – two major Northern Irish poets of very different backgrounds and primary aesthetic dispositions. Notwithstanding their respective signature identifications with modernity, flux and hybridity on the one hand and tradition, continuity and community on the other, the chapter proposes that Heaney turns to MacNeice in order to seek out new directions for his own growth as artist. The chapter centrally argues that these two poets share a common concern with renewing the relationship between immutable reality and the alterity of dream-life. In consequence, their engagements with territorial conflict lead both poets to open vital space for non-conformity with the totalizing logic of enforced national destiny. Within this space, MacNeice and Heaney offer a linked vision of creativity renewed rather than foreclosed through recognizing human frailty in the face of mortality.

In “Bald Naturalism and McDowell’s Hylomorphism,” Rorty distinguishes between two views of the mind’s relation to the world. One view, which he calls “bald naturalism” and attributes to Donald Davidson, sees the mind as a network of intentional states profitable to attribute to certain complexly behaving objects to predict and control their interactions with the environment. The other view, which he dubs “naturalized Platonism” or “hylomorphism” and attributes to John McDowell, sees the mind as a device for getting the world right, where this process consists in the reproduction of the world in the mind. Rorty then uses the distinction to assess the force of McDowell’s criticisms of Davidson’s bald naturalism in Mind and the World. He argues, first, that those criticisms rely on attributing to Davidson a set of views only expressible in terms for which there is no place in his bald naturalism. Second, Rorty holds that those terms belong to McDowell’s hylomorphism and that this view needs to be abandoned, along with the intuitions it expresses. The paper makes this case by pointing to various counterintuitive consequences of McDowell’s view, such as its implication that the world has its own language.

“The Objectivity of Values” assesses Plato’s contributions to Western philosophy and culture. It posits that among the most lasting of those contributions are the idea of the world of absolute truth beyond time and chance, and the idea that unless such a world exists there is no way to answer Socrates’s questions. But then it posits that these ideas should be abandoned. Recognizing that there are no knock-down philosophical arguments against them, it resorts to the historical argument that they have done more harm than good. Finally, the paper proposes that a good alternative to those ideas may be found in John Dewey’s view that the point of Socratic questioning is not to arrive at absolute truths but to keep the conversation of humanity going.

In the chapter, I attempt to identify and briefly describe the main features of CMT, as I see them. Other researchers might emphasize different properties of the theory. At the same time, I tried to select those features on which there is some agreement among practitioners of CMT. At the end of the chapter and given the description of the properties, I list a number of outstanding issues in CMT – issues that we need to get clear about in order to make CMT an even more powerful theory of metaphor.