Similar Convictions Research Articles

Developing a model of guilty plea decision-making: Fuzzy-trace theory, gist, and categorical boundaries.

To date, most research on plea bargaining has used some form of the shadow of the trial (SOT) model to frame defendant decisions. In this research, we proposed and tested a new conceptual model of plea decision-making, based on fuzzy-trace theory (FTT), for the context in which a nondetained, guilty defendant chooses between a guilty plea or trial, where both the plea and potential trial sentence entail incarceration. We predicted that plea decisions would be affected by (a) meaningful, categorical changes in conviction probability (e.g., low to moderate, moderate to high), as opposed to more granular changes within categories and (b) the presence and magnitude of categorical distinctions between plea offer and potential trial sentence rather than fine-grained differences between individual offers. We conducted three vignette-based experiments (Study 1: N = 1,701, Study 2: N = 1,098, Study 3: N = 1,232), using Mechanical Turk participants. In Studies 1 and 2, we manipulated potential trial sentence and conviction probability, asking participants to indicate either the maximum plea sentence they would accept (Study 1) or whether they would plead guilty to a specific offer (Study 2). In Study 3, we manipulated plea discount and potential trial sentence and measured plea acceptance. Maximum acceptable plea sentences were similar within and different between "groupings" of meaningfully similar conviction probabilities (Study 1). Plea rates were similar within and different between groupings that comprised plea offers of similarly meaningful distance from the potential trial sentence (Study 3). The results also provide insight into the plea rates that might be expected under different combinations of the independent variables (Studies 2 and 3). These results support a new conceptual model of plea decision-making that may be better suited to explaining case-level differences in plea outcomes than the SOT model and suggest that future research extending this model to a wider range of contexts would be fruitful. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Encyclopaedic Autobiography in Roland Barthes’s Roland Barthes (1975) and Amy Krouse Rosenthal’s Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life (2004)

Abstract This article examines two works of autobiographical literature that are structured in fragmentary form and that engage explicitly with the formal and conceptual model of the encyclopaedia. One of the works, Roland Barthes’s Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975) is by a literary theorist, and the other, Amy Krouse Rosenthal’s Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life (2004) is by a popular mainstream columnist and broadcaster. Both works, despite a disparity of tone and material, display similar convictions about the utility of what I will call ‘encyclopaedic autobiography’ as a form. I argue that these autobiographical works allow us to reconceive not only of autobiography but of the question of what ‘encyclopaedic literature’ might be.

Postsecular Style

Abstract In Culture and Redemption (2007), Tracy Fessenden argues that the development of postsecular critique requires a more thorough reckoning with the secular assumptions that so durably structure the categories and grammars of critical thought. As Peter Coviello and Jared Hickman have since elaborated, such a reckoning entails the radical reinvention of postsecularism’s critical style. But what might these more pointedly situated and styled voices of postsecular critique sound like? Recent books of Americanist criticism by Coviello, Lindsay V. Reckson, and Phillip Maciak suggest new possibilities by coupling alternate cultural histories of the nineteenth century with instructive experiments in critical style. Each of these studies begins with a similar conviction: that stepping outside the immanent frame of secularism is impossible. Yet Coviello, Reckson, and Maciak all work to locate and create meaningful cracks in this frame. By flagging the hegemonic secular presumptions inherent to their own critical authority, by thinking, feeling, and writing from an unusually intimate proximity to their subjects, these three critics model how others might similarly evolve and enliven the postsecular approach.

Poetry for Parliament: The Women’s Peace Write Campaign

Poetry for Parliament: The Women’s Peace Write Campaign Andrea Beverley (bio) In January 1985, a call went out for Canadian women writers to stand up for world peace and nuclear disarmament by sending literature to the government. Called the Women’s Peace Write / Rites des femmes pour la paix, the campaign was rooted in the conviction that women writers should mobilize their craft in opposition to nuclear weapons. Not long before, in 1983, Margaret Laurence, whose name is perhaps the first to spring to mind when considering connections between Canadian literature and anti-nuclear mobilization of this era, expressed a similar conviction (Gerry 218, 224–28; Stovel 325–27). In “My Final Hour,” Laurence unequivocally states, “the question of disarmament is the most pressing practical, moral, and spiritual issue of our times” (189). She goes on: “I believe that as a writer … as an artist, if you will … I have a responsibility, a moral responsibility, to work against the nuclear arms race” (195). For the contributors to the Women’s Peace Write, acting on this “moral responsibility” took the form of a concerted effort to send pro-peace literature in the mail weekly to all Members of Parliament while the House of Commons was in session over the course of an entire year. My essay aims to describe how this campaign came to be and to provide some literary analysis of its contents. How did this activist project emerge? What are the features of its literary corpus? [End Page 53] What kinds of teachings and consciousness raising did it aim to offer to its imagined audience, the Members of Parliament serving under Brian Mulroney? I learned of the existence of the Women’s Peace Write when I came across a copy of the assembled texts in the Women and Words archive at Simon Fraser University’s Special Collections and Rare Books Library.1 I visited the archive with two undergraduate student research assistants who worked with me to comb through the many boxes that comprise the Women and Words fonds. Especially because the Finding Aid does not include item-level cataloguing of the boxes’ contents, there was the potential for surprise and discovery as we opened file folders, perused photograph negatives, scanned the headlines of old newspaper clippings, and even listened to some audio recordings. When I happened upon the texts of the Women’s Peace Write campaign, I was immediately intrigued. Although this was only a couple years ago, at the time, nuclear bombs were not making headlines as they are now. Compiled over thirty years ago, the Peace Write texts imagine nuclear threat in a late Cold War context; today, nuclear weapons come up in relation to Germany, Turkey, North Korea, China, Russia, Israel, Iran, and the United States. One can imagine that a similar literary campaign launched in our current political climate would have a multi-pronged pedagogical and outreach strategy, including a robust promotional media component, and thus be much more visible in the public sphere than was the Women’s Peace Write. Although the Peace Write organizers did plan some media coverage of their project, it was not, to my knowledge, particularly well known. Some of its texts were previously or subsequently published, as I describe in more detail below. But otherwise, its existence as an anthological text is mostly archival.2 Although it is no doubt remembered by contributors and others who were aware of it at the time—and possibly even by some mps or House staffers—I had not heard of it in Canadian scholarly circles before coming across it in a box. Printed on eight-by-eleven-inch paper, the texts are held together by a black spiral binding and a blue card stock paper cover. [End Page 54] Descriptors on the cover label the document “Women’s Peace Write / Rite des femmes pour la paix” subtitled “une campagne de textes pour les députés” and “a writing campaign to Members of Parliament.” Along with the mailing address for the West Coast Women and Words Society, the front cover also describes the document as “a calendar of selections for the weeks the House is in session, June...

Recording Intimacy, Reviewing Spectacle: The Emergence of Video in the American Home

This article traces the discourses surrounding home video-recording technologies, from their emergence in the mid-1960s to their popularity in the mid-1990s. Through an analysis of newspapers, magazines, and advertisements, this article contends that video’s history has been shaped by two seemingly opposed visions of the medium: one which embraced it as a tool for intimacy, and another that condemned it as a harbinger of spectacle. Ultimately, I argue that these two seemingly contradictory views actually share similar convictions and emerge in response to crises and conditions of American capitalism. In their attempt to grapple with video, they condemn commercial television, defend a nostalgic vision of home and family, and in so doing reveal the instability of intimacy and persistence of spectacle at the heart of American domestic life.

Intertextuality in New Testament Scholarship: Significance, Criteria, and the Art of Intertextual Reading

‘Intertextuality’ is currently a hot topic among biblical interpreters. However, a great deal of debate regarding the locus, purpose, and meaning-effect of an intertextual event, the criteria used to discern the presence of intertexts (if in fact there are any), and the theological value of intertextuality in Scripture still exists. This article surveys these interpretive questions and discusses how the foremost contributors to the conversation have aimed at resolving these hermeneutical tensions. In this article, I examine and compare the hermeneutical methodologies of Richard Hays, Michael Thompson, Dale Allison, Greg Beale, Christopher Beetham, Leroy Huizenga, and Peter Leithart with respect to intertextuality. My aim is to identify the strengths of each contributor’s hermeneutical method, while clarifying where these scholars share similar hermeneutical convictions, as well as where they part ways with one another’s convictions about the practice of intertextual reading.

Christians and the unsaved: A Comparative Examination of John MacArthur’s and Rick Warren’s Views of People Outside the Church

The article is a comparative analysis of two sets of sermons by John MacArthur and Rick Warren (25 sermons from each preacher) with respect to how each of the two pastors portray people outside the Christian community and how they instruct their members to relate to the "unsaved." As evangelicals, both MacArthur and Warren share similar theological convictions, however, when they speak about relationships to those outside the church, significant differences in emphases come to the surface. The article traces these back to different concepts of the world (in the sense of human society as such). Deductive theology by MacArthur tends to see the world negatively and encourages Christian separation from it, whereas dialogical theologizing by Warren emphasizes individual and sees humans in a more positive way, thus encouraging creative but discerning involvement in their lives. The choice of the topic is based on perceived influence of both preachers on emerging theology of missions among evangelicals in Russia.

The Legal Concept of Liberal Reforms in Russia (Through the Example of Federalism Reform and Higher Education Reform)

The intensification of Russian citizens’ political activities after December 2011 has simplified the process of political parties’ registration and led to the creation of the Opposition Coordination Council. The analysis of the Council’s functioning proves that it doesn’t carries out the real coordination of all the opposition forces’ actions. This is because the Council consists of politicians whose views differ too much. The impossibility of working out a common opposition strategy requires the development of a unified political program of opposition politicians who have similar convictions. In these conditions the development of this program is needed for liberal politicians who mutually understand the necessity to build in Russia a democratic legal state, in which human rights would be observed. The article draws attention to some approximate structural elements of such a political program of the union of liberal parties. The author thoroughly analyzes two issues: federalism reform and education reform. The revival of Russian federalism is supposed to include at least three lists of arrangements: renewal of budgetary federalism, i.e. the increase of regional budget revenues collected in its territory; political reorganization of regional managerial human resources including the revival of the institute of election of all governors and the determination of their performance quality characteristics regulated by the civil society. Third, this is the reform of the existing distribution of matters of competence and powers between the center and regions according to the sectoral factor. In this sense, the experience of the federative state of Canada can be used. The distribution of powers between the center and regions there is carried out not according to the sectoral factor, like in Russia, but according to the types of activity having either central or regional importance. Education reform that is currently under way in Russia causes a series of negative consequences connected with the growth of educational process bureaucratization, reduction in financing for universities, their groundless enlargement, lack of objective criteria for evaluation of students’ knowledge, and creation of the atmosphere of insecurity of the future. In this regard, the liberal concept involves the release of lecturers from paper work, election of state universities’ rectors and rating system allowing taking into account the scientific and methodical contribution of each lecturer to the process of students’ education, increase in financing for lecturers’ salaries depending on their position in the higher educational institution’s rating, and increase in financing for research activities.

Scientific Theology? Herman Bavinck and Adolf Schlatter on the Place of Theology in the University

Abstract This article, primarily historical in focus, explores the contributions of Herman Bavinck (1854-1921) and Adolf Schlatter (1852-1938) to discussion on the place of theology within the university. Schlatter’s belief that theology is a science belonging within the academy is explored via his debate with Paul Jäger on the possibility of ‘atheistic theology’. Bavinck’s similar convictions, it is seen, were formed in response to the Higher Education Act (1876), a piece of legislation which sought to marginalise theology in a Dutch academic context. The article concludes by tentatively encouraging twenty-first century theology to see itself as a necessary subject (on the grounds of its divine object and power to bring coherence among the sciences) within the contemporary university.

The Impact of the Individual for Achieving Diversity

The Impact of the Individual for Achieving Diversity

Critical and creative perspectives on fairy tales: an intertextual dialogue between fairy-tale scholarship and postmodern retellings

In and Creative Perspectives on Fairy Tales: An Intertextual Dialogue between Fairy-Tale Scholarship and Postmodern Retellings Vanessa Joosen broadens the traditional concept of intertextuality to include academic texts. With three key texts from the 1970s at the center of her discussion-Marcia K. Lieberman's Some Day My Prince Will Come, Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment, and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic-Joosen connects the critical views expressed in these feminist and psychoanalytic interpretations with fictional fairy-tale retellings and illustrations that have been published in Dutch, English, and German since the 1970s. While readers may not automatically connect fairy-tale retellings and criticism, Joosen argues that they represent a similar conviction to understand, interpret, criticize, and experiment with the original tale. Moving through her three critical focus texts in chronological order, Joosen addresses fairy-tale retellings in prose, poetry, and pictures, including revisions of Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood, and Beauty and the Beast. Authors and illustrators whose work is discussed include Paul Biegel, Anthony Browne, Gillian Cross, Emma Donoghue, Iring Fetscher, Ad?le Geras, Otto Gmelin, Wim Hofman, Anne Provoost, Anne Sexton, Barbara Walker, and Jane Yolen.Joosen argues that retellings and criticism participate in a continuous and dynamic dialogue about the traditional fairy tale, but on different terms. Critical and Creative Perspectives on Fairy Tales offers many insights into the workings of fiction and criticism that will appeal to fairy-tale scholars, literature scholars, and general readers interested in intertextuality and fairy tales.

Studiu Privind Analiza Complexă a Cauzelor Legislativ-Instituţionale de Comdamnare a Republicii Moldova de Curtea Europeană a Drepturilor Omului (Study on the Complex Analysis of Legislative and Institutional Causes Leading to Conviction of the Republic of Moldova by the European Court of Human Rights)

The following study aims to analyse the causes of the convictions of Moldova by the European Court of Human Rights, to establish the progress made in removing those causes and to determine the measures to be taken in order to avoid further similar convictions. The gathering of the required information has taken place by holding interviews with various persons (doctors, prosecutors, lawyers, judges, plaintiffs and so on) able to establish certain circumstances. The interviews sought both to establish the relevant events leading to judgments and to determine the changes that have taken place as a result of those judgments. Additionally, as for the relevant issues, a study on actual legislation and practice (for example case-law, medical practice) was conducted.

Identity Politics and the Fragmenting of the 1970s Evangelical Left

AbstractIn the early 1970s, a group of progressive evangelicals challenged the mid-century cultural conservatism of their tradition. Activists associated with Reformed, Anabaptist, and neo-evangelical institutions denounced militarism, racism, sexism, economic injustice, and President Richard Nixon's “lust for and abuse of power.” When this coalition met in 1973 to issue the Chicago Declaration, delegates effused a profound sense of optimism. The evangelical left held very real potential for political impact.Within a decade, however, the movement seemed to be in disarray. This article suggests the centrality of identity politics to evangelicalism in the 1970s and outlines the fragmentation of the progressive evangelical coalition along gender, racial, and theological lines. The formation of the Evangelical Women's Caucus, the growing stridency of the National Black Evangelical Association, and the divergence of Anabaptist-oriented Evangelicals for Social Action and the Reformed-oriented Association for Public Justice sapped the evangelical left of needed resources and contributed to its impotence into the 1980s. The forces of identity politics, which also plagued the broader political left, were powerful enough to sabotage even a group of evangelicals with remarkably similar theological convictions, religious cultures, and critiques of conservative politics. The story of the fragmenting evangelical left, however, reflects more than broader culture's preoccupation with identity. It points to often-overlooked religious elements of the broader left. And alongside the New Left and the New Right, the evangelical left's debates over racial, sexual, and theological difference added to the disruptions of the liberal consensus in the 1960s and 1970s.

Clinical supervision: outsider reports of a research-driven implementation programme in Queensland, Australia

The aim of the present study was to explore substantive issues related to the implementation of Clinical Supervision (CS). Historically, the treatment of mental illness in Australia has been inadequate. CS has shown promise as a positive contribution to the clinical governance agenda, as a structured staff support mechanism. Within the wider context of a randomized controlled trial (RCT) of CS, semi-structured interviews (n = 17) were conducted with staff who worked alongside colleagues that attempted to implement CS. Senior managers embraced CS and were disappointed when junior managerial colleagues did not hold a similar conviction, when tested by the realities of CS implementation. If CS was regarded as an additional activity, it stretched human resources and created inter-staff tensions. The personal testimony of these 'outsiders' spoke about the practicalities of implementing CS and the prevailing culture into which they were introduced. When perceived as a tour de force for culture change, CS was polarized as an opportunity by many, but also as a threat by some. A single, cohesive and explicit management position on CS in each Health Service entity may obviate some of the impediments to CS implementation.

We were conscious of the sort of people we mixed with: The state, social attitudes and the family in mid twentieth century Ireland

In the Republic of Ireland, the family is both a private entity and a construct of the state, and the relationship between family and state is outlined in the Irish constitution. In the Northern Irish state a similar conviction that the family unit is essential to the welfare of society has been implicit in social policy and legislation, as has the classification of women's place. Access to financial resources has played a significant role in situating the family in society and income and social class were inextricably interwoven. This paper explores how social attitudes have shaped family behaviour and identity in mid twentieth century Ireland, particularly in terms of the part played by women. Class consciousness and definitions of “respectability” are considered, using oral history testimony from a number of women remembering when they were young in the 1930s and 40s. The interviewees accepted the domestic role assigned to them by popular consensus and social policy. Their stories contain frequent references to their reluctance to associate with people whose occupations were judged to be inferior because of the lower status accorded to certain kinds of work. The paper will consider the extent to which legislators and policy makers shared such class awareness and how that might have influenced the shaping of the family unit in Ireland in the middle decades of the twentieth century.

Hopkins' Affective Rhythm: Grace and Intention in Tension

Hopkins' Affective Rhythm:Grace and Intention in Tension Joshua King (bio) "Why do I employ sprung rhythm at all?" the Victorian poet and Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins asks fellow poet Robert Bridges in 1877.1 Hopkins' question remains largely unanswered. I do not, however, intend yet another contribution to the eye-glazing debate over sprung rhythm's technical integrity, its viability versus impracticability; doing so would merely perpetuate the presumption, still active in most discussions of sprung rhythm since W. H. Gardner's foundational Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889): A Study of Poetic Idiosyncrasy in Relation to Poetic Tradition, that Hopkins poses his question in purely technical terms.2 Unquestionably much has been and is yet to be learned from such formal scrutiny; but the assumption that analysis of sprung rhythm should begin and end at this level is entirely questionable. Hopkins answers his own question for Bridges, and his focus is not on pure technique. He champions his prosody's preservation of "the native and natural rhythm of speech" (Letters, p. 46). To presume to have captured in poetry the native character of spoken rhythm is to presume to have captured at least some of the native character of its speaker.3 Sprung rhythm is more than a metrical novelty: in it Hopkins finds a means for apprehending and recommending to a reader kinds of affective and cognitive experience. In his earliest experiments with sprung rhythm, he connects its performance to an experience of grace. He wants to guide his anticipated reader's rhythmic voicing into an impression of grace. My use of "anticipated" recognizes the tension between Hopkins' intention for his rhythm and his inability to ensure its fulfillment. In Hopkins' theology and prosody, the intentions—meanings, designs, purposes—of poetry and the experienced world are "uttered" by a person through intensive mental engagement and received by him as stresses of affective and cognitive energy. This process requires straining inherent qualities of the speaker and what is spoken into more vigorous states, just as potential energy is converted into kinetic: the activation of sprung rhythm's intentional tension necessitates conversion of a reader's "natural" inclinations in voicing. When Hopkins' few contemporary readers resist this conversion, he is confronted by the possibility that, rather than conveying the nature of grace, his cadences evidence his efforts to shape his reader's nature. [End Page 209] II. One's Own Utterances: Hopkins' Theology of Grace "God, grant to men to see in a small thing, notices common to things great and small."4 St. Augustine comments on our experience of time and grace, "notices" of which we encounter "in [the] small thing" of listening to ourselves speak. He recites a line of Latin verse, wondering how he measures its syllables, since each is instantly passing before he finishes hearing it. He does this, he believes, because his "'present [mental] intention (praesens intentio) [intentio: a straining, a tension]'" conveys before him a sequence of mentally preserved sensations.5 A person's present intention can be drawn out of mental distension (distentio: a stretching asunder) between diverse impressions and toward God's eternal present through the mediation of the incarnate Word, Christ. Hopkins holds a similar conviction: humans are intended to interpret temporally and spatially distended impressions of the world's energies into spoken utterances, through which may be felt present, affective stresses of God's grace. He wrote his most systematic meditations on grace while on his 1881 Long Retreat, a thirty-day contemplation of St. Ignatius Loyola's Exercises observed by Jesuits. Yet, the meditations are Hopkins' exposition, with the aid of Roman Catholic theology,6 of intuitions he had been working out in poetry and prose for over a decade: these temporally disparate writings can be used to interpret each other's uniting intentions. We might begin with notes Hopkins made as an undergraduate at Oxford on the pre-Socratic philosopher, Parmenides. Parmenides believes the "is" invoked or implied by all speech acts (e.g. "blood is red") actually exists, everywhere indivisible and itself: every time we speak we can hear ourselves saying "Being is." Cotter identifies the significance of this statement for Hopkins: "The divine name of...

On Understanding Too Quickly: Colonial and Postcolonial Misrepresentation of Indigenous Fijian Land Tenure

From the very beginning of British colonial rule, government attempts to understand Fijian land tenure led to confusion about its nature and the development of a European understanding that oversimplified and misrepresented it as simple communal ownership. Indigenous land ownership was officially recognized and standardized over most of Fiji, as communal rights in the collective hands of a mid-level descent group within the sedentary lineage system, the mataqali. Actual land tenure is, however, more complex, and in many areas continues to be followed today. Recently, the common property theoretical model has been applied in many parts of the non-Western world, based on a similar oversimplification and misrepresentation of actual practice, as well as on a similar conviction that such tenure systems can be reduced to communal land rights. Drawing on a critique of the common property approach and empirical observations from the interior of Vitilevu, this paper shows how Fijian land tenure cannot be reduced to its superficial common property aspect, but has simultaneous, multilayered sets of rights, both communal and individual. A land tenure theory must be able to take into account such systems if it is to have any serious analytic value.

Forgiveness and Reconciliation: The Religious Dimension

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on “forgiveness” as one of the most conspicuous expressions of the growing role of religion in conflict transformation. The main questions put forward are the following: What is the role of forgiveness in reconciliation? Is forgiveness a necessary condition for reconciliation between former enemies? Is it sufficient for bringing about real and stable peace between them? To what extent and how does religion affect the reconciliation via forgiveness process? This paper distinguishes between material conflicts, which evolve around material and dividable assets, and identity conflicts, which involve deep-seated hatred originating in the feeling of at least one of the sides that the other has usurped their legitimate rights. While material conflicts can be brought to an end through traditional conflict resolution techniques, identity conflicts need “track two” diplomacy strategies, and particularly forgiveness in order to reach reconciliation. Forgiveness, basically a religious concept, is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for bringing about reconciliation in identity conflicts. To the extent that the sides to the conflict share similar religious convictions regarding the centrality and nature of forgiveness, religion will contribute to reconciliation. But if the contenders hold different (let alone conflicting) tenets regarding forgiveness, religion may hamper the reconciliation process. A quick glance at the three monotheistic religions shows significant differences in their approaches toward forgiveness. While Judaism, and to some extent Islam, see repentance as a sine qua non for forgiveness, Christianity highlights mercy and love and teaches its believers to ask and grant forgiveness without preconditions. These differences may widen the gap between the parties to an identity conflict that wish to resolve their conflict and ultimately reach full and genuine reconciliation. The arguments put forward in this paper need to be put to the test in historic and actual cases of identity conflicts. The Israeli–Palestinian conflict could serve as a suitable example for such a test.

Knowledge Society and Third Way

Knowledge Society and Third Way

Jaspers and Ricoeur on the Self and The Other

The relationship between Karl Jaspers and Paul Ricoeur is remarkable both for the intensity of its early days and for its apparent coolness soon there after. The typical understanding of this separation focuses on Ricoeur's critique of Jasper's understanding of religious commitment. As the story goes, Ricoeur dismisses Jaspers' faith as a form of Don Juanism; while Jaspers' and his followers see in Ricoeur's turn to the symbolics and hermeneutics of religion a move away from the rigors of a philosophical faith in the power of antinomial reason (Vernunft),1 I shall argue, however, that Ricoeur's break with Jaspers is not best understood as a move to the narrower and more manageable confines of religious immanence in the face of the abyss of transcendence but rather as a detour into particular testimony made necessary by a philosophical account of the self that is inspired in many ways by Jaspers insofar as it is focused on attestation and testimony. More importantly, this detour into religious exegesis by Ricoar, rather than being an abandonment of philosophical investigation, has stimulated important recent developments in his thought; the most significant of these are developed in Oneself as Another and La memoire, l'histoire, l'oubli.2 In these works, Ricoeur has made clear, what is already apparent in his earlier works, the connection between self, attestation, conscience, the other, and the Absolute Other. In this essay, I shall examine these central notions in order to begin a more constructive account of the relationship between Ricoeur and Jaspers. The Centrality of the Elucidation of the Self for Ricoeur and Jaspers For both Ricoeur and Jaspers, any attempt at re-examining or re-invigorating metaphysics in this age must pass through a critical investigation of the self. For Jaspers, the systematic organizing of worldviews becomes the soaring analysis of transcendence and ciphers only through the elucidation of the self as Existenz. Thus the ultimate question of his three-volume Philosophy concerns what sort of a cipher of foundering is still possible today? How can it be, beyond all exegesis, if what foundering shows us is not the void, after all-if it is transcendent being?3 The answer to these questions, however, is determined by his account of Existenz: Possible Existenz today can no longer solidify the ciphers, and yet they need not be nothing. And no matter what they are, they will be ambiguous once they become objective, and in order to be true they must withstand the final cipher, that of foundering. They must hold up under a ruthlessly positivistic view of the facts of foundering, and under an existentially serious approach to it in boundary situations.4 We can find similar convictions in Ricoeur's Oneself as Another. Neither selfhood nor otherness, in the sense in which we take these terms, can simply be reformulated in the frozen language of an ontology, ready for repetition, in the flattest sense of repetition. The other than self will never be a strict equivalent of Platonic Otherness, and our selfhood will never repeat Platonic Sameness. The ontology we present here is faithful to the suggestion made in our Introduction, namely that an ontology remains possible today inasmuch as the philosophies of the past remain open to reinterpretation and re-appropriations, thanks to a meaning potential left unexploited, even repressed, by the very systematization and of school formation to which we owe the great doctrinal corpora.5 Thus, what may be said about transcendence, God, the Absolute Other, etc. in philosophy today, according to both Ricoeur and Jaspers, is grounded in an account of the self. In what follows, I shall argue first that Ricoeur and Jaspers agree that the self has a fundamental desire to know itself as whole and to be faithful to such integrity (what Ricoeur sometimes calls the gnoseological dimension or simply, self-esteem); but that, second, Riconr-even in his earliest writings6-includes the relationship to an other than self in the very constitution of the self as it is manifest in the centrality of attestation; and finally, third, that the role of attestation not only gives a different shape to Ricoar's account of the other (even the Absolute Other) but enables him to avoid certain fundamental difficulties that he sees in Jaspers' account of transcendence and the Absolute Other. …