This article describes the spiritual formation training program for counseling students at Richmont Graduate University, an evangelical institution providing Master’s-level instruction for counselors and ministers. This model of spiritual formation has a dual foundation which includes the centrality of love to the Christian life and the importance of attachment to the development of persons. The training is intentionally designed to invite students to pursue a more secure attachment to God, healthier relationships with others, and a more grace-based self-awareness. Integrative and (...) clinical instruction, and experiences that foster establishment of secure attachment are described. Co-curricular efforts in research and student advisement focus on grace and wellness, as well as opportunities for service, and these serve to further contribute to a supportive environment for spiritual formation. (shrink)

This book develops an Aristotelian account of the virtue of practical intelligence or "phronesis"--an excellence of deliberating and making choices--which ...

In this volume of newly commissioned essays, leading moral philosophers offer a comprehensive overview of virtue ethics.

1. Happiness, then and now -- Happiness, eudaimonia, and practical reasoning -- Happiness as eudaimonia -- Happiness and virtuous activity -- New directions from old debates -- 2. Happiness then: the sufficiency debate -- Aristotle's case against the sufficiency thesis -- 3. Happiness now: rethinking the self -- Socrates' case for the sufficiency thesis -- Epictetus and the stoic self -- The Stoics' case for the sufficiency thesis -- The embodied conception of the self -- The embodied conception and psychological (...) well-being -- The Stoics' case against the embodied conception. (shrink)

Daniel Russell develops a fresh and original view of pleasure and its pivotal role in Plato's treatment of value, happiness, and human psychology. This is the first full-length discussion of the topic for fifty years, and Russell shows its relevance to contemporary debates in moral philosophy and philosophical psychology. Plato on Pleasure and the Good Life will make fascinating reading for ancient specialists and for a wide range of philosophers.

Little, Brown, 1992 Review by Glenn Branch on Jul 5th 1999 Volume: 3, Number: 27.

This collection of 17 essays by the author offers a comprehensive theory of mind, encompassing traditional issues of consciousness and free will.

This now-classic work challenges what Ryle calls philosophy's "official theory, " the Cartesian "myth" of the separation of mind and matter. Ryle's linguistic analysis remaps the conceptual geography of mind, not so much solving traditional philosophical problams as dissolving them into the mere consequences of misguided language. His plain language and essentially simple purpose put him in the tradition of Locke, Berkeley, Mill, and Russell - philisophers whose best work, like Ryle's, has become a part of our general literature.

Intentional explanation and attributions of mentality -- International systems -- Reply to Arbib and Gunderson -- Brain writing and mind reading -- The nature of theory in psychology -- Skinner skinned -- Why the law of effect will not go away -- A cure for the common code? -- Artificial intelligence as philosophy and as psychology -- Objects of consciousness and the nature of experience -- Are dreams experiences? -- Toward a cognitive theory of consciousness -- Two approaches to mental (...) images -- Why you can't make a computer that feels pain -- Free will and personhood -- Mechanism and responsibility -- The abilities of men and machines -- Conditions of personhood -- On giving libertarians what they say they want -- How to change your mind -- Where am I? (shrink)

This paperback edition contains a preface placing the book in the context of recent work in the area.

Are there really beliefs? Or are we learning (from neuroscience and psychology, presumably) that, strictly speaking, beliefs are figments of our imagination, items in a superceded ontology? Philosophers generally regard such ontological questions as admitting just two possible answers: either beliefs exist or they don't. There is no such state as quasi-existence; there are no stable doctrines of semi-realism. Beliefs must either be vindicated along with the viruses or banished along with the banshees. A bracing conviction prevails, then, to the (...) effect that when it comes to beliefs (and other mental items) one must be either a realist or an eliminative materialist. (shrink)

" Qualia " is an unfamiliar term for something that could not be more familiar to each of us: the ways things seem to us. As is so often the case with philosophical jargon, it is easier to give examples than to give a definition of the term. Look at a glass of milk at sunset; the way it looks to you--the particular, personal, subjective visual quality of the glass of milk is the quale of your visual experience at the (...) moment. The way the milk tastes to you then is another, gustatory quale, and how it sounds to you as you swallow is an auditory quale; These various "properties of conscious experience" are prime examples of qualia. Nothing, it seems, could you know more intimately than your own qualia ; let the entire universe be some vast illusion, some mere figment of Descartes' evil demon, and yet what the figment is made of will be the qualia of your hallucinatory experiences. Descartes claimed to doubt everything that could be doubted, but he never doubted that his conscious experiences had qualia, the properties by which he knew or apprehended them. (shrink)

We investigated the coupling between a speaker's and a listener's eye movements. Some participants talked extemporaneously about a television show whose cast members they were viewing on a screen in front of them. Later, other participants listened to these monologues while viewing the same screen. Eye movements were recorded for all speakers and listeners. According to cross-recurrence analysis, a listener's eye movements most closely matched a speaker's eye movements at a delay of 2 sec. Indeed, the more closely a listener's (...) eye movements were coupled with a speaker's, the better the listener did on a comprehension test. In a second experiment, low-level visual cues were used to manipulate the listeners' eye movements, and these, in turn, influenced their latencies to comprehension questions. Just as eye movements reflect the mental state of an individual, the coupling between a speaker's and a listener's eye movements reflects the success of their communication. (shrink)

Ethologists and others studying animal behavior in a spirit are in need of a descriptive language and method that are neither anachronistically bound by behaviorist scruples nor prematurely committed to particular Just such an interim descriptive method can be found in intentional system theory. The use of intentional system theory is illustrated with the case of the apparently communicative behavior of vervet monkeys. A way of using the theory to generate data - including usable, testable data - is sketched. The (...) underlying assumptions of this approach can be seen to ally it directly with theorizing in evolutionary biology, which has recently come under attack from Stephen Gould and Richard Lewontin, who castigate it as the Their arguments, which are strongly analogous to B. F, Skinner's arguments against point to certain pitfalls that attend the careless exercise of such thinking (and rival varieties of thinking as well), but do not constitute a fundamental objection to either adaptationist theorizing or its cousin, intentional system theory. (shrink)

_Behavioral and Brain Sciences_ , 15, 183-247, 1992. Reprinted in _The Philosopher's Annual_ , Grim, Mar and Williams, eds., vol. XV-1992, 1994, pp. 23-68; Noel Sheehy and Tony Chapman, eds., _Cognitive Science_ , Vol. I, Elgar, 1995, pp.210-274.

In the final essay, the "intrinsic" nature of "qualia" is compared with the naively imagined "intrinsic value" of a dollar in ...

Damasio remarks, it "informs virtually all research on mind and brain, explicitly or implicitly." Indeed, serial information processing models generally run this risk (Kinsbourne, 1985). The commentaries provide a wealth of confirming instances of the seductive power of this idea. Our sternest critics Block, Farah, Libet, and Treisman) adopt fairly standard Cartesian positions; more interesting are those commentators who take themselves to be mainly in agreement with us, but who express reservations or offer support with arguments that betray a continuing (...) allegiance to one or another tenet of the view we sought to discredit. (shrink)

This now-classic work challenges what Ryle calls philosophy's "official theory," the Cartesians "myth" of the separation of mind and matter. Ryle's linguistic analysis remaps the conceptual geography of mind, not so much solving traditional philosophical problems as dissolving them into the mere consequences of misguided language. His plain language and esstentially simple purpose place him in the traditioin of Locke, Berkeley, Mill, and Russell.

What is a self? I will try to answer this question by developing an analogy with something much simpler, something which is nowhere near as puzzling as a self, but has some properties in common with selves. What I have in mind is the center of gravity of an object. This is a well-behaved concept in Newtonian physics. But a center of gravity is not an atom or a subatomic particle or any other physical item in the world. It has (...) no mass; it has no color; it has no physical properties at all, except for spatio-temporal location. It is a fine example of what Hans Reichenbach would call an abstractum. It is a purely abstract object. It is, if you like , a theorist's fiction. It is not one of the real things in the universe in addition to the atoms. But it is a fiction that has nicely defined, well delineated and well behaved role within physics. (shrink)

This book brings together his essays on the philosphy of mind, artificial intelligence, and cognitive ethology that appeared in inaccessible journals from 1984...

One of the world’s leading philosophers offers aspiring thinkers his personal trove of mind-stretching thought experiments. Over a storied career, Daniel C. Dennett has engaged questions about science and the workings of the mind. His answers have combined rigorous argument with strong empirical grounding. And a lot of fun. Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking offers seventy-seven of Dennett’s most successful "imagination-extenders and focus-holders" meant to guide you through some of life’s most treacherous subject matter: evolution, meaning, mind, (...) and free will. With patience and wit, Dennett deftly deploys his thinking tools to gain traction on these thorny issues while offering readers insight into how and why each tool was built. Alongside well-known favorites like Occam’s Razor and reductio ad absurdum lie thrilling descriptions of Dennett’s own creations: Trapped in the Robot Control Room, Beware of the Prime Mammal, and The Wandering Two-Bitser. Ranging across disciplines as diverse as psychology, biology, computer science, and physics, Dennett’s tools embrace in equal measure light-heartedness and accessibility as they welcome uninitiated and seasoned readers alike. As always, his goal remains to teach you how to "think reliably and even gracefully about really hard questions." A sweeping work of intellectual seriousness that’s also studded with impish delights, Intuition Pumps offers intrepid thinkers—in all walks of life—delicious opportunities to explore their pet ideas with new powers. (shrink)

Conversation is supported by the beliefs that people have in common and the perceptual experience that they share. The visual context of a conversation has two aspects: the information that is available to each conversant, and their beliefs about what is present for each other. In our experiment, we separated these factors for the first time and examined their impact on a spontaneous conversation. We manipulated the fact that a visual scene was shared or not and the belief that a (...) visual scene was shared or not. Participants watched videos of actors talking about a controversial topic, then discussed their own views while looking at either a blank screen or the actors. Each believed (correctly or not) that their partner was either looking at a blank screen or the same images. We recorded conversants’ eye movements, quantified how they were coordinated, and analyzed their speech patterns. Gaze coordination has been shown to be causally related to the knowledge people share before a conversation, and the information they later recall. Here, we found that both the presence of the visual scene, and beliefs about its presence for another, influenced language use and gaze coordination. (shrink)

Theorists are converging from quite different quarters on a version of the global neuronal workspace model of consciousness, but there are residual confusions to be dissolved. In particular, theorists must resist the temptation to see global accessibility as the cause of consciousness (as if consciousness were some other, further condition); rather, it is consciousness. A useful metaphor for keeping this elusive idea in focus is that consciousness is rather like fame in the brain. It is not a privileged medium of (...) representation, or an added property some states have; it is the very mutual accessibility that gives some informational states the powers that come with a subject's consciousness of that information. Like fame, consciousness is not a momentary condition, or a purely dispositional state, but rather a matter of actual influence over time. Theorists who take on the task of accounting for the aftermath that is critical for consciousness often appear to be leaving out the Subject of consciousness, when in fact they are providing an analysis of the Subject, a necessary component in any serious theory of consciousness. (shrink)

Scientific disagreements are an important catalyst for scientific progress. But what happens when scientists disagree amidst times of crisis, when we need quick yet reliable policy guidance? In this paper we provide a normative account for how scientists facing disagreement in the context of ‘fast science’ should respond, and how policy makers should evaluate such disagreement. Starting from an argumentative, pragma-dialectic account of scientific controversies, we argue for the importance of ‘higher-order evidence’ (HOE) and we specify desiderata for scientifically relevant (...) HOE. We use our account to analyze the controversy about the aerosol transmission of COVID-19. (shrink)

Functional decomposition is an important goal in the life sciences, and is central to mechanistic explanation and explanatory reduction. A growing literature in philosophy of science, however, has challenged decomposition-based notions of explanation. ‘Holists’ posit that complex systems exhibit context-sensitivity, dynamic interaction, and network dependence, and that these properties undermine decomposition. They then infer from the failure of decomposition to the failure of mechanistic explanation and reduction. I argue that complexity, so construed, is only incompatible with one notion of decomposition, (...) which I call ‘atomism’, and not with decomposition writ large. Atomism posits that function ascriptions must be made to parts with minimal reference to the surrounding system. Complexity does indeed falsify atomism, but I contend that there is a weaker, ‘contextualist’ notion of decomposition that is fully compatible with the properties that holists cite. Contextualism suggests that the function of parts can shift with external context, and that interactions with other parts might help determine their context-appropriate functions. This still admits of functional decomposition within a given context. I will give examples based on the notion of oscillatory multiplexing in systems neuroscience. If contextualism is feasible, then holist inferences are faulty—one cannot infer from the presence of complexity to the failure of decomposition, mechanism, and reductionism. (shrink)

The intentional stance is the strategy of prediction and explanation that attributes beliefs, desires, and other states to systems and predicts future behavior from what it would be rational for an agent to do, given those beliefs and desires. Any system whose performance can be thus predicted and explained is an intentional system, whatever its innards. The strategy of treating parts of the world as intentional systems is the foundation of but is also exploited in artificial intelligence and cognitive science (...) more generally, as well as in evolutionary theory. An analysis of the role of the intentional stance and its presuppositions supports a naturalistic theory of mental states and events, their content or intentionality, and the relation between levels of explanation and neurophysiological or mechanistic levels of explanation. As such, the analysis of the intentional stance grounds a theory of the mind and its relation to the body. (shrink)