In her study Anarchism and Education, Judith Suissa argues that anarchist learning entails a constant interplay of tensions arising from emergent desires to transform society and the challenges society poises for realizing them. This is inescapable because a critical attitude is integral to an anarchist process of learning, infusing it with creative license premised on the conviction that we need not accept things as they are, that learning is not only a space for understanding, but also enactment. My purpose is (...) to explore this dynamic in the work of graphic artist Kevin Pyle, an American-born artist with a substantive body of illustrated books and comics addressing a myriad of issues. I am interested... (shrink)

It is widely believed that bringing parties with differing opinions together to discuss their differences will help both in securing consensus and also in ensuring that this consensus closely approximates the truth. This paper investigates this presumption using two mathematical and computer simulation models. Ultimately, these models show that increased contact can be useful in securing both consensus and truth, but it is not always beneficial in this way. This suggests one should not, without qualification, support policies which increase interpersonal (...) contact if one seeks to improve the epistemic performance of groups. (shrink)

Journals regulate a significant portion of the communication between scientists. This paper devises an agent-based model of scientific practice and uses it to compare various strategies for selecting publications by journals. Surprisingly, it appears that the best selection method for journals is to publish relatively few papers and to select those papers it publishes at random from the available “above threshold” papers it receives. This strategy is most effective at maintaining an appropriate type of diversity that is needed to solve (...) a particular type of scientific problem. This problem and the limitation of the model is discussed in detail. (shrink)

These editorial comments acknowledge those who have contributed to the success of the journal, especially through the transition period and our first year with SAGE. This work also serves as a brief introduction to the special section of manuscripts drawn from keynote speeches and invited addresses given at the 2019 International Association for the Psychology of Religion Conference in Gdańsk, Poland. Every other year, the IAPR hosts a conference. While these gatherings feature a variety of special invited keynote addresses, those (...) remarks are often only available for the edification of attendees. For the first time, we are able to present here, in the journal, the texts of the speeches, suitably revised and expanded. Our goal is to provide a similar record of keynote addresses as they occur at future conferences so that the ideas can stimulate conversation and reflection beyond the moment of presentation. (shrink)

Fan (2010) did a good job in applying his interpretation of Confucian ethics of giftedness to genetic enhancement. To him, it is God-like Heaven that gives lives to us and our ancestors as gifts th...

Magical ersatzism is the view that possible worlds are primitive abstract entities. In On the Plurality of Worlds, David Lewis presented what appeared to many to be a devastating argument against magical ersatzism. In this paper, I show that Lewis’ central argument does not succeed. Magical ersatzism remains a viable theory of possible worlds.

My concern in this essay is not so much with the invisible work or hidden labor produced by neoliberalism, but rather with what Joseph Pieper describes as an emerging culture of “total work”. More than the sheer number of hours of work, Pieper diagnoses a transformation in the way we view work. Work has become the exclusive point of reference for how we see and define ourselves. We are, Pieper feared, increasingly incapable of seeing beyond the working self. The human (...) being has become the human worker. Historically, the ideal of leisure offered a counter vision to this tendency. Michael Oakeshott notes that while human beings must attend to the necessities for survival, they are most especially distinguished by their capacity for leisure—by an ability to pursue questions, conversations, and explorations that transcend the realm of production and consumption. To overlook and exclude leisurely pursuits is to diminish our humanity. (shrink)

This paper aims at a cross-cultural comparison between friendship in Aristotle and friendship in Buddhist traditions. Aristotle’s thorough analysis of friendship results in Buddhist concepts of friendship necessarily a sub-category as Aristotle deems friendship within religious communities to be a niche category of friendship. Although Buddhist notions of love and compassion are universally prescribed, monastic friendship is necessarily highly selective to be between like-minded individuals within a Buddhist community pursuing the shared end of enlightenment. Buddhism however offers three categories of (...) friendship: lay community friendship, monastic friendship and spiritual friendship. Buddhism, therefore, while unavoidably a sub-category of Aristotelian concepts of friendship, reveal nuanced approaches to friendship depending on an individual’s place in the Buddhist tradition. (shrink)

Traditional critical thinking courses introduce students to tools for analyzing and evaluating arguments and reasoning. There are, however, good reasons to think that those courses fail to motivate students to make full use of those tools. It is this motivational problem that is the focus of the present paper. In what follows, I present several proposals for overcoming student resistance to the discipline of critical thinking. I offer a three-step strategy for challenging students’ presumption of competency regarding critical thinking, thereby (...) motivating them to embrace the tools we offer. I also sketch how this strategy can be applied in sections of a critical thinking course. (shrink)

Adolf Meyer-Abich spent his career as one of the most vigorous and varied advocates in the biological sciences. Primarily a philosophical proponent of holistic thought in biology, he also sought through collaboration with empirically oriented colleagues in biology, medicine, and even physics to develop arguments against mechanistic and reductionistic positions in the life sciences, and to integrate them into a newly disciplinary theoretical biology. He participated in major publishing efforts including the founding of Acta Biotheoretica. He also sought international contacts (...) and worked for long stretches in Chile, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, and the United States. His career straddled the Nazi period, which led him into a complex dance of support for and resistance to the regime. Despite the relative failure of his conceptual innovations to catch on, his ideas and writings sit squarely within the trajectory of thought and argument that has led to today’s reinvigoration of thought about conceptual integration in evolutionary developmental biology. (shrink)

Some years ago — never mind how long precisely — three eminent thinkers, having little or no need for more money in their purses, and nothing particular to interest them in the law reviews and philosophy journals, set out to meet and discuss legal philosophy in a literary part of the world. It is a way these three have of driving off ennui and formulating the next publication. Whenever they find themselves growing stale about the pen; whenever it is adamp, (...) drizzly November in London; whenever they find themselves involuntarily churning out conference papers and bringing up the rear of every symposium on offer; and especially whenever they find their critics getting such an upper hand on them, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent them from deliberately sitting down and methodically knocking off a paper excoriating every stranger they have met — then, they account it high time to gettogether as soon as they can. (shrink)

IN RECOVERY OF THE MEASURE: INTERPRETATION AND NATURE, Robert Cummings Neville develops a philosophy of nature and theory of interpretation as centerpieces for his projected three-volume Axiology of Thinking. This emerging ontology of value is impressive for both its originality and complexity. Neville's claims about meaning, truth, objectivity, and knowledge are deployed in explicit opposition to the relativism, historicism, and subjectivism currently so popular among philosophers. His critique is formidable because neither polemical nor defensive; it is rather the expression of (...) a coherent metaphysical vision. (shrink)

We examine schoolchildren’s reasoning with spatial relations, such as ‘is to the left of’. Our aims are to obtain a more precise account of the effect of working memory on reasoning, a more detaile...

Meta Analyses for Improvements in Wetlands, Terrestrial Habitat, and Surface Water Quality.….

An overview of Bradley's metaphysics and epistemology, which had much of the basic structure of quantum mechanics, but was all but ignored in the years following the formal quantum theories discovered by Heisenberg and Schrödinger. Bradley's version of absolute idealism was infected with the mentalism that was generally associated with idealism in the late nineteenth century. I develop his ideas from a standpoint somewhat more friendly to modern formal methods, although this is not much of a stretch, as Bradley had (...) already taken absolute idealism strongly in that direction, if not all the way. (shrink)

Scientific methods may be viewed as procedures for converging to the true answer to a given empirical question. Typically, such methods converge to the truth only if certain empirical presuppositions are satisfied, which raises the question whether the presuppositions are satisfied. Another scientific method can be applied to this empirical question, and so forth, occasioning an empirical regress. So there is an obvious question about the point of such a regress. This paper explains how to assess the methodological worth of (...) a methodological regress by solving for the strongest sense of single-method performance that can be achieved given that such a regress exists. Several types of regresses are. (shrink)

The dominance of the medical-model in American psychiatry over the last 30 years has resulted in the subsequent decline of the “talking cure”. In this paper, we identify a number of problems associated with medicalized psychiatry, focusing primarily on how it conceptualizes the self as a de-contextualized set of symptoms. Drawing on the tradition of hermeneutic phenomenology, we argue that medicalized psychiatry invariably overlooks the fact that our identities, and the meanings and values that matter to us, are created and (...) constituted by our dialogical relations with others. While acknowledging the importance of medical and pharmaceutical interventions, we suggest that it is only by means of the dialogical interplay of the talking cure that the client can both recognize unhealthy and self-defeating ways of being and be opened up to the possibility of new meanings and self-interpretations. (shrink)

Heidegger’s failure to discuss ‘the body’ in Being and Time has generated a cottage industry of criticism. In his recently translated Zollikon Seminars, Heidegger provides a response to the critics by offering a thematic account of the body that is strikingly similar to Merleau-Ponty’s account in Phenomenology of Perception. In this article, I draw on the parallels between these two texts in order to see how Heidegger’s neglect of the body affects his early project of fundamental ontology and to determine (...) whether or not an account of the body is necessary to complete the project. I defend Heidegger by suggesting that any analysis of the body is ‘ontic’ or regional and is made possible only on the basis of Dasein, understood as a public ‘clearing’ or ‘there’ of intelligibility that determines in advance the way things emerge-into-presence as the kinds of things that they are. Heidegger’s core concern in Being and Time is to unearth the essential, ‘ontological-existential’, structures of Dasein that make it possible for us to begin regional investigations into the problem of the body in the first place. (shrink)

This paper argues that cosmopolitan law has been more successfully achieved not by appeal to a supra-state authority or community, but by the development of features of existing treaty law. Specifically, it shows how the International Criminal Court's jurisdiction over serious human rights violations has been extended to the citizens and territories of non-member states – and even to otherwise immune state officials – not by challenging the sovereignty of non-member states directly, but on the basis of member states’ own (...) territorial sovereignty and the universal jurisdiction which they delegate to the Court and to the United Nations Security Council. In light of this, the authors argue that cosmopolitanism is better conceived not as invoking an independent sense of global community that supersedes and constrains state sovereignty, but as an immanent, contingent and creative development of statist criminal law itself, rooted in its principles of state sovereignty. (shrink)