In this paper I consider Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous attack on natural theology with respect to how it lines up with Catholic thought on that topic. I argue that Kierkegaard’s recently shown similarities to accounts of basic beliefs raise an interesting question when a Catholic hybrid of basic beliefs and natural theology, which I develop in the paper, is considered. Kierkegaard does not attack what we might call natural reason, or a natural awareness of God’s existence, only natural theology’s demonstrative capabilities, and (...) his reasons for doing the latter, in our current epistemological climate, are shown to be mistaken. (shrink)

Placing Kierkegaard in sustained dialogue with the Catholic tradition, Jack Mulder, Jr., does not simply review Catholic reactions to or interpretations of Kierkegaard, but rather provides an extended look into convergences and differences ...

In a recent article, Jack Mulder, Jr., gives a Plantinga-style defense of the Virgin Mary’s free consent to bear Jesus at the Annunciation. Against Mulder, I argue that a theodicy (rather than a defense) is necessary to undermine my arguments, that Mulder’s Catholic appeal to Mary’s Immaculate Conception amounts to a kind of freedom-undermining metaphysical grooming, and therefore Marian consent remains invalid.

Vaccination can protect vaccinated individuals and often also prevent them from spreading disease to other people. This opens up the possibility of getting vaccinated for the sake of others. In fact, altruistic vaccination has recently been conceptualized as a kind of vaccination that is undertaken primary for the benefit of others. In order to better understand the potential role of altruistic motives in people’s vaccination decisions, we conducted two focus group studies with a total of 37 participants. Study 1 included (...) three focus groups on the subject of HPV vaccination for boys. Study 2 included three focus groups on the subject of pertussis and measles vaccination for childcare workers. We found substantial evidence of other-regarding motives across all focus groups, which suggests that altruistic motives could be an important factor when it comes to people’s vaccination decisions. We address the significance of these findings for vaccination policy surrounding HPV vaccination for boys and vaccination for childcare workers. We also extend the findings to normative work on vaccination for the sake of others more generally. (shrink)

Interpreting Figurative Meaning critically evaluates the recent empirical work from psycholinguistics and neuroscience examining the successes and difficulties associated with interpreting figurative language. There is now a huge, often contradictory literature on how people understand figures of speech. Gibbs and Colston argue that there may not be a single theory or model that adequately explains both the processes and products of figurative meaning experience. Experimental research may ultimately be unable to simply adjudicate between current models in psychology, linguistics and philosophy (...) of how figurative meaning is interpreted. Alternatively, the authors advance a broad theoretical framework, motivated by ideas from 'dynamical systems theory', that describes the multiple, interacting influences which shape people's experiences of figurative meaning in discourse. This book details past research and theory, offers a critical assessment of this work and sets the stage for a new vision of figurative experience in human life. (shrink)

Philosophical defenses of cognitive/evolutionary psychological accounts of racialism claim that classification based on phenotypical features of humans was common historically and is evidence for a species-typical, cognitive mechanism for essentializing. They conclude that social constructionist accounts of racialism must be supplemented by cognitive/evolutionary psychology. This article argues that phenotypical classifications were uncommon historically until such classifications were socially constructed. Moreover, some philosophers equivocate between two different meanings of “racial thinking.” The article concludes that social constructionist accounts are far more robust (...) than psychological accounts for the origins of racialism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Acts of Enjoyment: Rhetoric, Žižek, and the Return of the SubjectJames J. Brown Jr. and Joshua GunnActs of Enjoyment: Rhetoric, Žižek, and the Return of the Subject by Thomas Rickert. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007. Pp. x + 252. $24.95, hardcover.Thomas Rickert had a falling-out with his brother, and this distresses him so much that his disrupted relation is described as “traumatic.” Rickert reports that while listening (...) to a portable CD player during a run on an unexpectedly warm winter day, a song by the now defunct jazz/rock band Morphine reminded him of a happy time at a pool hall with his brother (24). Mediated—or better, medicated—by music, the homological happiness of running in the sun and a positive past memory also resurfaced a painful relational rupture, the reason of which Rickert omits to underscore that mysterious, “little detail or object” of the Real that marks his singular finitude as a writing subject (216 n. 11). We’ll want to come back to this curiously deliberate omission, but for the present we note Rickert is not simply an undead author but a human being with relations and feelings. He is not just a gifted scholar or a bundle of reflections, but a nexus of body and movement and words and affect. If there is anything that Rickert’s study can be said to work through with brilliance, humor, and grace, it is the reality of complex personhood.Rickert’s brotherly confession comes in Chapter 1 as a way to introduce a psychoanalytic understanding of subjectivity, and more specifically, to help illustrate how trauma works itself out as an afterwardness or “belatedness” ( Nachträglichkeit ): traumatic events from the past are not reckoned with or worked-through until some coincidence or reminder, such as a similar [End Page 183] sensory experience, reintroduces the event in doubled re-presentation (18–27). This implies the “subject” (a paradigm person) is a kind of timedelay, a self-conscious temporal moving that becomes this way through re-presentation. The rhetorical subject is analogously a retrojected reckoning with events past (not all traumatic) that Rickert identifies as a scene of writing, a locus that has important implications for rhetorical studies in general and writing pedagogy in particular. Rickert’s logic is as follows: if we agree that the subject is a belated one in the psychoanalytic sense, then how we teach rhetoric needs to change. Rickert opens the book with the observation that his students are producing excellent cultural critiques but that such critiques do not lead the students to change their actions (1–7), perhaps evidence enough that something is not quite right in a classroom grounded by “cultural studies pedagogy” and ideology critique—or at the very least, proof that something has changed. The opening gambit is simply that a “postpedagogy” premised on an understanding of rhetorical subjectivity as belatedness is better than a status quo rooted in the rational subject of the Enlightenment.Mostly through a Žižek-filtered, Lacanian lens, Acts of Enjoyment then undertakes a retake of the rhetorical field, frequently scanning from the traumatic ontology of the rhetorical subject to that domain of knowledge that we hold dear, the subject of rhetoric. In Chapter 2, the (primal) scene thus shifts from the slo-mo subject to rhetorical studies, initially through a reassessment of Kinneavy’s “communications triangle,” but ultimately in response to the shock treatment of poststructuralism. The initial theoretical traumas introduced by Victor Vitanza, Diane Davis, Sharon Crowley, and others discussed in Chapter 1 are threaded into an account of “poststructural” redress in Chapter 2: as is true of all forms of trauma, the initial poststructural jolt delivered to the concept of subjectivity was deadened; poststructural theory was eventually used to “shore up rather than challenge Kinneavy’s triangle” (37). To truly work-through our traumatized subject in both senses, we need a second trauma: Lacanian psychoanalysis. Presumably, “poststructuralist thought” is to be opposed because it has no account of the subject (21–24); “Lacan,” after all, “is not a poststructuralist” (48). The remainder of the chapter is then used to deploy Lacan’s conceptual lexicon.Just as... (shrink)

Biology and the social sciences share an interest in phylogeny. Biologists know that living species are descended from past species, and use the pattern of similarities among living species to reconstruct the history of phylogenetic branching. Social scientists know that the beliefs, values, practices, and artifacts that characterize contemporary societies are descended from past societies, and some social science disciplines, linguistics and cross cultural anthropology for example, have made use of observed similarities to reconstruct cultural histories. Darwin appreciated that his (...) theory of descent with modification had many similarities of pattern and process to the already well developed field of historical linguistics. In many other areas of social science, however, phylogenetic reconstruction has not played a central role. (shrink)

Conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) has become prominent in metaphor scholarship because of its explanation of the relations between people's metaphoric thoughts and their use of metaphoric discourse. Our aim in this article is to explore the temporal characteristics of how conceptual metaphors shape verbal metaphor use. We argue that cognitive linguistics and psycholinguistics mostly adopt simplistic, and psychologically implausible, views of how conceptual metaphors are activated and then constrain people's comprehension of metaphoric language. But more contemporary ideas on how cognitive (...) processing unfolds over time in human experience provide better models of how conceptual metaphors shape verbal metaphor use. The implications of this newer vision of CMT are discussed, particularly in regard to methods for studying how conceptual metaphors support interpretation of linguistic metaphor. (shrink)

Few observers of relationship dynamics would dispute the claim of interdependence theorists that a defining feature of close relationships is the extent to which partners influence each other's thoughts, feelings, or behaviors. However, partners do not behave simply in response to each other's behavior; both partners in a given relationship bring themselves - indeed, their selves - into the relationship as well. Not only are individuals' selves enormously complex and rich in content, but so too are the multitude of personality (...) characteristics, including traits, values, attitudes, motives, and emotions, that contribute to selves' richness. Gaines, Jr provides a major integration of research on personality with research on relationship science, and demonstrates how personality constructs can be readily incorporated into the two most influential theories of close relationships: attachment theory and interdependence theory. This study will be of value to scholars in the fields of close relationships, personality psychology, communication studies, and family studies. (shrink)

Exposição de alguns aspectos básicos da analítica existencial realizada por Martin Heidegger na obra Ser e Tempo. Nosso ponto de partida é o curso do semestre de verão de 1923, Hermenêutica da facticidade, no qual o filósofo antecipa muitas das descrições fenomenológicas presentes na analítica existencial de Ser e Tempo. Em seguida, explicita-se as estruturas ontológicas do homem como ser-aí cuja constituição fundamental é ser no mundo, analisando as possíveis repercussões no campo da educação.

A finalidade do presente artigo é mostrar como o conjunto dos temas propostos por Heidegger se insere em uma posição bem clara sobre a modernidade na qual se destacam as noções de ciência e técnica.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:"He Who Eats Me Will Live Because of Me":Eucharistic Indwelling and Aquinas's Johannine Theology of the Missions of the Divine PersonsDaniel M. Garland Jr.IntroductionIn the Bread of Life Discourse of John 6, Jesus begins his teaching by stating that he is the true bread from heaven sent from God to give life to the world. After "the Jews" (οἱ Ἰουδαῖοι)1 boast that Moses gave their fathers manna to eat (...) in the wilderness, Jesus makes a contrast between the manna in the wilderness and himself as the "bread of life" (6:35). While the title "Bread of Life" carries a metaphorical sense, Jesus climaxes his discourse by [End Page 1171] insisting that believers eat of (ἐσθίω) or gnaw on (τρώγω) his flesh and drink his blood. Then, in John 6:57, Jesus makes the startling claim: "As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so the one who eats [τρώγω] me will live because of me." Jesus, here, connects his mission with the giving of his flesh as food for eternal life. At the same time, Jesus declares in John 17:3 that eternal life is predicated on the knowledge of God the Father and Jesus Christ, whom he has sent. There seems to be a tension here in John's Gospel. Do we have eternal life by eating or by knowing?This article will explore the gift of eternal life communicated through the sacramental eating and drinking of Christ's body and blood and its relation to our coming to know the Father and the Son. It will be divided into two main parts. The first part will explore this as revealed in the text of the Gospel of John by examining what it means "to know God." Next, I will show that Jesus has the power to give eternal life because he is Life itself and that John points to the root of this power as being derived from Jesus's procession from the Father. Then, I will take up Jesus's mutual abiding/indwelling language in John 6 and elsewhere in the Gospel and how this contributes to bringing eternal life to believers. The second part will show how St. Thomas's teaching on the missions of the divine persons further clarifies Jesus's teaching in the Gospel of John that eternal life comes about through both eating Christ's flesh and coming to the knowledge of the Father and the Son and also gives greater theological insight into the Johannine theology of the Eucharist as the source of eternal life.Gospel of JohnJohn 17 and the Relational Name of the Father and the Son in Relation to Eternal LifeIn John 17, Jesus prays from the vantage point of already having completed (17:4; τελειώσας) the work that the Father has given him to do. The work that Jesus speaks of is both a past event, consisting of the signs that witness that the Father has sent him (see 5:36; τελειώσω), but also the future event of the Cross(see 19:30; τελειώσω),2 Here, Jesus requests glorification by the Father in order that he, as Son, may glorify the Father in return. This mutual glorification is rooted in the power (ἐξουσίαν) that the Father has given to the Son over all flesh—the power to grant eternal life (17:2). Jesus [End Page 1172] then defines eternal life in 17:3 as "to know the only true God and Jesus Christ whom he has sent." There is an intimate connection, here, between knowing the Father ("the only true God") and Jesus. Eternal life is not merely knowledge of the Father, but knowledge of the Father as the one who sent the Son.3 How does one know the Father? John 17 suggests that it is through the revelation of his name. There is a repeated refrain in John 17 of Jesus making known the Father's name (17:6, 26) and keeping them in this name (17:11, 12). Looking back in the Gospel, we can recall that in John 5:43, Jesus associates the "Father's name" with his mission: "I have come in my Father's name." The same can... (shrink)

While philosophers debate the precise articulation of philosophical theory to achieve a desirable change in environmental attitudes, they may be neglecting the fountainhead of social change. Insofar as ordinary people are concemed, it is religion which is the greatest factor in determining morality. In order to achieve an enlightened environmental ethics, we need what can only be termed a “religious experience.” While not denying the efficacy of other religious persuasions, I explore the contribution of an informed modem Pantheism to environmental (...) ethics. The conceptual division of the holy and theworld is rectified by pantheism. As a form of “nature mysticism,” pantheism promotes a theological basis for achieving oneness with God through knowledge, devotion, and works, all of which establish an enlightened theory for environmental ethics. A modem pantheism bears investigation by those advocating new ethical approaches toward the environment. (shrink)

The argument for Christianity from fulfilled Bible prophecies, when implemented with best practices, can be public, impartial, empirical, significant, efficient, and promising. The competing hypotheses considered here are that Bible prophecies exhibit spectacular accuracy because of revelation from God, or else miserable accuracy because of merely occasional luck from unaided humans. A new statistical analysis can test these hypotheses efficiently with a manageable collection of fulfilled Bible prophecies, typically about five to twenty prophecies, and also can refute a charge that (...) these successful prophecies result from mere luck and bias. (shrink)

The epistemological and sociological consequences of post-modernity include the inability to show moral strangers, in terms they can see as binding, the moral wrongness of activities such as abortion. Such activities can be perceived as morally disordered within a content-full moral narrative, but not outside of the context it brings. Though one can salvage something of the Enlightenment project of justifying a morality that can bind moral strangers, one is left with moral and metaphysical views that can be recognized as (...) impoverished and incomplete by those who live their lives within the embrace of a content-full moral narrative. The cardinal dualism of post-modemity is not that which separates mind from body, but the gulf between the morality binding moral strangers and that binding moral friends. Keywords: dualism, human embryo, personhood, post-modernity CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

Este trabalho analisa idéias e atividades de Karl Popper referentes à controvérsia sobre interpretações e fundamentos da mecânica quântica. Atenção especial será dedicada às relações entre Popper e o físico italiano Franco Selleri, ao longo da década de 1980. A interpretação proposta por Popper para os enunciados probabilísticos como propensões, bem como seu ponto de vista realista, contribuíram para estabelecer uma ponte entre suas investigações filosóficas e a pesquisa física em mecânica quântica, ainda que sua idéia sobre as propensões tenha (...) tido uma pequena repercussão entre físicos, matemáticos e filósofos. Argumentaremos neste trabalho que a influência de Popper na física foi possível devido à legitimação, a partir de 1970, da controvérsia sobre os fundamentos da teoria quântica como uma genuína controvérsia científica com implicações filosóficas. Popper foi beneficiado por essa legitimação, mas ele também contribuiu para fazer aquela controvérsia chegar a um público mais amplo que aquele dos físicos envolvidos na própria controvérsia.I intend to present in this paper Karl Popper’s ideas and activities concerning the controversy about the interpretations and foundations of quantum mechanics. I will pay special attention to Popper’s relationship with the Italian physicist Franco Selleri, during the 1980s. Popper’s ideas of propensity and realism contributed to build a bridge between his philosophy and physical research in quantum mechanics, even if his idea of propensity has had a weak reception among physicists, mathematicians and philosophers. I will argue that Popper’s contributions to physics were possible due to the legitimization in the 1970s of the controversy about the foundations of quantum mechanics, a process which permitted a trading zone between physics and philosophy. Popper was benefited by that process, but he also contributed to give to that controversy a larger audience thanthat of the physicists involved in that controversy. (shrink)

The analogy between biological and cultural evolution is not perfect. Yet, as Mesoudi et al. show, many of the vaunted differences between cultural and genetic evolution (for example, an absence of discrete particles of cultural inheritance, and the blurred distinction between cultural replicators and cultural phenotypes) are, on closer inspection, either illusory or peripheral to the validity of the analogy. But what about horizontal transmission? We strongly agree with the authors that the potential for horizontal transmission of cultural traits does (...) not invalidate an evolutionary approach to culture. We suggest, however, that it does require a different evolutionary treatment. (Published Online November 9 2006). (shrink)

Perhaps only Tar Baby is as enigmatic and compelling a figure from Afro-American mythic discourse as is that oxymoron, the Signifying Monkey.3 The ironic reversal of a received racist image of the black as simianlike, the Signifying Monkey—he who dwells at the margins of discourse, ever punning, ever troping, ever embodying the ambiguities of language—is our trope for repetition and revision, indeed, is our trope of chiasmus itself, repeating and simultaneously reversing in one deft, discursive act. If Vico and Burke, (...) or Nietzsche, Paul de Man, and Harold Bloom, are correct in identifying “master tropes,” then we might think of these as the “master’s tropes,” and of signifying as the slave’s trope, the trope of tropes, as Bloom characterizes metalepsis, “a trope-reversing trope, a figure of a figure.” Signifying is a trope that subsumes other rhetorical tropes, including metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony, and also hyberbole, litotes, and metalepsis. To this list, we could easily add aporia, chiasmus, and catachresis, all of which are used in the ritual of signifying.The black tradition has its own subdivisions of signifying, which we could readily identify with the typology of figures received from classical and medieval rhetoric, as Bloom has done with his “maps of misprision.” In black discourse “signifying” means modes of figuration itself. When one signifies, as Kimberly W. Benston puns, one “tropes-a-dope.” The black rhetorical tropes subsumed under signifying would include “marking,” “loud-talking,” “specifying,” “testifying,” “calling out”, “sounding,” “rapping,” and “playing the dozens.”4 3. On Tar Baby, see Ralph Ellison, “Hidden Man and Complex Fate: A Writer’s Experience in the United States,” Shadow and Act, p. 147, and Toni Morrison, Tar Baby. On the black as quasi-simian, see Jean Bodin, Method for the Easy Comprehension of History, trans. Beatrice Reynolds, p. 105; Aristotle Historia Animalium 606b; Thomas Herbert, Some Years Travels, pp. 16-17; and John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 8th ed., 2 vols., 2:53.4. Geneva Smitherman defines these and other black tropes and then traces their use in several black texts. Smitherman’s work, like that of Claudia Mitchell-Kernan and Abrahams, is especially significant for literary theory. See Smitherman, Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America, pp. 101-66. See also nn. 13 and 14 below. (shrink)