The claim of consistent hemispheric specialisations across classes of chordates is undermined by the absence of population-based directional asymmetry of paw/hand use in rodents and primates. No homologue of the cerebral torque from right frontal to left occipital has been established in a nonhuman species. The null hypothesis that the torque is the sapiens-specific neural basis of language has not been disproved.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:LONERGAN'S "CRITICAL REALISM" AND RELIGIOUS PLURALISM TIMOTHY R. STINNETT University of Detroit Mercy Detroit, Michigan THE PHENOMENON of religious pluralism is raising ome basic questions for philosophical thought that must e faced not only by philosophies not linked to any particular religious tradition but also by the theologies or philosophies of specific religious traditions. Christian theologians seem first to have discovered the range of questions raised by religious (...) pluralism in the face of apparently conflicting truth claims. No less important, however, are certain moral questions: how the advocates of the various religious traditions should bear witness to their respective traditions, and how they should go about identifying and correcting the ideological biases that seem inevitably to occur as the result of the historical and cultural conditions in which their respective witnesses emerge and develop. Thus, a philosophical treatment of religious pluralism will need to make explicit the relevant conditions of truth by which religious claims must be assessed. It will also need to clarify how apparently conflicting truth claims may be examined to see whether they are genuinely conflicting and then how genuinely conflicting truth claims may be adjudicated. Bernard Lonergan's philosophy of critical realism may be considered a valuable resource for addressing such questions insofar as he undertakes to answer such fundamental questions as " What am I doing when I am knowing? Why is doing that knowing? What do I know when I do it? " 1 Attention to these questions 1 Bernard Lonergan, Method vn Theology (New York: The Seabury Press, 1979), p. 25. See also Bernard Lonergan, A Third Collection: Papers by Bernard I. F. Lonergan, S.J., edited by Frederick E. Crowe, S.J. (New York: Paulist Press, 1985), p. 210. 97 98 TIMOTHY R. STINNETT promises clarification about how religious truth claims may be shown to be true (and thus to count as " knowledge ") and how genuinely conflicting truth claims may be adjudicated. It also promises to clarify how one may recognize ideological bias and correct for it in a fully reflective understanding of a particular religious witness. For Lonergan, answers to the three questions cited above provide respectively a cognitional theory, an epistemology, and a metaphysics, all three of which together constitute his philosophy of critical realism.2 In this essay I will explore the relevance of his critical realism for philosophical treatment of questions raised by religious pluralism. After an analysis of the salient features of Lonergan's philosophy, I will consider the disadvantages and advantages it affords a philosophy of religious pluralism. By attending to the disadvantages I will register an immanent criticism of Lonergan's critical realism, and I will atexplain how it must be revised in order to become a useful resource for treating philosophical questions raised by religious pluralism. Lonergan's "Critical Realism" The human capacity to know is for Lonergan what constitutes human being as spirit. " Let us say," he writes, that intelligibility that is not intelligent is material, and that intelligibility that is intelligent is spiritual.... But inasmuch as we are spiritual, we are orientated towards the universe of being, know ourselves as parts within that universe, and guide our living by that knowledge.8 Knowing, then, is a process with distinguishable moments, and it is completed in action consistent with what is known. Moreover, what can be known by a human subject determines the parameters of "proportionate being." The coordination of all of the departments of human knowledge is the object of metaphysics, 2 Method in Theology, pp. 25, 83, 261, 316. See also Bernard Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, revised ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), pp. 322ff., p. 350. a Insight, p. 516. LONERGAN ON RELIGIOUS PLURALISM 99 which Lonergan defines as " the integral heuristic structure of proportionate being." 4 Proportionate being is not, however, a comprehensive term for everything that exists ; there is also "transcendent being." Transcendent being is revealed as mystery, and knowledge of it is obtained through the operation of grace in religious conversion.5 But I will postpone discussion of this knowledge of transcendent being for the moment. The orientation of the human spirit toward " the universe of being" manifests itself in "the primordial drive" to know. "It... (shrink)

Disorders of volition are often accompanied by, and may even be caused by, disruptions in the phenomenology of agency. Yet the phenomenology of agency is at present little explored. In this paper we attempt to describe the experience of normal agency, in order to uncover its representational content.

At any given time, a subject has a multiplicity of conscious experiences. A subject might simultaneously have visual experiences of a red book and a green tree, auditory experiences of birds singing, bodily sensations of a faint hunger and a sharp pain in the shoulder, the emotional experience of a certain melancholy, while having a stream of conscious thoughts about the nature of reality. These experiences are distinct from each other: a subject could experience the red book without the singing (...) birds, and could experience the singing birds without the red book. But at the same time, the experiences seem to be tied together in a deep way. They seem to be unified, by being aspects of a single encompassing state of consciousness. (shrink)

We discuss three varieties of affective dynamics ( affective instability, emotional inertia, and emotional differentiation). In each case, we suggest how these affective dynamics should be operationalized and measured in daily life using time-intensive methods, like ecological momentary assessment or ambulatory assessment, and recommend time-sensitive analyses that take into account not only the variability but also the temporal dependency of reports. Studies that explore how these affective dynamics are associated with psychological disorders and symptoms are reviewed, and we emphasize that (...) these affective processes are within a nexus of other components of emotion regulation. (shrink)

At any given time, a subject has a multiplicity of conscious experiences. A subject might simultaneously have visual experiences of a red book and a green tree, auditory experiences of birds singing, bodily sensations of a faint hunger and a sharp pain in the shoulder, the emotional experience of a certain melancholy, while having a stream of conscious thoughts about the nature of reality. These experiences are distinct from each other: a subject could experience the red book without the singing (...) birds, and could experience the singing birds without the red book. But at the same time, the experiences seem to be tied together in a deep way. They seem to be unified, by being aspects of a single encompassing state of consciousness. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

ABSTRACT:Drawing upon the collective action model of institutional change, I reconceptualize moral imagination as both a social process and a cognitive one. I argue that moral outcomes are not produced by individual actors alone; rather, they emerge from collective action processes that are influenced by political conditions and involve behaviors that include issue framing and resource mobilization. I also contend that individual moral imagination involves the integration of moral sensitivity with consideration of collective action dynamics. I illustrate my arguments with (...) a case study of the Chad-Cameroon oil project. The paper suggests new directions in teaching and research on moral imagination. (shrink)

There is relatively little comprehensive treatment of Heidegger’s theory of essences despite his ubiquitous use of essences. It is commonplace in contemporary analytic philosophy to view essences as the ground for true de re modal claims. I argue that Heidegger offers an account of essences that can best be understood as a type of relative essentialism. Relative essentialism is the view that more than one being can occupy the same space at the same time and those beings have distinct sets (...) of de re modal truths about them. Heidegger’s account of essences allows for true de re modal claims about a wide variety of things including scientific and cultural entities. At the same time, Heidegger rejects absolute essentialism: the view that there is one privilege collection of beings whose natures determine the truth values of de re modal claims about them. Relative essentialism is distinguished from contextual essentialism. (shrink)

We will investigate patterns of resemblance of order 2 over a family of arithmetic structures on the ordinals. In particular, we will show that they determine a computable well ordering under appropriate assumptions.

In this study, three individual descriptions of anxiety as experienced in social situations were analyzed so that a general structure representing social anxiety could potentially be obtained. The descriptions analyzed produced results that not only overlapped with already existing literature from various perspectives on the topic, but also highlighted certain key factors that have largely been unaccounted for by prior studies. By utilizing the Descriptive Phenomenological Method in Psychology , these factors were brought to light in more depth and clarity (...) than if the same phenomenon were studied using a third person approach. Specifically, six constituents of social anxiety were revealed; including factors related to inter-subjectivity, the relationship between fear and anxiety, and the relationship between desire and self-lack. (shrink)

A notation for an ordinal using patterns of resemblance is based on choosing an isominimal set of ordinals containing the given ordinal. There are many choices for this set meaning that notations are far from unique. We establish that among all such isominimal sets there is one which is smallest under inclusion thus providing an appropriate notion of normal form notation in this context. In addition, we calculate the elements of this isominimal set using standard notations based on collapsing functions. (...) This provides a capstone to the results in [2, 6, 8, 9, 7], using further refinement of ordinal arithmetic developed in [8] which then both allows for a simple characterization of normal forms for patterns of order one and will play a key role in the arithmetical analysis of pure patterns of order two, [5]. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Denying the Body? Memory and the Dilemmas of History in DescartesTimothy J. ReissIn an essay first published in The New York Review of Books in January 1983, touching her apprenticeship as writer, the Barbadian /American novelist Paule Marshall described the long afternoon conversations with which her mother and friends used to relax in the family kitchen. She recalled how they saw things as composed of opposites; not torn, but (...) completed and made whole by them.Theirs was not a Manichean brand of dualism that sees matter, flesh, the body, as inherently evil, because they constantly addressed each other as “soully-gal”—soul: spirit; gal: the body, flesh, the visible self. And it was clear from their tone that they gave one as much weight and importance as the other. They had never heard of the mind/body split. 1This closing claim is surely less than self-evident. Whether or not the companions had heard of the mind/body split depends on the meaning given to the verb “hear.” Certainly it was embedded in their language, however much the phrase “soully-gal” might recombine its parts.Did the split come from Descartes and early European debates, linguistically colonizing all those who came within its sphere—Africans, Barbadians, Brooklynites? Did it come from a Christian heritage, with its haggling over bodily mortality and immortality of soul? Who knows? A first point is that it is still an everyday experience, deeply buried in language and so in the ideas, feelings, and meanings expressed in language. A second point is that the post-Cartesian debates—to simplify for a moment with an overly heavy [End Page 587] hand—were and are themselves but a variant within a much longer received wisdom. Nonetheless, such wisdom is now bound to that variant, which, willy-nilly, does give one set of parameters to a common experience—at least, to that of those of us who dwell under Western hegemonies. It gives them also, no doubt, to many who live within them at once less clearly and more contentiously.I would like to offer a further powerful instance here, simply to emphasize what and how much is at stake in the questions to be addressed. It occurs in a writing by the Guyanese novelist Wilson Harris, his Palace of the Peacock. First in a tetralogy, this novel recounts something like a journey away from a life of colonial and postcolonial violence and oppression towards a hoped-for rebirth in “fulfilment and understanding.” 2 Early on, the harsh protagonist, Donne, mocks the narrator, his mysterious “double” and “brother,” Dreamer, who has remarked their distance from “the folk.” “Is it a mystery of language and address?” asks Donne. Slightly bewildered, Dreamer struggles to suggest that the obstacle is less of language than of a deeper disjunction:“it’s an inapprehension of substance,” I blurted out, “an actual fear of the substance of life, fear of the substance of the folk, a cannibal blind fear in oneself. Put it how you like,” I cried, “it’s a fear of acknowledging the true substance of life. Yes, fear I tell you, the fear that breeds bitterness in our mouth, the haunting sense of fear that poisons us and hangs us and murders us. And somebody,” I declared, “must demonstrate the unity of being, and show...” I had grown violent and emphatic... “that fear is nothing but a dream and an appearance....” 3Recovery of unity might become a way to defeat political and historical violences. In the next novel in the sequence, one of two self-indulgently whining characters, accused of pining for a woman who has run away to seek education, explodes: “I don’t believe you can begin to see how some body like they born seeking for mind.” 4 For peoples of the colonized Americas, imbued with “the great civilization of the American Indian,” this urge, Harris then wrote in a critical essay, was simply the personal form of a social and political necessity to recover still-living elements of a culture for which “matter truly bore the imprint of genius,” refusing “the taboo of spirituality removed from sensuous direction.” 5 Recently, Harris has worried this... (shrink)

On method, discursive logics, and epistemology -- Questions of medieval discursive practice -- From the middle ages to the (w)hole of Utopia -- Kepler, his Dream, and the analysis and pattern of thought -- Campanella and Bacon: concerning structures of mind -- The masculine birth of time -- Cyrano and the experimental discourse -- The myth of sun and moon -- The difficulty of writing -- Crusoe rights his story -- Gulliver's critique of Euclid -- Emergence, consolidation, and dominance of (...) a discourse. (shrink)

In this paper we defend the doxastic conception of delusions against the metacognitive account developed by Greg Currie and collaborators. According to the metacognitive model, delusions are imaginings that are misidentified by their subjects as beliefs: the Capgras patient, for instance, does not believe that his wife has been replaced by a robot, instead, he merely imagines that she has, and mistakes this imagining for a belief. We argue that the metacognitive account is untenable, and that the traditional conception of (...) delusions as beliefs should be retained. (shrink)

Relative essentialism is the novel metaphysical theory that there can be multiple objects occupying the same space at the same time each with its own de re modal truths. Relative essentialism is motivated by Davidson’s semantics and his denial that nature itself is divided into a privileged domain of objects. Relative essentialism was first presented by Samuel C. Wheeler. I argue that Wheeler’s approach to the Davidsonian program needs to be elaborated in terms of various types of preconceptual intentional relations. (...) This elaboration is already largely implicit in Davidson’s own later work and in Wheeler’s relaunching of Davidsonian metaphysics. More specifically, I argue that relative essentialism is ultimately founded not on predication narrowly construed but on intentionality broadly construed. Following Wheeler’s suggestion, comparisons are made between relative essentialism and work within the phenomenological tradition. (shrink)

Contemporary epistemology has been moving away from classical foundationalism—the thesis that our empirical knowledge is grounded in perceptual beliefs we know with certainty. McGrew reexamines classical foundationalism and offers a compelling reconstruction and defense of empirical knowledge grounded in perceptual certainty. He articulates and defends a new version of foundationalism and demonstrates how it meets all the standard criticisms. The book offers substantial rebuttals of the arguments of Kuhn and Rorty and demonstrates the value of the classical analytic approach to (...) philosophy. 'Foundations' will interest philosophers of science, language, and the mind. (shrink)

David Lewis proved in 1974 that all logics without iterative axioms are weakly complete. In this paper we extend Lewis's ideas and provide a proof that such logics are canonical and so strongly complete. This paper also discusses the differences between relational and neighborhood frame semantics and poses a number of open questions about the latter.

Previous research has suggested that bodily signals from internal organs are associated with diverse cortical and subcortical processes involved in sensory-motor functions, beyond homeostatic reflexes. For instance, a recent study demonstrated that the preparation and execution of voluntary actions, as well as its underlying neural activity, are coupled with the breathing cycle. In the current study, we investigated whether such breathing-action coupling is limited to voluntary motor action or whether it is also present for mental actions not involving any overt (...) bodily movement. To answer this question, we recorded electroencephalography (EEG), electromyography (EMG), and respiratory signals while participants were conducting a voluntary action paradigm including self-initiated motor execution (ME), motor imagery (MI), and visual imagery (VI) tasks. We observed that the voluntary initiation of ME, MI, and VI are similarly coupled with the respiration phase. In addition, EEG analysis revealed the existence of readiness potential (RP) waveforms in all three tasks (i.e., ME, MI, VI), as well as a coupling between the RP amplitude and the respiratory phase. Our findings show that the voluntary initiation of both imagined and overt action is coupled with respiration, and further suggest that the breathing system is involved in preparatory processes of voluntary action by contributing to the temporal decision of when to initiate the action plan, regardless of whether this culminates in overt movements. -/- . (shrink)

The target paper by Noë and Thompson is a very welcome addition to the literature on the neural correlates of consciousness. It raises a number of important issues, and the debate it will generate should go some way towards clarifying the conceptual terrain that we’re in. In this commentary I focus on three issues: the link between isomorphism and the matching-content doctrine; the argument against the matching-content doctrine; and the argument against experiential internalism.

The Uncertainty of Analysis pursues key issues raised in the author's earlier Discourse of Modernism, a ground-breaking work which focused attention on the nature of discourse and the ways in which one culturally dominant "discursive class" may be replaced by another. In this timely and provocative collection of his essays, Timothy J. Reiss shows how efforts to reconfirm the force and power of modernist, analytico-referential discourse in the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries have actually brought to the fore (...) internal contradictions, have made clear the problematic nature of the dominant discourse, and have precipitated the emergence of competing discourses. Reiss considers the explorations in foundational logic by Frege and Peirce; examinations of language and its relations to mind by Saussure, Greimas, and Chomsky; work in linguistic and scientific epistemology by Wittgenstein and Heisenberg; and the attempts to analyze the nature of society by Sartre and other Western Marxists. Reiss turns to some practitioners of literary criticism and theory who have sought to escape past constraints, and he points to what appear to be erroneous routes away from the dilemmas raised by these philosophers and critics. (shrink)

Secondary education around the world has been significantly disrupted by covid-19. Students have been forced into new ways of independent learning, often using remote technologies, but without the social nuances and direct teacher interactions of a normal classroom environment. Using data from the School Attitudes Survey—which surveys students regarding the perceived level of difficulty, anxiety level, self-efficacy, enjoyability, subject relevance, and opportunities for creativity with regards to each of their school subjects—this study examines students' responses to this disruption from two (...) very different schools with two very different experiences of the pandemic. This paper reports on the composite attitudinal profiles of students in the senior secondary levels at each school. The findings challenged our expectation that the increased difficulty and anxiety caused by the disruption would reduce perceived opportunities for creativity. Indeed, our analyses showed that the students at both schools demonstrated generally positive attitudes toward their learning and strongly associated opportunities for creativity with other attitudinal constructs including enjoyability, subject relevance, and self-efficacy. These complex associations made by the students appear to have buffered the impacts of the disruption, and they may even have supported creative resilience. (shrink)

The existing literature on moral imagination proposes that actors can best respond to ethical dilemmas by tailoring their actions to the practical demands of the situation. It has done little to develop this insight, however. To address this gap, I used institutional theory to identify six ideal type approaches to moral imagination. I proposed that in addressing ethical dilemmas, the morally imaginative actor takes account of two situational factors: first, the social construction of the unmet ethical claim or obligation which (...) constitutes the ethical dilemma, and in particular whether or not it is broadly perceived to be legitimate; and second, its own degree of power. The framework presented represents the first attempt to systematically enumerate approaches to moral imagination and identify their boundary conditions. (shrink)

In this paper I critically examine the implications of the uncodifiability thesis for principlism as a pluralistic and non-absolute generalist ethical theory. In this regard, I begin with a brief overview of W.D. Ross’s ethical theory and his focus on general but defeasible prima facie principles before turning to 2) the revival of principlism in contemporary bioethics through the influential work of Tom Beauchamp and James Childress; 3) the widespread adoption of specification as a response to the indeterminacy of abstract (...) general principles and the limitations of balancing and deductive approaches; 4) the challenges raised to fully specified principlism by the uncodifiability thesis and 5) finally offer a defense of the uncodifiability thesis against various critiques that have been raised. (shrink)

We will introduce a partial ordering $\preceq_1$ on the class of ordinals which will serve as a foundation for an approach to ordinal notations for formal systems of set theory and second-order arithmetic. In this paper we use $\preceq_1$ to provide a new characterization of the ubiquitous ordinal $\epsilon _{0}$.

The following analysis demonstrates that G.H. Mead's understanding of human speech is remarkably consistent with today's interdisciplinary field that studies speech as a natural behavior with an evolutionary history. Mead seems to have captured major empirical and theoretical insights more than half a century before the contemporary field began to take shape. In that field the framework known as “Tinbergen's Four Questions,” developed in ecology to study naturally occurring behavior in nonhuman animals, has been an effective organizing framework for research (...) on human speech. It is used in this paper to organize the comparison of Mead with contemporary scholars. The analysis concludes that Mead was, in a sense, “beyond” the Four Questions by recognizing the limitations of reductionist methods in understanding the nature of conscious phenomena, especially language. Mead's socially situated model of the nature of human speech makes him relevant to today's field where some see an undervaluation of the treatment of language as a social process. (shrink)

Individuals higher on avoidant coping may remember fewer specific autobiographical memories and more nonspecific memories on the Autobiographical Memory Test in order to protect themselves from the painful emotions accompanying some specific memories. Habitually remembering this way may be a risk factor for depression. In Studies 1 and 2, avoidant coping was associated with more specific memories and fewer overgeneral memories, at odds with the functional avoidance view. In Study 3, there were no significant relationships between AMT indices and avoidant (...) coping. Results are discussed in light of ironic process theory. (shrink)

Through extensive readings in philosophical, legal, medical, and imaginative writing, this book explores notions and experiences of being a person from European antiquity to Descartes. It offers quite new interpretations of what it was to be a person—to experience who-ness—in other times and places, involving new understandings of knowing, willing, and acting, as well as of political and material life, the play of public and private, passions and emotions. The trajectory the author reveals reaches from the ancient sense of personhood (...) as set in a totality of surroundings inseparable from the person, to an increasing sense of impermeability to the world, in which anger has replaced love in affirming a sense of self. The author develops his analysis through an impressive range of authors, languages, and texts: from Cicero, Seneca, and Galen; through Avicenna, Hildegard of Bingen, and Heloise and Abelard; to Petrarch, Montaigne, and Descartes. (shrink)

One of the fundamental components of the concept of economic rationality is that preference orderings are “complete,” i.e., that all alternative actions an economic agent can take are comparable. The idea that all actions can be ranked may be called the single utility assumption. The attractiveness of this assumption is considerable. It would be hard to fathom what choice among alternatives means if the available alternatives cannot be ranked by the chooser in some way. In addition, the efficiency criterion makes (...) sense only if one can infer that an individual's choice reflects the best, in expected welfare terms, among all choices that individual could have made. The possibility that a rearrangement of resources could make someone “better off” without making others “worse off” can be understood only if the post-rearrangement world is comparable with the pre-rearrange-ment world. (shrink)