This essay demonstrates that Athenagoras’ theology is primarily concerned, not with the creative activity of God, as L.W. Barnard has argued, but rather with the immateriality of the divine nature and the unity of the Father and the Son. It is this two-fold basis of distinction and unity that makes the apprehension of God possible only by mind and reason. Since the divine nature is heavenly and immaterial, such apprehension cannot occur in the physical realm as promoted in pagan worship, (...) but must take place in the mind through the Son, who is the Logos or Mind, the Reason and Wisdom of the Father. Athenagoras’ assertion that the immaterial God can only be apprehended by reason emphasizes the distinction between God and matter, while the unity of the Father and Son in God’s acts and teachings highlights the role of reason in the soul’s apprehension of the divine. One must be conformed to the Son, who is the Reason of God, in order to apprehend God the Father, and Athenagoras evokes the ethical dimension of reason in the soul’s apprehension of the divine. As the soul follows the Son in obeying his teachings, it is conformed to the Son, thereby becoming rational and engaging in rational worship, focusing on the heavenly rather than the earthly. Thus it is in ethical conduct that Christians are essentially pure in spirit and rational in worship, as they are directed by the Son, who is unified with the Father, to apprehend the immaterial God. (shrink)

The shape and course which Christian thought has taken over its history is largely due to the contributions of individuals and communities in the second and third centuries. Bringing together a remarkable team of distinguished scholars, The Routledge Companion to Early Christian Thoughtis the ideal companion for those seeking to understand the way in which Early Christian thought developed within its broader cultural milieu and was communicated through its literature, especially as it was directed toward theological concerns. Divided into three (...) parts, the Companion: asks how Christianity's development was impacted by its interaction with cultural, philosophical, and religious elements within the broader context of the second and third centuries. examines the way in which Early Christian thought was manifest in key individuals and literature in these centuries. analyses Early Christian thought as it was directed toward theological concerns such as God, Christ, Redemption, Scripture, and the community and its worship. (shrink)

We explore psychological contracts as mechanisms by which individuals gain influence in organizations. Using two distinct research settings and longitudinal analysis, we demonstrate that ideological contracts endow individuals with increased centrality in the organization’s influence network. More generally, we propose that an important outcome of different psychological contract types may be how they affect the nature of influence in organizations.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have had extraordinary successes in classifying photographic images of objects and are often described as the best models of biological vision. This conclusion is largely based on three sets of findings: (1) DNNs are more accurate than any other model in classifying images taken from various datasets, (2) DNNs do the best job in predicting the pattern of human errors in classifying objects taken from various behavioral datasets, and (3) DNNs do the best job in predicting (...) brain signals in response to images taken from various brain datasets (e.g., single cell responses or fMRI data). However, these behavioral and brain datasets do not test hypotheses regarding what features are contributing to good predictions and we show that the predictions may be mediated by DNNs that share little overlap with biological vision. More problematically, we show that DNNs account for almost no results from psychological research. This contradicts the common claim that DNNs are good, let alone the best, models of human object recognition. We argue that theorists interested in developing biologically plausible models of human vision need to direct their attention to explaining psychological findings. More generally, theorists need to build models that explain the results of experiments that manipulate independent variables designed to test hypotheses rather than compete on making the best predictions. We conclude by briefly summarizing various promising modeling approaches that focus on psychological data. (shrink)

This book provides a focus for future discussion in one of the most important debates within historical theology within the protestant tradition - the debate about the definition of a category of analysis that operates over five centuries of religious faith and practice and in a globalising religion. In March 2009, TIME magazine listed ‘the new Calvinism’ as being among the ‘ten ideas shaping the world.’ In response to this revitalisation of reformation thought, R. Scott Clark and D. G. Hart (...) have proposed a definition of ‘Reformed’ that excludes many of the theologians who have done most to promote this driver of global religious change. In this book, the Clark-Hart proposal becomes the focus of a debate. Matthew Bingham, Chris Caughey, and Crawford Gribben suggest a broader and more historically responsible definition for ‘Reformed,’ as Hart and Scott respond to their arguments. (shrink)

In this paper, a new method of quantitatively assessing continuity and discontinuity of visual attention is developed. The method is based on representing narrative information using graph theory. It is applicable to any type of narrative report. Since dream reports are often described as bizarre, and since bizarreness is partially characterized by discontinuities in plot, we chose to test our method on a set of dream data. Using specific criteria for identifying and arranging objects of visual attention, dream narratives from (...) 10 subjects were obtained and mapped onto graphs. The interrater reliabilities were 76% and 91% . Discontinuities in visual attention were quantified by plotting transitions from one part of a graph to another, which provided a spatiotemporal map of attention shifts within a narrative. This procedure was compared with other approaches to discontinuity and also applied to a set of 10 fantasy reports from the same subjects. The results showed that our method includes but transcends other approaches and has the capability to distinguish dream and fantasy reports. To our knowledge, the method provides the most rigorous and reliable measure to date of continuity and discontinuity of attention in narrative reports. (shrink)

Cooperation is common across nonhuman animal taxa, from the hunting of large game in lions to the harvesting of building materials in ants. Theorists have proposed a number of models to explain the evolution of cooperative behavior. These ultimate explanations, however, rarely consider the proximate constraints on the implementation of cooperative behavior. Here we review several types of cooperation and propose a suite of cognitive abilities required for each type to evolve. We propose that several types of cooperation, though theoretically (...) possible and functionally adaptive, have not evolved in some animal species because of cognitive constraints. We argue, therefore, that future modeling efforts and experimental investigations into the adaptive function of cooperation in animals must be grounded in a realistic assessment of the psychological ingredients required for cooperation. Such an approach can account for the puzzling distribution of cooperative behaviors across taxa, especially the seemingly unique occurrence of cooperation observed in our own species. (shrink)

Does nostalgia for one’s time at university predict current intentions to engage with the university? In Study 1, United States participants’ nostalgia for their university experience (university nostalgia) at a southern public university predicted stronger intentions to socialize with fellow alumni, attend a future reunion, volunteer for their university, and donate money to their university. Study 2 replicated these findings with alumni from a northeastern private university, and extended them by finding that the links between university nostalgia and university engagement (...) emerged even when controlling for the positivity of university experience. In both studies, feelings of university belonging mediated most of the associations between university nostalgia and university engagement. In Study 2, the positivity of the university experience moderated the relation between university nostalgia and two indices of university engagement. Specifically, university nostalgia was more strongly associated with intentions to attend a reunion and donate money among those who had a relatively negative university experience. Nostalgia for one’s university past predicts future engagement with the university as well as its members. (shrink)

The most common form of the CO2‐fixing enzyme rubisco is a form I enzyme, heretofore found universally in oxygenic phototrophs (cyanobacteria and plastids) and widely in proteobacteria. Two groups(1–4), however, now report that in dinoflagellate plastids the usual form I rubisco has been replaced by the distantly related form II enzyme, known previously only from anaerobic proteobacteria. This raises the important question of how such an oxygensensitive rubisco could function in an aerobic organism. Moreover, the dinoflagellate rubisco has unusual molecular (...) properties: it is encoded as a polyprotein, by nuclear (rather than plastid) genes, and these genes contain noncanonical spliceosomal introns. The nuclear location and alphaproteobacterial affinity of dinoflagellate rubisco genes hint at a possible mitochondrial origin and highlight the extraordinary richness of lateral gene transfers, both between and within organisms, that have occurred during rubisco evolution. (shrink)

The small, relatively constant size and conservative evolution of chloroplast DNA (cpDNA) make it an ideal molecule for tracing the evolutionary history of plant species. At lower taxonomic levels, cpDNA variation is easily and conveniently assayed by comparing restriction patterns and maps, while at higher taxonomic levels, DNA sequencing and inversion analysis are the methods of choice for comparing chloroplast genomes. The study of cpDNA variation has already yielded important new insights into the origin and evolution of many agriculturally important (...) crop plants, and promises to significantly enhance our phylogenetic understanding of the major lines of descent among land plants and algae. (shrink)

The field of psychology, including cognitive science, is vexed by a crisis of confidence. Although the causes and solutions are varied, we focus here on a common logical problem in inference. The default mode of inference is significance testing, which has a free lunch property where researchers need not make detailed assumptions about the alternative to test the null hypothesis. We present the argument that there is no free lunch; that is, valid testing requires that researchers test the null against (...) a well-specified alternative. We show how this requirement follows from the basic tenets of conventional and Bayesian probability. Moreover, we show in both the conventional and Bayesian framework that not specifying the alternative may lead to rejections of the null hypothesis with scant evidence. We review both frequentist and Bayesian approaches to specifying alternatives, and we show how such specifications improve inference. The field of cognitive science will benefit because consideration of reasonable alternatives will undoubtedly sharpen the intellectual underpinnings of research. (shrink)

The Benedictine Dom Léger-Marie Deschamps and the philosophical Abbé Claude Yvon may indeed be minor eighteenth-century figures, and they both may be considered to have emerged from the Catholic side of something Helena Rosenblatt has dubbed the Christian Enlightenment, but neither of these figures is neatly “conservative” (as Mark Curran defines it), nor are they fully “radical” (in the sense of having contributed to the Radical Enlightenment). Rather, Deschamps and Yvon are among a number of eighteenth-century figures who do not (...) fit neatly into the expected parameters of Catholic, Christian, Religious or Radical Enlightenment. This article argues that the entanglement of both heterodoxy and orthodoxy, and of sociopolitical progressivism and conservatism, is characteristic of Yvon’s and Deschamps’s particular engagement with what Vincenzo Ferrone describes as the cultural revolution of the eighteenth century. This study of these under-examined Catholic scholars further suggests that conventional and tidy scholarly narratives of the history of Enlightenment should be further problematized. (shrink)

In 1773, Pope Clement XIV suppressed the Society of Jesus, a dramatic, puzzling act that had a profound impact. This volume traces the causes of the attack on the Jesuits, the national expulsions that preceded universal suppression, and the consequences of these extraordinary developments. The Suppression occurred at a unique historical juncture, at the high-water mark of the Enlightenment and on the cusp of global imperial crises and the Age of Revolution. After more than two centuries, answers to how and (...) why it took place remain unclear. A diverse selection of essays - covering France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, the Netherlands, China, Eastern Europe, and the Americas - reflects the complex international elements of the Jesuit Suppression. The contributors shed new light on its significance by drawing on the latest research. Essential reading on a crucial yet previously neglected topic, this collection will interest scholars of eighteenth-century religious, intellectual, cultural, and political history. (shrink)

This paper offers a deconstructive reading of the pure actuality of the un­moved mover of Aristotle’s Metaphysics Lambda. Aristotle describes this first, unmoved principle of movement as a divine sovereign—the king of the cosmos—and maintains that the good governance of the cosmos depends on its unmitigated unity and pure actuality. It is striking, then, when Giorgio Agamben claims that Aristotle bequeathed the paradigm of sovereignty to Western philosophy not through his arguments for the pure actuality of the unmoved mover but (...) rather through his description of the essence of potentiality. An interpretation of Aristotle’s account of potentiality in Metaphysics Theta therefore prepares the way for a deconstruction of the unity and pure actuality of the divine sovereign. I argue that the repetition of nous in Aristotle’s description of the divine thinking of thinking betrays traces of division and difference at the heart of divine sovereignty. If this is the case, then actuality and potentiality become indis­cernible at the level of the absolute and the sovereign corresponds to the bifurcated site of this indiscernibility. (shrink)

:Our theoretical claim is that racism was consciously devised, and later evolved, to serve two conflicting purposes. First, racism served a legal-economic purpose, legitimating ownership and savage treatment of slaves by southern whites, preserving the value of property rights in labor. Second, racism allowed slave owners to justify, to themselves and to outsiders, how a morally "good" person could own slaves. Racism portrayed African slaves as being less than human, or else as being other than human. The interest of the (...) historical narrative presented here is the emergence of racial chattel slavery as a coherent and fiercely defended ideal, rather than the "necessary evil" that had been the perspective of the Founders. The reason that this is important is that the ideology of racism persisted far beyond the destruction of the institution of slavery, through Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and in some ways persisting even today. This work is an example of the problems of assuming that there is a "feedback" mechanism by which moral intuitions are updated and perfected; to the contrary, as suggested by Douglass North, even socially inferior ideologies can prove extremely persistent. (shrink)

The article retraces three important steps along the path of Derrida’s Heidegger interpretation in The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II. Readings of The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Introduction to Metaphysics, and “The Onto-Theo-Logical Constitution of Metaphysics” complement and further develop Derrida’s deconstruction of Heidegger, which revolves around the term “Walten” and its role in the world-formation that makes community possible. The analysis of what Derrida calls the hyper-sovereignty of Walten reveals an ethico-political ambiguity in Heidegger’s texts. On the one (...) hand, this hyper-sovereignty registers as a super-sovereign violence that founds theological-political world-constructs through the exclusion of those deemed other. On the other hand, like différance it serves as the condition of impossibility of a common world. Following Derrida’s provocation, I develop this second sense to argue that the dissolution of the common world entails an ethical imperative to carry the other with whom one has nothing in common. (shrink)

Discussions of withdrawal of life support often revolve around a patient’s perceived level of suffering or lack of experience. Personhood, however, is often linked to personal agency. In the present study, 279 laypeople estimated the amount of agency and experience in hypothetical patients differing in degree of consciousness. Participants also indicated whether they would choose to maintain or terminate life support. Patients were more likely to terminate life support for a patient in a persistent vegetative state, followed by one with (...) amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and in a minimally conscious state. The decision to maintain life support was reliably predicted by perceptions of a patient’s agency but life support decisions were not significantly predicted by ratings of experience. In sum, decisions regarding maintaining life support are more influenced by perceptions of a patient’s ability to plan and act than by perceptions of a patient’s ability to feel or experience. (shrink)

To test the notion that shifts in visual imagery and attention are correlated with experiences of emotion, we studied 10 dream reports using an affirmative probe of emotion and a quantitative measure of plot discontinuity. We found that emotion, especially changes in emotion, are correlated with discontinuities in visual imagery. These correlations are quantified using a new graph theoretical method for analyzing narrative reports.

Development of the New Zealand nursing workforce has been shaped by social, political, scientific and interprofessional forces. The unregulated, independent and often untrained nurses of the early colonial period were succeeded in the early 1900s by registered nurses, with hospital‐based training, working in a subordinate role to medical practitioners. In the mid/late 1900s, greater specialisation within an expanding workforce, restructuring of nursing education, health sector reform, and changing social and political expectations again reshaped nursing practice. Nursing now has areas of (...) increasing autonomy, expanding opportunities for postgraduate education and leadership roles, and a relationship with medicine, which is more collaborative than in the past. Three current challenges are identified for nursing in New Zealand's rapidly evolving health sector; development of a nursing‐focused knowledge culture, strengthening of research capacity, and dissemination of new nursing knowledge. (shrink)

College students judged dog or cat misbehavior via questionnaire items. Common factor analysis yielded 3 dimensions of student response: the sinner ; the sin ; and mercy . Correlations among sinner, sin, and mercy factor scores supported predictions from causal attribution theory. Nevertheless, cross-tabulation analysis revealed that nearly 90% of all respondents endorsed mercy , regardless of the extent to which the animals were seen as sinners , or evaluations of the level of sin . Absolutely high average mercy scores (...) indicated an animal positivity bias. Results thus evoked the adage that "the quality of mercy is not strained." That is, regarding errant companion animals, cognitive responses to punish and to forgive are not always mutually exclusive options. (shrink)

Storage and Commodity Markets is primarily a work of economic theory, concerned with how the capability to store a surplus affects the prices and production of commodities. Its focus on the behaviour, over time, of aggregate stockpiles provides insights into such questions as how much a country should store out of its current supply of food considering the uncertainty in future harvests. Related topics covered include whether storage or international trade is a more effective buffer and whether stockpiles are more (...) useful in raw or processed form. Several chapters are devoted to analysing such government programmes as price bands, buffer stocks, and strategic reserves. This material is in the domain of applied welfare analysis with public finance. Because the theory presented is sufficiently general, it should be of interest to macroeconomists studying aggregate inventories or savings and to those in operations research studying inventory and pricing policies of large firms. (shrink)

On several key issues we agree with the commentators. Perhaps most importantly, everyone seems to agree that psychology has an important role to play in building better models of human vision, and (most) everyone agrees (including us) that deep neural networks (DNNs) will play an important role in modelling human vision going forward. But there are also disagreements about what models are for, how DNN–human correspondences should be evaluated, the value of alternative modelling approaches, and impact of marketing hype in (...) the literature. In our view, these latter issues are contributing to many unjustified claims regarding DNN–human correspondences in vision and other domains of cognition. We explore all these issues in this response. (shrink)