Richard Rorty places William James in the same category of thinkers as Hegel. These thinkers, he claims, do not believe that philosophical discussion involves any reference to a reality external to their dialogue. Rorty’s claim initially seems justified, for Jamesdoes after all speak of the malleability of reality and insists that reality is part of experience. However, the fact that reality is part of experience does not necessarily mean that it is created by experience. Indeed, James insists that the reality (...) that limits truth is “found, not manufactured,” and the flexibility of truth cannot be attributed to the lack of an external reality but rather results from the interplay of thought and reality in determining truth. (shrink)

Parts and wholes come in an infinite variety, but in each instance something, namely relations, joins the parts together to make them into a whole rather than an Aristotelian "heap." The ontological status of relations is the subject of this dissertation. ;The question of whether relations are real presupposes some method of determining what is real. A modified version of Whitehead's ontological principle, or the idea that only real things can have effects on other things, serves as the test of (...) the reality. If any effects result from a whole but not from a collection of parts, then a whole differs from its parts and relations are real. Such effects can manifest themselves in two ways: parts themselves may somehow be affected by being joined into a whole or some new property may emerge with a whole that cannot be attributed to the parts taken separately. If one discovers either type of effect, then relations are real. ;The first section of the dissertation is an historical examination on the question of the reality of the relations. In the first chapter, the positions of Hume, Parmenides and Whitehead are considered but ultimately rejected. The second chapter examines the positions of Aristotle and Wittgenstein, thinkers for whom relations are in some cases real, while the third examines Plato's idea on relations. ;In the fourth chapter, a distinction between two types of relations is drawn. The difference between these relations is found in whether or not the parts joined are affected by being in a whole. Static relations are those which join parts into a whole without affecting those parts, while parts joined by dynamic relations are affected by being in a whole. Both static and dynamic wholes possess emergent properties which come into being only when parts are joined into wholes. ;The second section focuses on the consequences of the reality of relations in philosophy, specifically in ethics, logic and the philosophy of space and time. (shrink)

Research examining non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) in daily life has grown substantially; thus, it is essential in conducting ecological momentary assessment (EMA) research with individuals who self-injure to follow important ethical guidelines. Given the challenges faced by researchers in monitoring, assessing, and responding to risk among those who self-injure, further guidance and research is warranted in informing best-practices for conducting EMA research examining NSSI. We suggest ethics-based approaches to professional competence, responding to and monitoring risk, and ensuring inclusive and representative approaches (...) to NSSI research in daily life. Related empirical and practical issues in need of further investigation are discussed. (shrink)

Language and culture endow humans with access to conceptual information that far exceeds any which could be accessed by a non-human animal. Yet, it is possible that, even without language or specific experiences, non-human animals represent and infer some aspects of similarity relations between objects in the same way as humans. Here, we show that monkeys’ discrimination sensitivity when identifying images of animals is predicted by established measures of semantic similarity derived from human conceptual judgments. We used metrics from computer (...) vision and computational neuroscience to show that monkeys’ and humans’ performance cannot be explained by low-level visual similarity alone. The results demonstrate that at least some of the underlying structure of object representations in humans is shared with non-human primates, at an abstract level that extends beyond low-level visual similarity. Because the monkeys had no experience with the objects we tested, the results suggest that monkeys and humans share a primitive representation of object similarity that is independent of formal knowledge and cultural experience, and likely derived from common evolutionary constraints on object representation. (shrink)

A basic aspect of emotional responding to music involves the liking for specific pieces. Juslin & Vll (J&V) fail to acknowledge that simple exposure plays a fundamental role in this regard. Listeners like what they have heard but not what they have heard too often. Exposure represents an additional mechanism, ignored by the authors, that helps to explain emotional responses to music.

This book provides a compositional, truth-conditional, crosslinguistic semantics for evidentiality, the linguistic encoding of the source of information on which a statement is based. Central to the proposed theory is the distinction between what propositional content is at-issue and what content is not-at-issue. Evidentials contribute not-at-issue content, and can affect the level of commitment a sentence makes to the main proposition, contributed by sentential mood. In this volume, Sarah Murray builds on recent work in the formal semantics of evidentials (...) and related phenomena, and proposes a semantics that does not appeal to separate dimensions of illocutionary meaning. Instead, she argues that all sentences make three contributions: at-issue content, not-at-issue content, and an illocutionary relation. At-issue content is presented and made available for subsequent anaphora, but is not directly added to the common ground; not-at-issue content directly updates the common ground; and the illocutionary relation uses the at-issue content to impose structure on the common ground, which, depending on the clause type, can trigger further updates. 0The analysis is supported by extensive empirical data from Cheyenne, drawn from the author's own fieldwork, as well as from English and a variety of other languages. (shrink)

Why do so many of God’s followers seem to prefer their boxed-in religion over God? Listen to their rhetoric and you might wonder how a Supreme Being could be so narrow and small, so angry and unattractive. It’s time to start over with an honest conversation instead of a box. If God does exist, there should be some clear indications of his being. And if humans bear God’s image, as the Bible indicates, then we should be able to connect with (...) God on some level. This book is about God, not religion. It’s about questions more than watertight answers. It’s about the experience of God more than it is about incontrovertible evidence that he exists. God can’t be seen, but he can be found. And while he can’t be fully explained, he can be known and experienced. Religious boxes have a way of blinding us to spiritual reality. So this dialogue is all God, no box. Are you ready? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Peaceful Persuasion: The Geopolitics of Nonviolent RhetoricSarah E. DempseyPeaceful Persuasion: The Geopolitics of Nonviolent Rhetoric. Ellen W. Gorsevski. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004.pp. 262. $55.00, hardcover.The overriding emphasis on violence, militarization, and retribution within current geopolitical contexts demands that we acquire greater understandings of nonviolent communicative practices. In Peaceful Persuasion, author Ellen Gorsevski, Professor of English and Communication at Oregon State University, argues that nonviolent (...) rhetoric tends to be ignored by scholars—that its methods, strategies, and impacts are often passed over and that nonviolence is often framed as hopelessly utopian, unrealistic, and ineffective. Gorsevski situates her study of nonviolent rhetoric less within its humanistic and religious inheritance, drawing instead on a contrast with existing models of rhetoric. As a strategy for rhetorical and political action, Gorsevski takes nonviolence to be instructive of new ways to reconfigure both rhetorical studies and social movement strategy.It is important to note that Gorsevski's need to study peaceful means of relating to others is driven as much by a love of rhetorical theory as by a passion for translating an understanding of nonviolent rhetoric into strategies for activists. As such, this book provides a solid introduction to rhetorical theory, including an appendix on the connection between rhetoric and nonviolence that details what activists have to gain from each. In addition, instructors will find useful a chapter on the specifics of incorporating nonviolence into speech communication classrooms.Peaceful Persuasion's greatest contribution to rhetorical studies is the careful drawing out of the many ways that a rhetorical take on nonviolence has become increasingly necessary. To make this solid case, Gorsevski draws on four very diverse case studies of nonviolent rhetoric. In a move that is both surprising and refreshing, Gorsevski's case studies do more than provide exemplars of how critics may read nonviolence as a powerful rhetorical strategy; each helps to further delineate the key characteristics of what has been, until now, a relatively undefined area of rhetorical action.Gorsevski's gift to her readers is the ability to demonstrate the rich subtleties of nonviolence through very different contexts. The case studies [End Page 89] draw from such different sources that at first seem disorienting. Upon reflection, it becomes clearer that they greatly complicate our notions of nonviolence, redressing the disservices of previous bleary analyses that configured nonviolence only by its lack of violence rather than according to its fruitful range of seemingly contradictory strategies. The cavernous distances each study crosses illuminate the multiplicity of forms, meanings, and strategies that nonviolence may take. As such, any definition of nonviolence that I may provide in this short review does a serious disservice to the depth that Gorsevski creates through her sometimes disjointed case studies.The case studies serve at least dual purposes, as each provides an analysis that extends our understandings of nonviolence in action as it also offers instructive mini-lessons for the further development of rhetorical studies. In the first case study, Gorsevski provides a contextualized analysis of critics' interpretations of the film The Spitfire Grill, which she shows to be reflective of the "predominantly accepting orientation that rhetoric and film critics hold for the idea that humans are characterized by "innate aggression" and violence" (68). For Gorsevski, this study demonstrates that nonviolence as a lens can be applied to a range of texts just as well as any other approach to rhetoric. Gorsevski moves her analysis of nonviolent rhetoric into the geopolitical realm for her study of President of Macedonia Kiro Gligorov's historic first speech before the United Nations. She takes his speech as evidence of the usefulness of pragmatic nonviolence, which entails "noncooperation or defiance of political adversaries in order to decry a perceived injustice" (72). Gligorov's speech illustrates that nonviolence and violence are best seen less as equivalent than, rather, as operating on a sliding scale. For Gorsevski, successful use of pragmatic nonviolence may even include a measure of violence as long as it serves to reduce the escalation of further strife.Next Gorsevski explores the visual rhetoric of the gendered body of Burmese activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi to show... (shrink)

This essay seeks to demonstrate how ministers and others can enhance attentiveness to God in a culture that does much to distract us. Through such practices as fasting from technological distractions and retreating, we can open ourselves to God’s transforming love and allow that love to flow through us in our everyday lives and ministries.

Sarah E. Wilson, University of Central LancashireThis paper's account of the core issues at stake in relation to genetic enhancement is presented as an alternative to mainstream liberal defenses of enhancement. The mainstream arguments are identified as being associated with reproductive autonomy, individual choice, and a `neutral', passive interpretation of technology. The alternative account is associated with the perspective of `woman' or child-bearer, with a fundamental concern for social justice, and an understanding of society in both a global and (...) a contextual sense. This paper adopts a theoretical framework informed by feminist ethics, particularly a feminist ethic of care. The paper begins by outlining some of the key points of the care perspective, highlighting how this contrasts with a mainstream `justice' perspective, and illustrating how this is reflected in arguments relating to genetic enhancement. The paper then turns to a consideration of how a care perspective might be applied to questions of genetic enhancement, and how this may bring forward new issues. This includes in particular a consideration of IVF technologies and how applying understandings from research into this area brings forward usually unaddressed concerns in considering genetic enhancement. The final section of the paper covers some of the questions that there is space to ask once the narrow focus on individual rights is overcome. (shrink)

Precollege philosophy programs provide young people with alternative spaces to ask questions and develop critical perspectives on their experiences, but neoliberal school management practices make the creation of these spaces increasingly difficult. Relying on my own experience as an instructor of a community-engaged course that focuses on precollege philosophy, I investigate how college and university professors and students can create philosophical learning opportunities for high school students without participating in the culture of volunteerism demanded by neoliberal logic. I argue that (...) the work my university students perform in the community-engaged course is a win-win that undermines neoliberalism’s assault on education by providing high school students with a valuable opportunity while helping my students achieve important skills. (shrink)

This article draws on Donna Haraway’s call for feminist speculative fabulation as an approach to qualitative research methodologies and writing praxis in schools. The first section of the article outlines how I conceptualize speculative thought, through different philosophers and theorists, and provides a brief literature review of speculative fiction used in secondary English curricula. The article then focuses on an in school creative writing project with grade 9 English students. In the student examples that I attend to, speculative fabulations and (...) situated feminisms are entangled, rendered complex, and in tension. In the final section, I discuss the Whiteness of mainstream speculative fiction and argue that speculative fabulation must be accountable to situated feminisms in how we read, write, and conduct research. (shrink)

In Consecrating Science: Wonder, Knowledge, and the Natural World, Lisa H. Sideris makes a compelling case that a new cosmology movement advocates for a new, universal, creation story grounded in the sciences. She fears the new story reinforces elite power structures and anthropocentrism and thus environmental degradation. Alternatively, she promotes genuine wonder which occurs in experiences of the natural world. As Sideris focuses on the likely logical outcome of the assumptions and arguments of the new cosmologies, she does not investigate (...) whether and how people react to these new myths. I suggest that methods of documentary studies, applied to popular book reviews on Amazon and Goodreads, shed light on the ramifications of the new cosmologies among the general public. While many reviewers exhibit attitudes and behaviors that would concern Sideris, responses are far from univocal. Using this case as a guide, I suggest that attention to the experience of laypeople could contribute productively to religion and science research in general. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn 1651, Alexander Ross published an attack on Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Bacon's Natural History and William Harvey's De generatione. Ross's work, Arcana Microcosmi, defended Aristotelian natural philosophy against the ‘new philosophy’ that figures like Bacon, Harvey and Browne represented. Though Ross's attacks on these authors make up no more than half of the treatise’s contents, the book’s paratextual materials emphasise scientific debate. While Ross's authorial approach advocates reading exclusively ancient authorities for the sake of glossing and transmitting their knowledge (...) to a wider public, in order to argue against the new philosophy Ross must engage with its textual production. Furthermore, his works advertise their focus on Bacon, Harvey and Browne, which would have attracted a readership drawn to new scientific approaches to knowledge formation. Ross's polemic represents an effort to model his devotion to ancient authority while also generating a reading public that would resist the new approach to reading that the new philosophy proposed. (shrink)

School gardens and garden-based learning continue to gain great popularity in the United States, and their pedagogical potential, and ability to impact students’ fruit and vegetable consumption and activity levels have been well-documented. Less examined is their potential to be agents of food system reskilling and transformation. Though producer and consumer are inextricably linked in the food system, and deskilling of one directly influences the other, theorists often focus on production-centered and consumption-centered deskilling separately. However, in a school garden, the (...) production/consumption disconnect is erased, by virtue of the design of the site itself and how it is utilized by the actors within it. School gardens provide the critical component of education in alternative food networks, and contribute to the producer/consumer reskilling that is a necessary part of food system transformation. We conducted a case study of an established school garden program during its transition from autonomous non-profit to official, district-funded program of a rural school district in the Midwest. By participating in the full “seed to plate” life cycle of a garden crop, students in the garden were actively involved in the reconnection of producer and consumer, while educators were fostering in students an appreciation for fresh, healthy foods and actively challenging the “McDonaldization” of both students’ diets and education. Based upon these findings, we argue that school gardens in rural areas could leverage the dominant role of rural America in developing and shifting food system paradigms. (shrink)

Many languages grammatically mark evidentiality, i.e., the source of information. In assertions, evidentials indicate the source of information of the speaker while in questions they indicate the expected source of information of the addressee. This dissertation examines the semantics and pragmatics of evidentiality and illocutionary mood, set within formal theories of meaning and discourse. The empirical focus is the evidential system of Cheyenne (Algonquian: Montana), which is analyzed based on several years of fieldwork by the author.

Mastery imagery (i.e., images of being in control and coping in difficult situations) is used to regulate anxiety. The ability to image this content is associated with trait confidence and anxiety, but research examining mastery imagery ability's association with confidence and anxiety in response to a stressful event is scant. The present study examined whether trait mastery imagery ability mediated the relationship between confidence and anxiety, and the subsequent associations on performance in response to an acute psychological stress. Participants (N= (...) 130; 55% male;Mage= 19.94 years;SD= 1.07 years) completed assessments of mastery imagery ability and engaged in a standardized acute psychological stress task. Immediately prior to the task, confidence, cognitive and somatic anxiety intensity, and interpretation of anxiety symptoms regarding the task were assessed. Path analyses supported a model whereby mastery imagery ability mediated the relationship between confidence and cognitive and somatic anxiety interpretation. Greater mastery imagery ability and confidence were both directly associated with better performance on the stress task. Mastery imagery ability may help individuals experience more facilitative anxiety and perform better during stressful tasks. Improving mastery imagery ability by enhancing self-confidence may help individuals successfully cope with anxiety elicited during stressful situations. (shrink)

Christian ethicists rarely study apology or forgiveness about climate change, possibly because it is just another sin that God may forgive. Yet apology between humans may be critical to avoiding paralysis after people realize the horror of their actions and enabling cooperative responses to climate change among its perpetrators and victims. Climate change challenges traditional ideas and practices of apology because it involves unintentional, ongoing acts of diffuse collectives that harm other diffuse collectives across space and time. Developing concepts of (...) collective agency and responsibility enable a reconceptualization of apology for an era of climate change. While more work is needed to understand and implement such ideas, this paper lays the groundwork for future studies of collective apology and forgiveness by identifying general features of climate apologies including their symbolic dimensions and connection to ongoing changed actions. (shrink)

We examined liking for happy- and sad-sounding music as a function of exposure, which varied both in quantity (number of exposures) and in quality (focused or incidental listening). Liking ratings were higher for happy than for sad music after focused listening, but similar after incidental listening. In the incidental condition, liking ratings increased linearly as a function of exposure. In the focused condition, liking ratings were an inverted U-shaped function of exposure, with initial increases in liking (after 2 exposures) followed (...) by decreases (after 8 or 32 exposures). The results documented that: (1) sad music is liked as much as happy music in some instances; (2) frequency of exposure causes both familiarity (positive) and over-familiarity (negative) effects; and (3) effects of exposure on liking differ for focused and incidental listening. (shrink)

This paper discusses three potential varieties of update: updates to the common ground, structuring updates, and updates that introduce discourse referents. These different types of update are used to model different aspects of natural language phenomena. Not-at-issue information directly updates the common ground. The illocutionary mood of a sentence structures the context. Other updates introduce discourse referents of various types, including propositional discourse referents for at-issue information. Distinguishing these types of update allows a unified treatment of a broad range of (...) phenomena, including the grammatical evidentials found in Cheyenne (Algonquian) as well as English evidential parentheticals, appositives, and mood marking. An update semantics that can formalize all of these varieties of update is given, integrating the different kinds of semantic contributions into a single representation of meaning. (shrink)

Treatments for students with problematic levels of music performance anxiety commonly rely on approaches in which students are referred to psychotherapists or other clinical professionals for individual care that falls outside of their music training experience. However, a more transdisciplinary approach in which MPA treatment is effectively integrated into students’ training in music/performing arts colleges by teachers who work in consultation with clinical psychologists may prove more beneficial, given the resistance students often experience toward psychotherapy. Training singing teachers, and perhaps (...) music teachers at large, to use an evidence-based coaching strategy like Acceptance and Commitment Coaching to directly manage students’ MPA is one such approach. Building on the work of a previous study in which ACC was administered by a singing teacher to a musical theatre student with problematic MPA, we piloted the effectiveness of a six-session, group ACC course for a sample of performing arts students with MPA related to vocal performances, using a mixed-methods design. The coach here was also a singing teacher without a clinical background, and her training in ACC by a clinical psychologist was of a similar duration as the previous teacher’s. Similar to the musical theatre student, the students reported being significantly less fused with their MPA-related cognitions, more accepting of their MPA-related physiological symptoms, and more psychologically flexible while performing in general, and these improvements were maintained after 3 months. Furthermore, they appeared to lower their shame over having MPA and change how they thought in relation to one another. Of note, these improvements were similar to those shown by seven vocal students with MPA after they received Acceptance and Commitment Therapy from a clinical psychologist, but with larger reductions in shame and better acceptance of MPA, which suggests a non-clinical, group ACC intervention that includes supportive discussions to normalize MPA and challenges attempts to control it may be more helpful than individual psychotherapy. These results are promising and indicate a brief training in ACC may be sufficient for singing teachers to provide significant benefit for students with problematic MPA. (shrink)

Work defines the lives of most people. Many people work overtime, work second jobs, or bring work home with them. It is often difficult to know when work stops and the rest of life begins. In a culture where work is central to our identities, good work is increasingly difficult to find. This article argues that one of the impediments to imagining a future beyond work is the productivist logic that predominates today, which determines labor and production to be key (...) activities and values. To sketch a path beyond work, the author turns to Marx, arguing that Marx provides an important critique of productivism and gestures toward a postwork future in his own writings. To do so, the author defends Marx against critiques of productivism. (shrink)

An important role for all health care professionals is to be an advocate for their patients, and there is no question that many patients need advocacy to reach their health care goals. The role of advocate takes many forms, but one is to speak up when one is concerned for the safety or well‐being of a patient. A nurse is often the member of a health care team most likely to notice changes that might signal problems or poor responses to (...) treatment. The duty of the nurse is to speak up in a timely and urgent manner when the nurse believes—or fears—that the patient's safety may be at risk. Yet the role of nurses as advocates for their patients has assumed near‐mythic status. Rather than seeing advocate as one among many equally important and interrelated professional roles, the nurse, when asked, “Who are you?” is likely to give the heartfelt and passionate answer, “The patient's advocate!” This essay examines and critically analyzes the advocacy role adopted by the nursing profession and outlines the challenges it has created to nursing's contributions to collaborative practice, ethics, and policy in health care. (shrink)

There has yet to be a culture discovered which lacks music. Music is a part of our existence, but we do not fully understand it. In this paper, working in the tradition of Aristotle, Wittgenstein and Langer, I elucidate some of the connections between music and the emotions. Using contemporary philosophy of mind theories of emotion, I explain how we can have a better understanding of our emotive responses to music. I follow the pattern through representational painting and abstract painting (...) to music, and show how each functions as an intentional object for the object of our emotions in response to each art form. (shrink)

Philosophers of literature direct their studies to the moral, cognitive, and emotional aspects of our involvement with fiction. In spite of this, they rarely engage works of popular fiction. In this paper I use The Da Vinci Code as a case study of the impact of popular fiction on readers in terms of these three areas. Although this book will never be considered good literature, its impact is far reaching. l address concerns dealing with the fiction/non-fiction distinction as weIl as (...) issues with history, accuracy, and falsehoods. I flesh out the issues The Da Vinci Code brings up and argue that it, along with other works of popular fiction (Oprah’s book club for example), might be taken more seriously by philosophers of literature. (shrink)

Much of leftist political philosophy has uncritically accepted the logic of capitalism, which is a logic of conservation that presents itself as a logic of “production.” Many leftist political philosophers subscribe to capitalism’s fundamental myth—that capitalism produces the new. This appearance of proliferation, however, masks an underlying stasis. This article interrogates this trend in the apparently disparate projects of contemporary accelerationism and Jacques Rancière. The accelerationist project of immanence allows for newness only in quantity and not in quality, while Rancière, (...) coming closer to thinking radical newness in his account of politics, forecloses the possibility of a radically emancipatory society. I suggest an open ontology, which Marx offers, provides a better framework for thinking revolutionary newness. (shrink)

Although the dynamic field model predicts infants' perseverative behavior in the context of the A-not-B manual search task, it does not account for infant perseveration in other contexts. An alternative cognitive capacity explanation for perseveration is more parsimonious. It accounts for the graded nature of perseverative responses and perseveration in different contexts.

In this paper, I discuss the quantificational variability of Cheyenne indeterminates: the variety of interpretations they can receive and the grammatical contexts that condition these interpretations. Building on analyses of indeterminates in other languages, such as Kratzer and Shimoyama (2002), I present a Hamblin-style analysis of Cheyenne indeter- minates. The proposal builds on the analysis of declaratives and interrogatives argued for in Murray (2010). This analysis can account for the quantificational variability of indeterminates in the scope of propositional operators as (...) well as the scope of illocutionary mood markers. The analysis is formalized in an independently motivated update semantics (Update with Centering, Bittner 2011), which automatically provides the required alternatives. (shrink)