How is cultural progress possible? Historically, no other animal has progressed as humans have. Conventional wisdom suggests that by having language, people accumulate knowledge, which produces progress. Such Formal stage 10 wisdom begs fundamental questions. Thus, we assert the cultural necessity of levels of support, or scaffolding, for people to develop higher stages of hierarchical complexity. The resulting, wider accessibility to higher-stage action and knowledge, which requires higher stages of development to understand, enables social and scientific progress. With memes and (...) downward assimilation, larger proportions of society gain access to advanced thinking with support, in turn enabling cultural progress. (shrink)

This paper asks how anti-nuclear activists form collectives that are able to act collectively. It argues that shared interests and collective identities only insufficiently explain the emergence of collective action. Alternatively, the paper investigates meeting talk of German anti-nuclear groups where activists discuss proposals for collective action. Based on audio recordings, a sequential analysis of activists’ deliberations traces the transformation of vague ideas into concrete and collectively agreed to proposals. It is shown how the process by which activists reach a (...) common understanding about a particular protest activity—as something that is being talked about here and now—and the process of becoming an acting collectivity—a group that is ready to carry out this protest activity in the future—are interdependent. Activists make use of “indexicality” to introduce specifically vague proposals, enabling others to respond and contribute to the emerging proposal while group agency is suspended. At first, the authorship of proposals is minimized. Step by step, vague proposals are specified by meeting participants until a “change in footing” marks group consensus. While the group emerges as the author and principal of proposals through this process, the paper shows that implementation relies on individual principals again who take responsibility during and after the meeting. (shrink)

This chapter discusses Wittgenstein's influence on Richard Rorty's approach to philosophy throughout his career and his relationship to the analytic tradition. In doing so, it highlights Rorty's tendency, as a pragmatist, to focus on what he regards as the practical consequences of Wittgenstein's later works, especially Philosophical Investigations. And, it concludes with a critical assessment of the use that Rorty makes of a putative distinction between therapeutic and pragmatic Wittgensteinians.

The Association of Staff Developers in Philosophy for Children came into being in 1988. It was the result of staff developers feelin a need to be a part of an ongoing community of inquiry among themselves concerning problems of staff development, drawing upon our collective experience as staff developers, and recognizing our autonomy as philosophers. At the San Antonio Symposium in April of 1989, an Excutivr Board of 5 persons was elected: Marie Hungerman, Gerard Potvin, Cynthia Duque, Ron Reed, Ann (...) Sharp, and myself, Dale Cannon, as President, One of our decisions at that meeting was to solicit reports from different Centers of Philosophy for Children on their experience with different formats of staff developement and publish them in Analytic Teaching. The longer range goal was inclusion in a projected resource manual for staff development. (shrink)

Globalisation may concern many different issues, among others, the increase in migration that creates opportunities for all. There should be no doubt that globalisation can bring both positive and negative effects to workers. It can be seen as new opportunities for people, because they can travel, work, learn and live in different countries. Simultaneously however it can be perceived as synonymous to job losses, social injustice, or low environmental, health, and privacy standards. As a result of globalisation, the world is (...) becoming more and more complex and the economic importance of state borders is reduced. It should therefore not raise doubts, that global problems require the capacity to agree on coordinated global responses and mechanisms on the basis of international cooperation. Among the basic international organisations which provide solutions for workers who have decided to look for a job in another country, one can generally mention the International Labour Organisation, the Council of Europe, and the European Union. There is quite a large number of legal acts created in the framework of those organisations, and so we should ask a question if in such a situation we should also try to understand some legal concepts; in our case concepts connected with taking up employment, in a similar way. Even if the answer is positive, another question comes to mind – is it possible to have such definitions in a global world? It is thus not enough to provide legal regulations concerning worker’s rights and obligations if we do not know who exactly should be treated like a worker. The following article will try to answer those questions and simultaneously try to show that globalisation may affect the way certain terms should be understood. (shrink)

MY PAPER EXAMINES THE ’VIOLATION’ CONCEPT OF THE MIRACULOUS, INVOLVING THE OCCURRENCE OF AN EVENT RULED OUT BY A LAW OF NATURE. ANY BELIEF IN THE OCCURRENCE OF SUCH AN EVENT IS IRRATIONAL, IN THE SENSE IN WHICH IT WOULD BE IRRATIONAL FOR YOU TO BELIEVE AT THIS MOMENT THAT YOU WERE NOT READING THIS ABSTRACT BUT WERE HALLUCINATING. TO SHOW THAT IT IS NOT ALWAYS IRRATIONAL TO BELIEVE IN MIRACLES, ONE MUST ASSERT THAT TO KNOW WITH CERTAINTY THAT AN (...) EVENT IS PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE, IS NOT TO KNOW WITH CERTAINTY THAT IT IS IMPOSSIBLE, ON GROUNDS THAT ITS OCCURRENCE DOES NOT INVOLVE A SELF-CONTRADICTION. BUT SUCH A PREMISE LEADS TO A FORM OF GENERAL SKEPTICISM WHICH WOULD MAKE IT IMPOSSIBLE EVER TO ESTABLISH THAT ANY EVENT HAD OCCURRED. (shrink)

This article presents a community-based account of salience as an alternative and a complement to the ‘natural salience’ approach which is endorsed by almost all game theorists who use this concept. While in the naturalistic approach, salience is understood as an objective and natural property of some entities, the community-based account claims that salience is a function of community membership. Building on David Lewis’s theory of common knowledge and on some of its recent refined accounts, I suggest that salience (...) acts as a correlating device in a correlated equilibrium. What is constitutive of salience is common understanding, the fact that agents have common knowledge that they share the same modes of reasoning with respect to a well-identified set of events. I argue that the basis for common understanding is community membership. The relevance of this account stems from the fact that it answers the objection that salience is either unnecessary or unable to account for coordination between rational agents. (shrink)

In 1791 Karl Leonhard Reinhold expressed full agreement with Kant’s verdict that appeal to common understanding is not acceptable in philosophy. Only three years later Reinhold presented a philosophical methodology in which common understanding was explicitly assigned an essential function. In my contribution, I shall first reconstruct Reinhold’s account of the relation between common understanding and philosophising reason (Section 2). According to this account, common understanding is supposed to provide a multitude of (...) empirical facts of consciousness. Philosophising reason takes these facts as the starting point of philosophical analysis and establishes their a priori, transcendental grounds. Common understanding and philosophising reason thus fulfil complementary roles: philosophy analyses, explains, and justifies the basic beliefs of common understanding; philosophical claims are, in turn, substantiated through their reference to the facts provided by common understanding. I shall also show that the account of the relation between common understanding and philosophising reason enables Reinhold to deal with some objections against his philosophical system. The appeal to common understanding thus serves the purpose of corroborating the structure and the contents of the Elementarphilosophie. In Section 3, I shall suggest that Reinhold’s introduction of common understanding was not influenced by common-sense philosophy but rather by the Wolffian conception of the relation between common cognition and philosophical cognition. Reinhold accepted the general outline of Wolff’s rationalist conception but adopted it to the framework of critical philosophy. In my concluding remarks (Section 4) I shall briefly indicate that the main characteristics of the account of the relation between common understanding and philosophical reason withstood Reinhold’s later changes of philosophical systems. (shrink)

Part One. In our strife to express the meanings of moral terms, we have neglected the one transparently built?in meaning: ?A man ought to keep his promises? could mean ?A man owes it to other men to keep his promises. Such is his debt and duty ? just what is due or owed?. This proposal is supported by the evidence of major languages of the world, ancient and modern, in all of which identical or closely related words serve to express (...) both the idea of material debt and that of moral obligation. But on study the revealing model and analogue of ?moral debt? is found, not in debts of exchange, the simplest and most obvious class of debts, but in debts of shared responsibility. Working from such models we conclude that ?A ought to do X? means X is part of A's share in the cost of the good community, the common cause and stake of all mankind? (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper argues that Machiavelli's method, his inductive and comparative use of history and experience for political analysis, and his fashioning of historical-political analysis as ‘science’, played an important and still unrecognised role in his reception in the sixteenth century. It makes the case that Machiavelli's inductive reasoning and stress on historia and experientia offered a model for scientific method that open-minded sixteenth-century scholars, eager to understand, organise and augment human knowledge, could fit to their own epistemology. By focusing on (...) the question of method—a crucial issue for sixteenth-century contemporaries—the paper offers more than a key to the understanding of Machiavelli's positive reception. It also helps in apprehending the crucial importance of Lucretius to Machiavelli's scholarship; the role of the late Renaissance fascination with historia in his reception; and the breadth of appropriation of his method exactly in the decades when anti-Machiavellianism became official politics all over Europe. These claims are sustained through the cases of Machiavelli's early translators and promulgators; the French legal humanists and historiographers; the Swiss, Italian and French scholars engaging with medicine, Paracelsism and astronomy; the authors of political maxims from all over Europe; and finally Francis Bacon. (shrink)

For thirty years at least, I have designated myself as a zoologist interested in the “philosophical aspects of biology”. But I have now to admit that not until within the last two or three years have I recognized that logic, particularly in its inductive aspect, is involved in such interest.For me as a zoologist with a predilection for natural history, observation has had a place of wide application and of implicit confidence. Until recently, I had rested in the supposition that (...) after all of the devices practiced by naturalists to insure certainty of their observations, nothing further was needed so far as the information and understanding they gained was concerned. I had gone ahead with my reasoning, my logic, with no more qualms about the trustworthiness of the “inductive” than of the “deductive” side of it. I had not taken seriously the assertion, made years ago in my hearing by an eminent philosopher, that no one can be a philosopher without being skeptical and critical of the use of his senses in getting knowledge. Latterly, however, I have come to see that traditional philosophers take themselves very seriously in such assertions. This realization has been due to the discovery that the recent advances in physics and mathematics have led most of the leaders in these fields to believe that observation and the inductive side of logic may be left where they were a hundred years ago. These scientists seem to be about where John Stuart Mill was in his effort to improve Lord Bacon's effort for a better understanding of both observation and induction. (shrink)

Common knowledge is ubiquitous in our lives and yet there remains considerable uncertainty about how to model or understand it. Standard analyses of common knowledge end up being challenged by either regress or circularity which then give rise to well-known paradoxes of practical reasoning, such as the Two Generals’ Paradox. This paper argues that the nature and utility of common knowledge can be illuminated by appeal to Wittgenstein’s Hinge Epistemology. It is argued that those things that we (...) standardly think of as being common knowledge in our lives are the same as those that Wittgenstein identified as hinge certainties. This identification of common knowledge with hinge certainties allows us to resolve the regress problem for common knowledge and explain how the Two Generals’ Paradox arises. (shrink)

The main goal of this article consists in addressing two fundamental issues of consciousness research and cognitive science, namely, the question of why declarative memory functions are inextricably linked with phenomenal awareness and the question of the physical basis of memory traces. The presented approach proposes that high-level cognitive processes involving consciousness employ a universal mechanism by means of which they access and modulate an omnipresent background field that is identified with the zero-point field (ZPF) specified by stochastic electrodynamics, a (...) branch of physics that deals with the universal principles underlying quantum systems. In addition to its known physical properties and memory capacities, the ZPF is hypothesized to be an immanently sentient medium. It is propounded that linking up to a particular field mode of the ZPF activates a particular phenomenal nuance, implying that the phase-locked coupling of a set of field modes, i.e., the formation of a so-called ZPF information state, constitutes an appropriate mechanism for the amalgamation of elementary shades of consciousness into a complex state of consciousness. Since quantum systems rest exactly on this mechanism, conscious memory processes in the brain are expected to differ from unconscious processes by the presence of the typical features of many-body quantum systems, particularly long-range coherence and attractor formation, which is supported by a huge body of empirical evidence. On this basis, the conceptual framework set out in this article paves the way for a new understanding of the brain as a write-read head interacting with the ZPF, leading to self-consistent interpretations of the neural correlates of memory formation and memory retrieval and explaining why these memory processes are closely intertwined with phenomenal awareness. In particular, the neural correlates suggest that the brain produces consciously perceived memory traces by writing sequences of information states into the ZPF and retrieves consciously experienced memory traces by reading sequences of information states from the ZPF. Using these theoretical foundations, altered states of consciousness and memory disorders can be traced back to impairments of the ZPF write-read mechanism. The mechanism should reveal itself through characteristic photon emissions, resulting in testable predictions. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this article, we explore the debate on corporate citizenship and the role of business in global governance. In the debate on political corporate social responsibility it is assumed that under globalization business is taking up a greater political role. Apart from economic responsibilities firms assume political responsibilities taking up traditional governmental tasks such as regulation of business and provision of public goods. We contrast this with a subsidiarity-based approach to governance, in which firms are seen as intermediate actors who (...) have political co-responsibilities in society endowed upon them by national governmental institutions. We argue that both approaches face conceptual and empirical problems, and do not make clear the content and scope of political corporate responsibility. Based on Iris Marion Young’s account of political responsibility we argue that corporate actors and governmental actors have a shared responsibility to tackle societal problems. Taking political corporate responsibility not only entails engaging in private action or engaging in public–private partnerships, but it also includes aiding governmental actors to remedy injustice or even create public institutions where they do not yet exist. By adding this perspective we contribute to the debate on responsibility in corporate citizenship and clarify the political role business can play in global governance. (shrink)

In his defense of innateness in New Essays on Human Understanding (1704), Leibniz attributes innateness to concepts and principles which do not originate from the senses rather than to the ideas that we are born with. He argues that the innate concepts and principles can be known in two ways: through reason or natural light (necessary truths), and through instincts (other innate truths and principles). In this paper I will show how theoretical and moral reasoning differ from each other (...) in Leibniz, and compare moral reasoning and instincts as sources of knowledge in his practical philosophy. As the practical instincts are closely related to pleasure and passions, which are by nature cognitive, my emphasis will be on the affective character of instinctive moral action and especially deliberation which leads to moral action. I will argue that inclinations arising from moral instinct, which lead us to pleasure while avoiding sorrow, can direct our moral action and sometimes anticipate reasoning when conclusions are not readily available. Acting by will, which is related to moral reasoning, and acting by instincts can lead us to the same moral knowledge independently, but they can also complement each other. To illustrate the two alternative ways to reach moral knowledge, I will discuss the case of happiness, which is the goal of all human moral action for Leibniz. (shrink)

Here we examine the hypothesis that symbolic understanding across domains is mediated by a fundamental ‘symbolizing’ ability in young children. We tested 30 children aged 2–4 years on symbolic tasks assessing iconic and non-iconic word-referent and picture-referent understanding and administered standardised tests of symbolic play and receptive language. Children showed understanding of the symbol-referent relation earlier for pictures than written words, and performance within domains was correlated and, importantly, predicted by a marker of general symbolic ability. Performance (...) on picture and written word tasks was also unrelated to language comprehension. Thus, symbolic abilities in specific domains are underpinned by a general symbolizing ability which arises early in development. (shrink)

This article proposes a way of understanding Kantianism, act-utilitarianism and some other important ethical theories according to which they are all versions of the same kind of theory, sharing a common structure. I argue that this is a profitable way to understand the theories discussed. It is charitable to the theories concerned; it emphasizes the common ground between them; it gives us insights into the differences between them; and it provides a method for generating new ethical theories (...) worth studying. The article briefly discusses the relationship between these ideas and some other recent proposals that emphasize the common ground between Kantianism and versions of consequentialism. (shrink)

In her book Liberty of Conscience: In Defense of America's Tradition of Religious Equality the American philosopher Martha Nussbaum joins a chorus of American intellectuals who have criticized France and other European nations for their failure to embrace the concept of cultural pluralism. In Nussbaum's opinion, the meaning that the French attach to egalité has remained stuck in circumstances peculiar to the eighteenth century. The concept is outdated and has not in the contemporary world been able to protect cultural diversity (...) in general and religious diversity in particular. Her book takes to task what she terms “the French tradition of “coercive assimilation” that is insensitive to what George Washington stressed as the “‘delicacy and tenderness’ that is owed to other people's ‘conscientious scruples.’” The French refusal to allow Muslim schoolgirls to cover their heads with a foulard, however stylish it might be, is linked back to the French emancipation of Jews that required, in Nussbaum's analysis, a heavy requirement of cultural erasure. The French, like most Europeans, grew used to the idea “that citizens are all alike,” an idea that now haunts France as it tries to figure out what to do with its Muslim population. (shrink)

Comparative thanatologists study the responses to the dead and the dying in nonhuman animals. Despite the wide variety of thanatological behaviours that have been documented in several different species, comparative thanatologists assume that the concept of death is very difficult to acquire and will be a rare cognitive feat once we move past the human species. In this paper, we argue that this assumption is based on two forms of anthropocentrism: an intellectual anthropocentrism, which leads to an over-intellectualisation of the (...) CoD, and an emotional anthropocentrism, which yields an excessive focus on grief as a reaction to death. Contrary to what these two forms of anthropocentrism suggest, we argue that the CoD requires relatively little cognitive complexity and that it can emerge independently from mourning behaviour. Moreover, if we turn towards the natural world, we can see that the minimal cognitive requirements for a CoD are in fact met by many nonhuman species and there are multiple learning pathways and opportunities for animals in the wild to develop a CoD. This allows us to conclude that the CoD will be relatively easy to acquire and, so, we can expect it to be fairly common in nature. (shrink)

This review of Madhav Kkhosla’s book, India’s Founding Moment, sees his approach as one of “best lights” understandings, that is, an effort to identify and explain the conceptual underpinnings of India’s founding constitution in their best lights. Khosla emphasizes as key the ways in which the constitution’s requirements of full adult suffrage, its intense specificity of language, and its strongly centralized government form, all contribute conceptually to the creation of the democratic citizen of India—a citizen whose rights across the country (...) were secured by a common constitution and central government, whose knowledge of and ability to exercise rights were enhanced by the constitution’s codified approach, and a citizen whose capacities to participate in democratic processes would be developed by the exercise of democratic rights. The review focuses attention on choices about suffrage, comparing India’s with the less inclusionary founding impulses of the United States constitution. It explores nuances of how codification would and would not promote exercises of citizenship rights, noting the importance of adjudication in the construction of the “common knowledge” to which the founders aspired. And the review argues that today, as more illiberal, authoritarian regimes are on the rise, the book’s emphasis on the importance of ideas, words, and common knowledge in constructing liberal, democratic politics is of urgent contemporary importance. (shrink)

I distinguish between two ways of understanding the effect of a decision as a precedent in the common law, which I refer to as the individual rule approach and the holistic approach. I consider the different versions of the common law that they would be expected to give rise to, which approach is more closely reflected in the practices of the common law, and why the holistic approach is preferable as a method for finding and developing (...) the law in adjudication. I explain why under the holistic approach the common law contains principles as well as rules, and I consider the two approaches in the light of the requirement of the rule of law, and I show how the holistic approach explains a version of the policy/principle distinction. (shrink)

Wittgenstein’s concepts shed light on the phenomenon of schizophrenia in at least three different ways: with a view to empathy, scientific explanation, or philosophical clarification. I consider two different “positive” wittgensteinian accounts―Campbell’s idea that delusions involve a mechanism of which different framework propositions are parts, Sass’ proposal that the schizophrenic patient can be described as a solipsist, and a Rhodes’ and Gipp’s account, where epistemic aspects of schizophrenia are explained as failures in the ordinary background of certainties. I argue that (...) none of them amounts to empathic-phenomenological understanding, but they provide examples of how philosophical concepts can contribute to scientific explanation, and to philosophical clarification respectively. (shrink)

Millum and Bromwich provide a thorough and thoughtful analysis of what is required for sufficient informed consent, offering distinct conceptualizations of the ethical requirements of disclo...

The Holocaust and attempts to deny it, racism, murder, the case of Mary Bell. How can we include these and countless other examples of evil within our vision of a common humanity? These painful human incongruities are precisely what Raimond Gaita boldly harmonizes in his powerful new book, _A Common Humanity_. Hatred with forgiveness, evil with love, suffering with compassion, and the mundane with the precious. Gaita asserts that our conception of humanity cannot be based upon the empty (...) language of individual rights when it is our shared feelings of grief, hope, love, guilt, shame and remorse that offer a more potent foundation for common understanding. Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, Simon Weil, Primo Levi, George Orwell, Iris Murdoch and Sigmund Freud, Gaita creates a beautifully written and provocative new picture of our common humanity. (shrink)

In this paper I offer three main challenges to James (2011). All three turn on the nature of philosophy and secure knowledge in Spinoza. First, I criticize James's account of the epistemic role that experience plays in securing adequate ideas for Spinoza. In doing so I criticize her treatment of what is known as the ‘conatus doctrine’ in Spinoza in order to challenge her picture of the relationship between true religion and philosophy. Second, this leads me into a criticism of (...) her account of the nature of philosophy in Spinoza. I argue it is less piecemeal and less akin to what we would recognize as ‘science’ than she suggests. Third, I argue against James's core commitment that Spinoza's three kinds of knowledge differ in degree; I claim they differ in kind. My argument will offer a new interpretation of Spinoza's conception of ‘common notions’. Moreover, I argue that Spinozistic adequate knowledge involves something akin to angelic disembodiment. (shrink)

This analysis maps the deepening global crisis and the principles of its resolution by life-value analysis and method. Received theories of economics and justice and modern rights doctrines are shown to have no ground in life value and to be incapable of recognizing universal life goods and the rising threats to them. In response to this system failure at theoretical and operational levels, the unifying nature and measure of life value are defined to provide the long-missing basis for understanding (...) the common interest, human rights and social justice—that is, the universal life necessities of humanity across cultures and the evolving civil commons infrastructures to ensure them. In contrast, the treaty-imposed corporate rights system miscalled “globalization” is structured to predate life means and support systems at all levels with no accountability beyond itself. Only the logic of life value, human rights and life-protective law, it is concluded, can comprehend or govern this inherently life-blind and cumulatively eco-genocidal regime. (shrink)

A currently popular proposal for fairly distributing emission quotas is the equal shares view, which holds that that emission quotas should be distributed to all human beings globally on an equal per capita basis. In this paper I aim to show that a number of arguments in favour of equal shares are based on a misleading analysis of climate change as a global commons problem. I argue that a correct understanding of the way in which climate change results from (...) the overuse of a global commons shows those who defend equal shares using commons arguments to be harbouring more controversial commitments than might at first appear. I then discuss two options for equal shares theorists who wish to maintain the view in the face of my critique, and attempt to show that one approach holds more promise than the other. (shrink)

The Common Good and Christian Ethics rethinks the ancient tradition of the common good in a way that addresses contemporary social divisions, both urban and global. David Hollenbach draws on social analysis, moral philosophy, and theological ethics to chart new directions in both urban life and global society. He argues that the division between the middle class and the poor in major cities and the challenges of globalisation require a new commitment to the common good and that (...) both believers and secular people must move towards new forms of solidarity if they are to live good lives together. Hollenbach proposes a positive vision of how a reconstructed understanding of the common good can lead to better lives for all today, both in cities and globally. This interdisciplinary study makes both practical and theoretical contributions to the developing shape of social, cultural, and religious life today. (shrink)

What is common sense? -- Back in time -- How does common sense work -- Understanding common sense -- More than common sense -- Common sense and mistakes -- Animal common sense -- More than common sense -- Common sense nonsense -- Common sense test.

BackgroundThe COVID-19 crisis has introduced a variety of stressors, while simultaneously decreasing the availability of strategies to cope with stress. In this context, it could be useful to understand issues that people find most concerning and ways in which they cope with stress. In this study, we explored these questions with a sample of graduate and professional students.MethodUsing open-ended assessments, we asked participants to identify their biggest challenge or concern, their most effective way of handling stress, and their most (...) class='Hi'>common way of handling stress. We applied thematic analysis and evaluated whether participants’ strategies corresponded with evidence-based practices.ResultsParticipants frequently reported top problems relating to productivity, physical health, and emotional health. Distraction was the most frequently classified common strategy, whereas behavioral activation was the most frequently identified effective strategy. Participants who reported a common strategy classified as an EBP reported lower depressive and anxiety symptoms. In contrast, there was no evidence of an association between symptom levels and whether or not participants’ effective strategy was an EBP. Participants who reported the same strategy as both their common and effective strategy reported lower depressive symptoms than those whose common and effective strategies were different.ConclusionOur findings highlight stressors that students are experiencing and ways they are coping during the COVID-19 crisis. We discuss how these findings can inform mental health promotion efforts and future research on coping with stressors. (shrink)

The existential–phenomenological approach of the early Heidegger and Max Scheler to religion as an amplified empirical phenomenology of the human condition, combined with Heidegger’s specific derivation of his Daseins-analysis from the Christianity of Eckart, Paul, and Kierkegaard, is shown to be broadly congruent with the contemporary transpersonal psychology of higher states of consciousness, largely based on Eastern meditative traditions. This descriptive transpersonal psychology of a mystical core to all religions based on the direct experience of presence or Being, as developed (...) by Rudolf Otto and elaborated by Laski, Almaas, and others, is then applied to selected gospel narratives as a further step, past its beginnings in the early Heidegger and Rudolf Bultmann, toward a re-construction of specific numinous states in early Christianity. This derivation of facets of the numinous from their presumed doctrinal schematizations and/or amplifications places Christianity closer to the goals of the meditative traditions, and allows a more directly experiential understanding of doctrines of Christian redemption, loving compassion, and eternal life as amplifications of the phenomenology of the inner forms of ordinary here and now consciousness, within which they are already foreshadowed. (shrink)

In the target article, Bowers et al. dispute deep artificial neural network (ANN) models as the currently leading models of human vision without producing alternatives. They eschew the use of public benchmarking platforms to compare vision models with the brain and behavior, and they advocate for a fragmented, phenomenon-specific modeling approach. These are unconstructive to scientific progress. We outline how the Brain-Score community is moving forward to add new model-to-human comparisons to its community-transparent suite of benchmarks.

Businesses have long been admonished for being unduly focused on the pursuit of profit. However, there are some organizations whose purpose is not exclusively economic to the extent that they seek to constitute common good. Building on Christian ethics as a starting point, our article shows how the pursuit of the common good of the firm can serve as a guide for humanistic management. It provides two principles that humanistic management can attempt to implement: first, that community good (...) is a condition for the realization of personal good, and second, that community good can only be promoted if it is oriented towards personal good. To better understand which community good can favor personal good and how it can be achieved, we examine two recent humanistic movements—Conscious Capitalism and Economy of Communion—that strive to participate in the common good. From the analysis of these two movements, we identify a shared managerial willingness to adopt the two principles. Moreover, we also reveal that Conscious Capitalism and Economy of Communion present different ways of linking community good and personal good, and therefore, different means exist for firms to participate in the common good. (shrink)

The contributors to this volume examine recent controversies about the importance of common sense psychology for our understanding of the human mind. Common sense provides a familiar and friendly psychological scheme by which to talk about the mind. Its categories tend to portray the mind as quite different from the rest of nature, and thus irreducible to physical matters and its laws. In this volume a variety of positions on common sense psychology from critical to supportive, (...) from exegetical to speculative, are represented. Among the questions posed are: Is common sense psychology an empirical theory, a body of analytic knowledge, a practice or a strategy? If it is a legitimate enterprise can it be naturalized or not? If it is not legitimate can it be eliminated? Is its fate tied to our understanding of consciousness? Should we approach its concepts and generalizations from the standpoint of conceptual analysis or from the philosophy of science? (shrink)

THE PREVALENCE TODAY of "semiotics" as the preferred linguistic form for designating the study of signs in its various aspects already conceals a history, a story of the ways in which, layer by layer, the temporal achievement we call human understanding builds, through public discourse, ever new levels of common acceptance each of which presents itself as, if not self-evident, at least the common wisdom. Overcoming such present-mindedness is not the least of the tasks faced by the (...) awakening of semiotic consciousness. (shrink)