Psychedelic or ecodelic medicines (e.g., psilocybin, ayahuasca, iboga) for the care and treatment of addiction, post‐traumatic stress disorder, cancer, cluster headaches, anxiety, and depression have surged to the forefront of discussions about mental health in the US, leading to the emergence of well‐capitalized biotech companies offering multimillion‐dollar IPOs. Venture capital website Pitchbook reports “continuing investor interest and growing acceptance of what until recently was seen as a fringe area of medicine.” As scholars, activists, and practitioners who have been healed by (...) these medicines and applaud the recent wave of decriminalization after a long, strange trip of mass incarceration and widespread dangerous misinformation, we look forward to a culture that makes these medicines available in a safe and affordable way that respects the lineages of the knowledges that are essentially and not accidentally bundled with these plants—Indigenous and counterculture wisdoms for whom these medicines were never “fringe,” but always foundational. In place of corporadelia's pursuit of standardization, we emphasize the care and wisdom of the Indigenous and countercultural teachings—traditions that have made psychedelics available to the emerging corporate/research partnership in the first place. These knowledge traditions offer foils to the ongoing translation of university peer‐reviewed research into market copy, technical articles, and IPOs, and the concomitant emergence of psychedelic pundits. In particular, we examine instances where prominent researchers have overstated the findings of existing clinical trials in public‐facing representations of the field. We argue that these corporate priorities and tactics are being aided by a new wave of psychedelic “thought leaders” who seek to delegitimize non‐hierarchical approaches to knowledge production and community support within a psychedelic commons. While prominent psychedelic psychiatrists and behaviorists are focused on rooting out and transforming individual habits of mind, we argue that there is another, latent potential for psychedelics to draw attention to—and transform—the invisible, hegemonic infrastructures and ideologies that subtly naturalize and perpetuate deeply unequal societies. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 35.2 (2002) 153-174 [Access article in PDF] LSDNA: Rhetoric, Consciousness Expansion, and the Emergence of Biotechnology Richard Doyle I had to struggle to speak intelligibly. —Albert Hofmann on his self-experiment with LSD-25 Finding a place to start is of utmost importance. Natural DNA is a tractless coil, like an unwound and tangled audio tape on the floor of the car in the dark. —Kary (...) Mullis on the invention of Polymerase Chain Reaction 1. Undoing life What happened is this: Once upon a time there was a narrative of vitality. Ok, not a narrative, but an apprehension, a fear, a vision. It didn't have a beginning, middle, or end. It was. Its contours were no more determinable than those of consciousness. Indeed, our consciousness, as humans, was our sole alleged difference from it. From something called "life." We were more than life, but were also, tragically, confined to it. You know the story all too well. Some of its major authors were Cuvier, Lamarck, Darwin, Bichat. Even Shelley.Just because this sudden transformation happened on paper doesn't mean it was easy to endure. Enormous numbers of humans went on tranquilizers just to deal with the effects. Others, elsewhere, knew nothing but rumors. Nonetheless, they became increasingly implicated in its effects, the effects of understanding and experiencing both "life" and "consciousness" as informatic events. Suddenly—and it is sudden, a real surprise—both our vitality and our thought were distributed, scattered across a network and nowhere in particular. Timothy Leary and Francis Crick were speaking the same language, the language of information where the organic and the machinic enfold each other helically and, sometimes, the capacity for replication goes through the ceiling. This new language of information would [End Page 153] introduce a novel response and abyss: the pleasures and hells of eternal replication. The distribution of both life and consciousness enabled a dream of immortality from which we have not yet awakened, as the mere specter of infinite clonal replicants provokes entropies of identity even as it preserves the self from onslaughts of decay. 1In at least one of its characteristics this shift toward an informatic understanding of life is perhaps not really so novel. The seductions of control are hardly, historians of science tell us, foreign to the practices and effects of technoscience. Evelyn Fox Keller makes this point concisely and precisely in her not-quite eponymous essay, "From Secrets of Life to Secrets of Death," itself a self-professed sequel to her 1986 "Making Gender Visible." Here the scientific "impulse" is underwritten by a perennial motif that underlies much of scientific creativity, namely, the urge to fathom the secrets of nature and the collateral hope that, in fathoming the secrets of nature, we will fathom (and hence gain control of) our own mortality (Secrets, 29).Surely Keller is correct that the nascent practices of molecular biology were cryptographic in character, an espionage project unknowingly launched by Erwin Schrodinger during the Second World War. Surely it is crucial to this moment that while Schrodinger's 1943 Dublin lectures were introducing audiences to the concept of the code-script, Alan Turing again brilliantly decrypted a modified U-boat code, giving the Allies code superiority for the remainder of the war. 2 But in this segment on that strange growth called "biotechnology," I want to focus on what Keller has called the "collateral" of hope in this cryptographic impulse, namely the collateral equation between inquiry and control, specifically the control of mortality.For is "fathoming" a secret identical to the exercise of control? The very cadence and rhetorical encryption of Keller's formulation here, a general parenthetical syllogistic conclusion within and alongside a hyphenated invocation of particularity, suggest that concepts and practices of secrecy are more unstable than Keller implies with her invocation of Feynman's "disease" of lock picking: "One of my diseases, one of my things in life, is that anything that is secret, I try to undo" (40).For Keller, Feynman's confession is emblematic of a desire to control life and death... (shrink)

Numerous and diverse reports indicate the efficacy of shamanic plant adjuncts (e.g., iboga, ayahuasca, psilocybin) for the care and treatment of addiction, post-traumatic stress disorder, cancer, cluster headaches, and depression. This article reports on a first-person healing of lifelong asthma and atopic dermatitis in the shamanic context of the contemporary Peruvian Amazon and the sometimes digital ontology of online communities. The article suggests that emerging language, concepts, and data drawn from the sciences of plant signaling and behavior regarding “plant intelligence” (...) provide a useful heuristic framework for comprehending and actualizing the healing potentials of visionary plant “entheogens” (Wasson 1971) as represented both through first-person experience and online reports. Together with the paradigms and practices of plant signaling, biosemiotics provides a robust and coherent map for contextualizing the often reported experience of plant communication with ayahuasca and other entheogenic plants. The archetype of the “plant teachers” (called Doctores in the upper Amazon) is explored as a means for organizing and interacting with this data within an epistemology of the “hallucination/perception continuum (Fischer 1975). “Ecodelic” is offered as a new linguistic interface alongside “entheogen” (Wasson 1971). (shrink)

This book inquires into the swarm of ontological, epistemological, and ethical questions provoked by psychedelic experience in the context of global ecological crisis. Richard M. Doyle is professor of English and science, technology, and society at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of On Beyond Living and Wetwares.

However much Greek tragedy was concerned with fate, it was more deeply concerned with the ways of men, the failures and achievements of human freedom.

Theories of laughter exemplify the radical difference between descriptive language and actuality. This difference is figured by Henri Bergson in his classic treatment of laughter as the mismatch between the mechanical and the living, a differential locus modeled herein with the help of a banana peel.

A recent issue of Topics in Cognitive Science featured 11 thoughtful commentaries responding to our article “What happened to cognitive science?” (Núñez et al., 2019). Here, we identify several themes that arose in those commentaries and respond to each. Crucial to understanding our original article is the fundamental distinction between multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary endeavors: Cognitive science began (and has stayed) as multidisciplinary but has failed to move on to form a cohesive interdisciplinary field. We clarify and elaborate our original argument (...) and reiterate the importance of a data‐driven evaluation of the current status of the field, which exhibits a marked disciplinary imbalance, a lack of a coherent conceptual core, and a striking absence of a consistent curriculum in the institutions that grant degrees in this domain. Half a century after the creation of cognitive science, it may now be a good time to revisit goals and visions for how to best approach the ever‐fascinating scientific study of the mind(s). (shrink)

This book applies Augustine's thought to current questions of teaching and learning. The essays are written in an accessible style and is not intended just for experts on Augustine or church history.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Best Love of the Child: Being Loved and Being Taught to Love as the First Human Right ed. by Timothy P. JacksonMary M. Doyle RocheReview of The Best Love of the Child: Being Loved and Being Taught to Love as the First Human Right EDITED TIMOTHY P. JACKSON Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011. 416 pp. $28.00With The Best Love of the Child, Eerdmans adds to an (...) already impressive roster of books on children and families. While previous contributions to the field have challenged the appropriateness of rights in addressing the needs of children, Best Love explores the “best interest” standard that is commonly used by courts and international bodies to adjudicate cases involving children. The book’s fundamental claim is that what is “best” for children involves being loved and being taught to love. Although the essays in this volume acknowledge that the primary locus for the love and care of children is the family, they also engage other contexts including religious communities, courts, and legislative bodies.In a section dealing with social-psychological perspectives on this theme, Peter Benson and Eugene Roehlkepartain make the case that doing the best for children requires shifting from a deficit model that focuses on what children lack to a model that emphasizes their developmental assets. Other chapters in this section highlight the ways parents can pursue the best for children by introducing them to spiritual practices rooted in love for God and compassion [End Page 231] toward others, and by providing them with a narrative-rich environment that deepens bonds between adults and children.A section on historical perspectives continues this trajectory by highlighting the vocations of children from the late thirteenth century on to the early modern period. In his concluding essay in this section, Charles Reid links historical and contemporary concerns by focusing on the right to life and its implications for analyses of war and healthcare access.In a section on philosophical and theological perspectives, Cynthia Willett challenges liberal understandings of rights in view of the experiences of children and argues for an approach that recognizes a central paradox of human freedom: that relationships of interdependence do not weaken freedom but rather enhance it. This paves the way for developing a sense of collective responsibility for children based on shared commitments to justice and solidarity that reach beyond the privatized family. Richard Osmer tackles the concept of original sin in order to advance a vision of a missional church in which congregations work with families to encourage authoritative—rather than authoritarian—styles of parenting that model mutual forgiveness. Marcia Bunge’s contribution is the most practical, offering a list of practices for children, families, and congregations for nurturing children’s vocations.In a concluding section on legal perspectives, Michael Broyde notes that, in the context of custody cases in Jewish law, the primary question is not who loves the child the most but rather who can best meet the child’s needs in an atmosphere of respect. Margaret Brinig and Steven Nock argue that law can, in fact, foster the love of children and the potential children have for becoming loving themselves by promoting family structures that are stable and afforded status in the community. In this way families can model the covenantal relationships of unconditional love in which children thrive. The collection concludes with an essay by Don Browning that emphasizes weaving together love’s affective elements with the very practical activities of caring for children and respecting their emerging selves.By inviting thoughtful reflection on how loving and being loved are central to the well-being of children in families and other institutions, Best Love makes an important contribution to the interdisciplinary field of childhood studies. The book is best suited for graduate students, although the essays by Osmer and Bunge are relevant to pastoral settings. [End Page 232]Mary M. Doyle RocheCollege of the Holy CrossCopyright © 2015 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Conscience and Calling: Ethical Reflections on Catholic Women's Church Vocations by Anne E. PatrickMary M. Doyle RocheConscience and Calling: Ethical Reflections on Catholic Women's Church Vocations Anne E. Patrick NEW YORK AND LONDON: BLOOMSBURY T&T CLARK, 2013. 197 PP. $24.95In Conscience and Calling, Anne Patrick weaves together insights into women's moral agency, vocational discernment, and historical narratives of religious women's engagement with clerical authority. Taking up James (...) Gustafson's question, "What is God enabling and requiring us to be and to do?" she offers a nuanced view of virtuous discernment and action in the context of the "ecclesial oppression" of women. Patrick asks, "What is correct 'church practice' for female moral agents in view of the institutionalized injustice toward women in Catholicism?" (59).Chapter 1 begins with cases of conflict between women's religious congregations and clerical leadership. In the first case, Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary protested intolerable living conditions at a parish in Brooklyn, New [End Page 201] York, in 1939. When repeated requests for heat fell on the pastor's deaf ears, the sisters requested to leave the parish and were told that they would then also have to leave another thriving ministry in the diocese. The sisters acquiesced to this decision in a spirit of obedience and did not publicize the real reason for their departure. Fifty years later in Miami, Florida, when another conflict arose, the sisters involved discerned a very different response to injustice, one marked by concern for "justice, honesty, and personal responsibility." The model of a "good sister" had shifted from an emphasis on obedience and institutional loyalty toward shared responsibility for ministry and leadership.Chapter 2 surveys the landscape of women's engagement with the Church and its structures of leadership and adapts H. Richard Niebuhr's Christ and Culture to sketch five "types": women against the Church; women content with the Church; women above the Church; women and Church in paradox; and women transforming Church. Patrick proposes the transformationist model as the approach that most adequately meets the challenges that women face in the Church today; she calls on those who adopt this approach to live in creative tension with the Church and with those who follow the other models, to espouse justice and mutuality in organizational structures, and to be self-critical. Chapter 3 recounts the history of the National Assembly of Religious Women through this transformational lens.Chapter 4 proposes a "framework for love" that builds on Margaret Farley's ethic of commitment to envision an ethic of vocation that elicits "active receptivity," values the contributions of institutions, practices egalitarianism, and keeps justice and love in dialectical relationship. The "myth" of vocation (the notion that vocation is a "thing" to be discovered and pursued, like one's destiny or soul mate) is balanced by the "mystery" of vocation that engages ongoing, lifelong discernment. Controversial cases involving women religious illustrate this kind of discernment and women's striving to live justly and faithfully. The final chapter, "Vocation in a Transformed Social Context," recounts the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith's visitation of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, a case that has changed the landscape for women's discernment once again. Patrick calls the Church to live out its rhetorical commitment to the dignity of women by opening all church ministries so that women might serve and lead.Conscience and Calling tells an important story about how women religious have discerned the signs of the times and imagined new vocations in the Church and the world. Though the focus here is on women in the American Catholic Church, Patrick's contribution should pave the way for sharing religious women's stories in the global context to further enrich a Christian vision of virtue and vocation for those navigating ecclesial politics and practicing ministry in particular. [End Page 202]Mary M. Doyle RocheCollege of the Holy CrossCopyright © 2017 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Richard Posner is a leading contemporary critic of privacy. He is highly skeptical of most appeals to privacy, characterizing them as self-serving attempts to keep discrediting, embarrassing, or inconvenient facts from others. Accordingly, he is opposed to the legal protection of most personal information. Posner calls his own theory of privacy “economic.” He argues that the social “markets” in which people sell themselves as employees, business associates, friends, or mates would be far more efficient if nearly all personal information (...) were available to potential “buyers.” I offer two direct criticisms of this view. I then attempt to show that Posner’s conception of privacy is too narrow in the light of the challenge presented by the so-called new panopticon that digital technology has created. I close with a criticism of Posner’s endorsement of sweeping surveillance of U.S. citizens’ e-communications in the name of fighting terrorism. (shrink)

Although I do not know Richard Doyle personally, I would say that Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex Plants and the Evolution of the Noosphere is a deeply personal book. Not only does the author offer multiple accounts of his own multicontinental explorations of intraspecies cross-pollination, but he also provides many rhetorical analyses of trip reports, biological treatises, and science fiction, all of which seem to be crucial constitutive elements of his research. That is, this is not a book that offers (...) abstract erudition—though there is plenty of content that anyone can extract from it—but one that offers something more rare. Here, I am reminded of Goethe’s famous remark, which Nietzsche chose to use as the epigraph to.. (shrink)

A collaborative article by the Editorial Collective of Social Imaginaries. Investigations into social imaginaries have burgeoned in recent years. From ‘the capitalist imaginary’ to the ‘democratic imaginary’, from the ‘ecological imaginary’ to ‘the global imaginary’ – and beyond – the social imaginaries field has expanded across disciplines and beyond the academy. The recent debates on social imaginaries and potential new imaginaries reveal a recognisable field and paradigm-in-the-making. We argue that Castoriadis, Ricoeur, and Taylor have articulated the most important theoretical frameworks (...) for understanding social imaginaries, although the field as a whole remains heterogeneous. We further argue that the notion of social imaginaries draws on the modern understanding of the imagination as authentically creative. We contend that an elaboration of social imaginaries involves a significant, qualitative shift in the understanding of societies as collectively and politically-instituted formations that are irreducible to inter-subjectivity or systemic logics. After marking out the contours of the field and recounting a philosophical history of the imagination, the essay turns to debates on social imaginaries in more concrete contexts, specifically political-economic imaginaries, the ecological imaginary, multiple modernities and their inter-civilisational encounters. The social imaginaries field imparts powerful messages for the human sciences and wider publics. In particular, social imaginaries hold significant implications for ontological, phenomenological and philosophical anthropological questions; for the cultural, social, and political horizons of contemporary worlds; and for ecological and economic phenomena. The essay concludes with the argument that social imaginaries as a paradigm-in-the-making offers valuable means by which movements towards social change can be elucidated as well providing an open horizon for the critiques of existing social practices. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 369 On Divine Foreknowledge. (Part IV of the Concordia). By Lms DE MOLINA. Trans. Alfred J. Freddoso. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988. Pp. xii +286. $34.95. The contents of the sixteenth century Jesuit theologian Luis de Molina's famous work are specified in its title: Liberi arbitrii cum gratiae donis, divina praescientia, providentia, praedestinatione et reprobatione concordia-" The Agreement of Free Choice with the Gifts of Grace, Divine (...) Foreknowledge, Providence, Predestination, and Reprobation." Part IV, which particularly concerns the Divine Fore· knowledge, is divided into seven " Disputations," 47-53 inclusive. These deal with contingency, the presence of all things to God in eternity, God's knowledge of future contingents (including the role of the Divine Ideas), and especially the reconciliation of freedom and contingency with absolutely certain Divine Foreknowledge and Predeterminations. It is Part IV, especially Disputation 52, which contains Molina's well known teaching about the scientia media, God's "middle knowledge," i.e., eternally between the natural knowledge He has of all things possible and the free or post-volitional (according to our way of conceiving it) knowledge He has of all things actual. More precisely, by middle knowledge God knows, before any exercise of His will, what a created free agent would do in various circumstances, both those which actually will obtain and those which, although possible, will never in fact exist. The objects of such knowledge are situated between what is merely possible and what will simply he at some moment of time. They are possible with a certain hypothetical (ex hypothesi) dependence on both Divine and human free causation. Thus, in comprehending them as they are, God's absolutely necessary and prior knowledge would seem in some way dependent upon what is contingent and even created. Molina's doctrine attempts to overcome the paradox in this. A competent admirer of Molina's position, University of Notre Dame Professor Freddoso is not just a master of the Jesuit's baroque Latin, with its sesquipedalian sentences bristling with spiny technical terms. He also shows himself to be a fine logician (earlier he translated portions of Ockham's Summa Logicae), with an excellent understanding of scholastic theology (in areas such as the Trinity, Christology, and the Eucharist), metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of human nature. To make the translated work even more accessible, he has in his introduction briefly treated prior parts of the Concordia as preparing the stage for Part IV, has related Molina's concerns to those of present day philosophers of religion, and has made clear the agreement as well 370 BOOK REVIEWS as the main difference between Molina and his " Banezian " opponents, whose position he summarizes from the 20th century theologian-philosopher, Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P. In addition, he has graced the translation with helpful footnotes. At times these identify persons mentioned by Molina, some of whom (e.g. Richard of Middleton, William Durandus, Gregory of Rimini, or Didacus de Deza [Hispalensis]) would be less than household names today for a non·medievalist. At other times, Freddoso's notes clearly and succinctly explain items of Catholic doctrine which Molina presupposes or to which he refers. Still again, they reproduce important texts of St. Thomas connected with points Molina is making. And something which I welcomed, Freddoso uses his notes frequently to recall and clarify premises of earlier arguments to which Molina later simply alludes without restatement. The translation itself is from the modern critical edition of the Concordia by Johannes Rabeneck, S.J. (Oniae et Matriti, 1953), which I would like to have seen reproduced on facing pages. Freddoso's version is accurate to the point of being literal. Despite that, however, it is amazingly readable. He does on occasion have difficulty with terms like complexio (which he specially notes on page 10) and ratio: whether to understand them subjectively or objectively-but then, doesn't everyone have the same problem? Again, while one might wonder about sentences as long as nineteen lines (e.g. page 178), they are in fact the legacy of Molina himself (cf. Disp. 52, n. 19, Rabeneck, p. 346, where the Latin runs 14 lines). Freddoso speaks of Molina's " lumbering " prose. But at the same... (shrink)

With his clear and accessible prose, impeccable scholarship, and balanced Judgment, Roland Teske, SJ, has been an influential and important voice in Medieval philosophy for more than thirty years. This volume, in his honour, brings together more than a dozen essays on central metaphysical and theological themes in Augustine and other medieval thinkers. The authors, listed below, are noted scholars who draw upon Teskes work, reflect on it, go beyond it, and at times even disagree with it, but always in (...) a spirit of respectful co-operation, and always with the aim of getting at the truth. Essays on Augustine contributed by Gerald Bonner, Charles Brittain, Joseph Koterski, SJ, Joseph T. Lienhard, SJ, David Vincent Meconi, SJ, Ann A. Pang-White, Frederick Van Fleteren, Dorothea Weber, and James Wetzel. Essays on Bernard of Clairvaux, William of Auvergne, and other medieval themes contributed by John P. Doyle, William Harmless, SJ, John A. Laumakis, Edward P. Mahoney, and Philipp W. Rosemann. (shrink)

With his clear and accessible prose, impeccable scholarship, and balanced Judgment, Roland Teske, SJ, has been an influential and important voice in Medieval philosophy for more than thirty years. This volume, in his honour, brings together more than a dozen essays on central metaphysical and theological themes in Augustine and other medieval thinkers. The authors, listed below, are noted scholars who draw upon Teskes work, reflect on it, go beyond it, and at times even disagree with it, but always in (...) a spirit of respectful co-operation, and always with the aim of getting at the truth. Essays on Augustine contributed by Gerald Bonner, Charles Brittain, Joseph Koterski, SJ, Joseph T. Lienhard, SJ, David Vincent Meconi, SJ, Ann A. Pang-White, Frederick Van Fleteren, Dorothea Weber, and James Wetzel. Essays on Bernard of Clairvaux, William of Auvergne, and other medieval themes contributed by John P. Doyle, William Harmless, SJ, John A. Laumakis, Edward P. Mahoney, and Philipp W. Rosemann. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 35.2 (2002) 91-95 [Access article in PDF] From: A Symposium on Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture Jeffrey Walker For who does not know, except them, that the art of using letters is fixed and unchanging, so that we always use the same letters for the same purposes, but in the art of discourse the case is entirely the reverse? —Isocrates, Against the SophistsThe essays composing this issue (...) of Philosophy and Rhetoric are based on papers that originally were presented at a symposium on "Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture," sponsored by the Emory University Center for Teaching and Curriculum, Department of English, and Hightower Fund, in March 2001. The ostensible purpose of the symposium was to consider the double nature and status of rhetoric: on one hand, a hermeneutic/theoretical discipline with applications across the humanities (in the analysis of texts, events, culture, argumentative practices, ideologies, and so forth); and, on the other hand, a practical "art of discourse," a techne, whose central or distinctive application is the training of skilled writers and speakers. The former tends to be emphasized in contemporary rhetorical studies, while the latter is the most familiar (though not necessarily essential) characteristic of "classical" or ancient rhetoric. Likewise, we can connect these two orientations, respectively, with rhetorical cultural studies and with the teaching of writing, speaking, and communication in general. While the natural assumption is that these two orientations are mutually supporting, that is not always or necessarily the case. One can argue that the first pulls in the direction of "philosophy" (however that may be defined), while the second pulls in the direction of sheer technique—and at one time or another, each has been [End Page 91] open to criticism for its lack of attention to the other: philosophers are ineffective rhetoricians, and cannot intervene in the public sphere; orators are superficial thinkers, and practice an irresponsible, demagogic art of manipulation and domination. This tension goes all the way back to the first critiques of the sophists, and plays out through the entire history of rhetoric. The symposium's speakers, then, were asked to reflect, in any way that seemed suitable to them, on either or both aspects of rhetoric's double nature, and/or the relationships between them.A symposium, inevitably, as a rhetorical event, always takes its own somewhat unpredictable trajectory, as papers are produced and presented, and as the ensuing discussion unfolds. And the four essays presented here—Steven Mailloux on Frederick Douglass and the nineteenth-century American debate over slavery; Susan Wells on "double consciousness" in S. Weir Mitchell's account of the case of Mary Reynolds and W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk; James L. Kastely on the discontinuity between the "philosophical" and "technical" halves of Plato's Phaedrus;and Richard Doyle on the strange intersection between the emergence of LSD and the evolution of biotechnological understandings of DNA—are all revisions and expansions of the original presentations, reflecting the contingencies of their invention and reinvention. Nevertheless, the original motives of the symposium are still in evidence.As different as these essays are, it can be said that one or two underlying themes run through them, and provide a reply to the original topic proposed for the symposium. Perhaps the keynote is what Mailloux describes as "rhetorical paths of thought": that is, the "migration" and "evolution" of topoi, figures, lines of arguments, bits of narratives, and rhetorical traditions themselves (or fragments of them?) "from one community to another... [and] from one cultural moment to the next," as Frederick Douglass takes in the rhetorical traditions, practices, tropes and arguments exemplified in the Columbian Orator, as well as Aristotle's arguments on slavery, and as they become enabling parts of his own rhetorical repertoire in the debate on abolition. In Wells's essay, this appears as the "refunctioning" or reworking of topoi, as the notion of "double consciousness" is adapted as part of a "new logic of scientific authority" in Mitchell's account of "split personality," and also as a way of understanding and performing public discourse and identity in... (shrink)

The teaching of evolution has always been a controversial issue in the United States. Despite the fact that evolution is accepted by biologists all over the world and the evidence is beyond dispute, the percentage of Americans who do not accept evolution hovers around 40%. (P.14) However, it's important to note that there are positive trends on the horizon. For example, the percentage of Americans under the age of 30 who accept evolution increases to about 68%. While several factors contribute (...) to this increase in acceptance and understanding, it's fair to say that improvements in science education have contributed to the increase. In order to continue this trend, it's essential that today's science teachers present their evolution lessons with confidence and a good depth of understanding. And since teachers are each other's best resources, this book offers to give science teachers a glimpse into the classrooms of effective evolution educators. In the book's foreword, one of the world's most imminent educators of science education, Dr. Richard Dawkins, offers his insights about evolution education in America. The chapters of twelve veteran science teachers follow. Each teacher shares their educational journeys, their insights, and their best practices in the hopes they can positively contribute to the scientific literacy of our nation. All of these teachers are members of the Teacher Institute for Evolutionary Science, TIES (www.tieseducation.org). Under the direction of its director, Bertha Vazquez, TIES has presented over 200 TIES workshops and webinars in all 50 US States in the last 6 years. The authors in this book are all TIES presenters. They represent the varied voices of America's evolution educators. The astounding success of TIES is a testament to the importance of teacher training in evolution education. It is our hope that this book contributes to this ongoing professional development. (shrink)

After a brief, personal reflection on Aron Gurwitsch's life and his many influences on my career, I devote this lecture to some of the central themes of a phenomenology of medicine. Its core is the clinical encounter, which displays a certain structure I term the asymmetry of power and vulnerability —a complex contextual imbalance characterized by multiple points of view, hence points for reflective entrance. These are then interpreted phenomenologically in terms of epoché and reduction, evidence, reflection, and other related (...) themes. I conclude with a suggestion about "the fundamental method" of phenomenology, free fantasy variation. (shrink)

Social cognition differs from general cognition in its focus on understanding, perceiving, and interpreting social information. However, we argue that the significance of domain‐general processes for controlling cognition has been historically undervalued in social cognition and social neuroscience research. We suggest much of social cognition can be characterized as specialized feature representations supported by domain‐general cognitive control systems. To test this proposal, we develop a comprehensive working model, based on an interactive activation and competition architecture and applied to the control (...) of action. As such, we label the model “ICON” (interactive activation and competition model for the control of action). We used the ICON model to simulate human performance across various laboratory tasks. Our simulations emphasize that many laboratory‐based social tasks do not require socially specific control systems, such as those that are argued to rely on neural networks associated with theory‐of‐mind. Moreover, our model clarifies that perceived disruptions in social cognition, even in what appears to be disruption to the control of social cognition, can stem from deficits in social representation instead. We advocate for a “default stance” in social cognition, where control is usually general, but representation is specific. This study underscores the importance of integrating social cognition within the broader realm of domain‐general control processing, offering a unified perspective on task processing. (shrink)

When the modern artist is seen as moving about in a nebulous area between two opposing worlds, that of life or immediate experience and that of art or established truth, I think it is appropriate to discuss this activity in terms of metaphor. Indeed the present concern for metaphor in the academic and artistic communities is but one of many reflections of our sense that life is a process of the gradual attainment of knowledge through experience, whether sensuous or intellectual. (...) Like our artists, we strive to create a picture of our world, yet that picture is never complete; for we continually pass on to new experiences and new images of reality. Not only do we grow and change but our world seems to change with us. Although the truths revealed through our art are founded in our experience, they seem more permanent and public than the acts of discovery leading to them. A principle once established and integrated with a body of other established truths enters into recorded history perhaps to be revered, disputed, or reinterpreted, but nevertheless to remain. The individual experience or discovery, however, passes; with the individual, only the sense of the continuing search yields personal identity. In a changing world, metaphor renders the truth of experience as the truth of knowledge, for it is the means of passing from individual immediacy to an established public world; the new must be linked to the old, and the experience of any individual must be connected with that of his society. Excluding the possibility of the creation of entirely new worlds and the resultant transformation of all personal identities, acts of genius or dramatic breakthroughs in fields of study can affect our present world order only if they are joined to it by means of a powerful metaphor. Indeed establishing the metaphoric bridge itself may be considered the act of genius, and the entry into new areas of knowledge is its consequence. Richard Shiff is associate professor of art at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His contributions to Critical Inquiry are "Seeing Cézanne" and, with Carl Pletsch, "History and Innovation". (shrink)

RICHARD SHEDENHELM responds to Robert Campbell's essay, "Ayn Rand and the Cognitive Revolution in Psychology" . He identifies the most likely source of the crow-counting experiment cited at the beginning of chapter seven of Ayn Rand's Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. He finds that the crow study was not at all an experiment, but instead an anecdotal account dating from the eighteenth-century French writer of animal behavior, Charles-Georges Leroy.

Rational choice models are characterized by the image of the self-interested Homo economicus. The role of moral concerns, which may involve a concern for others' welfare in people's judgments and choices, questions the descriptive validity of such models. Increasing evidence of a role for perceived moral obligation within the expectancy-value-based theory of reasoned action and the theory of planned behavior indicates the importance of moral-normative influences in social behavior. In 2 studies, the influence of moral judgments on attitudes toward food (...) produced with the use of genetic engineering techniques and toward meat consumption is addressed. The reasons participants provide for their moral judgments indicate some foci of their moral concerns. The results of both studies corroborate earlier findings that perceived moral obligation has independent effects on behavioral intentions; they also provide evidence that such judgments may affect attitudes themselves. The results are discussed in relation to the need for attitude-behavior models to reflect the role of moral evaluations in judgment and choice. (shrink)

In his essay “Painting Memories” , Michael Fried identifies memory as the privileged thematic that structures Charles Baudelaire’s Salon of 1846. But he then limits his investigation of this topic by focusing on the representation of “past” art, to the exclusion of the recollection of “past” experience. Fried thus isolates the theme of memory from the dialectic of life and art that characterizes its performance for Baudelaire. Such selective analysis not only reverses Baudelaire’s priorities but deflects his pointed comments on (...) modernity and naiveté, which in turn inform the example of Edouard Manet, Fried’s exemplary modernist painter. One wonders whether too much of Baudelaire and Manet is lost to this view. Perhaps the predilections of contemporary criticism have sanctioned Fried’s approach. For today we hesitate to ground art in experience, preferring to conceive of representations as signs fully engendered by and engendering other signs. Baudelaire was of a different mind; he lived through the dawning of our own age, but also in the fading light of another. He was heir to a tradition that regarded the forms of art as powerfully motivated by the experience of internalized ideas and sensations; for him, a master artist’s “signs” would appear more symbolic than allegorical, more immediate than mediated or distanced. As we deny artistic signs motivation in extralinguistic “experience,” we aggravate that perennial problem of origins which Fried himself invokes. It might be reformulated in this manner: all painting depends on a lineage of antecedent painting; yet, to succeed, a new work must transcend its filial bondage, as it compounds the effect of the “original” in its own originality. Vexation follows from this issue of the artistic source. Since memories of past art make possible the very creation of art, the creative event cannot assume priority over memory. And the matter of primordial memory, like the matter of an absolutely original art, is aporia. Fried does not pursue this matter ; but the question necessarily implies that both representations and memories, in constituting the “past,” must always be distanced. Distanced not from the present, which they enter and likewise constitute, but from those “original” experiential moments they purport to present. Richard Schiff is associate professor of art at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of Cézanne and the End of Impressionism: A Study of the Theory, Technique, and Critical Evaluation of Modern Art and is currently working on a study of modernism in relation to classicism and a related study of photographic realism. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are “Seeing Cézanne” , “Art and Life: A Metaphoric Relationship” , and, with Carl Pletsch, “History and Innovation”. (shrink)

Systematics based solely on structuralist principles is non-science because it is derived from first principles that are inconsistent in dealing with both synchronic and diachronic aspects of evolution, and its evolutionary models involve hidden causes, and unnameable and unobservable entities. Structuralist phylogenetics emulates axiomatic mathematics through emphasis on deduction, and “hypotheses” and “mapped trait changes” that are actually lemmas and theorems. Sister-group-only evolutionary trees have no caulistic element of scientific realism. This results in a degenerate systematics based on patterns of (...) fact or evidence being treated as so fundamental that all other data may be mapped to the cladogram, resulting in an apparently well-supported classification that is devoid of evolutionary theory. Structuralism in systematics is based on a non-ultrametric analysis of sister-group informative data that cannot detect or model a named taxon giving rise to a named taxon, resulting in classifications that do not reflect macroevolutionary changes unless they are sister lineages. Conservation efforts are negatively affected through epistemological extinction of scientific names. Evolutionary systematics is a viable alternative, involving both deduction and induction, hypothesis and theory, developing trees with both synchronic and diachronic dimensions often inferring nameable ancestral taxa, and resulting in classifications that advance evolutionary theory and explanations for particular groups. (shrink)