This paper reviews the fate of the central ideas behind the complementary learning systems (CLS) framework as originally articulated in McClelland, McNaughton, and O’Reilly (1995). This framework explains why the brain requires two differentially specialized learning and memory systems, and it nicely specifies their central properties (i.e., the hippocampus as a sparse, pattern-separated system for rapidly learning episodic memories, and the neocortex as a distributed, overlapping system for gradually integrating across episodes to extract latent semantic structure). We review the (...) application of the CLS framework to a range of important topics, including the following: the basic neural processes of hippocampal memory encoding and recall, conjunctive encoding, human recognition memory, consolidation of initial hippocampal learning in cortex, dynamic modulation of encoding versus recall, and the synergistic interactions between hippocampus and neocortex. Overall, the CLS framework remains a vital theoretical force in the field, with the empirical data over the past 15 years generally confirming its key principles. (shrink)

Ethics of Compassion places central themes from Buddhist and Christian moral teachings within the conceptual framework of Western normative ethics. What results is a viable alternative ethical theory to those offered by utilitarians, Kantian formalists, proponents of the natural law tradition, and advocates of virtue ethics. Ethics of Compassion bridges Eastern and Western cultures, philosophical ethics and religious moral discourse, and notions of acting rightly and of being virtuous.

The pressure of oversight and scrutiny in the business-to-business purchasing process has the potential to cause psychological distress in purchasing professionals, giving rise to apprehensions about being ethically inappropriate. Utilizing depth interviews with public sector purchasing professionals in a phenomenological approach, the authors develop the notion of ethical purchasing dissonance to explain the psychological distress. An inductively derived conceptual framework is presented for ethical purchasing dissonance that explores its potential antecedents and consequences; illustrative propositions are presented, and managerial implications are (...) discussed. (shrink)

A number of theistic philosophers have recently denied that God is subject to moral and rational norms. At the same time, many theists employ epistemological and inductive arguments for the existence of God. I will argue that ‘no-norms’ theists cannot make use of such arguments: if God is not subject to norms – particularly rational norms – then we can say nothing substantive about what kind of worlds God would be likely to create, and as such, we cannot predict the (...) likelihood of any particular evidence given theism. What is more, I argue that this lack of constraint on God's creative act raises a serious sceptical challenge for no-norms theism. (shrink)

The metaverse is equivocal. It is a science-fictional concept from the past; it is the present’s rough implementations; and it is the Promised Cyberland, expected to manifest some time in the future. The metaverse first emerged as a techno-capitalist network in a 1992 science fiction novel by Neal Stephenson. Our article thus marks the metaverse’s thirtieth anniversary. We revisit Stephenson’s original concept plus three sophisticated antecedents from 1972 to 1984: Jean Baudrillard’s simulation, Sherry Turkle’s networked identities, and Jacques Lacan’s schema (...) of suggestible consumers hooked up to a Matrix-like capitalist network. We gauge the relevance of these three antecedents following Meta’s recent promise to deliver a metaverse for the mainstream and the emergence of blockchain-oriented metaverse projects. We examine empirical data from 2021 and 2022, sourced from journalistic and social media (BuzzSumo, Google Trends, Reddit, and Twitter) as well as the United States Patent and Trademark Office. This latest chapter of the metaverse’s convoluted history reveals a focus not on virtual reality goggles but rather on techno-capitalist notions like digital wallets, crypto-assets, and targeted advertisements. The metaverse’s wallet-holders collect status symbols like limited-edition profile pictures, fashion items for avatars, tradable pets and companions, and real estate. Motivated by the metaverse’s sophisticated antecedents and our empirical findings, we propose a subtle conceptual re-orientation that respects the metaverse’s equivocal nature and rejects sanitised solutionism. Do not let the phantasmagorical goggles distract you too much: Big Meta is watching you, and it expects you to become a wallet-holder. Blockchain proponents want this as well. (shrink)

Arbitrary symbolism is a linguistic doctrine that predicts an orthogonal relationship between word forms and their corresponding meanings. Recent corpora analyses have demonstrated violations of arbitrary symbolism with respect to concreteness, a variable characterizing the sensorimotor salience of a word. In addition to qualitative semantic differences, abstract and concrete words are also marked by distinct morphophonological structures such as length and morphological complexity. Native English speakers show sensitivity to these markers in tasks such as auditory word recognition and naming. One (...) unanswered question is whether this violation of arbitrariness reflects an idiosyncratic property of the English lexicon or whether word concreteness is a marked phenomenon across other natural languages. We isolated concrete and abstract English nouns, and translated each into Russian, Arabic, Dutch, Mandarin, Hindi, Korean, Hebrew, and American Sign Language. We conducted offline acoustic analyses of abstract and concrete word length discrepancies across languages. In a separate experiment, native English speakers with no prior knowledge of these foreign languages judged concreteness of these nouns. Each naïve participant heard pre-recorded words presented in randomized blocks of three foreign languages following a brief listening exposure to a narrative sample from each respective language. Concrete and abstract words differed by length across five of eight languages, and prediction accuracy exceeded chance for four of eight languages. These results suggest that word concreteness is a marked phenomenon across several of the world's most widely spoken languages. We interpret these findings as supportive of an adaptive cognitive heuristic that allows listeners to exploit non-arbitrary mappings of word form to word meaning. (shrink)

Scholars have characterised the trial of the life of pleasure in Philebus 20b-21d as digressive or pejorative. I argue that it is neither: it is a thought experiment containing an important argument, in the form of a reductio, of the hypothesis that a life could be most pleasant without cognition. It proceeds in a series of steps, culminating in the precisely chosen image of the jellyfish. Understanding the intended resonance of this creature, and the sense in which it is deprived, (...) is critical for reconstructing the argument, and yields new insight into Plato’s views on the minimal conditions for pleasure. (shrink)

The need to re-examine established ways of thinking about secularism and its relationship to feminism has arisen in the context of the confluence of a number of developments including: the increasing dominance of the ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis; the expansion of postmodern critiques of Enlightenment rationality to encompass questions of religion; and sustained critiques of the ‘secularization thesis’. Conflicts between the claims of women's equality and the claims of religion are well-documented vis-à-vis all major religions and across all regions. The (...) ongoing moral panic about the presence of Islam in Europe, marked by a preoccupation with policing Muslim women's dress, reminds us of the centrality of women and gender power relations in the interrelation of religion, culture and the state. Added to postmodern and other critiques of the secular-religious binary, most sociological research now contradicts the equation of modernization with secularization. This article focuses on the challenges that these developments pose to politically oriented feminist thinking and practice. It argues that non-oppressive feminist responses require a new critical engagement with secularism as a normative principle in democratic, multicultural societies. To inform this process, the author maps and links discussions across different fields of feminist scholarship, in the sociology of religion and in political theory. She organizes the main philosophical traditions and fault lines that form the intellectual terrain at the intersection of feminism, religion and politics in two broad groups: feminist critiques of the Enlightenment critique of religion; and feminist scholarship at the critical edges of the Enlightenment tradition. The author argues that notwithstanding the fragmented nature of feminist debates in this area, common ground is emerging across different politically oriented approaches: all emphasize ‘democracy’ and the values that underpin it as the larger discursive frame in which the principle of secularism can be redefined with emancipatory intent in a neo-secular age. (shrink)

Durante mucho tiempo el cosmos se entendió como algo eterno. Las tradiciones Abrahamicas trajeron al debate no solo la idea de creación sino también la idea de fin del mundo, eschaton, sin embargo, nadie sabía el día ni la hora. Durante el proceso de secularización, esta promesa que encontramos en el Apocalipsis tiene impacto en el discurso político fomentando una perspectiva optimista sobre el futuro. Sin embargo, durante el siglo XX la física y la astronomía descubren que el cosmos no (...) podrá seguir alojando más vida en le futuro, y esto fue visto por varios autores como una confirmación de que la vida no tiene sentido. Sin embargo, prestando mayora atención a la relación entre la idea de eschaton y telos podemos comprender que existe una diferencia entre ambas nociones. A pesar de que la Astronomía afirme que en un futuro lejano habrá un fin, ¿es esta la última respuesta a la pregunta por el sentido de la vida? Este artículo es una aproximación a la distinción entre sentido de la idea de fin dado por la cosmología y el sentido de fin que encontramos en la filosofía. (shrink)

Words associated with perceptually salient, highly imageable concepts are learned earlier in life, more accurately recalled, and more rapidly named than abstract words (R. W. Brown, 1976; Walker & Hulme, 1999). Theories accounting for this concreteness effect have focused exclusively on semantic properties of word referents. A novel possibility is that word structure may also contribute to the effect. We report a corpus-based analysis of the phonological and morphological structures of a large set of nouns with imageability ratings (N = (...) 2,023). High- and low-imageability nouns differed by length, etymology, prosody, affixation, phonological neighborhood density, and rates of consonant clustering. On average, nouns denoting abstract concepts were longer, more derivationally complex, and emerged in English from a different distribution of languages than did concrete nouns. We address implications for interactivity of word form and meaning as pertain to theories of word concreteness, lexical acquisition, and word processing. (shrink)

The pessimistic conclusion that people have relatively poor insight into the weighting schemes they use when they make holistic judgements has been generally accepted among judgement researchers. The empirical research that supported this generalisation rested on indices of self-insight that were produced directly by the subjects. It was often the case that subjects were unable to correctly name even the single most important factor influencing their decisions, as indicated by a mathematical model of their judgement schemes. Using an alternate method (...) of assessing self-insight, however, Reilly and Doherty found that subjects have far better self-insight than previously believed possible. The present paper employed the same methodology to investigate insight into the policy of another person as well as into oneself, and examined the relation of self-insight and other-insight to interpersonal conflict. Subjects were 50 dyads of university students. The results showed that: subjects exhibited the expected high levels of self-insight via the recognition procedure; subjects were able to identify the statistically generated policy of their roommate, thus exhibiting other-insight; the ability to identify one's own policy is somewhat related to the ability to articulate one's own policy that is, roommates with insight via recognition had higher indices of self-insight as measured by the traditional correlation method; subjects who were able to identify their own policy were more likely to identify their roommate's policy and individuals who possess self- and other-insight had less conflict in their roommate relationships. (shrink)

The book argues that the category of mother is distinct from the category of woman and that many of the problems mothers face-socially, economically, politically, culturally, and psychologically-are specific to women's work and identity as mothers. Indeed, mothers, arguably more so than women in general, remain disempowered despite forty years of feminism. Mothers, thus, need a feminism of their own, one that positions mothers' concerns as the starting point for a theory and politic of empowerment. O'Reilly terms this new (...) mode of feminism matricentic feminism and the book explores how it is represented and experienced in theory, activism, and practice. The chapter on maternal theory examines the central theoretical concepts of maternal scholarship to include Adrienne Rich's distinction between mothering and motherhood, Sara Ruddick's model of maternal thinking and practice and Patricia Hill Collins' concept of othermothering while the chapter on activism considers the 21st century motherhood movement. Feminist mothering is likewise examined as the specific practice of matricentric feminism and this chapter discusses varies theories and strategies on and for maternal empowerment. Matricentric feminism is also examined in relation to the larger field of Feminist Theory and Women's Studies; here O'Reilly persuasively shows how matricentric feminism has been marginalized in feminist scholarship and considers the reasons for such exclusion and how such may be challenged and changed. (shrink)

This article appeals to Thomas Aquinas in order to offer a construal of the nature of reason arguably preferable to that prominent in the Enlightenment. Thomas’s account neither espouses the notion that reason is devoid of any appetitive influence nor so conflates reason and will as to suggest that thinking becomes essentially a form of willing. His view does respect that the activity of willing is of fundamental import for the life of reason. Since the ultimate object of the will (...) is union with God, it follows that the virtue that specifically promotes the attainment of this end—the virtue of religion—has particular import because it aims at rectifying the will and is the most excellent among the moral virtues. In brief, this virtue promotes the optimal intellectual and moral flourishing of individuals as well as the realization of justice in society. (shrink)

Physically enhancing brain–machine interfaces communicate elec­tronically with the patient’s mind in both directions. They present significant opportunities to improve a patient’s health and to restore his or her physical function, but they also present problems for the patient’s sense of agency and self. This is exacerbated by notions of extension and enhancement that are not grounded in an authentic human anthropology that describes the inherently dignified person as an integral union of body and soul.

'Take care of the means and the ends will take care of themselves'By the time you are reading this instalment I will have been in my new position as Team Leader for a Community Conservation Project for more than one year. Why I left my previous position will perhaps become clear in this instalment. I may be unsuited to working in institutions that in theory value knowledge and analysis, but in practice become increasingly uncomfortable when the critical analysis is turned (...) inwards. I find I am not alone; witness the prominent case of the response of the World Bank to criticisms from their own former Chief Economist, the Nobel Economics laureate Joseph Stiglitz. His criticism of the International Financial Institutions after years of working with them could not be dismissed as the work of an uninformed outsider and were therefore treated with the disdain due to some one who had 'jumped ship'. (shrink)

Avicenna's Philosophia Prima occupies a relevant place in the history of metaphysics. In its first four chapters, we find a definition of metaphysics as wisdom and the more certain philosophy that highlights the scientific character that Avicenna seeks to give metaphysics. The elucidation of the subject matter of this discipline is developed in the debate among its Arab sources, but at the same time, it extends in the historical discussion on the place of God and being in metaphysics. This article (...) presents the definition of metaphysics as the first science, and the establishment of the being as the proper subject of metaphysics, and God as what is sought. (shrink)

This work adds to the growing literature on children’s talk and the extensive research on interruptions by combining the two. I investigate children in the institutional context of family therapy and their interactions with the parents and therapist. Drawing upon 22 hours of natural family therapy data and four families, I use a discursive approach. I note that children are not attended to when they try to interrupt unless they persist and then the acknowledgement is negative. I show that when (...) the main topic is about extremes of behaviour the child’s none relevant interruption is ignored. There are occasions however when the child interrupts with a topic relevant issue and these are usually attended to. This research has wider implications for therapeutic practice and children’s role in therapy. There is a need for further study of children’s interruptive discourse practice as research in this area is limited. (shrink)