Dyson explores the fate of pride from Christain theology to the social responsibilities of self-regard and regard for the society as a whole. Also discusses pride in black communities.

Limitations of space dictate that we confine ourselves to Miss Stern's most salient comments. First, a preliminary point. Miss Stern says “Levin offers no argument” for why “e happened because of c” implicitly contains an explanatory description, while “c caused e” does not. But surely the remark that we often know that c caused e without knowing why c caused e is just such an argument. Our linguistic intuition suggests that we use the first locution in this case; Miss (...) Stern's evidently does not. Cases of non-diagnostic causal ascriptions do exist, and even ordinary language must provide for them; how it does so is a verbal dispute about English. (shrink)

Philosophers often distinguish in some way between two senses of life's meaning. Paul Edwards terms these a ‘cosmic’ and ‘terrestrial’ sense. The cosmic sense is that of an overall purpose of which our lives are a part and in terms of which our lives must be understood and our purposes and interests arranged. This overall purpose is often identified with God's divine scheme, but the two need not necessarily be equated. The terrestrial sense of meaning is the meaning people find (...) in their own lives apart from the place of their lives in any ultimate end or context. (shrink)

Let us follow Robert Oakes in describing a self-authenticating experience of God as one that ‘would have the epistemic uniqueness of guaranteeing –all by itself – its veridicality to the person who had it.’ The idea that there could be self-authenticating experiences of God has been criticized often in recent years. It seems that the only experiences that could be self-authenticating are those about one's own current psychological states. Nevertheless, the individual who claims to have such an experience of God (...) is clearly using ‘experience’ in such a way as to suppose that one's experience of God is logically independent of the existence of God, but still self-authenticating. (shrink)

I shall argue that the question ‘Can we speak literally of God?’ is fundamentally an epistemological question concerning whether we can know that God exists. If and only if we can know that God can exist can we know that we can speak literally of God.

Through various applications of the ‘deep structure’ of moral and religious reasoning, I have sought to illustrate the value of a morally informed approach in helping us to understand the complexity of religious thought and practice…religions are primarily moved by rational moral concerns and…ethical theory provides the single most powerful methodology for understanding religious belief. Ronald Green, Religion and Moral Reason.

In The Existence of God Richard Swinburne argues that ‘if there is a God, any experience which seems to be of God, will be genuine – will be of God.’ On the face of it this claim of the essential veridicality of any religious experience, given the existence of God, is incredible. Consider what is being claimed by looking at a particularly dramatic example – but one that is well within the purview of Swinburne's claim. The ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ who murdered (...) at least thirteen women, claimed to hear voices telling him to kill. He took these voices to be divine. While it is easy enough to suspect the killer's sanity, it is not so easy to doubt his sincerity. Yet since Swinburne claims that God probably exists, he is committed to the view that the Ripper had a series of genuine religious experiences – so much for the arduous preparations sometime taken as necessary for a ‘vision’ of God. (shrink)

Two theses are central to foundationalism. First, the foundationalist claims that there is a class of propositions, a class of empirical contingent beliefs, that are ‘immediately justified’. Alternatively, one can describe these beliefs as ‘self–evident’, ‘non–inferentially justified’, or ‘self–warranted’, though these are not always regarded as entailing one another. The justification or epistemic warrant for these beliefs is not derived from other justified beliefs through inductive evidential support or deductive methods of inference. These ‘basic beliefs’ constitute the foundations of empirical (...) knowledge. One can give a reason for the justification of a basic belief even though the justification for that belief is not based on other beliefs. Thus, according to Chisholm, if asked what one's justification was for thinking that one knew, presently, that one is thinking about a city one takes to be Albuquerque, one could simply say ‘what justifies me…is simply the fact that I am thinking about a city I take to be Albuquerque’. (shrink)

Why does the paradox play such a crucial role in Kierkegaard's notion of truth as subjectivity? Richard Schacht explains it as follows: Eternal happiness is possible for a man only if it is possible for him to relate himself to God. A man, however, is a being who exists in time; and it would not be possible for such a being to enter into a ‘God-relationship’ if God had not also at some point existed in time. Through the ‘leap of (...) faith’ in which one affirms the proposition that God did exist in time, one is able to enter a ‘God-relationship’ and thereby attains ‘an eternal happiness’. (shrink)

Compiles the photographs taken by Leonard Freed of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, during which Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech.

An academic history book has to be unusually successful to get through to a fourth edition. This one has done so not only because the continuing Israel–Palestine conflict is a subject of heated con...

Harold Saxton Burr was a biologist working throughout the 1930s–1950s on an important set of problems related to biological organization and the origin of complex living forms. He was a profound thinker, suggesting a complementary focus on field concepts in addition to the emphasis on particle models and integrating concepts from physics and philosophy in his work. He developed innovations in electrophysiological technique and used them to perform a wide experimental survey of bioelectricity in normal and pathological growth. Here, I (...) briefly review his classic paper with philosopher F. S. C. Northrop, “The Electro-Dynamic Theory of Life,” in the context of advances in this field over the last few decades. Based on recent progress, it is now clear that Burr was a prescient and visionary thinker. His main hypothesis, that bioelectric gradients serve as prepatterns guiding morphogenesis, has been confirmed using modern molecular physiology, as have his ideas about the place of cancer and the nervous system in the question of biological organization. With limited technology but deep insight, he derived insights that anticipated many modern discoveries. Even more importantly, Burr’s view of bioelectricity as a convenient entry point for rigorous investigation of the broader question of self-organizing properties of life highlights a frontier of inquiry that awaits today’s researchers. Burr and Northrop’s “The Electro-Dynamic Theory of Life,” originally published in the Quarterly Review of Biology :322–333, 1935), is available as supplementary material in the online version of this essay. (shrink)

A collection of essays on the foundations of biology and its connection to other sciences. Its lengthy and profound foreword by Stuart Kauffman, a major figure in the quantitative analysis of biological regulation at the system level, summarizes the intended main point: “we live not only in a world of webs of cause and effect, but webs of opportunities that enable, but do not cause, often in unforeseeable ways, the possibilities of becoming of the bio- sphere, let alone human life. (...) But most importantly, I seek in this new worldview a re-enchantment of humanity”. (p. 1). To some extent, it’s meant as a reaction to what some perceive as a demoralizing aspects of the mechanistic paradigm that is driven by recent advances in the molecular bio-sciences: “I believe we are partially lost in modernity, seeking half-articulated, a pathway forward. Re-enchantment may be an essential part of this transformation.” (p. 1). I do not agree that the current situation is as bleak as many critics of the scientific mainstream suggest, but this book should appeal to anyone interested in the larger questions of biology no matter where they stand on this issue. All in all, it is an extremely enjoyable and valuable tour of important concepts and controversies. (shrink)

This chapter argues that Hume’s argument against justified belief in miracles in Part 1 of his essay is a priori and applies to firsthand experience of a miracle as well as to testimony. The disputed issues cannot be decided on how closely one reads the text or on what Hume “actually says” but are interpretive and require setting them in the context of Hume’s Treatise—his peculiar empiricism, his account of causation, and his theory of a posteriori reasoning. But even if, (...) contrary to the a priori reading of Hume’s argument in Part 1, Hume never thought it impossible to justifiably believe in a miracle, and even if Hume’s argument in Part 1 fails, this does nothing to support the view that anyone has ever been “justified” in believing in a miracle or that “difficult and delicate empirical investigations” are needed before one justifiably rejects such belief. (shrink)

For most of the history of prejudice research, negativity has been treated as its emotional and cognitive signature, a conception that continues to dominate work on the topic. By this definition, prejudice occurs when we dislike or derogate members of other groups. Recent research, however, has highlighted the need for a more nuanced and “inclusive” (Eagly 2004) perspective on the role of intergroup emotions and beliefs in sustaining discrimination. On the one hand, several independent lines of research have shown that (...) unequal intergroup relations are often marked by attitudinal complexity, with positive responses such as affection and admiration mingling with negative responses such as contempt and resentment. Simple antipathy is the exception rather than the rule. On the other hand, there is mounting evidence that nurturing bonds of affection between the advantaged and the disadvantaged sometimes entrenches rather than disrupts wider patterns of discrimination. Notably, prejudice reduction interventions may have ironic effects on the political attitudes of the historically disadvantaged, decreasing their perceptions of injustice and willingness to engage in collective action to transform social inequalities.These developments raise a number of important questions. Has the time come to challenge the assumption that negative evaluations are inevitably the cognitive and affective hallmarks of discrimination? Is the orthodox concept of prejudice in danger of side-tracking, if not obstructing, progress towards social justice in a fuller sense? What are the prospects for reconciling a prejudice reduction model of change, designed to get people to like one another more, with a collective action model of change, designed to ignite struggles to achieve intergroup equality? (shrink)

Analyzing Mediumistic Mentation - Alvarado Proposal for Short List of Best Papers in Parapsychology - Levin Kauffman Stokes.

Reliabilism holds that knowledge is true belief reliably caused. Reliabilists should say something about individuating processes; critics deny that the right degree of generality can be specified without arbitrariness. It is argued that this criticism applies as well to processes mentioned in scientific explanations. The gratuitous puzzles created thereby show that the “generality problem” is illusory.

David Michael Levin's ongoing exploration of the moral character and enlightenment-potential of vision takes a new direction in The Philosopher's Gaze . Levin examines texts by Descartes, Husserl, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Benjamin, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas, using our culturally dominant mode of perception and the philosophical discourse it has generated as the site for his critical reflections on the moral culture in which we are living. In Levin's view, all these philosophers attempted to understand, one way or (...) another, the distinctive pathologies of the modern age. But every one also attempted to envision--if only through the faintest of traces, traces of mutual recognition, traces of another way of looking and seeing--the prospects for a radically different lifeworld. The world, after all, inevitably reflects back to us the character, the reach and range, of our vision. In these provocative essays, the author draws on the language of hermeneutical phenomenology and at the same time refines phenomenology itself as a method of working with our experience and thinking critically about the culture in which we live. (shrink)

Birch, Ginsburg, and Jablonka lay out a very convincing case for an important transition marker: unlimited associative learning. Especially welcome are the empirical predictions. I focus here not on the question of how to infer phenomenal consciousness from this behavioral metric, but on possible novel applications of this useful and fundamental framework. Specifically, I highlight two aspects of biology that are often not considered in philosophy of mind approaches that focus on natural species and evolutionary time scales. These are the (...) ability of minds and bodies to change drastically on the time scale of an individual experiencing subject, and bioengineering of novel living forms with no evolutionary history at the organism level. Both of these aspects provide interesting new contexts within which to explore UAL and its implications. (shrink)

In Phenomenology of Spirit (1806) Hegel is often held to have announced the end of history, where 'history' is to be understood as the long pursuit of ends towards which humanity had always been striving. In this, the first book in English to thoroughly critique this entrenched view, Eric Michael Dale argues that it is a misinterpretation. Dale offers a reading of his own, showing how it sits within the larger schema of Hegel's thought and makes room for (...) an understanding of the 'end of history' as Hegel intended. Through an elegant analysis of Hegel's philosophy of history, Dale guides the reader away from the common misinterpretation of the 'end of history' to other valuable elements of Hegel's arguments which are often overlooked and deserve to endure. His book will be of great interest to scholars and advanced students of Hegel, the philosophy of history, and the history of political thought. (shrink)

The Strange Situation procedure was developed by Ainsworth two decades agoas a means of assessing the security of infant-parent attachment. Users of the procedureclaim that it provides a way of determining whether the infant has developed species-appropriate adaptive behavior as a result of rearing in an evolutionary appropriate context, characterized by a sensitively responsive parent. Only when the parent behaves in the sensitive, species-appropriate fashion is the baby said to behave in the adaptive or secure fashion. Furthermore, when infants are (...) observed repeatedly in the Strange Situation,the pattern of behavior is said to be highly similar, and this pattern is said to predict the infants' future behavior in a diverse array of contexts. After an exhaustive review of the literature, it is shown that these popular claims are empirically unsupported in their strong form, and that the interpretations in terms of biological adaptationare misguided. There is little reliable evidence about the specific dimensions of parental behavior that affect Strange Situation behavior, although there does appear to be some relationship between these constructs. Temporal stability in security of attachment ishigh only when there is stability in family and caretaking circumstances. Likewise, patterns of Strange Situation behavior only have substantial predictive validity in similarly stable families. Implications for future research and theorizing — particularly as they relate to the use of evolutionary biology in psychological theory — are discussed. (shrink)

Discussions of immortality have tended to focus on the nature of personal identity and, in a related way, the mind/body problem. Who is that is going to survive, and is it possible to survive bodily destruction? There has been far less discussion of what immortality would be like; e.g. the nature of heaven. Richard Swinburne, however, has recently discussed ‘heaven’, and has constructed a novel theodicy fundamentally based on his conception of what heaven is like. I shall criticize both his (...) conception of heaven – a conception he claims is consonant with the classical theistic one of Aquinas – and also his theodicy. I will argue that his theodicy reintroduces the problem of evil in connection with his idea of heaven – and does nothing to resolve it. (shrink)

For Greek antiquity, the question of right or fitting measure constituted the very heart of both ethics and politics. But can the Good of the ethical life and the Justice of the political be reduced to measurement and calculation? If they are matters of measure, are they not also absolutely immeasurable? In critical dialogue with texts by Plato, Hölderlin, Rilke, Heidegger, Benjamin, Adorno, Marx, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and Levi, the author argues that the question of measure has become ever more urgent (...) in the context of a modernity pressured by the conditions of a technological economy and a relativism that threatens to destroy a vital sense of moral responsibility and the commitment to justice that underlies the possibility of freedom. Conceived as a task for the “metaphysics” of memory, this book explores the normative problematic of measure, bringing its deeply buried redemptive promise to appearance in our gestures, uses and abuses of the hands, the dialectic of tact, and the manners of social existence. (shrink)

"This is a book for our troubled times.

A decade after the completion of the Human Genome Project, the widespread appeal of personalized genomic medicine's vision and potential virtues for health care remains compelling. Advocates argue that our current medical regime “is in crisis as it is expensive, reactive, inefficient, and focused largely on one size fits all treatments for events of late stage disease.” What is revolutionary about this kind of medicine, its advocates maintain, is that it promises to resolve that crisis by simultaneously increasing the ability (...) to be “personalized,” “predictive,” “preventive,” and “participatory.” Some call personalized genomic medicine “P4 Medicine,” inscribing these cardinal virtues into the movement's name. All of these putative virtues have interesting implications for the future of health care. In this essay, we are especially interested in the claims that personalized medicine will lead to a more “participatory” or “patient‐centered” approach to health care, in which patients are “empowered” to take more personal control over their care. The rhetoric of patient empowerment is nothing new in health care, but personalized medicine is an interesting case study because it portrays empowerment as one of its key virtues and as a mechanism for fixing the health care “crisis.”. (shrink)

This paper defends the view that homosexuality is abnormal and hence undesirable—not because it is immoral or sinful, or because it weakens society or hampers evolutionary development, but for a purely mechanical reason. It is a misuse of bodily parts. Clear empirical sense attaches to the idea of the use of such bodily parts as genitals, the idea that they are for something, and consequently to the idea of their misuse. I argue on grounds involving natural selection that misuse of (...) bodily parts can with high probability be connected to unhappiness. I regard these matters as prolegomena to such policy issues as the rights of homosexuals, the rights of those desiring not to associate with homosexuals, and legislation concerning homosexuality, issues which I shall not discuss systematically here. However, I do in the last section draw a seemingly evident corollary from my view that homosexuality is abnormal and likely to lead to unhappiness. (shrink)

Michael Levine's book is the first comprehensive study of pantheism as a philosophical position. Spinoza's Ethics, finished in 1675, has long been seen as the most complete attempt at explaining and defending pantheism. Historically, however, pantheism has numerous forms and Spinoza's version is best considered as one among many variations on pantheistic themes. Levine manages to disentangle the concept from Spinoza; this book is a broad philosophical and historical survey of pantheism itself. There is much confusion about what pantheism, (...) this "form of... non-theistic monotheism," actually is. The early part of the book deals with definitions of pantheism and examines critical distinctions between them. Chapter 2 is an analysis, both historical and contemporary, of the concept of pantheism. What is "unity" in pantheism's "all-inclusive divine unity"? Pantheism is compared to theism in Chapter 3. In Chapter 4 an account is presented of how some philosophical problems usually associated with theism are to be recast in pantheism and how, if at all, they might be resolved. The later chapters discuss the relationship between belief and practice. What are the religious implications of pantheism in terms of practice? Are there grounds - both philosophical and religious - for believing that pantheism presents the genuine alternative to theism that many contemporary non-theists think it does? (shrink)

Uncertainty and affect are fundamental and interrelated aspects of the human condition. Uncertainty is often associated with negative affect, but in some circumstances it is associated with positive affect. In this paper, we review different explanations for the varying relationship between uncertainty and affect. We identify “mental simulation” as a key process that links uncertainty to affective states. We suggest that people have a propensity to simulate negative outcomes, which results in a propensity towards negative affective responses to uncertainty. We (...) also propose the existence of several important moderators of this process, including context and individual differences such as uncertainty tolerance, as well as emotion regulation strategies. Finally, we highlight important knowledge gaps and promising areas for future research, both empirical and conceptual, to further elucidate the relationship between uncertainty and affect. (shrink)

Derrida’s “What is a ‘Relevant’ Translation?”, first delivered at the fifteenth annual Assises de la Traduction Littéraire à Arles in 1998, is an address that appears at first to speak from the outside and with a certain deference to professional translators. Yet, it quickly becomes apparent that Derrida not only counts himself among them but uses the occasion to reflect on his own surprising success as a translator of Hegel. This success has to do first and foremost with the proven (...) “relevance” of his translation of the notoriously untranslatable term Aufhebung as relève [in English: sublation]. Not a little perplexed by this apparent triumph, Derrida takes up the French term again, this time redeploying it in the translation of a crucial line from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. In doing so, he relaunches his engagement with Hegel, asking what energies bound up in the concept of relève might yet be released, what internal resistances silently at work in it might still be mobilized to take it in an entirely new direction. Such an engagement enables him to explore in turn what resistances may be at work in the notion of translation itself. Inhabited by an internal otherness, by a constitutive resistance to itself, translation must be understood from the very first as transference. While translation studies have long been attentive to the transferential dynamics in which individual translators find themselves enmeshed, Derrida’s text views transference in more impersonal terms as the tenacious grip in which certain structures of thought hold us, structures which also inform our understanding of translation. How to work with and against this structural unconscious? To address this question, it is necessary to examine Derrida’s own translational practice and the privilege he accords to the term trouvaille. (shrink)

In this essay we argue for the Janus-faced nature of hope. We show that attempts to sanitise the concept of hope either by separating it conceptually from other phenomena such as wishful thinking, or, more generally, by seeking to minimise the negative aspects of hope, do not help us to understand the nature of hope and its functions as regards religion. Drawing on functional accounts of religion from Clifford Geertz and Tamas Pataki, who both—in their different ways—see the function of (...) religion in terms of its capacity to satisfy deep psychological needs, we demonstrate that religion uniquely positions itself with regard to hope’s two faces, simultaneously exploiting positive and negative aspects of hope. (shrink)

24 undergraduates were blindfolded and walked through paths laid out on a floor to investigate whether the orientation of Ss' cognitive maps (CMs) could be determined after they had learned a path by walking through it. Given the assumption that the CM is picturelike, it was predicted that it has a specific orientation, which implies that tests in which the CM is assumed to be aligned with the path should be less difficult than tests in which the CM is hypothesized (...) to be contraligned. In Exp I (8 Ss), Ss were required to draw a picture of the path they had walked through; in Exp II (14 Ss), Ss were required to locate targets in the path under conditions in which their presumed CMs were either aligned or contraligned with the path. Results show that, in Exp I, all Ss drew the 1st line segment of the path upward, suggesting that this part of the path was fixed in an upward direction in memory. In Exp II, Ss were more accurate and faster in locating points on the path when the CM was hypothesized to be aligned with the path than when it was hypothesized to be contraligned. (shrink)