What could it mean to be religious in a world where religion no longer retains its former authority? Posing this question for his fellow Western intellectuals who inhabit just such a world, James C. Edwards investigates the loss of religion's traditional power in a culture characterized by what he calls "normal nihilism"—a situation in which one's commitment to a particular set of values is all one really has, and in which traditional religion is only a means of interpretation used to (...) preserve what one most cares about. Recognizing the important historical role of religion in making us the people we are, he seeks to establish a viable understanding of religion without traditional beliefs and within the context of contemporary skepticism. _The Plain Sense of Things_ is a book more interested in the power of religion that in its truth and in what happens to that power when the claims to truth slacken their grip. (shrink)

Conscious experience has been said to be outside of, or alien to, physics, and unexplained in a physical world. However, it is argued here that experience is entirely expected in a physical world that can only be defined by its power to determine patterns of experience. Something physical is something with the type of causal power that can contribute to determining the content of an experience if a subject is present at the right place and time. Physical powers also interact (...) with other physical powers, distant from any given subject, to form chains, and it is these interactions that physics handles mathematically. Nevertheless, actual causation is always defined by reference to determination of experience. The apparent puzzle of why there should be a link between experience and the physical may relate in part to the fact that experience is always immediately causally proximal, always 'here and now', at least as far as we can ascertain. Proximality, and with it the potential for mentality, cuts across existential/ ontological categories. Experience also requires a concept of an intrinsic individual, in order for there to be individual points of view. The practical problem for consciousness studies is to identify intrinsically individual causal units with event domains in human brains, that can have points of view and content that could fit with human experiences, in a way consistent with current physics. It is suggested that the 'causal diamond' concept of the here and now explored by Savitt (2015) and Arthur (2019), together with principles of field theory, may provide a useful starting point. (shrink)

Post-foundational politics and democracy -- Agonism and democracy -- A typology of agonistic democracy -- Agonistic democracy and the question of institutions -- Agonistic democracy and the limits of popular participation -- Populism, representation, and the popular will -- Political liberalism, contingency and agonistic pluralism -- Liberalism, agonism, and democracy.

Today most of us are awash with choices. The cornucopia of material goods available to those of us in the developed world can turn each of us into a kid in a candy store; but our delight at picking the prize is undercut by our regret at lost opportunities. And what's the criterion for choosing anything -- material, spiritual, the path taken or not taken -- when we have lost our faith in everything? In The Era of Choice Edward (...) Rosenthal argues that choice, and having to make choices, has become the most important influence in both our personal lives and our cultural expression. Choice, he claims, has transformed how we live, how we think, and who we are.This transformation began in the nineteenth century, catalyzed by the growing prosperity of the Industrial Age and a diminishing faith in moral and scientific absolutes. The multiplicity of choices forces us to form oppositions; this, says Rosenthal, has spawned a keen interest in dualism, dilemmas, contradictions, and paradoxes. In response, we have developed mechanisms to hedge, compromise, and to synthesize. Rosenthal looks at the scientific and philosophical theories and cultural movements that choice has influenced -- from physics to postmodernism, from Disney trailers to multiculturalism. He also reveals the effect of choice on the personal level, where we grapple with decisions that range from which wine to have with dinner to whether to marry or divorce, as we hurtle through lives of instant gratification, accelerated consumption, trend, change, and speed. But we have discovered, writes Rosenthal, that sometimes, we can have our cake and eat it, too. (shrink)

The Consensus Statement of the Third International Congress on Concussion in Sport in November 2008 defined concussion as a “complex pathophysiologic process affecting the brain, induced by traumatic biochemical forces.” Definitions of concussion vary slightly between various professional organizations of neurosurgeons, neurologists, and orthopedic surgeons, but all share the common characteristics of trauma affecting the head or body resulting in transient neurologic deficits or symptoms. Underlying the symptoms of concussion is a complex pathophysiologic process at the cellular level. While concussion (...) is typically thought of as resulting from a direct impact to the head, a concussion can also be sustained as a result of an impact to the body causing the force of the impact to be transmitted to and absorbed by the brain. (shrink)

We investigate the notion of conditional probability and the quantum mechanical concept of state reduction in the context of GL spaces satisfying the Alfsen-Shultz condition.

Heraclitus is famous for affirming contradictions, though most readers do not regard the content of his fragments as contradictory. Examining fragments 1 and 50, this article argues that Heraclitus aims to assert a special class of contradictions, the intrinsic conflict between the content of any universal metaphysical claim and the assertion or reception of that claim. Such contradictions undermine the possibility of metaphysics as a science that knows all things. Second, the article argues that Heraclitus himself embraces this sort of (...) contradiction by making it, as it were, the content of his Logos. Third, the article examines three other solutions to the problem that have been advanced, mostly tacitly, by other philosophers. The article concludes with some steps towards a different way of preserving the possibility of metaphysics. (shrink)

It is proposed that a human conscious experience of the sort we report to each other reflects a direct causal interaction between a pattern of information about the world, encoded in a field of postsynaptic potentials, and a quantized mode of excitation occupying dendritic cytoskeleton. The requirement for a quantized account is seen simply as the need for an event of experience to be a single indivisible, but richly patterned, causal relation between information and an 'informee'. It is argued that (...) the informee is likely to be a higher-order quantized collective mode (much as proposed by Craddock and colleagues, 2017) with the biologically relevant dynamics likely also to be describable in classical terms. No specific interpretation of quantum theory is needed. In this scenario, anaesthetics would abrogate reportable experience by detuning parameters underpinning cytoskeletal informee modes, perhaps critically increasing associated impedence. It is also proposed that tuning and detuning of informee modes in individual dendritic trees by binding of accessory proteins to cytoskeleton plays a physiological role in short-term memory and truth evaluation through ascertainment of sequential signal pattern consonance. Components of this model may be involved in cellular adaptive responses in many types of organism. (shrink)

This book is part of a larger study of the problem of the one and the many in Aristotle's Metaphysics. Although this portion can be read and understood on its own, some remarks about the contents of the two sister volumes will be helpful.

It can be shown that considerable common ground exists between indigenous or traditional theories of contagious disease in Africa, and modern medicine, whether human or veterinary. Yet this is not recognized because of the generally low regard in which the medically trained – whether African or expatriate – hold African traditional medicine. This attitude seems to result from the assumption that African health beliefs are based on witchcraft and related “supernatural” thinking. I argue that this may not be so in (...) the important domain of diseases biomedically classified as contagious; such diseases tend to be understood naturalistically. An accurate understanding of how Africans traditionally interpret contagious diseases of humans and livestock is the foundation for the design and implementation of more effective health programs. (shrink)

Pharmaceutical memory modification is the use of a drug to dampen, or eliminate completely, memories of traumatic experience. While standard therapeutic treatments, even those including intense pharmaceuticals, can potentially offer individual biomedical healing, they are missing an essential perspective offered by Christian bioethics: re/incorporation of individuals and traumatic memories into communities that confront and reinterpret suffering. This paper is specifically grounded in Christian ethics, engaging womanist understandings of Incarnational, embodied personhood, and Johann Baptist Metz’s “dangerous memory.” It develops an ethical (...) framework of Christian “enfleshed counter-memory” that responds to the specific challenge of pharmaceutical memory modification, and traumatic experience generally. (shrink)

Mendler contends that many of the beliefs, tenets, conclusions, and understandings that are widely accepted as “truths” are, in fact, not valid at all. He asserts that we should challenge them all — from Plato on to contemporary theorists in all of those fields — and analyze every element of their conclusions.

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) is considered to be among the half dozen most important philosophers the United States has produced. The Charles S. Peirce Sesquicentennial International Congress opened at Harvard University on September 5, 1989 and concluded on the 10th - Peirce's birthday. The Congress was host to approximately 450 scholars from 26 different nations. Papers concerning Peirce's philosophy of science were given at the Congress by representatives from Italy, France, Sweden, Finland, Korea, India, Denmark, Greece, Brazil, Belgium, Spain, Germany, (...) and the United States. The present volume is a compilation of some of the papers that were presented at that Congress. (shrink)

This paper addresses a central metaphysical issue that has not been recognized: what kind of entity is a syllogism? I argue that the syllogism cannot be merely a mental entity. Some counterpart must exist in nature. A careful examination of the Posterior Analytics’s distinction between the syllogism of the fact and the syllogism of the reasoned fact shows that we must set aside contemporary logic to appreciate Aristotle’s logic, enables us to understand the validity of the scientific syllogism through its (...) content rather than its form, and explains the priority of the scientific syllogism over other valid syllogisms. The opening chapters of Posterior Analytics II help us to distinguish the entities that scientific syllogism must include as its terms; namely, a genus, an essential nature, and essential attributes of the genus. Often, the attributes are found in closely linked sequences. By exploring why there are such sequences and how they are linked, the paper argues that sequences of genus, nature, and sequential attributes are the basis in nature for the process of reasoning that we call the syllogism: we come to grasp the syllogism over time but the sequences to which it refers exist together in things. So understood, the syllogism, like knowledge of forms and truths, exists in us and in the world. (shrink)

A discussion of American pragmatism through the writings of its three major advocates: Charles S. Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. Examines how each applied pragmatism to, respectively, the theory of reality, the notion of truth, and the concept of the good.