Everything about us today tells us that we live in a world which will be increasingly dominated by empirical and theoretic science. This is the world in which the Church lives and proclaims its message about Jesus Christ. It is not an alien world, for it is in this world of space and time that God has planted us. He made the universe and endowed man with gifts to investigate and understand it. Just as he made life to produce itself, (...) so he has made the universe with man as an essential constituent in it, that it may bring forth and articulate knowledge of itself. Regarded in this light the pursuit of science is one of the ways in which man exercises the dominion in the earth which he was given at his creation. That is how, for example, Francis Bacon understood the work of human science, as man's obedience to God. Science is a religious duty, while man as scientist can be spoken of as the priest of creation , whose task it is to interpret the books of nature, to understand the universe in its wonderful structures and harmonies, and to bring it all into orderly articulation, so that it fulfils its proper end as the vast theatre of glory in which the creator is worshipped and praised. Nature itself is dumb, but it is man's part to bring it to word, to be its mouth through which the whole universe gives voice to the glory and majesty of the living God. (shrink)

THE DOMINATING CONCEPT IN GREEK THOUGHT, SAYS TORRANCE, WAS A RECEPTACLE NOTION OF SPACE. THIS HAD NO PLACE IN THE NICENE THEOLOGY. WITH THE ASCENDANCY OF ARISTOTELIAN PHILOSOPHY THE RECEPTACLE NOTION OF SPACE DOMINATED MEDIEVAL THEOLOGY, AND THIS IS WHAT, DESPITE LUTHER’S INSIGHT INTO THE RELATION BETWEEN THE ONTOLOGICAL AND DYNAMIC WAYS OF THINKING OF THE REAL PRESENCE AND THE INCARNATION, PRODUCED THE SEPARATION BETWEEN THEM. THIS PROBLEM INHERITED BY MODERN THEOLOGY CAN ONLY BE SOLVED IF WE USE THE (...) PATRISTIC UNDERSTANDING OF JESUS CHRIST IN SPACE AND TIME AS GOD’S PLACE IN THIS WORLD WHERE HE IS PRESENT IN OUR PLACE. (BP). (shrink)

My personal relation with Polanyi, discussions with him in Oxford, contribution to the International Academy of the Philosophy of Science, the relevance of his innovative thought for Christian worship and theology, Magda and Michael in Oxford, the role of his literary executor.

My personal relation with Polanyi, discussions with him in Oxford, contribution to the International Academy of the Philosophy of Science, the relevance of his innovative thought for Christian worship and theology, Magda and Michael in Oxford, the role of his literary executor.

Intrinsic to rigorous knowledge of God is the recognition that positive theological concepts and statements about God arising under the compelling claims of God's reality upon the human mind must have an open revisable structure. A similar combination of critical realism and ontological openness is apparent in the profound change that has taken place in the rational structure of rigorous science from the radical dualism and closed causal system of classical mechanics to the unifying world view and open dynamic field‐theories (...) of modern physics. It is argued that the intersection of theological and natural science in their epis‐temological foundations can enhance their ontological commitment and heuristic thrust. (shrink)

Through faith we understand that the worlds were made by the Word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear By faith we understand that the universe was framed by God's command, so that the visible came forth from the invisible.

Through faith we understand that the worlds were made by the Word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear (Hebrews 11:3, AV)By faith we understand that the universe was framed by God's command, so that the visible came forth from the invisible (Hebrews 11:3, NEB).

Existing research suggests that people's judgments of actual causation can be influenced by the degree to which they regard certain events as normal. We develop an explanation for this phenomenon that draws on standard tools from the literature on graphical causal models and, in particular, on the idea of probabilistic sampling. Using these tools, we propose a new measure of actual causal strength. This measure accurately captures three effects of normality on causal judgment that have been observed in existing studies. (...) More importantly, the measure predicts a new effect ("abnormal deflation"). Two studies show that people's judgments do, in fact, show this new effect. Taken together, the patterns of people's causal judgments thereby provide support for the proposed explanation. (shrink)

Understanding the development and practice of power based on an in-depth observation of human psychology has been a part of traditional Chinese thought for thousands of years and is considered a prerequisite for mastering the arts of strategy and leadership. "Thunder in the Sky" presents two secret classics of this ancient Chinese tradition. The commentary by Thomas Cleary the renowned translator of dozens of Asian classics highlights the contemporary application of these teachings.

This chapter contains sections titled: Origins and underlying ideologies 1700–1776 Earlier American business ethics 1777–1890 A mature American business ethics 1891–1963 The rise of social issues in business ethics 1962–1970 Business ethics as a specific discipline American business ethics as global Conclusion.

Many individuals with developmental language disorder (DLD) and individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing (D/HH) have social–emotional problems, such as social difficulties, and show signs of aggression, depression, and anxiety. These problems can be partly associated with their executive functions (EFs) and theory of mind (ToM). The difficulties of both groups in EF and ToM may in turn be related to self-directed speech (i.e., overt or covert speech that is directed at the self). Self-directed speech is thought to (...) allow for the construction of non-sensory representations (i.e., representations that do not coincide with direct observation). Such non-sensory representations allow individuals to overcome the limits set upon them by the senses. This ability is constrained by the development of word meaning structure (i.e., the way words are understood). We argue that the greater ability to construct non-sensory representations may result in more enhanced forms of EF and ToM. We conclude that difficulties in EF, ToM, and social–emotional functioning in those with hearing and language problems may be accounted for in terms of word meaning impairments. We propose that word meaning structure and self-directed speech should be considered in assigning EF and ToM treatments to individuals with DLD and those who are D/HH. (shrink)

While Bayesian models have been applied to an impressive range of cognitive phenomena, methodological challenges have been leveled concerning their role in the program of rational analysis. The focus of the current article is on computational impediments to probabilistic inference and related puzzles about empirical confirmation of these models. The proposal is to rethink the role of Bayesian methods in rational analysis, to adopt an independently motivated notion of rationality appropriate for computationally bounded agents, and to explore broad conditions under (...) which Bayesian agents would be rational. The proposal is illustrated with a characterization of costs inspired by thermodynamics. (shrink)

Theories of rational decision making often abstract away from computational and other resource limitations faced by real agents. An alternative approach known as resource rationality puts such matters front and center, grounding choice and decision in the rational use of finite resources. Anticipated by earlier work in economics and in computer science, this approach has recently seen rapid development and application in the cognitive sciences. Here, the theory of rationality plays a dual role, both as a framework for normative assessment (...) and as a source of scientific hypotheses about how mental processes in fact work. The latter project, often called rational analysis, depends for its success on a fine-grained characterization of the computational problem facing a decision maker, which may in turn depend on realistic assumptions about what the relevant agent is like. As a consequence, resource rationality involves a delicate, but often fruitful interplay between the normative and the descriptive. (shrink)

This essay considers the recuperation of beauty as a productive critical strategy in discussions of African American dance. I argue that black performance in general, and African American concert dance in particular, seeks to create aesthetic sites that allow black Americans to participate in discourses of recognition and appreciation to include concepts of beauty. In this, I suggest that beauty may indeed produce social change for its attendant audiences. I also propose that interrogating the notion of beauty may allow for (...) social change among audiences that include dance theorists and philosophers. Through a case-study consideration of work by three African American choreographers, Donald Byrd (b. 1949), Ulysses Dove (1947 – 1996), and Abdel Salaam (b. 1949), I ultimately hope to suggest critical possibilities aligning dance performance with particular aesthetic theory relevant to its documentation and interpretation. (shrink)

This essay adopts a semiotic perspective focused on practices of communication, movement, and translation to examine the global impact of A. J. Greimas and his oeuvre. The linguist and semiotician’s lecture trips abroad, the number and provenance of international students in his Paris seminar, and the chronology and linguistic geography of translations of his work help describe, gauge, and explain the dissemination and development of his ideas throughout the world. His project has engendered distinctive appropriations and at times productive institutional (...) structures in a number of cultural and linguistic contexts, notably Romance, Anglo-American, Germanic, Russian, Lithuanian, and Chinese. The broader historical relations between France and other lands, and the extent of each society’s use of the French language have conditioned, fostered, or impeded responses to his proposals. The conclusion’s discussion of the relative importance of personal contacts, socio-historical context, and the sociolinguistic and pedagogical status of French for his international reception aims to contribute to general methodological debates in the history of science and ideas and in transnational history. (shrink)

We present a formal, mathematical model of argument structure and evaluation, taking seriously the procedural and dialogical aspects of argumentation. The model applies proof standards to determine the acceptability of statements on an issue-by-issue basis. The model uses different types of premises (ordinary premises, assumptions and exceptions) and information about the dialectical status of statements (stated, questioned, accepted or rejected) to allow the burden of proof to be allocated to the proponent or the respondent, as appropriate, for each premise separately. (...) Our approach allows the burden of proof for a premise to be assigned to a different party than the one who has the burden of proving the conclusion of the argument, and also to change the burden of proof or applicable proof standard as the dialogue progresses from stage to stage. Useful for modeling legal dialogues, the burden of production and burden of persuasion can be handled separately, with a different responsible party and applicable proof standard for each. Carneades enables critical questions of argumentation schemes to be modeled as additional premises, using premise types to capture the varying effect on the burden of proof of different kinds of questions. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2017 Heft: 214 Seiten: 9-13.

In Pietroski ( 2018 ) a simple representation language called SMPL is introduced, construed as a hypothesis about core conceptual structure. The present work is a study of this system from a logical perspective. In addition to establishing a completeness result and a complexity characterization for reasoning in the system, we also pinpoint its expressive limits, in particular showing that the fourth corner in the square of opposition (“ Some_not ”) eludes expression. We then study a seemingly small extension, called (...) SMPL +, which allows for a minimal predicate-binding operator. Perhaps surprisingly, the resulting system is shown to encode precisely the concepts expressible in first-order logic. However, unlike the latter class, the class of SMPL + expressions admits a simple procedural (context-free) characterization. Our contribution brings together research strands in logic—including natural logic, modal logic, description logic, and hybrid logic—with recent advances in semantics and philosophy of language. (shrink)

The Pleadings Game is a normative formalization and computational model of civil pleading, founded in Roberty Alexy''s discourse theory of legal argumentation. The consequences of arguments and counterarguments are modelled using Geffner and Pearl''s nonmonotonic logic,conditional entailment. Discourse in focussed using the concepts of issue and relevance. Conflicts between arguments can be resolved by arguing about the validity and priority of rules, at any level. The computational model is fully implemented and has been tested using examples from Article Nine of (...) the Uniform Commercial Code. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2017 Heft: 214 Seiten: 1-3.

Rights, justice, and power raise many interesting questions. Why do such basic concepts as rights and justice have such differentpoints of concern—equality, proportionality, medium rei? Why are there such different perspectives in philosophy, theology, and law? Why is the notion of power in business ethics so isolated from the general discussion of applied justice in treatises on business contracts, employee relations, and in other related topics? Discussions of power seemed parallel with discussions of justice. The two did not seem to (...) intersect. In this paper I shall argue that rights, power, and justice are interrelated. While natural rights are the basis for justice, rights cannotbe realized nor justice become operative without power. I shall call this relationship and the theory underlying it “Transforming Justice.”One of the basic concerns of this article is to notice the lack of interaction between rights and power in the traditional theories ofjustice. Granted that for many philosophers it is sufficient to determine what is just. But the notion of justice as an active virtue that persons are to exercise in their dealings with others goes further. It touches the realities of life that every person experiences. Life doesnot separate rights from power. Reflection upon the current separation of rights from power both in theory and in action is analogous to the separation of the “sensory” from the “imaginative” in art and in life. The urge to devise a framework of justice that brings out thewholeness of its existential being is the underlying rationale for developing a theory of transforming justice. Another purpose fordeveloping a theory of transforming justice is to suggest a conceptual framework of business ethics and corporate social responsibility that incorporates values, rights, power, and virtue. Authors and teachers approach these issues either from a value perspective or from the view that institutions respond only to those who exercise power. Thus, it isnecessary for a conceptual framework to incorporate the dynamics of power and the qualifying aspects of rights or claims.A natural law approach to justice and rights argues that humans have certain basic rights that others, whether humans or institutions, are required to respect. Natural rights theory places the burden or duty on each individual to respect the rights ofevery other person. In addition, justice is usually defined by natural law theorists as “giving each person his or her due,” what is requiredby natural rights, what is owed, earned, or deserved. But its applications fall short of reality. It raises other questions. How does one person get another to give him what is “his due”? How are duties and claims entailed by natural rights enforced in practice? The notionof transforming justice attempts to answer these questions. (shrink)

External cues and internal configuration states are the likely instigators of involuntary autobiographical memories (IAMs) and déjà vu experience. Indeed, Barzykowski and Moulin discuss relevant neuroscientific evidence in this direction. A complementary line of enquiry and evidence is the study of inhibition and its role in memory retrieval, and particularly how its (dys)function may contribute to IAMs and déjà vu.

The emergence of ethical controversy -- First embryo research regimes -- The ethics of embryonic stem cell research -- Stem cell and cloning politics.

While pragmatic arguments for numerical probability axioms have received much attention, justifications for axioms of qualitative probability have been less discussed. We offer an argument for the requirement that an agent’s qualitative judgments be probabilistically representable, inspired by, but importantly different from, the Money Pump argument for transitivity of preference and Dutch book arguments for quantitative coherence. The argument is supported by a theorem, to the effect that a subject is systematically susceptible to dominance given her preferred acts, if and (...) only if the subject’s comparative judgments preclude representation by a standard probability measure. (shrink)

The reaction to Darwin's Origin of Species varied in many countries according to the roles played by national scientific institutions and traditions and the attitudes of religious and political groups. The contributors to this volume, including M. J. S. Hodge, David Hull, and Roberto Moreno, gathered in 1972 at an international conference on the comparative reception of Darwinism. Their essays look at early pro- and anti-Darwinism arguments, and three additional comparative essays and appendices add a larger perspective. For this paperback (...) edition, Thomas F. Glick has added a new preface commenting on recent research. (shrink)

This article on the early history of phenomenological psychological research in the academic context in America focuses on the four approaches of the following respective psychologists: 1) Donald Snygg, Arthur W. Combs, and Anne C. Richards and Fred Richards; 2) Robert B. MacLeod; 3) Adrian L. van Kaam; and 4) Amedeo P. Giorgi. It begins by first addressing the "context" for this early history namely, the European origin of philosophical phenomenology and the connection of it with the psychology of its (...) times in Europe, and then the American background for the development of a sensibility for phenomenology and an eventual connection of phenomenology with psychology. Each of the four positions was examined in terms of basic approach to the study of human experience and behavior. That is, examination was directed toward whether the respective position was under the aegis of psychology as a human science or as a natural science. Also examined were the research postures and the methodologies of the four positions in terms of their respective degrees of reflecting either the human science or the natural science approach, and in terms of their approximation to a phenomenological psychology. It was found that syncretism characterized the approaches of the first three positions, and that there was either an absence of phenomenological psychological method in the psychologies of those positions or, in the case of MacLeod, an undeveloped and non-worked-out method. Only the work of Amedeo Giorgi presented 1) a human science approach that was radical and not compromised by natural science syncretions, and 2) an articulated phenomenological psychological method based on Husserl's concept of intentionality and on mediation of Merleau-Ponty's philosophical phenomenological method. (shrink)

This collection of eminently practical advice from the likes of Socrates, Plato, Diogenes, Pythagoras, and Aristotle covers subjects as diverse as money, child-raising, politics, philosophy, law, and relationships--all aspects of life and how to live it. Thomas Cleary has translated these sayings and aphorisms from the Arabic sources that preserved Greek thought throughout the Middle Ages. Many of the texts no longer exist in the original Greek. Included in the book is an appendix that presents resonant sayings and fragments (...) from Buddhist, Taoist, and Muslim sources, demonstrating the universal quality of the teachings of the Greek sages and hinting at the interaction between Western and Eastern cultures. (shrink)

To judge people's true character, pay careful attention to what they do, not to what they say; to develop human resources successfully, first develop your own skills and resources; be exacting without being needlessly demanding; and don't dwell on the present but always look to future goals. These are just a few of the insights revealed in this basic course on how to recognize, organize, and develop human resources. Drawing on essential sources - such as Confucius, Lao Tzu, Sun Tzu, (...) and the I Ching - Thomas Cleary shows what today's business executives, personnel managers, and political leaders can learn from these ancient Asian traditions about the inner dynamics of human interaction. Among the selections are passages from an important but less well-known work, The Thirty-six Strategies, which summarizes the powerful techniques of the Asian "art of advantage". Also provided are short, accessible introductions to Confucianism, Taoism, The Art of War, and the I Ching, along with lists of resources for further reading. (shrink)