Mimetic theory draws support from diverse disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. But arguably Girard would have even more influence if his theory had stronger life data, and one field well positioned to provide such input is psychology. Girard distinguished his thinking from Freud, while critiquing the psychoanalytic tradition more generally, in Book III of Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World1—a work taking the form of an extended dialogue with two psychiatrists. One of these, Jean-Michel Oughourlian, has (...) begun to develop the Girard-inspired practice of "interdividual psychology."2 In Girard's own hands, albeit to a limited degree, mimetic theory has been applied to mental health issues.3... (shrink)

Interview with Michael Bruce and Steven Barbone, editors of Just the Arguments.

Do our lives have meaning? Should we create more people? Is death bad? Should we commit suicide? Would it be better to be immortal? Should we be optimistic or pessimistic? Since Life, Death, and Meaning: Key Philosophical Readings on the Big Questions first appeared, David Benatar's distinctive anthology designed to introduce students to the key existential questions of philosophy has won a devoted following among users in a variety of upper-level and even introductory courses.

_Does the existence of evil call into doubt the existence of God? Show me the argument._ Philosophy starts with questions, but attempts at answers are just as important, and these answers require reasoned argument. Cutting through dense philosophical prose, 100 famous and influential arguments are presented in their essence, with premises, conclusions and logical form plainly identified. Key quotations provide a sense of style and approach. _Just the Arguments_ is an invaluable one-stop argument shop. A concise, formally structured summation of (...) 100 of the most important arguments in Western philosophy The first book of its kind to present the most important and influential philosophical arguments in a clear premise/conclusion format, the language that philosophers use and students are expected to know Offers succinct expositions of key philosophical arguments without bogging them down in commentary Translates difficult texts to core arguments Designed to provides a quick and compact reference to everything from Aquinas’ “Five Ways” to prove the existence of God, to the metaphysical possibilities of a zombie world. (shrink)

The objective of this paper is to augment the business values literature by building upon research that claims individual value frames are subject to hierarchical re-scaling, value redefinition, and value removal or induction. In contrast to the person-organization cultural fit approach of value congruence, we postulate that the cognitive discomforts resulting from just-world needs, self-identity completion and self-concept maintenance, as moderated by contextual and dispositional variables, are resolved through the selection and accentuation of legitimating and justifying values that ultimately cast (...) the nature of the world as fair, complete central self-identities, and affirm the self. Research and practical implications are discussed. (shrink)

A research project by the Schools of Theology and Psychology of Australia’s Charles Sturt University surveyed a large sample of Salvation Army officers. This article considers survey responses to two questions relating to end-of-life care: the use of pain medications that may shorten life, and the cessation of fluid and food intake. The results of the analyses are evaluated in terms of Michael Banner’s proposal that moral theology should more assiduously converse with ‘patient ethnographic study’, which the survey instantiates to (...) some extent. Banner’s proposal and the results of the survey are contrasted to Peter Singer’s analytical moral philosophical dictums on end-of-life care. The results are also compared to a metastudy by Andrea Rodríguez-Prat and Evert van Leeuwen of 14 ethnographic studies of those who wish to hasten death at the end of life. We conclude that respondents exemplify a form of moral reasoning that is embedded within Christian spirituality; counters the assumptions of Singer’s approach; contrasts the diminishment of ‘meaning’ at the end of life, as seen in Rodríguez-Prat and van Leeuwen; and deserves further respectful ethnographic study. (shrink)

Literature addressing organizational ethical behavior has focused intensely on cognitive moral development, and more recently the automatic and natural moral inclinations. Research addressing the incapacity for moral reasoning, such as psychopathy, is rarely addressed in organizational behavior. Our first aim is to develop a construct definition for functional psychopathy that is appropriate for organizational science and theoretically consistent with the extensive previous clinical and criminal research in this field. Second, we apply two versions of a scale not previously used in (...) business research relative to moral judgments. This scale is a self-reported measure of functional psychopathy and is useful for its relationships with ethically relevant business decisions. Further, we examine which factors emerge as having the highest relationship with ethical decision making. Third, we seek to advance the usefulness of this construct by more precisely placing psychopathy within its nomological network. With these goals in mind, a combined sample of business school seniors participated in three studies. Findings indicate a significant influence of psychopathy over a range of ethically relevant business decisions, as well as negative correlations with factors of the Moral Approbation and the Moral Awareness scales. We conclude with directions for future research and considerations for practice. (shrink)

This interdisciplinary article explores the intersection between the virtue ethics tradition and psychological therapies exploring the meaning of happiness for people living with a disabling mental illness. The logic of virtue ethics faces the challenge of mental illness, which is how to conceive of eudaimonia in the context of an illfness that targets happiness and potentially disrupts a person’s capacity to function rationally and exercise virtue. Drawing on two illustrative case studies of schizophrenia and major depression disorder, this article identifies (...) substantive points of contact between virtue ethics and the therapeutic strategies of recovery theory and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. In so doing, it aims to provide ways of thinking about happiness that can help therapists and people with a mental illness conceive of flourishing, not despite mental illness, but by incorporating the experience into the storied meaning of life. And since mental illness reflects the vulnerabilities that are central to human life, its examination also expands the horizons of the virtue ethics tradition. (shrink)

In this paper our aim is to augment the value-congruency literature by demonstrating the dynamics of business value structures. The relationship between cognitive discomforts and value restructuring is examined by applying self-affirmation theory. Subjects (N = 115) were randomly assigned either to the treatment group (n = 69) or control group (n = 46). Those subjects in the treatment group were tasked with deciding between two different organizational re-structuring options that involved downsizing. The values of job-entitlement, and obligations to the (...) disadvantaged shifted in emphasis in a direction that legitimated and justified the lay-off decision. The value of economic nationalism remained unchanged. Implications for research and practice are discussed. (shrink)

This introduction to the Common Knowledge symposium titled “Comparative Relativism” outlines a variety of intellectual contexts where placing the unlikely companion terms comparison and relativism in conjunction offers analytical purchase. If comparison, in the most general sense, involves the investigation of discrete contexts in order to elucidate their similarities and differences, then relativism, as a tendency, stance, or working method, usually involves the assumption that contexts exhibit, or may exhibit, radically different, incomparable, or incommensurable traits. Comparative studies are required to (...) treat their objects as alike, at least in some crucial respects; relativism indicates the limits of this practice. Jensen argues that this seeming paradox is productive, as he moves across contexts, from Lévi-Strauss's analysis of comparison as an anthropological method to Peter Galison's history of physics, and on to the anthropological, philosophical, and historical examples offered in symposium contributions by Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Marilyn Strathern, and Isabelle Stengers. Comparative relativism is understood by some to imply that relativism comes in various kinds and that these have multiple uses, functions, and effects, varying widely in different personal, historical, and institutional contexts that can be compared and contrasted. Comparative relativism is taken by others to encourage a “comparison of comparisons,” in order to relativize what different peoples—say, Western academics and Amerindian shamans—compare things “for.” Jensen concludes that what is compared and relativized in this symposium are the methods of comparison and relativization themselves. He ventures that the contributors all hope that treating these terms in juxtaposition may allow for new configurations of inquiry. (shrink)

[first paragraph]: Robert Forman's theory outlined in `Mysticism, language and the via negativa' reacts against an earlier account of mysticism which he calls constructivism'. Constructivism grew from a book of collected papers, Mysticism and philosophical analysis , contributed to and edited by Steven Katz. According to Forman, `the constructivist approach is, roughly, that of the historian [of ideas]' . But this characterization is much too generous.

Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) remains a controversial figure, applauded by those who support the late-twentieth-century turn to neoliberalism and criticized by those who see him as the poster-boy of...

The version uploaded to this site is a late draft. The paper arises both from William L. Rowe's classic 1979 discussion of the problem of evil, argues that there exist instances of intense suffering which an omnipotent, omniscient being could have prevented without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse, and also from Steven Wykstra's response, in the course of which he argues for the following Condition of Reasonable Epistemic Access (CORNEA): "On the basis (...) of cognized situation s, human H is entitled to claim 'It appears that p' only if it is reasonable for H to believe that, given her cognitive faculties and the use she has made of them, if p were not the case, s would likely be different in some way discernible by her." My paper discusses CORNEA, and proposes a replacement principle. (shrink)

Steven Rose regards oversimplification of biology as the supreme sin, inevitably leading to evil consequences, and requiring an unique distortion of scientific practice to avoid it. To avoid this, he proposes a short-cut to scientific knowledge by defining certain areas of biology that are intrinsically flawed. But this achieves only a subordination of science to politics. There are no general-purpose shortcuts for evaluating the validity of theories, and no substitutes for testing specific theories using relevant evidence.

Rather than "transitional," the American interwar years constituted a contiguous and seminal era during which the social, religious, and aesthetic consequences of a changed environment, modernity, became powerful forces in shaping the patterns in recent popular culture. Increased literacy and affluence, media technologies, and changes in work and leisure encouraged a mass marketplace of ideas. Popular intellectuals, namely D. W. Griffith, Bruce Barton, John B. Watson, Edward Bernays, Harry Emerson Fosdick, Edward L. Bernays, George Creel, Pearl Buck, John Steinbeck, (...) and Gilbert Selders helped Americans reimagine entire areas of existence for the new context. They illuminate important cultural shifts regarding the nature of self in a rationalized, urban world, the legitimacy of religion in the shadow of skeptical empiricism, and the qualities and social role of art in the age of science, alienation, and political apathy. ;Many of our persistent forms of popular expression can be understood as cultural exchanges over the problem of modernity, evidence of the obtuse ways in which modernism has affected the general culture. Griffith's mawkish melodrama is, upon serious scrutiny, deeply informed by modern fears of personal anomie, naturalism, and the aloof power of the new state. New concepts of "personality" and the "masses," based on behavioristic assumptions, envisioned both self and society as malleable and helped mitigate feelings of alienation with promises of empowerment and self-transformation. With Fosdick and Barton, mainstream Protestantism absorbed "positive thinking" and therapeutic conceptions of religion's role in modern life, and in the process redefined the nature of God, self, and the Church, Buck and Steinbeck reshaped melodramatic formulae into response to modern tensions with a blend of brutal naturalism and sentimental romanticism, a vision of an embattled "human spirit." In these thinkers, we can see Americans confronting the century's most compelling issues, disorder, naturalism, scientism, and relativism. Each phenomenon was a way of admitting modern change while imagining techniques for manipulating it. The relentless pursuit in popular culture for social connectedness, mastery of environment, spiritual assurance, managerial order, and personal power can best be understood as multifarious compensatory strategies for our ambivalence with modernity. (shrink)

With its balance of both classic selections and cutting-edge contemporary writings, this anthology for the beginning student clearly covers all the major historical and leading contemporary approaches to epistemology, or the theory of knowledge. One reviewer says: “...admirably even-handed and fair in its explanations of various views...The chapter introductions are concise and informative... not only are readings selected so as to engage one another in important ways, but the editor serves as a good guide through the scholarly thickets...The presentation of (...) content, both in the choice of readings and in the editor's introductions is superior to other texts I have used,” (Bruce Umbaugh, Webster University). (shrink)

I hope to persuade Charles Fried to think again about his developing views on distributive justice. Since I live at a certain remove from Cambridge, the best I can offer is a hypothetical dialogue with an imaginary person whose views seem, to me at least, of a Friedian inspiration. My central question deals with the way Fried establishes his rights to things he candidly concedes he does not deserve. To present my problems, I shall begin with a simpler case than (...) those – involving kidneys and talents – that Fried makes central to his discussion. Rather than starting with these rather special goods, I find it clarifying to focus first on more garden variety commodities – which, to emphasize their character, I shall call apples. (shrink)

In three parts, this volume in the AP-LS series explores the phenomena of captivity and risk management, guided and informed by the theory, method, and policy of psychological jurisprudence. The authors present a controversial thesis that demonstrates how the forces of captivity and risk management are sustained by several interdependent "conditions of control." These conditions impose barriers to justice and set limits on citizenship for one and all. Situated at the nexus of political/social theory, mental health law and jurisprudential ethics, (...) the book examines and critiques constructs such as offenders and victims; self and society; therapeutic and restorative; health; harm; and community. So, too, are three "total confinement" case law data sets on which this analysis is based. The volume stands alone in its efforts to systematically "diagnose" the moral reasoning lodged within prevailing judicial opinions that sustain captivity and risk management practices impacting: (1) the rights of juveniles found competent to stand criminal trial, the mentally ill placed in long-term disciplinary isolation, and sex offenders subjected to civil detention and community re-entry monitoring; (2) the often unmet needs of victims; and (3) the demands of an ordered society. Carefully balancing sophisticated insights with concrete and cutting-edge applications, the book concludes with a series of provocative, yet practical, recommendations for future research and meaningful reform within institutional practice, programming, and policy. (shrink)

The second edition of The Great Psychotherapy Debate has been updated and revised to include a history of healing practices, medicine, and psychotherapy, an expanded theoretical presentation of the contextual model, an examination of therapist effects, and a thorough review of the research on common factors such as the alliance, expectations, and empathy.

This resource puts theological concepts into everyday situations, showing the meaning of the terms and the importance of living out these doctrines in daily life.

The question whether the study of education and teacher education belong at a liberal arts college deserves careful consideration. In this essay Bruce Kimball analyzes and finds unpersuasive the three principled rationales that are most often advanced on behalf of excluding educational studies, teacher education, or both from a liberal arts college. Specifically, Kimball argues that no principled definition of the conventional liberal arts disciplines excludes the study of education without barring other fields now regarded as legitimate, and consistency (...) demands that all such fields be excluded if any are. In addition, teacher education, even if considered as merely “craft know-how” or as professional training, cannot be excluded from liberal arts colleges without arbitrarily classifying it as suspect and subjecting it to strict scrutiny. But the question of whether educational studies or teacher education fit any asserted definition of liberal education does not finally resolve the question of whether they belong in a liberal arts college. Kimball concludes by suggesting that there are moral and prudential reasons for liberal arts colleges to offer teacher education and, concomitantly, the study of education, even apart from the unpersuasive objections that they do not fit a definition of liberal education. (shrink)

Based upon the author's twenty-five years of experience leading seminars concerning the history of liberal education, this collection presents a uniquely comprehensive and salient set of documents, ranging from Plato to Martha Nussbaum, while incorporating the neglected portrayal and discussion of women within the history of the liberal arts.

Purely parallel neural networks can model object recognition in brief displays – the same conditions under which illusory conjunctions have been demonstrated empirically. Correcting errors of illusory conjunction is the “tag-assignment” problem for a purely parallel processor: the problem of assigning a spatial tag to nonspatial features, feature combinations, and objects. This problem must be solved to model human object recognition over a longer time scale. Our model simulates both the parallel processes that may underlie illusory conjunctions and the serial (...) processes that may solve the tag-assignment problem in normal perception. One component of the model extracts pooled features and another provides attentional tags that correct illusory conjunctions. Our approach addresses two questions: How can objects be identified from simultaneously attended features in a parallel, distributed representation? How can the spatial selectional requirements of such an attentional process be met by a separation of pathways for spatial and nonspatial processing? Our analysis of these questions yields a neurally plausible simulation of tag assignment based on synchronizing feature processing activity in a spatial focus of attention. (shrink)

This book examines the more traditional Christian explanation for why God permits evil in this world and offers an alternative explanation. Key Bible passages are discussed with an application of the alternative position to the great question of why God allows so much evil in this world.

As the applied field of social work attempts to become more of a sciencebased profession, it is relying more on the findings from empirical research studies. Withinsocial work there is little discussion of the philosophy of science underlying conventional research inquiry. This paper introduces some major philosophical principles that undergird scientific investigations of the causes of societal and psychosocial problems and of the effectiveness of structured programs, policies and practices to ameliorate social ills. Among the principles introduced are the philosophical (...) concepts of determinism, empiricism, realism, operationalism, scientific materialism, parsimony, logic, and positivism. Together these philosophical assumptions provide a pragmatic framework to design and conduct scientific research of value to the social work profession and other fields. (shrink)

Many stage‐specific embryonic antigens (SSEAs) have been identified as glycoconjugates. These molecules may play diverse roles in the development of the embryo, including regulation of cell growth, recognition, and differentiation. The example of SSEA‐1 is described in detail. This molecule appears to play an essential role in compaction of the early mouse embryo, and may illustrate the general importance of carbohydrate‐carbohydrate interactions in controlling cell surface interactions in development.

The problem for the CNS in any particular movement task is to coordinate the various frames of reference appropriate to the task. Control variables are determined by this coordination. The coordination problem varies greatly from task to task, and so no single set of control variables is likely to account for a broad range of movement tasks.