Introspective evidence is still treated with great suspicion in cognitive science. This work is designed to encourage cognitive scientists to take more account of the subject's unique perspective.

Introspective evidence is still treated with great suspicion in cognitive science. This work is designed to encourage cognitive scientists to take more account of the subject's unique perspective.

God In Us is a radical representation of the Christian faith for the 21st century. Following the example of the Old Testament prophets and the first-century Christians it overturns received ideas about God. God is not an invisible person 'out there' somewhere, but lives in the human heart and mind as 'the sum of all our values and ideals' guiding and inspiring our lives. This new updated edition includes a foreword by Bishop John Shelby Spong and an afterword from the (...) author. (shrink)

Volume 24, Issue 10, October 2024, Page 80-82.

Older adults prefer positive over negative information in a lab setting, compared to young adults. The extent to which OA avoid negative events or information relevant for their health and safety is not clear. We first investigated age differences in preferences for fear-enhancing vs. fear-reducing news articles during the Ebola Outbreak of 2014. We were able to collect data from 15 YA and 13 OA during this acute health event. Compared to YA, OA were more likely to read the fear-enhancing (...) article, select hand-sanitizer over lip balm, and reported greater fear of Ebola. We further investigated our research question during the COVID-19 pandemic with 164 YA and 171 OA. Participants responded to an online survey about the COVID-19 pandemic across 13 days during the initial peak of the pandemic in the United States. Both YA and OA preferred to read positive over negative news about the coronavirus, but OA were even more likely than YA to prefer the positive news article. No age differences in the fear of contraction were found, but OA engaged in more health-protective behaviors compared to YA. Although OA may not always report greater fear than YA or seek out negative information related to a health concern, they still engage in protective health behaviors. Thus, although positivity effects were observed in attention and emotional reports, OA still modified their behaviors more than YA, suggesting that positivity effects did not hamper OA ability to respond to a health crisis. (shrink)

Consider the odd fact—later I will try to show how very odd it is—that the only popular views about the morality of abortion are also the most extreme. Philosophical views are no exception; indeed I will argue that this extremism has deeply philosophical roots. It follows directly from the insistence on “drawing a line” dividing persons from non persons. We can't, so the usual arguments go, draw such a line anywhere except at the very beginning or the very end of (...) fetal development. But on the practical level, as most of us know first-hand, that extremism remains problematic: it yields a factious and clumsy casuistry. It is equally difficult—and, surely, equally inhumane—to believe that a conceptus two days old is the moral equivalent of a fully functioning human being and that a fetus just prior to birth is the moral equivalent of a tumor. The division between persons and non persons, however, is linked in turn with certain others. Not only may the possibility of dividing any concept's denotation from its neighbors' seem to be at stake here; the division between persons and non persons depends more particularly—so I will argue—on the contemporary division in moral theory between moral reasons and other kinds of reasons, and in particular on the division between the moral and the self-interested “points of view.” That division in turn I trace back, in part, to the Hobbesian picture of the social world, on which the most fundamental division of all runs between persons and other persons. So one division points beyond itself to others. The critic is launched on a kind of odyssey through the theoretical presuppositions of applied ethics. (shrink)

_Thinking Through Questions_ is an accessible and compact guide to the art of questioning, covering both the use and abuse of questions. Animated by wide-ranging and engaging exercises and examples, the book helps students deepen their understanding of how questions work and what questions do, and builds the skills needed to ask better questions. Cowritten by two of today's leading philosopher-teachers, _Thinking Through Questions_ is specifically designed to complement, connect, and motivate today’s standard curricula, especially for classes in critical thinking, (...) philosophical questioning, and creative problem- solving (called here "expansive questioning"). Offering students a wide and appreciative look at questions and questioning, this small book will also appeal to faculty and students across the disciplines: in college writing courses, creativity workshops, education schools, introductions to college thinking, design thinking projects, and humanities and thinking classes. Open-ended, creative, and critically self-possessed thinking is its constant theme—what field doesn’t need more of that? (shrink)

School reform and accountability tests have been hotly debated for decades, but the goal of reform and accountability has not. Most agree that the main problem with contemporary education is that it fails to adequately prepare students with the "21st century skills" needed to find jobs and promote national competitiveness in the global economy. Tony Armstrong challenges both the morality and the consequences of pushing this purpose of education. He says it is immoral because it neglects our children's deepest aspiration--happiness--and (...) treats them as mere cogs in the economic machine. Dr. Armstrong shows how methods of well-being based on happiness research--mindfulness, gratitude, perspective--can greatly improve kids' chances to feel better in the present and to live happier lives in the future. And the kindergarten-through-college "happiness pedagogy" he presents would also be a superior way to teach those "21st century skills.". (shrink)

Age of Anxiety: Meaning, Identity, and Politics in 21st Century Film and Literature applies historical and contemporary political and rhetorical theory to current popular culture to discuss the problem of the displaced autonomous self and the quest for a meaningful life.

The ArgumentThe thesis of this paper is that there are three basic processes by which a technological innovation is fitted into an existing culture: Rejection, in situations where all interested groups are satisfied with a traditional technology and reject apparently superior innovations because they would force unwanted changes in technology and ideology; Acceptance, in situations where a new technology is embraced by all because it appears to serve the same social and ideological functions as an inferior, or inoperative, traditional technology; (...) and — most commonly in complex societies — conflict over acceptance or rejection, in situations where a new technology introduced or proposed by one group, who perceive it as advancing their interests, is resisted by another group, who perceive it as threatening their welfare. A traditional tripartite concept of culture is employed, distinguishing technology, social organization, and ideology. Four case studies are introduced to illuminate the issue: the Thonga tribesmen of Mozambique, whose occupation as gold and diamond miners at first suited perfectly the requirements of the Thonga lineage and marriage system; the Yir Yoront of Australia, an aboriginal group who found that the steel axe introduced by whites disrupted the patriarchal status system and confounded their mythology; the Senecas, an American Indian tribe that for generations rejected male plow agriculture because their way of life was organized around female horticulture, but who took up male agriculture at the urging of a prophet when traditional male roles disintegrated on the reservation; and the anthracite miners and mine operators of nineteenth-century Pennsylvania, who discovered that fundamental changes in both social organization and ideology were needed in order to cope with catastrophically high rates of industrial accidents attendant on the new system of deep-shaft mining. (shrink)

This essay suggests that Hans-Georg Gadamer’s descriptive phenomenology of ‘tarrying’ [Verweilen] can be configured as an essential component of musical experience. At issue is the type of effortful work that intensifies the subject’s most valuable musical experiences and that allows them to become more sustainable and sensitive. It is assumed that music’s presence in the subject’s life should blossom and indeed bloom over time, although this guiding assumption is left unexamined while the essay considers how a detailed phenomenology of musical (...) tarrying might afford the subject a way of underwriting the ways in which human-music relationships are configured. John Cage’s plant piece Child of Tree is deployed, perhaps counterintuitively, as an example of the ideal hermeneutic attitude underwriting tarrying, although it is suggested that the applicability of Gadamer’s constitution of tarrying extends beyond the musical-theatrical avant-garde. (shrink)

Empirical legal research is defined in many ways. These differences in definition are important when considering the place of empirical legal studies in the law school curriculum. In this regard, this article reflects on school curricula in law schools in the United States and the United Kingdom. Empirical legal studies are largely absent from law school curricula. One indispensable pre-condition for any law school curriculum is that it must reflect what those teaching it believe to be true. Empirical legal studies (...) can be properly incorporated into the law school curriculum if students not only use and understand such studies but also understand the methods used and the theories upon which they are based. Law schools throughout the world are in a state of flux. Empirical legal research has to compete for the attention of academics in law schools with a number of other areas of research that are becoming more popular. (shrink)

For too long certain scholars have been content to portray Irenaeus of Lyons as a well-meaning churchman but incompetent theologian. By offering a careful reading of Irenaeus' polemical and constructive arguments, Briggman contradicts these claims by showing that he was highly educated, trained in the rhetorical arts, aware of general philosophical positions, and able to use both rhetorical and philosophical theories and methods in his argumentation. It is the first book to study both Irenaeus' conceptions of God and the person (...) of Christ. (shrink)

(2012). On Human Kinds and Role Models: A Critical Discussion about the African American Male Teacher. Educational Studies: Vol. 48, Black Teachers Theorizing, pp. 296-315.

This is a critical discussion of a paper on the problem of bootstrapping by Jose Zalabardo.

M. McKinsey has argued that the externalist theory of mental content implies that one can have a priori knowledge of propositions that are in fact only knowable a posteriori. So, according to McKinsey, the externalist theory must be mistaken. A. Gallois and J. O'Leary-Hawthorne have formalized this argument. In this paper, I discuss their formalization and their criticisms of it.

This article considers what St. Augustine has to say about administration in The City of God, as well as in The Rule of St. Augustine and in Of the Work of Monks. Rather than focusin...

Although first published in 1969, the methodological views advanced in Quentin Skinner's “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas” remain relevant today. In his article Skinner suggests that it would be inappropriate to even attempt to write the history of any idea or concept. In support of this view, Skinner advances two arguments, one derived from the philosophy of the later Wittgenstein and the other from that of J. L. Austin.In this paper I focus on the first of these (...) arguments. I claim that the conclusion which Skinner draws from this particular argument does not necessarily follow and that an alternative assessment of the methodological significance of Wittgenstein's philosophy for historians of ideas is possible. On this alternative view, far from ruling out conceptual history, an appeal to the view of meaning set out in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations leads to a quite different conclusion, namely that the writing of such a history is arguably a necessary precondition for the elucidation of the meaning of a number of the core concepts in the canon of the history of political thought.Skinner's views have changed somewhat since 1969. Indeed, from the mid 1970s onwards he came to relax the strict opposition to the idea of conceptual history to which he was then committed. The paper concludes by noting that this evolution in Skinner's thinking has made him much more sympathetic than anybody reading “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas” would have imagined to the research project of the Begriffgeschichte School of conceptual history. (shrink)