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This chapter explores the associations between personality factors, depression, and self-silencing. The authors contend that there are many reasons why individuals engage in self-silencing and these reasons reflect personality vulnerability factors associated with depression that are also associated with self-silencing. They present evidence that self-silencing combines with these personality factors, either as mediators or as moderators, to increase the risk for depression in certain individuals. Through an examination of particular personality variables, namely dependency, self-criticism, and perfectionism, the authors demonstrate that people with vulnerable personalities who also engage in self-silencing may suffer from chronic and destructive forms of stress that can be damaging to health and well-being.

This chapter argues that the method of the Phenomenology (the many contortions of that method) is determined by the effort to meet the epistemological demand of Kantian critique without implicitly presupposing subjectivism. This project turns out to require self-transformational criticism.

This chapter examines how reading contemporary Indian philosophers' writings as modern texts or considering them as modern authors fails to capture some important ideas contained in them. There are two different sets of interpretations on contemporary Indian philosopher Swami Vivekananda. The first consists of those like Tapan Raychaudhuri, who sees no traces of Hindu revivalism in Vivekananda. Raychaudhuri, together with Nemai Sadhan Bose, tries to project universalism, ultimate truth, rather than Hindu religion, as central to Vivekananda. The second set comprises those like Javeed Alam, who sees certain thoughts and categorizations of communalism in Vivekananda. This chapter argues that democracy in India can be sustained not only through a liberal epistemology based on empirical claims about reality, but also through Buddhist epistemology. To develop this argument, the chapter considers a crucial structural feature of democracy: criticism. It elaborates the three modes of criticism: criticism as rejection, self-criticism, and internal criticism.

Paul Ricoeur believes that Europe has produced a series of cultural identities which brought with them their own self-criticism, and he thinks that this is unique. Even Christianity encompassed its own critique. Plurality is within Europe itself. Europe has had different kinds of Renaissance—Carolingian, twelfth-century, Italian and French, fifteenth-century, and so on. The Enlightenment was another expression of this, and it is important that in the dialogue with other cultures people keep this element of self-criticism, which Ricoeur thinks is the only specificity of Europe (along with, of course, the enhancement of science). The kind of universality that Europe represents contains within itself a plurality of cultures which have been merged and intertwined, and which provide a certain fragility, an ability to disclaim and interrogate itself.

This chapter discusses the critical and reformist views of the knights. The ideas for change and improvement did not all come from the non-knightly. If model knights loudly and predictably praised chivalry, their fear and their ideals for reform were true, and their chosen words audible and important.

This chapter examines ethical issues in the multidisciplinary teamwork setting in palliative care. It contends that one of the great advantages of the multidisciplinary team is that each subgroup within it acts as a corrective to the view that any one group of professionals can do everything that is needed for a patient and their family. This corrective mechanism can also work at a moral level where no one perspective is allowed to prevail to the extent that moral debate and self-examination are replaced by complacency and lack of self-criticism or awareness.

In Chapter 22, the author discusses his career as a physician in general practice. He describes an especially harrowing experience accompanying a patient on a helicopter ride to the hospital with severe wounds that suddenly stopped breathing. The lessons learned from his career are both practical and theoretical. A practical lesson is the need to train rural physicians and staff in the skills and issues of transferring sick patients. The author also discusses self-criticism limitations and the need to accept one’s limitations and try to learn from mistakes.

This chapter discusses Chinese nationalism and China's apology diplomacy. It considers Sino-Japanese relations, and suggests that many contemporary Chinese confront their perceived humiliation at Japanese hands alternately with self-criticism and with anger at their rival. The chapter highlights Western scholars' criticism on the elites' use of nationalism to bolster their legitimacy and their dismissal of emotions as irrelevant to nationalist politics.

The introduction introduces the problem of accounting for the rationality of scientific paradigm shifts that motivates the book, sketches the solution proposed, and briefly outlines the chapters to come. To replace a scientific framework rationally requires deeming it sufficiently wanting to merit seeking an alternative. But how can one’s scientific norms and standards be found scientifically wanting if it is by means of them that one scientifically appraises? The solution turns on the difference between self-criticism and exposure to external criticism, which at times can destabilize a norm sufficiently, and render those committed to it sufficiently ambivalent to take a critical stand. The Introduction briefly indicates how this works in science, and outlines the case study detailed in the final three chapters.

This concluding chapter sums up the key findings of this study on the relationship between religion and politics in the American South. The history of the South has been, most fundamentally, the story of the struggle between liberalism and conservatism in a variety of venues and in a spectrum of areas. And in overarching struggle between liberalism and conservatism, the latter won out repeatedly and the South is still the most conservative region of the U.S. In the final analysis, the stream of toleration, progressivism, and self-criticism is still a distinctly minority current in the South and this is most apparent in the critical intersection between politics and religion.

The final chapter poses questions to readers who have successfully navigated material in the book in the interests of determining the steps best suited for their long-term artistic development: Do I have the foundational background to study successfully my next repertoire piece? Do I have the experience to make artistic and nuanced decisions, or will my ear be compromised by a struggling, exercise-like reading of a work? Am I only drawn to the type of music that comes easily to me, or am I willing to strike out in new directions? The answers may highlight differences between unexamined received wisdom and critical thinking. It is in these differences that a student’s development as an artist can begin to take flight.

This chapter discusses the works of academic historian Sari Kivistö, an expert in charting the moral discourse about scholarly vices in late Baroque and early Enlightenment Europe. Kivistö concentrates largely on dissertations written by German intellectuals between approximately 1670 and 1730, a period where academic self-criticism became a flourishing genre of publication. Kivistö's main purpose is to investigate how scholarly vices were conceptualized in this period of change, exploring in particular the connections between knowledge and morality. Her exploration is divided into five thematic chapters that explore the vices of self-love, the desire for fame, quarrelling, curiosity, and bad manners. Although these vices regularly overlap, Kivistö explains the division by stating that these sins are the most prominently discussed in the primary sources.

The prevailing grand narrative of Islam and modernity overlooks the phenomenon of non-Western modernity. It refuses to recognize continuing trends of reconciliations, self-criticism, and accommodation in Muslim thought, especially in South Asia. This chapter sets out to remedy some of these misunderstandings. From 1857 when the Raj introduced its ‘modernity project’ in India, the narrative of modernity changed. Hindu and Muslim civilizations were presented as indulging in casuistry, mythologies, and treacherous political ideas. Muslims were divided into puritan and nominal. The modernity project aimed at civilizing the natives. The ‘Western impact’ defined modernity as Westernism. It generated among Indian Muslims a cultural resistance to modernity. Religious groups began organizing themselves into political parties that stood for conservatism that was justified as denunciation of colonialism and imperialism. Eventually this conflict led to fundamentalist and extremist religious trends in the twentieth century.

This chapter argues that we must not allow fears of the Protocols in the 21st century to blind us to the differences between the text's role in our day and its role a century ago on the one hand, and not allow our fears of anti-Semitism to silence responsible self-criticism, in particular that of Jews criticizing aspects of Israeli policy, on the other. A rigorous critique of Israel is thus not only legitimate, but necessary. The very creation of Israel has fundamentally changed the situation, as Jews are no longer in the ghetto or an oppressed minority, therefore one cannot compare the real victims of Protocols-inspired genocidal paranoia to Israeli Jews, who can now defend themselves.

This chapter suggests a mutual “purification of memories” for healing the dolorous history of Catholic-Orthodox relations, its Catholic author first providing an examination of Catholic misdeeds vis-avis the Orthodox East, then suggesting that the Orthodox, too, learn the uses of history in a modern academic climate that seeks to be fair and objective insofar as that is possible, eschew scapegoating and the “our hands are always clean” victim-hood pretence, the use of the double-standard, and learn a little self-criticism and fairness. This will require that the Orthodox make their own frank examination of conscience too.

This chapter discusses Octavia E. Butler's writing career during the period 1971–1976, focusing on her early Patternist books, Patternmaster (1976), Mind of My Mind (1977), and Survivor (1978), along with the unpublished “The Evening and the Morning and the Night” [I] (1970s). The chapter begins with an overview of Butler's career struggles, her early interest in fantasy and science fiction, her initial foray into commercial fiction, and her love of comic books. It then considers Butler's preference for novel writing, her professional frustrations, and her depression and self-criticism before analyzing her Patternist series in greater detail. It also examines the theme of power that pervades Butler's stories.

American POWs initially acquiesced to the Chinese political education classes. However, since the Chinese sought genuine converts, they had to engage in give and take; there was no actual brainwashing. As POWs realized what they could get away with, they either tuned out or became increasingly resistant, arguing with their instructors or even mocking them. The prisoners especially resented how insufferably long and boring the politics classes were. The communist instructors adapted by toning down the Marxist theory and focusing instead on the ugliness of war and the brutality of the United Nations forces led by America. Nevertheless, they had little success in bridging the gaps between races, cultures, or between captive and captor. Mandatory study ended after one year. Some prisoners known as “Progressives” continued studying voluntarily, but they retained little of the indoctrination after returning to the United States. The postwar impression of unprecedented capitulation and assistance to the enemy was wrong. What collaboration occurred was comparable to what happened in other wars.