In the context of theistic religions, God representations are an important factor in explaining associations between religion/spirituality and well-being/mental health. Although the limitations of self-report measures of God representations are widely acknowledged, well-validated implicit measures are still unavailable. Therefore, we developed an implicit Attachment to God measure, the Apperception Test God Representations (ATGR). In this study, we examined reliability and validity of an experimental scale based on attachment theory. Seventy-one nonclinical and 74 clinical respondents told stories about 15 cards with (...) images of people. The composite Attachment to God scale is based on scores on two scales that measure dimensions of Attachment to God: God as Safe Haven and God as Secure Base. God as Safe Haven scores are based on two subscales: Asking Support and Receiving Support from God. Several combinations of scores on these latter subscales are used to assess Anxious and Avoidant attachment to God. A final scale, Percentage Secure Base, measures primary appraisal of situations as nonthreatening. Intraclass correlation coefficients showed that the composite Attachment to God scale could be scored reliably. Associations of scores on the ATGR scales and on the explicit Attachment to God Inventory with scores on implicitly and explicitly measured distress partly confirmed the validity of the ATGR scales by demonstrating expected patterns of associations. Avoidant attachment to God seemed to be assessed more validly with the implicit than with the explicit scale. Patients scored more insecure on the composite Attachment to God scale and three subscales than nonpatients. (shrink)

It is argued that editors have a moral responsibility to reject submissions that they felt publication of which may cause harm. However, Ploeg and others suggest that there may exist better alternatives to rejection. He also called for the code of publication ethics to incorporate acknowledgement of the moral responsibility for the effects of publishing, define benefits and harms of publishing, and specify a range of actions an editor may take. This letter highlights a recent such rejection ostensibly made on (...) the basis of harm, but could easily be construed as editorial bias, and supports the call for improving the code of publication ethics to guide editors and secure consistency in decisions. (shrink)

In this study we analyzed to what extent partners who share the same household affect each other's exposure to television. With the use of linear structural equation modeling we analyzed data from a large scale representative survey in The Netherlands. Results indicate that both men and women influence their partner's exposure to television. When people spend much time watching television, their partners are also likely to spend a lot of time in front of the television. These influences on each other's (...) exposure were of equal magnitude for both men and women. Finally, we found a strong socialization effect of parental viewing in the family of origin. (shrink)

Events often share elements that guide us to integrate knowledge from these events. Integration allows us to make inferences that affect reactions to new events. Integrating events and making inferences are thought to depend on consciousness. We show that even unconsciously experienced events, that share elements, are integrated and influence reactions to new events. An unconscious event consisted of the subliminal presentation of two unrelated words. Half of subliminal word pairs shared one word . Overlapping word pairs were presented between (...) 6 s and 78 s apart. The test for integration required participants to judge the semantic distance between suprathreshold words . Evidence of integration was provided by faster reactions to suprathreshold words that were indirectly related versus unrelated. This effect was independent of the time interval between overlapping word pairs. We conclude that consciousness is no requirement for the integration of discontiguous events. (shrink)

Health technology assessment (HTA) is often biased in the sense that it neglects relevant perspectives on the technology in question. To incorporate different perspectives in HTA, we should pursue agreement about what are relevant, plausible, and feasible research questions; interactive technology assessment (iTA) might be suitable for this goal. In this way a kind of procedural ethics is established. Currently, ethics too often is focussed on the application of general principles, which leaves a lot of confusion as to what really (...) is the matter in specific cases; in an iTA clashes of values should not be approached by use of such ethics. Instead, casuistry, as a tool used within the framework of iTA, should help to articulate and clarify what is the matter, as to make room for explication and consensus building. (shrink)

When viewing a circular coin rotated in depth, it fills an elliptical region of the distal scene. For some, this appears to generate a two-fold experience, in which one sees the coin as simultaneously circular (in light of its 3D shape) and elliptical (in light of its 2D ‘perspectival shape’ or ‘p-shape’). An energetic philosophical debate asks whether the latter p-shapes are genuinely presented in perceptual experience (as ‘perspectivalists’ argue) or if, instead, this appearance is somehow derived or inferred from (...) experience (as ‘anti-perspectivalists’ argue). This debate, however, has largely turned on introspection. In a recent study, Morales, Bax, and Firestone (2020) aim to provide the first empirical test of this question. They asked subjects to find an elliptical coin seen face-on from a search array that also included a circular coin seen either face-on or at an angle. They found that subjects reacted more slowly when the distracting circle was seen at an angle, such that it’s p-shape matched that of the target ellipse. From this, they concluded that the similar p-shape between the ellipse and circle constituted a phenomenal similarity between the two, and thus that perspectivalism is true. We show that these results can also be explained by pre-attentive guidance by unconscious representations (in what follows, just “unconscious pre-attentive guidance”) and that this explanation is at least as plausible as one from phenomenal similarity. Thus, we conclude that the experiment does not support perspectivalism over anti-perspectivalism. (shrink)

Subjects and Simulations presents essays focused on suffering and sublimity, representation and subjectivity, and the relation of truth and appearance through engagement with the legacies of Jean Baudrillard and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe.

Recent evidence suggests that consciousness of encoding is not necessary for the rapid formation of new semantic associations. We investigated whether unconsciously formed associations are as semantically precise as would be expected for associations formed with consciousness of encoding during episodic memory formation. Pairs of faces and written occupations were presented subliminally for unconscious associative encoding. Five minutes later, the same faces were presented suprathreshold for the cued unconscious retrieval of face-occupation associations. Retrieval instructions required participants to classify the presented (...) individuals according to their putative regularity of income, length of education, and creativity value of occupational activity. The three instructions yielded more classifications consistent with a person’s occupation if the person had been subliminally presented with his written occupation versus a meaningless word . This suggests that consciousness is not necessary to encode, long-term store, and retrieve semantically precise associations between primarily unrelated items. (shrink)

In this article we argue that ideas about management are led by cognitive frameworks rooted in cultural, including intellectual, traditions. African management is part of ambiguous mental concepts. African management results from a quest for an essentialist authenticity in the framework of decolonisation. Through analysing the life and work of the Ugandan African nationalist, poet and anthropologist Okot p’Bitek (1931–1982), we argue that the concept of double consciousness as defined by W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) can be used as (...) a strategy to analyse the ambiguous nature of management in Africa. Generally speaking, double or, even better, multiple consciousness could serve as an instrument of any manager (and scholar), both in Africa and outside Africa, avoiding the danger of essentialism. (shrink)

In November 2010, the Library of the Peace Palace in The Hague acquired a copy of Hugo Grotius’s seminal study on the law of war, De iure belli ac pacis (Paris: Nicolas Buon, 1625). The purchase represents the very rare first state (issue or printing) of the first edition, item no. 565-I in the well-known bibliography of Grotius’s works by Jacob Ter Meulen and P.J.J. Diermanse. This article is an adapted version of a speech held in the Peace Palace on (...) 21 February 2011, when the copy of De iure belli ac pacis was presented to the public. After a short survey of the genesis, printing history and early reception, the article goes into the differences between the three states of the first edition and their significance for the interpretation of Grotius’s work. A provisional checklist of copies in public libraries is added in an appendix. (shrink)

The Birth of String Theory by Cappelli et al. tells the story of the beginnings of string theory and of the evolutionary process it has undergone from its origins in S-matrix theory to its current status as a candidate unification theory. The book is intended for an audience of students and researchers in physics, as well as historians and philosophers of science with some background in quantum field theory.In the 50s and early 60s, theoretical particle physics focused on formulating a (...) theory to explain the strong interactions. Due to issues with the application of perturbative quantum field theory to the strong interactions, theoretical particle physicists shifted their attention to Heisenberg’s ‘S-matrix’ theory, which focused solely on observable quantities. This endeavour led in 1968 to the breakthrough of the famous ‘Veneziano amplitude’, which along with the Dolen–Horn–Schmid duality between the s- and the t-channels led to the dual resonance model . Following Ve .. (shrink)

Harry G. Frankfurt has put the problem of volitional conflict at the center of philosophical attention. If you care fundamentally about your career and your family, but these cares conflict, this conflict undermines the coherency of your decision standard and thereby your ability to choose and act autonomously. The standard response to this problem is to argue that you can overcome volitional conflict by unifying your foundational motivational states. As Frankfurt puts it, the ‘totality of things that an agent cares (...) about’ plus his ‘ordering of how important to him they are effectively specifies his answer to the question of how to live’ (The Reasons of Love(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 23). In this paper, I critically assess the three main reasons given for such a coherency requirement: 1) we can do only one action at a time; 2) our motivational states come with normative pressure towards coherency; and 3) conflicting motivational states provide us with an incoherent decision-making framework. I conclude that these reasons do not ground a coherency requirement for practical deliberation and argue that we can autonomously express ourselves as volitionally conflicted by acting on our conflicting motivational states over the course of multiple actions. (shrink)

The growth of knowledge and its effects on the practice of medicine have been issues of philosophical and ethical interest for several decades and will remain so for many years to come. The outline of the present volume was conceived nearly three years ago. In 1987, a conference on this theme was held in Maastricht, the Netherlands, on the occasion of the founding of the European Society for Philosophy of Medicine and Health Care (ESPMH). Most of the chapters of this (...) book are derived from papers presented at that meeting, and for the purpose of editing the book Stuart Spicker, Ph. D., joined two founding members of ESPMH, Henk ten Have and Gerrit Kimsma. The three of them successfully brought together a number of interesting contribu tions to the theme, and ESPMH is grateful and proud to have initiated the production of this volume. The Society intends that annual meetings be held in different European countries on a rotating basis and to publish volumes related to these meetings whenever feasible. In 1988, the second conference was held in Aarhus, Denmark on "Values in Medical Decision Making and Resource Allocation in Health Care". In 1989, a meeting was held in Czestochowa, Poland, on "European Traditions in Philosophy of Medicine. From Brentano to Bieganski". It is hoped that these conferences and the books to be derived from them, will initiate a new European tradition, lasting well into the 21 st century! P. J. (shrink)

Introduction by Ralph McInerny The essays in this volume, indebted in great part to Jacques Maritain and to other Neo-Thomists, represent a contribution to an understanding of beauty and the arts within the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition. As such they constitute a different voice in present-day discussions on beauty and aesthetics, a voice which nonetheless shares with many of its contemporaries concern over questions such as the relationship between beauty and morality, public funding of the arts and their educational role, objective and (...) universal standards of what is beautiful. In the tradition in which the contributors of this volume reflect, beauty manifests itself in the order of the universe, an order that provides human reason with a window onto the transcendent. For Aristotle and Aquinas the natural order grounds both art and morality, and yet it is this very order which has been called into question by modern science and philosophy. Instead of pointing us to a suprahuman order, the beautiful then points to the order of human freedom and creativity. Reflection on the beautiful since the modern philosopher Immanuel Kant has thus often taken a subjectivistic turn. Because of the importance of beauty and art in human existence, in man's education and life as a moral and political being, an alternative should be sought to any reduction of the beautiful to a purely subjective experience or cultural construct. The Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition, in dialogue with modern and contemporary conceptions of the beautiful, provides us with just that alternative, and thus the essays herein represent a decisive step in the "journey for Thomistic aesthetics." THE CONTRIBUTORS: In addition to the editor, the contributors to the volume are: Brian J. Braman, Matthew Cuddeback, Christopher M. Cullen, S.J., Patrick Downey, Desmond J. FitzGerald, Donald Haggerty, Wayne H. Harter, Jeanne M. Heffernan, Thomas S. Hibbs, Gregory J. Kerr, Joseph W. Koterski, S.J., Daniel McInerny, Ralph McInerny, James P. Mesa, John F. Morris, Ralph Nelson, Katherine Anne Osenga, Carrie Rehak, Stephen Schloesser, S.J., Francis Slade, John G. Trapani, Jr., and Henk E. S. Woldring. ABOUT THE EDITOR: Alice Ramos is associate professor of philosophy at St. John's University. (shrink)

An interrogation of the term 'theory' from the perspective of linguistic discourse Zima offers a new definition of theory from a cultural and sociological perspective, with a view to encountering heterogenerous points of view in critical dialogue.