On the basis of knowledge prior to 1988, Ashbrook pointed out that whereas most men are primarily dependent on the left cerebral hemisphere (“dominant hemisphere”) for verbally related functions, women show a greater hemispheric balance in this respect. For men, he argues, their possession of a “speaking” and a “non‐speaking hemisphere” results in a positive‐negative, bipolar way of thinking that may be characterized as dualistic and dialectically hierarchical. In contrast, the greater balance of hemispheric function in women appears to promote (...) greater generalization and synthesis in their thinking.In this article I cite more recent neuroanatomical and brain imaging studies that provide further evidence of disparities in structure and function of the brains of men and women. As background for an attempt to explain these differences, I give a brief review of the triune evolution of the mammalian brain leading up to the human cerebrum. It is of major significance that the female has played a central role in mammalian evolution for more than 180 million years and that the evolutionary transition from reptilian therapsids to mammals is characterized by the develoment of (1) nursing conjoined with maternal care; (2) audiovocal communication or aiding mother‐offspring contact; and (3) play. In human beings, the infant‐carrying hypothesis suggests one means by which, over generations, certain parts of a woman's right hemisphere could undergo functional and eventual anatomical expansion. The mother‐infant communication of basic mammalian sounds with vowel and consonant components suggests a basis for the origination of speech.Finally, in an expansion of Ashbrook's original thesis, we arrive at the rovocative consideration that, unlike men, with their dialectical reasoning, women, with their more balanced brain, are provided with a trialectial ladder for climbing to achieve knowledge. In terms of quantum mechanics, the particle and wave would correspond to the substance and strength of the sides of the ladder, and the derived psychic information (which is neither matter nor energy) would compare to the rungs in between. (shrink)

At a historic dialogue convened at the University of Richmond, Virginia, Baptist and secular humanist scholars in theology, history, philosophy, and the social sciences, came together to define shared concerns and common values. The dialogue focused on major areas of concern: academic freedom; social, political, and religious tolerance; biblical scholarship; separation of church and state; the social agenda of the Christian Coalition and the Southern Baptist Convention; the danger of militant fundamentalism; freedom of conscience and the historic and current role (...) of American Baptists; as well as the plight of pluralistic democracy. (shrink)

The molecular mechanism of temperature‐dependent sex determination (TSD) is a long‐standing mystery. How is the thermal signal sensed, captured and transduced to regulate key sex genes? Although there is compelling evidence for pathways via which cells capture the temperature signal, there is no known mechanism by which cells transduce those thermal signals to affect gene expression. Here we propose a novel hypothesis we call 3D‐TSD (the three dimensions of thermolabile sex determination). We postulate that the genome has capacity to remodel (...) in response to temperature by changing 3D chromatin conformation, perhaps via temperature‐sensitive transcriptional condensates. This could rewire enhancer–promoter interactions to alter the expression of key sex‐determining genes. This hypothesis can accommodate monogenic or multigenic thermolabile sex‐determining systems, and could be combined with upstream thermal sensing and transduction to the epigenome to commit gonadal fate. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:REFLECTIONS ON PANNENBERG'S SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY 1 PAUL D. MOLNAR St. John's University Jamaica, New York RADING PANNENBERG leaves no doubt that one is encountering an intellectual giant. His thought is clear, systematic, comprehensive, and fact-filled. In many respects this book is exciting; topics are introduced and developed with details from scripture, from obscure and renowned Protestant theologians, from Aquinas, Augustine, Origen, Duns Scotus, Barth, Jiingel, Moltmann, Rahner, and (...) many others until Pannenberg 's own position is clarified and fully developed. Its six chapters explore : 1) how truth is the foundation of systematic theology; 2) how the concept of God relates to this truth (natural theology) ; 3) how the reality of God is understood in relation to other religions; 4) how to understand revelation; 5) the trinity; and 6) the unity and attributes of God. This last lengthy chapter (337-448) presents a very challenging description of God's attributes arguing that " the trinitarian life of God in his economy of salvation proves to be the true infinity of his omnipotence " (415). Hence the doctrine of the trinity makes it possible to speak correctly about God's immanence and transcendence without falling into pantheism, dualism, modalism, or subordinationism. This book is essential reading for any serious student of theology. Because of its complexity and difficulty, however, we shall focus on the relation of theology and philosophy and briefly explore the roles of experience and faith, natural theology, the 1 Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, Volume 1, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids : William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1991). 501 502 PAUL D. MOLNAR trinity, revelation, God's being and act, and the person and work of Jesus, with a view toward seeing how Pannenberg's philosophy affects his theology. In spite of his view that Rahner may succumb to " subjectivism " through a consensus theory of truth ( 14, n.22), many of Pannenberg's ideas, e.g., that "Nonthematic knowledge of God" is real and " part of our original situation " ( 115), and that, in the context of modern secularism, the word " God " still reminds us that "the wholeness of human existence has become an unanswered question" (71), would resonate positively with a Rahnerian method. And while he believes Barth did not succeed in grounding the doctrine of the trinity in revelation (327, 296), he contends that Rahner made progress with his thesis of identity, even though by allowing the Father to remain transcendent, he did not go far enough and should have seen that the Father " has made himself dependent upon the course of history " (329, emphasis mine). While Pannenberg deliberately intends to emphasize God's freedom and to avoid subjectivism (36ff., 127ff., 376-7, 391, 419), as when he argues that dogmaticians do not decide what is true, but only God decides (56), fundamental problems do affiict his approach to theology from the beginning. For example: The natural theology of the philosophers had formulated a criterion for judging whether any God could be seriously considered as the author of the whole cosmos, and Christian theology had to meet this criterion if its claim could be taken seriously that the God who redeems us in Jesus Christ is the Creator of heaven and earth and thus the one true God of all peoples (79). The obvious question which arises here is whether it is philosophy or God the creator, known through faith, who determines the meaning of creation and redemption; problems connected with this assertion arise within each chapter. Even though Pannenberg recognizes the problem of establishing our knowledge of God by negating our limited experience ( 184£., 406), he actually attempts to understand God's being in terms of the limits of creaturely experience when he argues that finite knowledge " is grounded especially in the time-bound nature PANNENBERG'S SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY 503 of the knowledge" (54). Thus all of our statements about God, who is not an object in the world, "rest on anticipations of the totality of the world and therefore on the as yet nonexistent future of its uncompleted history " (55, emphasis mine) ; following Descartes, he writes " We attain a sense of the infinite only by negation of the limit of the finite "; while our direct unthematic... (shrink)

In Situations and Individuals, Paul Elbourne argues that the natural language expressions that have been taken to refer to individuals — pronouns, proper names, and definite descriptions — have a common syntax and semantics, roughly that of definite descriptions as construed in the tradition of Frege. In the course of his argument, Elbourne shows that proper names have previously undetected donkey anaphoric readings.This is contrary to previous theorizing and, if true, would undermine what philosophers call the direct reference theory (...) (which holds that the sole contribution of a proper name to the truth conditions of a sentence is an individual) as well as the related doctrine that proper names are rigid designators. Elbourne begins by addressing donkey anaphora, relating other concerns about pronouns to the solution of this notorious problem. His subsequent argumentation provides a unified semantics for the donkey anaphoric and bound and referential uses of pronouns and discusses the prospect of unifying the syntax and semantics of pronouns with the syntax and semantics of normal definite descriptions. Elbourne's aim is not only to advance his proposal of a unified syntax and semantics but also to urge linguists and philosophers dealing with pronoun interpretation to consider a wider range of theories than they do at present, and to test the competing claims of description-based theories and dynamic semantics against the data. (shrink)

This article examined the effects of body–object interaction (BOI) on semantic processing. BOI measures perceptions of the ease with which a human body can physically interact with a word's referent. In Experiment 1, BOI effects were examined in 2 semantic categorization tasks (SCT) in which participants decided if words are easily imageable. Responses were faster and more accurate for high BOI words (e.g., mask) than for low BOI words (e.g., ship). In Experiment 2, BOI effects were examined in a semantic (...) lexical decision task (SLDT), which taps both semantic feedback and semantic processing. The BOI effect was larger in the SLDT than in the SCT, suggesting that BOI facilitates both semantic feedback and semantic processing. The findings are consistent with the embodied cognition perspective (e.g.,, Perceptual Symbols Theory), which proposes that sensorimotor interactions with the environment are incorporated in semantic knowledge. (shrink)

This 2004 book reconfigures the basic problem of Christian thinking - 'How can human discourse refer meaningfully to a transcendent God?' - as a twofold demand for integrity: integrity of reason and integrity of transcendence. Centring around a provocative yet penetratingly faithful re-reading of Kant's empirical realism, and drawing on an impelling confluence of contemporary thinkers Paul D. Janz argues that theology's 'referent' must be located within present empirical reality. Rigorously reasoned yet refreshingly accessible throughout, this book provides an (...) important, attentively informed alternative to the growing trends toward obscurantism, radicalization and anti-reason in many recent assessments of theological cognition, while remaining equally alert to the hazards of traditional metaphysics. In the book's culmination, epistemology and Christology converge around problems of noetic authority and orthodoxy with a kind of innovation, depth and straightforwardness that readers of theology at all levels of philosophical acquaintance will find illuminating. (shrink)

In this work Paul Murray explores which style of rationality is most appropriate to Christian theology in the contemporary pluralist, postfoundationalist, ...

Many commentators on Kant’s views on idealism, such as Kemp-Smith [1918], Strawson [1966] and, more recently, Guyer [1983 and 1987], begin by offering two choices. Either objects in space are nothing in themselves, or they exist independently of all knowers and all thought. After a fleeting, adolescent romance with idealism in the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason Kant is often said to emerge a mature realist in the second edition. It is said that for the later Kant (...) there is a noumenal realm of things-in-themselves which metaphysically grounds the phenomena we experience. We cannot have knowledge of things-in-themselves for reality must be taken as it comes, transformed by human cognitive capacities. Kant’s empirical realism is thus a genuine realism since it involves an ontologically separate mind-independent reality; yet it is an empirical realism because reality is accessible only by means of its causal impact on the senses. Moreover Kant is still an idealist since he holds that the nature of reality as experienced by humans is dependent on their cognitive structure. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Health Care Ethics: A Comprehensive Christian Resource by James R. ThobabenPaul D. SimmonsHealth Care Ethics: A Comprehensive Christian Resource by James R. Thobaben Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 2009. 429pp. $28.00In recent years, a stir has been created by the vocal and aggressive involvement of evangelicals in such issues as abortion, homosexuality, and end-of-life decisions. James Thobaben, the dean of Asbury Seminary, provides what he calls a [End (...) Page 203] “comprehensive resource” for evangelicals, and promises better understandings of their perspectives and commitments for those who are baffled or frustrated by the actions and claims of those on the religious right.Thobaben casts a wide net when defining those he includes as “evangelicals”—Southern Baptists, members of Campus Crusade, Pentecostals, the Holiness movement, neoevangelicals, charismatics, and Anabaptists. These diverse groups are evangelicals because of their “consistency on moral choices,” doctrinal orientation, and styles of social advocacy (24). Although they differ in a number of ways, they all share having been influenced in some way by John and Charles Wesley, Jonathan Edwards, and the Reformation. All stress conversion in that “one must say yes to the divine Jesus Christ” and become identified with the community of faithful believers (57). And in recent decades, they have become a potent political force with regard to the issues of abortion and homosexuality.Thobaben covers a wide range of topics in this book: from a general discussion of theodicy and healing to bioethics, disability, sickness, family and congregational care, professional truthfulness, managing care, end-of-life decisions, assisted reproduction, organ donation, and death. Yet, although he claims to provide a “comprehensive resource” on evangelical Christian health care ethics, he fails to provide a thorough examination of his subject matter. For example, Thobaben pays little attention to the historic beginnings of the religious right. One misses any mention of political action groups or the coalitions formed with or by conservative Christian groups to pursue social reforms, or of why such disparate groups have cooperated for political or social goals under the same umbrella. He focuses solely on identifying and articulating the consensus among those who embrace certain moral values on the current scene. Thobaben’s uncritical approach to his subject matter leaves the impression that this book is essentially an apology for evangelical, right-wing Christian social thought. One searches in vain for any critical discussion of the beliefs and values he presents or any thoughtful engagement with those who might view the stances he presents as an assault against women’s rights or an attack on the rights of gays, lesbians, and transsexuals.Moreover, in a book like this, one would have expected a more careful assessment of biblical passages and historical precedents. Thobaben does not provide much rationale for his method for moving from the Bible to current social issues. For example, no prohibition against abortion is found in the Bible and the few passages about homosexual practices hardly add up to the fierce opposition to gays found among strident evangelicals. Moreover, Thobaben does not mention that in 1965 laws against contraceptives were declared unconstitutional by the Griswold vs. Connecticut decision, the Supreme Court’s rejection of a ban supported by an evangelical crusade led by Anthony Comstock. [End Page 204]It is interesting to note that Thobaben holds a strongly qualified commitment to religious liberty and only a “thin” version of the social contract basic to the Bill of Rights (37). He argues that in at least some situations “intolerance is not only morally understandable but strongly preferable,” as in the examples of the “abolition of slavery and prolife/antiabortion advocacy” (29) or, in another context—where he distinguishes between tolerance toward those outside the church and intolerance toward those within it—with regard to homosexuality and alcohol intoxication (30).The task of Christian ethics is to enlighten believers and the general citizenry by a careful exposition of the sources of wisdom available to those who want to think and think morally about issues of importance to human flourishing. That task is especially important in an age of demagogic hostility toward unpopular groups. Sadly, this book does not engage such critical questions. It may prove... (shrink)

This article explores Karl Barth's early and later understanding of the incarnation with a view toward answering two very important theological questions: did Barth so historicize his Christology in his doctrine of Reconciliation that he could no longer accept his own earlier view that “His Word would still be His Word apart from this becoming [incarnate], just as Father, Son and Holy Spirit would be none the less eternal God, if no world had been created”? Or did his earlier view (...) enable him to present a more powerful understanding of how God himself was at work in the history of Jesus of Nazareth and in human history effecting the reconciliation of the world both from the side of God and from the human side? This article argues that Barth never historicized his Christology to such an extent that he ever would have espoused the idea that Jesus' human history “constituted” his being as the second person of the Trinity, since any such thinking undermines Barth's belief that Jesus' divinity must be recognized as “definitive, authentic and essential” if it is to be truly recognized at all. It is further argued that those who do espouse this view have confused epistemology and ontology by mistakenly assuming that since we cannot know the eternal Trinity except through the human history of Jesus as the incarnate Word, that must mean that the eternal Word never existed without that human history so that, strictly speaking, we can no longer distinguish between the immanent and the economic Trinity and the logos asarkos and logos incarnandus . This article suggests that those who hold that God realizes his own eternal being by suffering and dying for us have missed a crucial point of Barth's trinitarian doctrine which is that God realizes his purposes for us in the suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus, but that he did not thereby realize his own being as the triune God, since God's eternal being and act does not need any realization by virtue of the fact that God is perfect and acts toward us in the overflow of that perfect love in perfect freedom. (shrink)

In this study, we examined the effects of emotional experience, a relatively new dimension of emotional knowledge that gauges the ease with which words evoke emotional experience, on abstract word processing in the Stroop task. In order to test the context-dependency of these effects, we accentuated the saliency of this dimension in Experiment 1A by blocking the stimuli such that one block consisted of the stimuli with the highest emotional experience ratings and the other block consisted of the stimuli with (...) the lowest emotional experience ratings. We attenuated the saliency of this dimension in Experiment 1B by intermixing the stimuli. We observed slower color naming performance for words with higher emotional experience ratings only in Experiment 1A, suggesting that the dimension of emotional experience is an aspect of semantic representation for abstract words but that its influence can be modulated by context. We interpret these results more generally using Vigliocco, Meteyard, Andrews, and Kousta's framework of semantic representation, and more specifically using Cohen, Dunbar, and McClelland's model of Stroop task performance. (shrink)

In attempting to form rational personal probabilities by direct inference, it is usually assumed that one should prefer frequency information concerning more specific reference classes. While the preceding assumption is intuitively plausible, little energy has been expended in explaining why it should be accepted. In the present article, I address this omission by showing that, among the principled policies that may be used in setting one’s personal probabilities, the policy of making direct inferences with a preference for frequency information for (...) more specific reference classes yields personal probabilities whose accuracy is optimal, according to all proper scoring rules, in situations where all of the relevant frequency information is point-valued. Assuming that frequency information for narrower reference classes is preferred, when the relevant frequency statements are point-valued, a dilemma arises when choosing whether to make a direct inference based upon relatively precise-valued frequency information for a broad reference class, R, or upon relatively imprecise-valued frequency information for a more specific reference class, R*. I address such cases, by showing that it is often possible to make a precise-valued frequency judgment regarding R* based on precise-valued frequency information for R, using standard principles of direct inference. Having made such a frequency judgment, the dilemma of choosing between and is removed, and one may proceed by using the precise-valued frequency estimate for the more specific reference class as a premise for direct inference. (shrink)

The point, for the 946,326th time is that people get elected to office by currying the favor of powerful interest groups. They don’t get elected for their excellence as political philosophers.Congress has consistently failed to solve some serious problems with the cost, effectiveness, and safety of pharmaceuticals. In part, this failure results from the pharmaceutical industry convincing legislators to define policy problems in ways that protect industry profits. By targeting campaign contributions to influential legislators and by providing them with selective (...) information, the industry manages to displace the public’s voice in developing pharmaceutical policy. (shrink)

We propose that synesthetic cross‐activation between the primary auditory cortex and the anatomically adjacent insula may help explain two puzzling conditions—autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) and misophonia—in which quotidian sounds involuntarily trigger strong emotional responses. In ASMR the sounds engender relaxation, while in misophonia they trigger an aversive response. The insula both plays an important role in autonomic nervous system control and integrates multiple interoceptive maps representing the physiological state of the body to substantiate a dynamic representation of emotional wellbeing. (...) We propose that in ASMR cross‐activation of the map for affective (sensual) touch leads to an increase in subjective wellbeing and parasympathetic activity. Conversely, in misophonia the effect of the cross‐activation is to decrease emotional wellbeing and increase sympathetic activity. Our hypothesis also illuminates the connection between hearing and wellbeing more broadly and helps explain why so many people experience decreased wellbeing from modern urban soundscapes. (shrink)

The advent of digital cameras has provided photographers, with varying levels of expertise, the opportunity to accumulate large repositories of digital images. However, this expansion has also brought the attendant difficulty of image retrieval. This paper reviews the considerable work already carried out on image retrieval and identifies critical constraints in attempting to handle the underlying semantics of photographic images. The authors address the issue of how an amateur photographer, storing several thousand images a year, can effectively and efficiently manage (...) a personal collection. A number of surprisingly simple techniques are proposed utilising a sparse lexical ontology alongside iconic visual clues to identify key representative events in the collection. The photographer’s associated knowledge and experience, often shared by others who are attuned to the context of the collection, are critical to the effective management of the images. The authors recommend the use of existing browsers and a simple keyword table to facilitate concise and effective image storage and retrieval. Photographers can further enrich the representation of their collection by clustering images in accordance with their perceived relevance and aesthetic qualities. The authors argue that these properties can also be exploited to enhance retrieval. (shrink)

The relativist strain in Rorty’s work should be distinguished from the Davidsonian strain. The latter may be exploited in support of Rorty’s critique of philosophy but it is at odds with his use of “solidarity” and “ethnocentrism”as explanatory concepts. Once this is recognized, there remains in Rorty’s work a consistent challenge to the search for general philosophical theories of truth, objectivity, and rationality (of which relativism itself is an example). On this reading, however, Rorty’s pragmatism is not a theory that (...) offers answers to questions about the authority of beliefs and practices but rather a critical tool used to open detailed, concrete, and critical investigation into particular questions about the establishment and viability of the beliefs and practices we have. (shrink)

The prevailing view among historians of science holds that Charles Darwin became a convinced transmutationist only in the early spring of 1837, after his Beagle collections had been examined by expert British naturalists. With respect to the fossil vertebrate evidence, some historians believe that Darwin was incapable of seeing or understanding the transmutationist implications of his specimens without the help of Richard Owen. There is ample evidence, however, that he clearly recognized the similarities between several of the fossil vertebrates he (...) collected and some of the extant fauna of South America before he returned to Britain. These comparisons, recorded in his correspondence, his diary and his notebooks during the voyage, were instances of a phenomenon that he later called the “law of the succession of types.” Moreover, on the Beagle, he was following a geological research agenda outlined in the second volume of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, which implies that paleontological data alone could provide an insight into the laws which govern the appearance of new species. Since Darwin claims in On the Origin of Species that fossil vertebrate succession was one of the key lines of evidence that led him to question the fixity of species, it seems certain that he was seriously contemplating transmutation during the Beagle voyage. If so, historians of science need to reconsider both the role of Britain’s expert naturalists and the importance of the fossil vertebrate evidence in the development of Darwin’s ideas on transmutation. (shrink)

'A mere metaphor', 'only symbolic', 'just a myth' - these tell tale phrases reveal how figurative language has been cheapened and devalued in our modern and postmodern culture. In God and the Creative Imagination, Paul Avis argues the contrary: we see that actually, metaphor, symbol and myth, are the key to a real knowledge of God and the sacred. Avis examines what he calls an alternative tradition, stemming from the Romantic poets Blake, Wordsworth and Keats and drawing on the (...) thought of Cleridge and Newman, and experience in both modern philosophy and science. God and the Creative Imagination intriguingly draws on a number of non-theological disciplines, from literature to philosophy of science, to show us that God is appropriately likened to an artist or poet and that the greatest truths are expressed in an imaginative form. Anyone wishing to further their understanding of God, belief and the imagination will find this an inspiring work. (shrink)