Lam, Joseph The reception of Augustine's theology and thoughts in Thomas Aquinas's works has never been a point of serious disagreement among scholars. What divides scholars is rather the question of how to assess the weight of Aristotelian influence and Thomas's Augustinian heritage. According to Gilson, the answer is evident in itself. While acknowledging in the works of the Dominican friar a close familiarity with Augustine's theology, the French philosopher nevertheless argued for a distinct Aristotelian colour in Thomas's philosophical (...) approach to the question of natural truths. To the question of how human reasoning arrives at the truth, Gilson wrote: 'What is it to know truth? It is intellectually to grasp the essences of things such as they are and to associate them in our minds, by means of judgements, in the same way they are associated in reality'. Knowledge, therefore, is not the result of a subjective mind, but rather an outcome of a conscious judgement that concords with the objective intellection of the given objects. In this Gilson observed a basic difference between Augustine and Thomas: Both St. Thomas's philosophy and St. Augustine's philosophy are philosophies of the concrete, but their attitude toward the concrete is not the same. St. Augustine always seeks notions comprehensive enough to embrace the concrete in its complexity. Thomas always seeks notions precise enough to define the elements that constitute the concrete. In a word, the former expresses the concrete, the latter analyses it. (shrink)

Researchers from across the social sciences have found consistent deviations from the predictions of the canonical model of self-interest in hundreds of experiments from around the world. This research, however, cannot determine whether the uniformity results from universal patterns of human behavior or from the limited cultural variation available among the university students used in virtually all prior experimental work. To address this, we undertook a cross-cultural study of behavior in ultimatum, public goods, and dictator games in a range (...) of small-scale societies exhibiting a wide variety of economic and cultural conditions. We found, first, that the canonical model – based on self-interest – fails in all of the societies studied. Second, our data reveal substantially more behavioral variability across social groups than has been found in previous research. Third, group-level differences in economic organization and the structure of social interactions explain a substantial portion of the behavioral variation across societies: the higher the degree of market integration and the higher the payoffs to cooperation in everyday life, the greater the level of prosociality expressed in experimental games. Fourth, the available individual-level economic and demographic variables do not consistently explain game behavior, either within or across groups. Fifth, in many cases experimental play appears to reflect the common interactional patterns of everyday life. Key Words: altruism; cooperation; cross-cultural research; experimental economics; game theory; ultimatum game; public goods game; self-interest. (shrink)

How far has the Darwinian revolution come? To what extent have evolutionary ideas penetrated into the social sciences and humanities? Are the “science wars” over? Or do whole blocs of disciplines face off over an unbridgeable epistemic gap? To answer questions like these, contributors to top journals in 22 disciplines were surveyed on their beliefs about human nature, culture, and science. More than 600 respondents completed the survey. Scoring patterns divided into two main sets of disciplines. Genetic influences were emphasized (...) in the evolutionary social sciences, evolutionary humanities, psychology, empirical study of the arts, philosophy, economics, and political science. Environmental influences were emphasized in most of the humanities disciplines and in anthropology, sociology, education, and women's or gender studies. Confidence in scientific explanation correlated positively with emphasizing genetic influences on behavior, and negatively with emphasizing environmental influences. Knowing the current actual landscape of belief should help scholars avoid sterile debates and ease the way toward fruitful collaborations with neighboring disciplines. (shrink)

Analytic debates about truth are wide-ranging, but certain key themes tend to crop up time and again. The three themes that we will examine in this paper are (i) the nature and behaviour of the ordinary concept of truth, (ii) the meaning of discourse about truth, and (iii) the nature of the property truth. We will start by offering a brief overview of the debates centring on these themes. We will then argue that cross-linguistic experimental philosophy has an indispensable (...) yet underappreciated role to play in all of these debates. Recognising the indispensability of cross-linguistic experimental philosophy should compel philosophers to significantly revise the ways in which they inquire about truth. It should also prompt analytic philosophers more generally to consider whether similar revisions might be necessary elsewhere in the field. (shrink)

What motives underlie the ways humans interact socially? Are these the same for all societies? Are these part of our nature, or influenced by our environments?Over the last decade, research in experimental economics has emphatically falsified the textbook representation of Homo economicus. Literally hundreds of experiments suggest that people care not only about their own material payoffs, but also about such things as fairness, equity and reciprocity. However, this research left fundamental questions unanswered: Are such social preferences stable components of (...) human nature; or, are they modulated by economic, social and cultural environments? Until now, experimental research could not address this question because virtually all subjects had been university students, and while there are cultural differences among student populations throughout the world, these differences are small compared to the full range of human social and cultural environments. A vast amount of ethnographic and historical research suggests that people's motives are influenced by economic, social, and cultural environments, yet such methods can only yield circumstantial evidence about human motives. Combining ethnographic and experimental approaches to fill this gap, this book breaks new ground in reporting the results of a large cross-cultural study aimed at determining the sources of social preferences that underlie the diversity of human sociality. The same experiments which provided evidence for social preferences among university students were performed in fifteen small-scale societies exhibiting a wide variety of social, economic and cultural conditions by experienced field researchers who had also done long-term ethnographic field work in these societies. The findings of these experiments demonstrated that no society in which experimental behaviour is consistent with the canonical model of self-interest. Indeed, results showed that the variation in behaviour is far greater than previously thought, and that the differences between societies in market integration and the importance of cooperation explain a substantial portion of this variation, which individual-level economic and demographic variables could not. Finally, the extent to which experimental play mirrors patterns of interaction found in everyday life is traced.The book starts with a succinct but substantive introduction to the use of game theory as an analytical tool and its use in the social sciences for the rigorous testing of hypotheses about fundamental aspects of social behaviour outside artificially constructed laboratories. The results of the fifteen case studies are summarized in a suggestive chapter about the scope of the project. (shrink)

This book explores the challenges of informed consent in medical intervention and research ethics, considering the global reality of multiculturalism and religious diversity. Even though informed consent is a gold standard in research ethics, its theoretical foundation is based on the conception of individual subjects making autonomous decisions. There is a need to reconsider autonomy as relational-where family members, community and religious leaders can play an important part in the consent process. The volume re-evaluates informed consent in multicultural contexts and (...) features perspectives from Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism and Islam. It is valuable reading for scholars interested in bioethics, healthcare ethics, research ethics, comparative religions, theology, human rights, law and sociology. (shrink)

Uses erotetic logic to model the courtroom objection "Improper Cross!". -/- Readers downloading the article should also please download the erratum et corrigendum, which is locally available.

Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world's top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers – often implicitly – assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard subjects” are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is (...) substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species – frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior – hence, there are no obviousa priorigrounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions ofhumannature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges. (shrink)

BackgroundAlthough the peer review process is believed to ensure scientific rigor, enhance research quality, and improve manuscript clarity, many investigators are concerned that the process is too slow, too expensive, too unreliable, and too static. In this feasibility study, we sought to survey corresponding authors of recently published clinical research studies on the speed and efficiency of the publication process.MethodsWeb-based survey of corresponding authors of a 20% random sample of clinical research studies in MEDLINE-indexed journals with Ovid MEDLINE entry dates (...) between December 1 and 15, 2016. Survey addressed perceived manuscript importance before first submission, approximate first submission and final acceptance dates, and total number of journal submissions, external peer reviews, external peer reviewers, and revisions requested, as well as whether authors would have considered publicly sharing their manuscript on an online platform instead of submitting to a peer-reviewed journal.ResultsOf 1780 surveys distributed, 27 corresponding authors opted out or requested that we stop emailing them and 149 emails failed (e.g., emails that bounced n = 64, returned with an away from office message n = 70, or were changed/incorrect n = 15), leaving 1604 respondents, of which 337 completed the survey (21.0%). Respondents and non-respondents were similar with respect to study type and publication journals’ impact factor, although non-respondent authors had more publications (p = 0.03). Among respondents, the median impact factor of the publications’ journal was 2.7 (interquartile range (IQR), 2.0–3.6) and corresponding authors’ median h-index and number of publications was 9 (IQR, 3–20) and 27 (IQR, 10–77), respectively. The median time from first submission to journal acceptance and publication was 5 months (IQR, 3–8) and 7 months (IQR, 5–12), respectively. Most respondents (62.0%, n = 209) rated the importance of their research as a 4 or 5 (5-point scale) prior to submission. Median number of journal submissions was 1 (IQR, 1–2), external peer reviews was 1 (IQR, 1–2), external peer reviewers was 3 (IQR, 2–4), and revisions requested was 1 (IQR, 1–1). Sharing manuscripts to a public online platform, instead of submitting to a peer-reviewed journal, would have been considered by 55.2% (n = 186) of respondents.ConclusionCorresponding authors have high perceptions of their research and reported requiring few manuscript submissions prior to journal acceptance, most commonly by lower impact factor journals. (shrink)

This article situates Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite (2019) within the historical logics of the Washington Consensus. In this broad context, we might think of the film’s much-heralded class critique as not quite so domestically contained as may initially appear in a film staged primarily in the confines of a single household. Instead, it opens onto a global political economic framework, which it explores through a nested structure in which class dynamics are also mobilized to explore cold-war and trade-war logics, both of (...) which are revealed to be radically interconnected with domestic concerns. Parasite reveals then the inherent dissensus in the Washington Consensus, a dissensus that was always latent but eventually became more explicit. We might say more generally that stories of class difference take on a pointedly different tenor during periods of stagnation; the specific anxiety in Parasite then is not just over the moral fact of social inequality but also specifically about the material distribution of wealth in the face of diminishing resources. The fact of brutal competition emerges from a milieu that seems ostensibly defined by plentitude. (shrink)

Joseph Carens argues that Michael Walzer's account of the moral autonomy of political communities is not true to our shared understanding of justice. Drawing upon a wide range of cross‐cultural examples, he argues that our understanding of justice requires us sometimes to criticize institutions and policies of political communities that are culturally different to our own communities. Focusing on issues of gender and democracy, he also argues that the ‘we’ who make these judgements does not always correspond to (...) the members of a political community but can be either wider or narrower. (shrink)

A caregiver from the dominant U.S. culture and a patient from a very different culture can resolve cross‐cultural disputes about treatment, not by compromising important values, but by focusing on the patient's goals.

Climate models calibrated exclusively with observations from the 19th through 21st centuries are unsuitable for assessing many important hypotheses about the future. Many systems in the modern climate are expected to cross dynamic thresholds in the near future, requiring more than the instrumental record for adequate calibration. In this paper I argue that paleoclimate analogues from earth’s past can mitigate this threshold problem, even if the modern climate exhibits features that make it historically unique. While this requires that paleoclimatologists (...) be increasingly discriminate in the past systems they target for modern analogues, the upshot is a practice of climate model construction that improves the reliability of future projections. All of this is achieved by integrating features of past climate systems discovered by the study of earth deep in the past. My analysis synthesizes important empirical work done by climate modelers and paleoclimatologists with relevant philosophical work on analogical reasoning in science. (shrink)

Cross-fertilizing roots and routes calls for new practices of seeking, being, and Self-realization. Raimon Panikkar embodied such a vocation and praxis of being and becoming. Panikkar taught and lived in the United States from 1966–1987 and was known to generations of students here and around the world through both his lectures and his many books. What they heard and read were the arresting reflections of a multi-dimensional person, who was simultaneously a philosopher, theologian, mystic, priest, and poet. It was (...) also that combination of personae that made him at times difficult to understand. He was a formidable scholar with doctorates in philosophy, theology, and chemistry and an acquaintance with the worlds of learning and religious reflection in more than a dozen languages. This stupendous productivity, sustained over some sixty-five years, was made possible by great discipline, dedication, and focus. He was a classic Jnana Yogi. (shrink)

The theological turn in phenomenology continues to generate cross-disciplinary discussion among philosophers and theologians concerning the scope and boundaries of what counts as a “phenomenon.” This essay suggests that the very idea of the given, a term so important for Husserl, Heidegger, Henry and Marion, can be reassessed from the point of view of Wilifred Sellars’s discussion of the myth of the “immediate” given. Sometimes phenomenology is understood to involve the skill of unveiling immediate data that appear as “phenomena” (...) to a conscious and wakeful ego. In conversation with Jean-Luc Marion’s volume Givenness and Revelation, I challenge the assumption that phenomena are immediate in their givenness. The final remarks concern the “how” of the givenness of theological data, and in particular, the phenomenon of the Trinity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 123.4 (2002) 623-627 [Access article in PDF] Brief MentionMetamorphoses:a Play By Mary Zimmerman Joseph Farrell I CANNOT REMEMBER A TIME when scholarly interest in a particular classical author was equaled, and maybe exceeded, by a popular enthusiasm measured in weeks on the best-seller lists, boffo box office, and Tony awards. But this seems now to have happened with Ovid. Latinists for some time have (...) been taking Ovid much more seriously than they had done, making his poetry a vehicle for new directions in their work. Over roughly the same period, we have seen Ovidian novels by David Malouf, Christoph Ransmayr, and Jane Alison; fresh translations and ambitious reworkings by Ted Hughes and other poets; and now a remarkable new play by the extraordinary Mary Zimmerman (Circle in the Square, New York, N.Y., from 4 March 2002). 1Zimmerman, a professor of performance studies at Northwestern and a former MacArthur fellow, is a major figure in innovative theatrical venues nationwide. She is known to classicists particularly for her adaptation of the Odyssey, which has been staged in a number of cities since its 1989 premiere. Metamorphoses is, however, her first Broadway production. The show opened off Broadway last fall, and that run was preceded by several others in Chicago, Seattle, Berkeley, and Los Angeles over the past five or more years. 2 As a result, probably everybody [End Page 623] knows something about the play, if only that it is staged in and around a pool of water. The pool is in many ways the star of the show. In the play's opening episode, the Cosmogony, it signifies elemental water, and it recalls its original elemental role in subsequent appearances while signaling that in an Ovidian world, even elemental substances undergo constant change. Thus, water, the most protean of elements, becomes the luxurious swimming pool of a nouveau riche Midas, the ocean in which Ceyx drowns, the food devoured by Erysichthon, Narcissus' mirror, a basin to hold Myrrha's tears, the River Styx when it is crossed by Orpheus, another swimming pool (or maybe the River Po?) on which Phaethon neurotically floats. The pool is surrounded by a three-foot-wide deck, and the minimalist set is completed by an imposing double door behind the pool and to the left; a raised platform behind the pool and to the right; a rectangle of painted skyscape, vaguely reminiscent of Magritte, above the platform; and a chandelier above the pool. A cast of ten actors plays a couple of dozen characters, changing in and out of costumes that are evocative of a generalized antiquity but one in which such things as suspenders and trousers are not unknown: a dream antiquity, then, in which modern viewers can lose themselves or find themselves as circumstances dictate.The advance notices that I had heard or read prepared me to enjoy the play, but its power surprised me. Metamorphoses was an elating experience and one that moved me nearly to tears. It accomplished this by unexpected means. The script is not designed as a vehicle for virtuoso acting. The cast respect this quality in their lines and do not overplay the hand that they are dealt. Instead, the basic emotions of each story are allowed to speak directly. Not that the script or the actors' readings are naïve—on the contrary, they are generally inflected in just the right directions throughout a series of episodes that are, by turns, campy, risqué, or silly and then sweet, shocking, or exquisitely, heart-wrenchingly sad. It is in fact here that this play and this production excel: Laughter and tears walk side by side in each episode but with a different cadence in each case. Now tears are a reproach for taking a story too lightly; now laughter lightens and consoles in the midst of sorrow. In conducting the audience through this spectrum of emotions, Zimmerman has captured the seriocomic element in Ovid as perhaps no other interpreter has ever done. 3 It is worth mentioning here that the basis of Zimmerman's text... (shrink)

Notre époque de culture sans Dieu, celle du « discours sur la mort de Dieu », provoque la théologie à se concentrer sur la Croix du Christ pour y reconnaître le lieu même de la révélation de Dieu et fonder du même coup le vrai sens de la « mort de Dieu ». Si l’athéisme est né de l’impuissance de la pensée moderne à concevoir la nécessité de Dieu , la théologie de la Croix en apporte la justification ; car (...) la connaissance naturelle de Dieu ne peut se réclamer d’aucune nécessité rationnelle, quand la révélation de Dieu sur la Croix — scandale pour la raison — échappe à toute évidence externe et fait savoir que l’existence de Dieu n’a pas de fondement dans ce monde.La gratuité est donc caractéristique de cette révélation, la marque de son humilité. L’événement de la Croix est l’avènement historique de la liberté de l’homme face à Dieu, liberté de croire et de ne pas croire, d’exister avec Dieu ou sans Dieu. Cette liberté est le don même de la foi et le salut offet à tous ceux qui vivent selon la gratuité de l’amour. En révélant que Dieu est amour, la Croix proclame que la gratuité est son être en soi et pour soi en même temps que son être « pour nous », à la fois existence trinitaire et relation à la créature.Our era of a culture without God, that of “discourse on the death of God”, provokes theology to concentrate on the Cross of Christ in order to recognize the center of God’s revelation and to establish, at the same time, the true sense of the “death of God”. If atheism is born of the weakness of modern thought to conceive the necessity of God , the theology of the Cross brings justification to it. For the natural knowledge of God can not claim for itself any rational necessity, when the revelation of God on the Cross — a scandal to reason — escapes all external evidence and shows that the existence of God has no foundation in this world.Gratuitousness, then, is characteristic of this revelation, the mark of its humility. The event of the Cross is the historical coming of mankind’s freedom before God, freedom to believe or not to believe, to exist with God or without God. This freedom is the very gift of faith and salvation offered to all those who live according to the gratuitousness of love. In revealing that God is love, the Cross proclaims that gratuitousness is his being in itself and for itself at the same time as his being “for us”. It is both Trinitarian existence and relation to the creature. (shrink)

In this conceptual article, the authors explore the possibilities of another approach to examining the human dimensions of wildland fire. They argue that our understanding of this issue could be enhanced by considering a cultural studies construct known as the ‘‘circuit of culture.’’ This cross-disciplinary perspective provides increased analytic power by accounting for the meaningful role of 5 cultural processes in terms of their location and interrelation within social experience. The authors compare the circuit of culture approach with a (...) body of recent literature focused on wildland fire. The authors make the case that this research has moved in a positive direction since wildland fire first ignited social scientific interest in the 1980s, but it is still missing key cultural processes. Ultimately, following the circuit allows us to make more nuanced statements about meaning, something much needed in the face of the wicked problem of wildland fire. (shrink)

A geographically stratified cross-sectional survey was conducted in 2002 to investigate household-level factors associated with use of mosquito control measures and self-reported malaria in Malindi, Kenya. A total of 629 households were surveyed. Logistic regressions were used to analyse the data. Half of all households (51%) reported all occupants using an insecticide-treated bed net and at least one additional mosquito control measure such as insecticides or removal of standing water. Forty-nine per cent reported a history of malaria in the (...) household. Of the thirteen household factors analysed, low (OR=0·23, CI 0·11, 0·48) and medium (OR=0·50, CI 0·29, 0·86) education, mudcoral (OR=0·0·39, CI 0·24, 0·66) and mud block–plaster (OR=0·47, CI 0·25, 0·87) wall types, farming (OR=1·38, CI 1·01, 1·90) and travel to rural areas (OR=0·48, CI 0·26, 0·91) were significantly associated with the use of mosquito control, while controlling for other covariates in the model. History of reported malaria was not associated with the use of mosquito control (OR=1·22, CI 0·79, 1·88). Of the thirteen covariates analysed in the second model, only two household factors were associated with history of malaria: being located in the well-drained stratum (OR=0·49, CI 0·26, 0·96) and being bitten while in the house (OR=1·22, CI 0·19, 0·49). These results suggest that high socioeconomic status is associated with increased household-level mosquito control use, although household-level control may not be enough, as many people are exposed to biting mosquitoes while away from the house and in areas that are more likely to harbour mosquitoes. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 517 she does on these issues; this is hardly the case. And lastly she fails to discern that some feminist christology does not spring from a love for Jesus and what he has done through his cross and resurrection; rather, Jesus is merely used (and thus abused) to further a theological and political agenda. [Men obviously are not immune from this either.] Despite my disagreements with (...) some of Johnson's arguments and conclusions, and despite my disappointment at the way she addresses the feminist issues, I found this hook to he a basically reliable and clear summary of the christology of the last forty years. Whether it has all been true development, as Johnson maintains, is a debatable question. Nonetheless, this book does elaborate the contemporary issues and possible answers that confront christology today, and for this makes it a book well worth reading. Mother of God Community Washington. D.C. THOMAS WEINANDY, O.F.M. Cap. The Philosophical Theology of John Duns Scotus. By ALLAN B. WOLTER, O.F.M. Ed. Marilyn McCord Adams. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990. Pp. ix+ 356. $47.50. Duns Scotus was a brilliant light that flashed a brief time across the medieval sky hut was destined ultimately to he outshone by other luminaries immediately preceding him (Aquinas) and following him (Ockham). Perhaps no individual in the past half century has done more to illuminate the Subtle Doctor's thought and times than Allan B. Wolter, O.F.M. Both his editing and his translating of primary sources as well as his detailed readings and expositions of Scotus's theories have put medieval scholars in his debt. The present volume is a collection of thirteen essays on particular aspects of Scotus's work, preceded by an introduction. Ten of the essays have been previously published in other sources ranging from.the late 1940s to the present. But as editor Marilyn McCord Adams points out in her forward, many of these can be found only with difficulty in often inaccessible journals and books. Thus the value of this single volume. The essays are grouped under three headings: metaphysics and epistemology, action theory and ethics, and philosophical theology. As is often true with any volume spanning a number of topics and years, the quality of exposition and analysis is uneven. Obviously, in a limited space, I cannot hope to treat all subjects in a volume as comprehensive 518 BOOK REVIEWS as Wolter's. Permit me, however, to begin by making some general comments and then to narrow my remarks to one particular issue. Wolter's introduction to the volume is as clear and concise an overview of Scotus's ideas as one is likely to find anywhere in the literature. In general, the essays in the first part of the book on matters meta· physical and epistemological are quite solid. Here we find explicated many of the concepts which have become identified with Scotus: the formal distinction, univocity of being, the common nature and the hraecceity that constitutes distinct individuals. Wolter does justice to the subtlety and brilliance of Scotus's thinking and allows readers both old and new to Scotus to acknowledge him as a metaphysician for the ages. The author is particularly adept at explicating with helpful analogies some of the Subtle Doctor's most difficult concepts. I benefitted from his thought-provoking comparison between the formal distinction and a spotlight on a stage which can illuminate different and distinguishable aspects of the same reality. The next section on action rtheory and ethics draws in part on Wolter's work which culminated in the 1986 publication of Duns Scotus on the Will and Morality. Wolter has been in the forefront of those who urge that Scotus's description of an innate affection for justice in the will is crucial in understanding the freedom Scotus thought proper to humans. What remains unclear to me is how this strand in Scotus's writing relates to others which clearly imply a libertarian view of free• dom emphasizing the will's utter self-determination. The problem I see is this: if the will truly is self-determining, then an innate affectio justitiae seems to... (shrink)

One of the challenging problems in large scale cyber-argumentation platforms is that users often engage and focus only on a few issues and leave other issues under-discussed and under-acknowledged. This kind of non-uniform participation obstructs the argumentation analysis models to retrieve collective intelligence from the underlying discussion. To resolve this problem, we developed an innovative opinion prediction model for a multi-issue cyber-argumentation environment. Our model predicts users’ opinions on the non-participated issues from similar users’ opinions on related issues using intelligent (...) argumentation techniques and a collaborative filtering method. Based on our detailed experimental results on an empirical dataset collected using our cyber-argumentation platform, our model is 21.7% more accurate, handles data sparsity better than other popular opinion prediction methods. Our model can also predict opinions on multiple issues simultaneously with reasonable accuracy. Contrary to existing opinion prediction models, which only predict whether a user agrees on an issue, our model predicts how much a user agrees on the issue. To our knowledge, this is the first research to attempt multi-issue opinion prediction with the partial agreement in the cyber-argumentation platform. With additional data on non-participated issues, our opinion prediction model can help the collective intelligence analysis models to analyze social phenomena more effectively and accurately in the cyber argumentation platform. (shrink)

Sort of a Platonic dialogue based on a series of actual conversations between the author and his son. By vigorously "cross-examining" each other & scrutinizing their own logic the authors try to understand some of the key concepts in the development of physics, as well as the intellectual-social climate in which these ideas evolved.

This paper addresses three factors that have contributed to shifts in decision making in health care. First, the notion of patient autonomy, which has changed due to the rise of patient-centred approaches in contemporary health care and the re-conceptualization of the physician-patient relationship. Second, the understanding of patient autonomy has broadened to better engage patient participation. Third, the need to develop cross-cultural health care ethics. Our paper shows that the shift in the West from the individual to the relational (...) self indicates an important change in the understanding of autonomy through the lens of culture. Practices that recognize the notion of the relational self allow for a more balanced view of autonomy and a richer conception of moral agency. (shrink)

According to Davey, generalized expectancy biases cause fearrelevant behavior and may complement Seligman's biological preparedness model. Expectancy biases do not explain the preparedness phenomenon, because such cognitive (or covert behavioral) processes are themselves controlled by social and other environmentally based contingencies. Davey's own examination of the importance of cross-cultural factors can show the relationship between FR stimuli and behavior without needing cognitive agency to explain the behavioral phenomenon.

Using samples from three diverse populations, we test evolutionary hypotheses regarding how people reason about the inheritance of various traits. First, we provide a framework for differentiat-ing the outputs of mechanisms that evolved for reasoning about variation within and between biological taxa and culturally evolved ethnic categories from a broader set of beliefs and categories that are the outputs of structured learning mechanisms. Second, we describe the results of a modified “switched-at-birth” vignette study that we administered among children and adults (...) in Puno, Yasawa, and adults in the United States. This protocol permits us to study perceptions of prenatal and social transmission pathways for various traits and to differentiate the latter into vertical versus horizontal cultural influence. These lines of evidence suggest that people use all three mechanisms to reason about the distribution of traits in the population. Participants at all three sites develop expectations that morphological traits are under prenatal influence, and that belief traits are more culturally influenced. On the other hand, each population holds culturally specific beliefs about the degree of social influence on non-morphological traits and about the degree of vertical transmission—with only participants in the United States expecting parents to have much social influence over their children. We reinterpret people's differentiation of trait transmission pathways in light of humans' evolutionary history as a cultural species. (shrink)

Mainstream epistemology has typically taken for granted a traditional picture of the metaphysics of mind, according to which cognitive processes (e.g. memory storage and retrieval) play out entirely within the bounds of the skull and skin. But this simple ‘intracranial’ picture is falling in- creasingly out of step with contemporary thinking in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Likewise, though, proponents of active exter- nalist approaches to the mind—e.g. the hypothesis of extended cognitition (HEC)—have proceeded by and large without (...) asking what epistemological ramifications should arise once cognition is understood as criss-crossing the bounds of brain and world. This paper aims to motivate a puzzle that arises only once these two strands of thinking are brought in contact with one another. In particular, we want to first highlight a kind of con- dition of epistemological adequacy that should be accepted by proponents of extended cognition; once this condition is motivated, the remainder of the paper demonstrates how attempts to satisfy this condition seem to inevitably devolve into a novel kind of epistemic circularity. At the end of the day, proponents of extended cognition have a novel epistemological puzzle on their hands. (shrink)

LANGUAGE NOTE | Document text in English ; abstract also in Chinese. This paper explores the need for and place of input from local cultures and religious traditions when addressing the highly complex questions that frequently arise in the field of bioethics, something which is often overlooked and even questioned in much of the relevant academic literature. It begins by examining the historical roots of religious bioethics and the secularization of the discipline before then recounting the experience of the Bioethics, (...) Multiculturalism and Religion Project of the UNESCO Chair in Bioethics and Human Rights. Over the past 12 years, this Project has brought together Christians, Buddhists, Confucians, Daoists, Jews, Hindus, Muslims, and secular ethicists in eight encounters to discuss bioethical topics. First, the paper describes the different orientations, goals and methodological changes involved in these encounters. The methodology of meeting evolving is a search for possible convergence or common ground in the Project. The paper then addresses the most salient questions that have emerged these years. They are i) the problem of universalism vs. pluralism, which is witnessed in global bioethics vs. local diversity; ii) the East-West divide on the conception of human rights vs. duties; iii) cross-cultural and interreligious dialogue goals are framed as convergence, consensus or conversation; and iv) the ongoing issue of science and faith as different traditions confront modernity. 本文在探討解決生命倫理學領域經常出現的高度複雜問題時，當地文化和宗教傳統的涉入是必要的，也是應該具有一定地位的，但這一點在許多相關的學術文獻中卻經常被忽視，甚至被質疑。本文首先考察宗教生命倫理學的歷史 根源和該學科的世俗化，然後敘述聯合國教科文組織生命倫理學和人權教席的“生命倫理學、多元文化與宗教”國際項目的經驗。在過去12年裡，該項目將基督教、佛教、儒教、道教、猶太教、印度教、穆斯林教及世俗倫理學 的學者聚集在一起，進行了8次會議，討論生命倫理學課題。本文首先描述這些會議所涉及的不同取向、目標和方法論的演變。方法論的演變是為了尋求項目可能的趨同點或共同點。然後，本文討論這些年出現的最突出的問題。 它們是：i)普遍主義與多元主義問題，即體現在全球生命倫理學與地方倫理學之間的問題；ii)東西方在人權與義務概念上的分歧；iii)跨文化和跨宗教對話的目標應該被框定為趨同、共識還是對談；以及iv)在不同 傳統面對現代性時所持績存在的科學與信仰之間的問題。. (shrink)

BackgroundAn analysis of the position statements of secular US medical and surgical professional societies on physician-assisted suicide (PAS) and euthanasia have not been published recently. Available statements were evaluated for position, content, and sentiment.MethodsIn order to create a comprehensive list of secular medical and surgical societies, the results of a systematic search using Google were cross-referenced with a list of societies that have a seat on the American Medical Association House of Delegates. Societies with position statements were identified. These (...) statements were divided into 5 categories: opposed to PAS and/or euthanasia, studied neutrality, supportive, acknowledgement without statement, and no statement. Linguistic analysis was performed using RapidMinder in order to determine word frequency and sentiment respective to individual statements. To ensure accuracy, only statements with word counts > 100 were analyzed. A 2-tailed independentttest was used to test for variance among sentiment scores of opposing and studied neutrality statements.ResultsOf 150 societies, only 12 (8%) have position statements on PAS and euthanasia: 11 for PAS (5 opposing and 4 studied neutrality) and 9 for euthanasia (6 opposing and 2 studied neutrality). Although the most popular words used in opposing and studied neutrality statements are similar, notable exceptions exist (suicide,medicine, andtreatmentappear frequently in opposing statements, but not in studied neutrality statements, whereaspsychologists,law, andindividualsappear frequently in studied neutrality statements, but not in opposing statements). Sentiment scores for opposing and studied neutrality statements do not differ (mean, 0.094 vs. 0.104;P = 0.90).ConclusionsFew US medical and surgical societies have position statements on PAS and euthanasia. Among them, opposing and studied neutrality statements share similar linguistic sentiment. Opposing and studied neutrality statements have clear differences, but share recommendations. Both opposing and studied neutrality statements cite potential risks of PAS legalization and suggest that good palliative care might diminish a patient’s desire for PAS. (shrink)

The theological turn in phenomenology continues to generate cross-disciplinary discussion among philosophers and theologians concerning the scope and boundaries of what counts as a “phenomenon.” This essay suggests that the very idea of the given, a term so important for Husserl, Heidegger, Henry and Marion, can be reassessed from the point of view of Wilifred Sellars’s discussion of the myth of the “immediate” given. Sometimes phenomenology is understood to involve the skill of unveiling immediate data that appear as “phenomena” (...) to a conscious and wakeful ego. In conversation with Jean-Luc Marion’s volume Givenness and Revelation, I challenge the assumption that phenomena are immediate in their givenness. The final remarks concern the “how” of the givenness of theological data, and in particular, the phenomenon of the Trinity. (shrink)

This article draws on key models of monitoring and blockholding articulated in the incomplete contracts theory of the firm. Under incomplete contracts theory, different governance systems have incentive structures that entail different tradeoffs—tradeoffs between ownership concentration and liquidity, between monitoring and management initiative, and between private rent-seeking and activity benefiting shareholders as a group. The tradeoffs delimit opportunities for productive cross-reference. More specifically, blockholder systems, such as those in Europe, subsidize monitoring by permitting blockholders to reap private benefits of (...) control through self-dealing and insider trading. Market systems, such as those in the United States and Britain, regulate such private rent-seeking toward the end of maintaining an institutional framework that supports diffuse share ownership and liquid trading markets. It follows that a legal framework conducive to blockholding may be ill-equipped to foster dispersed equity ownership and thick trading markets and that a legal framework conducive to liquid trading markets may have properties that discourage blockholding. This gives rise to questions for law reform agendas on both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States, proponents ask for deregulation of controls on institutional investors, looking to encourage blockholding and more effective monitoring. In Europe, proponents ask for stronger securities regulation, looking to encourage deeper trading markets. This article suggests that each reform program may lead to disappointing results because neither assures conforming adjustments to the pertinent actors’ incentives. Alternatively, strict reforms that materially change prevailing incentive patterns could perversely destabilize workable arrangements without assuring the appearance of more effective alternatives. (shrink)

This paper warns of two threats to moral responsibility that arise when accounting for omissions, given some plausible assumptions about how abilities are related to responsibility. The first problem threatens the legitimacy of our being responsible by expanding the preexisting tension that luck famously raises for moral responsibility. The second threat to moral responsibility challenges the legitimacy of our practices of holding responsible. Holding others responsible for their omissions requires us to bridge an epistemic gap that does not arise when (...) holding others responsible for their actions—one that we might often fail to cross. (shrink)

The disappearance of the public good as a subject of philosophical discourse is described. The work of Confucius and the work of John Dewey contain robust concepts of the public good, but in the controversial work of Richard Rorty the idea of the public good undergoes a radical transformation. The Great Learning of Confucius, John Dewey's "The Public and Its Problems", and Richard Rorty's "Contingency, Irony and Solidarity" are examined. What emerges from this cross-cultural study is a reconsideration of (...) the relation between metaphysics and social philosophy. (shrink)

As in other societies, medical professionalism in the Peoples’ Republic of China has been rapidly evolving. One of the major events in this process was the endorsement in 2005 of the document, “Medical Professionalism in the New Millennium: A Physician Charter,” by the Chinese Medical Doctor Association (hereafter, the Charter). More recently, a national survey, the first on such a large scale, was conducted on Chinese physicians’ attitudes toward the fundamental principles and core commitments put forward in the Charter. Based (...) on empirical findings from that study and comparing them to the published results of a similar American survey, the authors offer an in-depth interpretation of significant cross-cultural differences and important transcultural commonalities. The broader historical, socio-economic, and ethical issues relating to salient Chinese cultural practices such as family consent, familism (the custom of deferring decisions to family members), and the withholding of medical information, as well as controversial topics such as not respecting patients’ autonomy, are examined. The Chinese Survey found that Chinese physicians supported the principles of the Charter in general. Here we argue that Chinese culture and traditional medical ethics are broadly compatible with the moral commitments demanded by modern medical professionalism. Methodologically and theoretically—recognizing the problems inherent in the hoary but still popular habit of dichotomizing cultures and in relativism—a transcultural approach is adopted that gives greater (due) weight to the internal moral diversity present within every culture, the common ground shared by different cultures, and the primacy of morality. Genuine crosscultural dialogue, including a constructive Chinese-American dialogue in the area of medical professionalism, is not only possible, but necessary. (shrink)

We investigate the causal effects of religious service attendance on prosocial behaviours using longitudinal data from a nationally representative sample of 33,198 New Zealanders collected between 2018 and 2021. Our study innovates in three ways: (1) we use longitudinal rather than cross-sectional data; (2) we incorporate measures of help received alongside self-reported giving; and (3) our statistical models are designed to address causal questions, rather than simply to describe change over time. We model causal contrasts for three hypothetical interventions (...) – increasing, decreasing, or maintaining religious service attendance – and assess their effects on eight distinct prosocial domains. Study 1 focuses on self-reported charitable donations and volunteering. Studies 2 and 3 examine receiving help – both personal and financial – from family, friends, and the wider community. Across all analyses, we find that the causal effects of religious service attendance are notably smaller than cross-sectional correlations suggest. However, even modest increases in regular attendance would result in charitable donations equivalent to approximately 4% of the New Zealand Government’s annual spending – a considerable public benefit. By applying robust methods for causal inference to national-scale panel data, our study provides insights that can inform public policy about the social functions of religious participation and advances a methodological framework for investigating the social consequences of cultural practices. (shrink)

The relation between imagery and philosophy in the poem of Parmenides has occasioned much discussion in recent years. One item of particular import has been the direction taken by the journey that was so inspiringly pictured in the opening section. Is the travel upwards? Or is it downwards? Or is it rather cross-country, either aloft, or on the earth’s surface, or in the depths of the nether world? Further, if there is cross travel on any of these three (...) levels, is the direction from east to west, or from west to east? (shrink)

BackgroundGenetic testing presents unique ethical challenges for research and clinical practice, particularly in low-resource settings. To address such challenges, context-specific understanding of ethical, legal and social issues is essential. Return of genetics and genomics research (GGR) results remains an unresolved yet topical issue particularly in African settings that lack appropriate regulation and guidelines. Despite the need to understand what is contextually acceptable, there is a paucity of empirical research and literature on what constitutes appropriate practice with respect to GGR.The study (...) assessed patients’ awareness, experiences and perceptions regarding genetic testing and the return of GGR results in a hypothetical context.MethodsThis cross-sectional study employed a qualitative exploratory approach. Respondents were patients attending the medical outpatient unit of Mulago National Hospital. Three deliberative focus group discussions involving 18 respondents were conducted. Data were analysed through thematic analysis.ResultsThree main themes and several subthemes were identified. Most respondents were aware of genetic testing, supportive of GGR and receiving results. However, only a few had undergone genetic testing due to cost constraints. They articulated the need for adequate information and genetic counselling to inform decision-making. Privacy of results was important to respondents while others were willing to share results.ConclusionThere was general awareness and support for GGR and the return of results. Stigmatisation emerged as a barrier to disclosure of results for some. Global health inequity impacts access and affordability of genetic testing and counselling in Africa and should be addressed as a matter of social justice. (shrink)

Since 2000, research within positive psychology has exploded, as reflected in dozens of meta-analyses of different interventions and targeted processes, including strength spotting, positive affect, meaning in life, mindfulness, gratitude, hope, and passion. Frequently, researchers treat positive psychology processes of change as distinct from each other and unrelated to processes in clinical psychology. This paper presents a comprehensive framework for positive psychology processes that crosses theoretical orientation, links coherently to clinical psychology and its more dominantly “negative” processes, and supports practitioners (...) in their efforts to personalize positive psychological interventions. We argue that a multi-dimensional and multi-level extended evolutionary approach can organize effective processes of change in psychosocial interventions, by focusing interventions on context-appropriate variation, selection, and retention of processes, arranged in terms of key biopsychosocial dimensions across psychological, biophysiological, and sociocultural levels of analysis. We review widely studied positive psychology constructs and programs and show how this evolutionary approach can readily accommodate them and provide a common language and framework for improving human and community flourishing. We conclude that Interventions should start with the person, not the protocol. (shrink)

Evolution (Lucile Hadžihalilović, 2016) offers a vision of Donna J. Haraway's feminist intervention where Haraway posits her neologistic chthulucene to signify the interpenetration of species in response to anthropocene discourse which recuperates the patriarchal narrative of homo faber – the human as maker. The risks and tribulations of cross-species “becoming-with”, as Haraway puts it, are dramatized in Evolution. The ambiguously defined, subaqueous species of the film nurture and care for human boys then impregnate them with squid-like creatures that are (...) incubated in the child's mid-section. The film is marked by images that are difficult to anthropomorphise, eliciting corporeal engagements with tentacular sea creatures that are alienating and confronting. Evolution presents images that are in sympathy with Haraway's chthulucene, in which the subject dissolves into the matter of “humus” or “compost” that ontologically bind the human and nonhuman alike. The film signals a reverse evolution in which humans return to the sea, a temporal backwards turn that Haraway similarly advocates in her book. While Evolution plays out Haraway's chthonic vision in which it shows a subject, Nicolas, embedded in a compost community, the film nonetheless situates this subject as bounded and coherent. Evolution does not, ultimately, forego the human but offers a chance to comprehend the human's transformation in the historical moment of the anthropocene. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Vetera Novis Augere et Perficere:Thomas Aquinas and Christian-Muslim DialogueJoseph Ellul, O.P.Pope Leo XIII's encyclical letter Aeterni Patris, issued on August 4, 1879, sought to address many issues that were challenging nineteenth-century Catholic scholarship and academic life. In proposing the thought of Thomas Aquinas as a model of Catholic teaching, the Pope intended, in his own words, "to strengthen and complete the old by aid of the new,"1 not only (...) by reviving the study of the works and teachings of the Angelic Doctor, especially in the realm of philosophy, but also to uphold as perennial his method of engaging with his contemporaries within and without the Catholic faith.2 It is within this context that we are called upon to reflect upon this appeal: "vetera novis augere et perficere."The thirteenth century was indeed a time of intellectual upheaval, following the introduction of Aristotle and, later on, the translations into Latin of the Arabic commentaries on Aristotle by Ibn Rušd (Lat. Averröes; d. 1198). This event was met within the ecclesiastical world with apprehension, if not outright fear. Neo-Platonic philosophy and its interpretation by Ibn Sina (Lat. Avicenna; d. 1037) was already perfectly acceptable to Mediaeval Christian scholars. The latter was in fact considered an essential tool for understanding the illuminationist thought of St. Augustine. Étienne Gilson even spoke of Augustinisme avicennisant (Avicennized [End Page 1231] Augustinianism).3 The problem was Aristotle and his renowned commentator Ibn Rušd: a pagan commented on by an infidel.One must also note, however, that mediaeval Western intellectuals and institutions were able to encounter and adapt the Islamic legacy, because they already possessed a sufficient scientific base (with of course the contribution of translations of Greek together with Latin works) with which to understand, assimilate, and build upon this new knowledge that appeared from the East. In sum, mediaeval Christendom created living, vibrant societies, constantly searching, always discovering something new.In dealing with the specific (and delicate) subject of Aquinas's dialogue with Islamic thought, it would be necessary to reflect in particular upon two key works of his: the Liber de Veritate Catholicae Fidei contra Errores Infidelium (A Book on the Truth of the Catholic Faith against the Errors of Unbelievers),4 popularly known as the Summa contra gentiles [SCG], together with his De rationibus fidei contra Saracenos, Gnæcos et Armenos ad Cantorem Antiochenum, better known simply as De rationibus fidei.At this point it would be necessary to articulate the term "Islamic thought." Of itself it should not be identified with Islam as a religion. Rather, it should be considered as embracing classical Greek philosophy as interpreted by the Neo-Platonic movement and disseminated through Oriental Christian and Jewish schools of thought. Islamic civilization absorbed these teachings and built its own proper ediice upon these foundations.A Model for Interreligious Dialogue?Proposing Thomas Aquinas as a model for engagement with Islamic thought may also raise a few eyebrows. Hence, it would be appropriate to pose an essential question: "What type of dialogue existed in mediaeval times?" One should begin with an a priori exclusion of dialogue as it is understood today, given the fact that there existed neither the motive nor the means to implement it.In fact mediaeval society was aware of only three religions: the pagan, which had been replaced by Christianity; the Jewish, founded upon the precepts of the First Covenant which "Christ fulilled by his actions and [End Page 1232] by his teaching"5 and which was also believed to prefigure the everlasting New Covenant sealed by Jesus on the Cross; and finally, the Christian, which believed in Jesus as the final revelation of God to humanity.6 With such a vision in mind it is obvious that any doctrine that is not situated within these parameters, or which proposes some form of belief or conduct which was different from, if not contrary to, the Christian vision of God, the cosmos, and society, would be considered as heretical and its promoter an impostor.7When Islam made its appearance in the Christian world, it carried with it a book that it considered of divine provenance, and... (shrink)

The objective of this book is to shed some light through a variety of contributed chapters on Ubuntu, Africa's unique philosophy because Knowledge of 'Ubuntu' will help minimize cross-cultural communication barriers when people from outside Sub-Saharan Africa interact with those of other regions of the world.