John Muller

In this original work of psychoanalytic theory, John Muller explores the formative power of signs and their impact on the mind, the body and subjectivity, giving special attention to work of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. Muller explores how Lacan's way of understanding experience through three dimensions--the real, the imaginary and the symbolic--can be useful both for thinking about cultural phenomena and for understanding the complexities involved in treating psychotic patients. Muller develops Lacan's perspective gradually, presenting it as distinctive approaches to data from a variety of sources, such as cognitive, social and developmental psychology, literature, history, art, and psychoanalytic treatment. The book's first four chapters present Muller's reading of selected data from child development research, psychology and linguistics, approximating a semiotic model of "normal" development. The following three chapters examine in a Lacanian framework the structural basis of psychotic stages as indicative of massive semiotic failure in development. The final chapters on human narcissism suggest reasons that "normal" development may be impossible.

In 1956 Jacques Lacan proposed as interpretation of Edgar Allan Poe's "Purloined Letter" that at once challenged literary theorists and revealed a radically new conception of psychoanalysis. Lacan's far-reaching claims about language and truth provoked a vigorous critique by Jacques Derrida, whose essay in turn has spawned further responses from Barbara Johnson, Jane Gallop, Irene Harvey, Norman Holland, and others. The Purloined Poe brings Poe's story together with these readings to provide, in the words of the editors, "a structured exercuse in the elaboration of textual interpretation. The Purloined Poe reprints the full text of Poe's story, followed by Lacan's "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter,'" along with extensive commentary by the editors. Marie Bonaparte's and Shoshana Felman's discussions of traditional and contemporary approaches to "psychoanalysing" texts precede Alan Bass's new translation of Derrida's "Purveyor of Truth." The subsequent essays join the Lacan-Derrida debate and offer alternative readings by literary theorists, philosophers, psychologists, and psychoanalysts. The Purloined Poe convenes much of the most important current scholarship on "The Purloined Letter" and presents a rich sampling of poststructuralist discourse.

In Alberts zweiten Kommentar zur Nikomachischen Ethik findet sich vor der Kommentierung des Aristoteles-Textes ein eigenständiger Traktat zum allgemeinen Begriff des Guten, der im Rahmen des Artikels erstmals in kritischer Edition zugänglich gemacht wird. In doktrinaler Sicht handelt es sich um einen Text von fundamentaler Bedeutung, insofern Albert verschiedene Definitionen und Bestimmungen des Guten in ihrer inhaltlichen Vereinbarkeit und Konvergenz aufweist. In nuce entwickelt Albert hier die für sein ganzes Werk maßgebliche Metaphysik des Guten, in welche sowohl die Transzendentalienlehre als auch die Grundmotive einer teleologischen Strebensethik aristotelischen Zuschnitts integriert werden. Der ethisch relevante Begriff des Guten findet dadurch seine ontotheologische Fundierung im höchsten Guten, also in Gott. Der vorliegende Artikel rekonstruiert im Anschluss an die kritische Edition die zentralen Argumente des Traktats und verortet diese durch Abgleich mit anderen Schriften in Alberts gesamten Oeuvre und Denken.Albert‘s second commentary on Aristotle‘s Nicomachean Ethics is preceded by an independent treatise dealing with the general concept of the good, which is made accessible in a critical edition in this article for the first time. Regarding its doctrinal contents this treatise proves to be of fundamental importance because Albert demonstrates the compatibility and even the convergence of several different definitions and descriptions of the good, e.g. by Aristotle, Avicenna, Ps.-Dionysius and Boethius. Albert develops in a nutshell his metaphysics of goodness which is of overarching importance for his whole work and which integrates the theory of the transcendentals as well as the basic ideas of an ethical teleology in an Aristotelian vein. Thereby, the concept of the moral good finds its ultimate foundation in the highest good, i.e. in God. Drawing on the text of the presented critical edition the article retraces the central arguments of this treatise and compares them with other writings in order to show their place in Albert’s complete work and thought.