Some porcupines come together on a cold winter day, in order to share each other’s warmth. But when they’re pricked by each other’s quills, they move apart. And so, like mankind, they move back and forth, satisfied neither with the cold of solitude, nor with society’s quills.

However, in all societies, as well as in the U.S., there is a slow linear increase in the suicide rate over time.

Nishida was the single most influential philosopher in the prewar period. His philosophical goal was to locate empiricism and scientific thinking within a larger system that would also give value judgements a non-subordinate place. Zen no kenkyū (An Inquiry into the Good), his first major work, developed the notion of ‘pure experience’, an idea adapted from William James and perhaps developed in light of Nishida’s own Zen Buddhist practice. The book’s theme is that there is a thrust toward unity in all experience. Thought arises out of the disruption of the unity of immediacy and serves as a means to establishing a more comprehensive unity. In Nishida’s phrase, pure experience is the ‘alpha and omega of thought’.

Nishida himself subsequently decided this early effort was too ‘psychologistic’ and ‘mystical’, and developed a different philosophical system in the 1920s and 1930s that emphasized the ‘logic of place (or topos)’. According to Nishida, every judgement is restricted by the logic of its context, which in turn derives from a broader experiential domain that it cannot explain in its own terms (see Logic in Japan). An empirical judgement, for example, excludes the subject of the experience (see Empiricism). Its internal logic precludes the consideration of the self. Yet, of course, there can be no empirical data without an experiencing subject; so, the logical place within which empirical judgements are made is within a broader experiential context that assumes the function of the self. If that broader context is then made the logical domain for judgements, we have idealism. In turn, according to Nishida, the experiential locus that makes idealist judgements possible cannot be spoken of logically within the domain of idealism. Nishida calls this experiential locus ‘place of absolute nothingness’, the ground of ‘acting-intuiting’. This region cannot be expressed in any logical form, but is the basis of all logical expression. It is also the ground of value: spiritual, ethical and aesthetic.

In this way, Nishida argued that the realm of empirical judgement is necessarily grounded experientially in a realm of value that it cannot analyse from its own standpoint. Nishida’s system attempted to grant Western science its logical place while showing that its experiential ground was what traditional Asian values had affirmed all along. Religion, at least in its Asian forms, was not antagonistic to science, nor was it endangered by science. On the contrary, Nishida argued that spiritual experience is what makes science logically possible.

"Depressed people may have a tendency to remember the negative experiences in a situation, but not remember the good things that happened," Conklin said. "Therapists need to be aware of that."

For example, a depressed person who is trying out a new exercise program may mention how it makes him feel sore and tired - but not consider the weight he has lost as a result of the exercise.

"Therapists might focus more on helping their depressed clients recognize and remember the positive aspects of their new experiences," Strunk said.

Evolutionary success is all about looking out for number one - or so most biologists would tell you. The genes that do the best job of passing themselves along to the next generation, whether by brute selfishness or canny cooperation, are the ones that flourish - a view most memorably championed by Richard Dawkins more than 30 years ago in his bestselling book The Selfish Gene.

This relentless focus on the gene may not tell the whole story, however. A small but growing coterie of evolutionary biologists argue that it leaves us blind to crucial evolutionary processes at higher scales - among groups, species and even whole ecosystem. If they are right, the popular view of evolution and the biological world needs a radical shake-up.

For example, the gene or genes that make worker ants devote themselves to helping their queen reproduce rather than reproducing themselves might appear altruistic but really these genes are promoting their own survival: helping a close relative is another way of passing on one's own genes. As this example shows, "selfish genes" do not always favour self-centred, uncooperative behaviour, a common misreading of Dawkins's position.

However, the consensus is that evolution never favours what might be called "selfless" genes - that is, adaptations that benefit a group of organisms or the species as a whole. An example would be a gene that restricts how many offspring a predator has, to avoid wiping out its prey. Such a gene should always lose out to selfish genes that maximise reproduction, the thinking goes, even if reproducing without restraint threatens the survival of the whole species.

http://orgtheory.wordpress.com/2009/03/02/all-of-sociology-in-four-e-z-steps/

The rap against sociology is that it’s an incoherent discipline. There’s definitely an element of truth in that view, but the case is overstated. I think the right way to say it is that sociology has a handful of major traditions and none of them has stamped out the others. What are they? I count four major traditions in soc world:

1. Hard core interactionism/social constructionism: Social reality is defined mainly by how it’s enacted in specific situations and these vary quite a bit.  Moreover, interactions aren’t necessarily reducible to the broader social order. The more radical elements of this tradition run into post-modernism - there is no coherent social reality because it’s created differently in different contexts (i.e., no coherent self). You see it also pop up in the strong sociology of knowledge (construction of ideas may have little to do with “reality”).
2. Critical social theory: The basis of social reality is power. This can be defined in economic terms (Marx), race (DuBois), or gender (feminists). Or it can be generically defined (Bourdieu). Most of social life boils down to struggle over the stuff that gives your power, or resisting the power.
3. Values, institutions, and relations: This is the broad trend stemming from Weber and Durkheim. The basic elements of VI&R are that human communities have values, which are translated into order via rules, organizations, and institutions. This basic set up motivates everyone from Parsons, to Selznick, to Sumner, to Luhmann, to the world polity crowd. The flavors may be different, but they’re all about the push and pull between values and structure.
4. Resources and Action: This strand represents what might be called the “economic view” on things. Psychology and values are strongly de-emphasized and you just work on strategic action. The old version was called “social exchange.” Now we call it rational choice. But the R&A tent is big enough to catch some other types of sociology. Organizational ecology - psychology thin and focusing on competition - fits here as well. So might lightly theoretical stratification research.

This scheme won’t catch everything. For example, demography rarely focuses on institutions and interactions, so it doesn’t fit here. A-theoretical areas of sociology, like network analysis, or applied statistics, don’t fit either. But when you think about it, each box in the typology offers an object of study, a vocabulary for studying society, and a set of preferred explanations.