The comorbidity of personality disorders and mental disorders is commonly understood through three types of theoretical models: either (a) personality disorders precede mental disorders, (b) mental disorders precede personality disorders, or (c) mental disorders and personality disorders share common etiological grounds. Although these hypotheses differ with respect to their idea of causal direction, they all imply a latent variable perspective. In this chapter, we aim to provide another meta-theoretical and methodological perspective on this issue. We start this chapter by explicating a relationalist ontology of this type of comorbidity in which we understand mental states and personality traits as ontologically related systems. Using psychometric network models, we endeavor to bridge to the empirical and clinical world and provide an example of a network model of the relations between major depression disorder (MDD) and borderline personality disorder (BPD). The results identify direct associations between symptoms of MDD and BPD.

This chapter considers a serious challenge to conceptual realist readings of Hegel which is based on his Philosophy of Nature. According to such readings, one way in which reason is inherent in the world rather than imposed upon it is that individuals are instantiations of substance universals such as “horse” or “human being” which we come to know, and which belong essentially to those individuals in their own right. However, critics of this conceptual realist reading have then countered that in his philosophy of nature, Hegel speaks about the “feebleness of the concept in nature” and seems to allow for a good deal of indeterminacy in the way individuals are classified into kinds, making it hard to see them as essential to individuals and as inherent to the world in the way the conceptual realist claims. This debate and how it relates to Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature is then the focus of this chapter. It is argued that nothing in what Hegel says about the problems in classifying nature in fact threatens conceptual realism, thereby showing how the conceptual realist reading can be vindicated in a way that is consistent with this text.

This chapter provides an overview of the theoretical and methodological perspectives underpinning LGBTIQ psychology and considerations for undertaking research with LGBTIQ populations. An overview of five main theoretical approaches (essentialism, social constructionism, critical realism, feminism, and queer theory) is provided, and each is discussed in relation to its implications for understanding LGBTIQ people’s lives and experiences. The construct ‘heteronormativity’ is also introduced. The chapter also introduces a range of overarching methodological approaches used in LGBTIQ psychological research (e.g., experiments, surveys, qualitative studies) and explores the extent to which each had been used for researching LGBTIQ topics. The final section of this chapter focuses on considerations in undertaking research with LGBTIQ populations. Challenges in defining populations of interest, access to and recruitment of participants, and principles for ethical practice with LGBTIQ populations are discussed here.

Taking advantage of what have been learned about “Japanese collectivism,” this chapter theoretically examines cultural stereotype, which is a simplified and distorted image of a culture. The cultural stereotype tends to create the following four basic illusions: uniformity (“The Japanese are all collectivists”), polarity (“The Japanese are collectivists, whereas the Americans are individualists”), determinacy (“Japanese culture causes Japanese collectivism”), and permanency (“Japanese collectivism is immutable”). Contrary to the illusions of uniformity and polarity, actual data typically show large individual difference within each group, and the distributions of individual difference typically have a large overlap between groups. Contrary to the illusion of determinacy, human behavior tends to be affected more strongly by situation than by culture. Contrary to the illusion of permanency, culture as well as human mind and behavior tends to change as a result of intellectual activity and situational change.

In one way or another, each of these teachers in the quotes above is grappling with the role of theory and how best to employ it in their teaching to assist their students to better understand the cultural complexity of the world in which they live. By ‘cultural complexity’, I am primarily referring to that derived from the ethnic diversity now characteristic of school communities in migrant-based nations, such as Australia. This, of course, is evident on a global scale with increasing migration, both voluntary and forced leading to the rapid transformation of national populations. Diversification through migration is more prevalent in some countries than others. But, with global flows of people occurring alongside that of information, goods, services and capital, aided by digital technologies and the speed of, and easier access to, travel, nowhere remains impervious to the forces of globalisation and the cultural complexity that results. Such rapid and complex change is difficult to comprehend, but its effects are so far-reaching that now, more than ever, there is a need for the appropriate conceptual resources to better navigate its impact.

Despite the promise of a post-racial science, debates over the meaning and implications of race and population differences have persisted, albeit in transformed terms. Given that they eschew fixed genetic differences, ‘biosocial’ perspectives on race have brought with them a renewed focus on the social, historical, and political bases of contemporary health disparities. However, the move away from reference to fixed genes in describing how racial health disparities emerge or are maintained is not without problems. In this chapter, we first challenge the notion that the embrace of environmentally driven effects is inherently progressive, through an examination of the longue durée of pre-modern racial typologies. Second, we review recent research within DOHaD and environmental epigenetics that addresses racial health disparities. Our review reflects our concern that postgenomics has the potential to catalyse new forms of essentialism and typological thinking. Studies in our review hew closely to essentialist forms of racial thought, albeit now marked by methylation differences and adverse early life conditions. To avoid the return of racialised typological thinking, we suggest methodological interventions and various research orientations, such as interdisciplinarity, that can prevent a return to notions of fixed racial difference

In the decades following the forging of the so-called Neo-Darwinian Synthesis in the 1940s, a number of its philosophical defenders created a myth about what Charles Darwin was up against, a viewpoint called “typological essentialism” often attributed to Aristotle. In this chapter I first sketch the history of how this myth was created. I then establish that it is a myth by providing an account of Aristotle’s essentialism as it is actually displayed in his philosophy of biology and in his biological practice. It has nothing to do with the ‘mythic’ version. We then turn to what Darwin was really up against—a creationist anti-evolutionary way of defining the species concept that was common in Darwin’s time (that owes nothing to Aristotle), and to his attempts to re-orient thinking about it. I will close by reconsidering Aristotle and Charles Darwin: Does it make any sense to think about the relationship between two thinkers separated by more than two millennia living in such vastly different cultures? What did Charles Darwin himself think about Aristotle?

It is suggested that current religious studies are distorted by what sociologists sometimes call recipe knowledge, especially in relation to the common assumption – still partially valid – that religion should no longer be seen in essentialist or perennialist terms. The possibility of neo-perennialism is explored. Widespread assumptions about projecting onto faith traditions ‘essentialist’ understandings are critiqued, particularly in relation to Buddhism, and common assumptions about the inapplicability of terms such as religion and myth are questioned. In this context, evolutionary perspectives are important because ‘dual process’ notions of human cognition may be applied to the historical development of human religiosity. This means that a revived recognition of a universal aspect of human religiosity is necessary, based not on very questionable anthropological speculations of the kind that became common in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries but on current exploration of brain functioning and of its evolutionary development.

In this chapter, I present a Kripkean argument against the materialist thesis that intentionality supervenes on the physical. The argument is inspired both by Kripke’s remarks on the essential nature of intentionality in Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, and his argument against the identification of mind and body in Naming and Necessity. The argument turns on the metaphysical possibility of quadders and zombies, where quadders are minimal physical duplicates of us who mean quaddition rather than addition by “plus,” and where zombies are minimal physical duplicates of us whose thought and talk are altogether devoid of intentionality.

This chapter explores metamorphosis by focusing on the so-called ‘shearwaters of Diomedea’ – a group of seabirds whose odd behaviour recalls their previous existence as humans. It puts these birds in conversation with other humans-turned-animals both ancient and modern and investigates how they reflect on the experience of transformation. The chapter reveals that both ancient and modern tales of metamorphosis draw on the notion of hybridity in so far as many of the creatures undergoing such a transformation are, in effect, hybrids: they retain part of their human identity while also sporting the body of an animal. At the same time the chapter points to an important difference between ancient and modern ways of thinking the human. It shows that modern tales of metamorphosis tend to explore the dissolution of the boundary that separates the human from all other animals. The ancient conversation, by contrast, returns to – and ultimately affirms – the positions of some of the Greek philosophers arguing for an essential human difference.

Nationalism rewrites the state. It rewrites authoritarian states as democracies. It rewrites democracies as authoritarian states. Whatever its cause and whatever its ends, it has been central to narratives of state transformation since the seventeenth century. Nevertheless, it is not a primeval force, is not ever-residing. It is derivative, and the historian who sorts out the roots and branches of an apparently nationalist phenomenon will discover that it disappears under scrutiny. It is, like centripetal force, an ideation that explicates but is not itself real.

Nationalism is able to rewrite the state because it is the accumulation of manifest internal opposition to an existing regime, based on the premise that the present form misrepresents the nature and interests of a defined population. In any nationalist movement, opposition is redefinition. For such opposition to thrive, it must draw upon established public terms of legitimacy, historical claims, and the credible definition of national solidarity in opposition to its governance.

Chapter two is dedicated to the complicated contemporary debate on the notion of biological species. After a short introduction and critical analysis of all major relational and intrinsic definitions of species, special attention is paid to the recent revival of the essentialist species concept, both in its contemporary and classical Aristotelian-Thomistic formulations, tested against the two major arguments denying their compatibility with evolutionary biology.