Session 1: Concepts and Critiques

1st Global Conference

Friday 3rd July – Saturday 5th July 2009
Mansfield College, Oxford

The Meaning of Age: Cultures Meet Biology
Jan Baars
Faculty of Humanities, Depatment of Philosophy, Tilburg University, The Netherlands

This paper will address the different ‘Times of our Lives’ that provide the complex temporal horizon that is presupposed in ‘Making sense of Aging’, but usually reduced to chronological time. This results in an overemphasis of chronological age that is supposed to represent biological (functional) age.

Building on earlier publications (Baars & Visser, 2006; Baars 2008; Baars, forthcoming a, b.) I shall first demonstrate how interpretations of ageing in terms of ‘chronological age’ run into trouble and are actually dependent on cultural contexts supplying these measurements with meaning. The epistemological riddle of the Age-Period-Cohort constellation undermines the exactness that is supposed to be presented in analyses of populations in terms of their chronological ages.

The background of this analysis is a critique of the dominance of chronological age as an instrument of categorization which impoverishes the experience of aging as living in and through different times. In the second part, some of these times will be discussed, such as natural rhythms, experiential time, narrative time and Kairos time.

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The Irrelevance of Chronological Age
Peter Caws and Julia Glahn
Department of Philosophy, The George Washington University, USA and and Institut für Geschichte, Theorie und Ethik der Medizin, RWTH Aachen, Aachen, Germany

Ageing is, obviously enough, a process of change over time. Some of the changes involved assign individuals to markedly different groups (“age-groups”) at different stages in the process, and make social relations across age-group boundaries problematic except as they fall into conventional categories. This paper postulates and explores constant factors underlying the changes due to ageing that can minimize these problematic differences and make possible social relations transcending chronological age. Because such relations are likely to encounter cultural stereotypes establishing them may not be easy, but it can be successful and rewarding. The paper follows two distinct strategies, one testing the concept of a timeless transcendental subject not affected by ageing, the other postulating an “immediate otherness” between subjects that might bracket differences of chronological age and render them irrelevant to the enjoyment of mutual presence. The first strategy appeals to the Aristotelian analysis of change as requiring the continuity of something unchanging (the “substratum” of Metaphysics 983a30), which finds an echo in the contrast between the “naively interested Ego” and the phenomenological Ego as “disinterested onlooker” in Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations. It seeks to reconcile the powerful intuition of the self as self-identical from first awareness to whatever age it has attained with the equally powerful intuition of difference from moment to moment and situation to situation. The second explores different modes and settings of immediacy and intimacy, from common interest in external objects (the “parallel” case) to shared concern of the subjects involved for one another (the “diametric” case). The paper’s authors offer themselves as existence proofs of these possibilities.

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Department of Human Development & Counselling, Nga Pumanawa, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand

Mainstream developmental psychology has always striven to be ‘scientific’, yet its influential mid-twentieth century conceptualization of adolescence––as ideally a ‘moratorium’ from major social responsibilities to facilitate self-exploration and pre-adult commitment to a self-constructed ‘identity’––was primarily the work of staunch nonempiricist, Erik Erikson. Despite accusations of Eurocentrism, androcentrism and classism over the years, Eriksonian theory endured thanks to requisite evidential support subsequently provided by numerous researchers. Nevertheless, by the end of the century some critics were convincingly arguing that adolescence for many was becoming less a period of freedom and opportunity and more one of dysfunctionally retarded progress towards social maturity. Contemporaneously, however, neuroscience researchers began publishing data seeming to offer not merely support for a psychological ideal of delayed adulthood but evidence for its biological authorization: brain imaging studies unexpectedly revealed maturation of the prefrontal cortex was not fully completed until at least the mid-20s. Swiftly popularized notions of ‘the teen brain’ as ‘a work in progress’ energized a new discourse of developmental immaturity incorporating propositions of severe and expectable problems of intellectual and emotional incompetence, temperamental unpredictability and poor self-control, even beyond the teenage years. Notwithstanding occasional cautions and caveats, the new science was (unsurprisingly) embraced quickly and fairly uncritically by many leading adolescent psychologists, and widely disseminated in (often questionable) advice for the general public. This presentation offers a contribution to the small but growing multidisciplinary critique of this new empiricist theorizing through considering its current and potential operation within the broader context of changing lifespan discourse and our understandings of physiological and psychological (im)maturity.

Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)