Presents general information about meteorology, weather, and climate and includes more than thirty activities to help study these topics, including making a ...

Arendt Contra Sociology re-assesses the relationship between Hannah Arendt's work and the theoretical foundations of sociology, bringing her insights to bear on key themes within contemporary theoretical sociology. Departing from the view of Arendt as a political theorist who sought to rescue politics from society, and political theory from the social sciences, this book re-examines her distinctions between labour, fabrication and action as a theory of the fundamental ontology of human societies, revisiting her criticism of the tendency of many sociological (...) paradigms to conflate the activity of fabrication with that of action. (shrink)

A flood of new multidisciplinary work on the causes of depersonalization disorder provides a new way to think about the feeling that experiences “belong” to the self. In this paper I argue that this feeling, baptized “mineness” or “subjective presence” : 565–573, 2013) emerges from a multilevel interaction between emotional, affective and cognitive processing. The “self” to which experience is attributed is a predictive model made by the mind to explain the modulation of affect as the organism progresses through the (...) world. When the world no longer produces predicted affect the organism needs to explain this unpredicted absence of feeling. It is important to this account that cognition and perception are otherwise intact. Consequently the mind’s representation of the world and its emotionally salient properties are unchanged, leading the mind to predict a characteristic affective response. When that prediction is not fulfilled the organisms feels as if she is no longer present in experience. This is reported at the as feeling of depersonalization. (shrink)

Bibliographic records published by the British Education Index (BEI) between 1957 and 2000 are analysed in the context of a history of the BEI's changing presentation of information about the field. The value of frequency counts for BEI subject terms is discussed, in relation to their potential for revealing trends in the fields of educational studies and information management.

De verkenning van God als vreeswekkende rechter is diep verankerd in het werk van Wittgenstein. Hiermee wil hij de grenzen van het menselijk denken aftasten.

The cultural turn has yet to fully reconfigure ‘class’ as a set of fictions, tropes, discourses and enduring culture-structures. Existing Durkheimian approaches have stalled at his middle period morphological reductionism. This paper constructs a more radical understanding in the late-Durkheimian idiom. It shows how class operates as a signifier in a language game of purity and pollution, virtue and vice. Taking a lead from studies of the ‘unruly’ working class, the paper opens up the more subtle pollution that attends to (...) the mythical ‘bourgeoisie’ and its associated and imagined ‘bourgeois’ culture. As a sign system this class location is deemed inauthentic, sybaritic, and as strangely deadening to cultural vitality. Although commonly found in contexts of gentrification and commodification that involve class conflict, this critical discourse is also applied within the bourgeois milieu. Such needless auto-critique suggests a relative autonomy from determination by class struggle. The possibilities for this approach are illustrated at length with reference to a paradigm case: the highly bourgeois milieu of the composer Richard Wagner and his Bayreuth Festival. (shrink)

Metaethics has recently been confronted by evidence from cognitive neuroscience that tacit emotional processes play an essential causal role in moral judgement. Most neuroscientists, and some metaethicists, take this evidence to vindicate a version of metaethical sentimentalism. In this paper we argue that the ‘dual process’ model of cognition that frames the discussion within and without philosophy does not do justice to an important constraint on any theory of deliberation and judgement. Namely, decision-making is the exercise of a capacity for (...) agency. Agency, in turn, requires a capacity to conceive of oneself as temporally extended: to inhabit, in both memory and imagination, an autobiographical past and future. To plan, to commit to plans, and to act in accordance with previous plans requires a diachronic self, able to transcend the present moment. While this fact about agency is central to much of moral philosophy (e.g. in discussions of autonomy and moral responsibility) it is opaque to the dual process framework and those meta-ethical accounts which situate themselves within this model of cognition. We show how this is the case and argue for an empirically adequate account of moral judgement which gives sufficient role to memory and imagination as cognitive prerequisites of agency. We reconsider the empirical evidence, provide an alternative, agentive, interpretation of key findings, and evaluate the consequences for metaethics. (shrink)

Philip Kitcher is one of the leading figures in the philosophy of science today. Here he collects, for the first time, many of his published articles on the philosophy of biology, spanning from the mid-1980's to the present. The book's title refers to Gregor Mendel, an Augustinian monk who was one of the first scientists to develop a theory of heredity. Mendel's work has been deeply influential to our understanding of our selves and our world, just as the study (...) of genetics today will have a profound and long-term impact on future scientific research. Kitcher's articles cover a broad range of topics with similar philosophical and social significance: sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, species, race, altruism, genetic determinism, and the rebirth of creationism in Intelligent Design. Kitcher's work on the intersection of biology and the philosophy of science is both unprecedented and wide-ranging, and will appeal not only to philosophers of science, but to scholars and students across disciplines. (shrink)

W.V.O.Quine’s doctrine of referential inscrutability (RI) is the thesis that, first, linguistic reference must always be determined relative to an interpretation of the discourse and, second, that the empirical evidence always underdetermines our choice of interpretation--at least in principle. Although this thesis is a central result of Quine’s theory of language, it was long unclear just how much force RI actually carried. At best, Quine’s discussions provided localized examples of RI (e.g., ‘gavagai’), supplemented merely by arguments for the (in principle) (...) constructability of more general referentially divergent manuals. In defense of Quine, Gerald Massey provides a method for generating large-scale referentially divergent manuals for a complex language. I argue that, while Massey’s rival manuals do meet Quine’s translational criteria, they are demonstrably inferior to their commonsensical “homophonic” competitor. This result provides a clear indication of seminal deficiencies in Quine’s behaviorial approach to the theory of language. Next I argue that Quine’s acceptance of standard assumptions about the nature of perception strongly influences the shape of his semantical theory. Finally, I suggest how an alternative to the standard account of perception might provide grounds for a more adequate understanding of language. (shrink)

When asked to explain their solutions to a problem, both adults and children gesture as they talk. These gestures at times convey information that is not conveyed in speech and thus reveal thoughts that are distinct from those revealed in speech. In this study, we use the classic Tower of Hanoi puzzle to validate the claim that gesture and speech taken together can reflect the activation of two cognitive strategies within a single response. The Tower of Hanoi is a well‐studied (...) puzzle, known to be most efficiently solved by activating subroutines at theoretically defined choice points. When asked to explain how they solved the Tower of Hanoi puzzle, both adults and children produced significantly more gesture‐speech mismatches—explanations in which speech conveyed one path and gesture another—at these theoretically defined choice points than they produced at non‐choice points. Even when the participants did not solve the problem efficiently, gesture could be used to indicate where the participants were deciding between alternative paths. Gesture can, thus, serve as a useful adjunct to speech when attempting to discover cognitive processes in problem‐solving. (shrink)

A defense of the modern family, in historical perspective, this book reconstructs political theory with the family in an important and honorable place. By reviewing critically both traditional and contemporary thought on the most special relationships—as well as current public policy issues relating to them—the author addresses concerns shared by professional and lay constituencies. Noting Tocqueville's observation of the American obsession with reevaluating and remodeling the family, Professor Abbott pleads for a balanced view. The development of liberal ambivalence toward the (...) family, along with radical hostility toward it, is clearly traced. For the most part the family was safely incorporated into political theory from Aristotle to Cicero and onward to Augustine and Aquinas until modern times. Then came the challenges of the rational individualists and the romantic individualists, followed by the attacks of social and psychological radicals. Some traditional criticisms of the family are shown to be soundly based, albeit less devastating than the critics supposed. As expanded in contemporary life, however, the great critics' revisionist models take on a fantastic quality. Here we are introduced to pleas for the "eroticization of children" and for freedom from "tyranny of reproductive biology." Proposals for new bureaucratic support structures appear with great frequency: professional guardians, children's camps, cloning hospitals. And people try to act out the roles prescribed for them by theorists who attempted "to set the solitary in new and different units." Liberals and radicals, the author argues, are infatuated with a "rights model," which "takes as its basis self-sufficient rational human beings"—at the expense of "solidarity among human beings." A tradition exists, Professor Abbott holds, that facilitates reconciliation between the modern family and the political order: pluralism. Pluralism is an attempt to balance individual autonomy and mutuality, decentralization and stratification, reform and tradition, reason and sentiment. Public policy in respect to schools, housing, health care, working conditions, and recreation should be designed to foster a pluralistic family-centered society. In line with this thesis the author offers a fresh perspective on such burning issues as abortion, sexual preference, alternative lifestyles, child abuse, and children's rights. _The Family on Trial _therefore is relevant to the concerns of social and behavioral scientists, the helping professions and the clergy, teachers and parents. (shrink)

Von einem Roman erwarten wir, dass sich seine Handlung zielstrebig auf ein Ende hin bewegt. Bis ins 19. Jh. wurden auch Vorgänge in einer von Gott eingerichteten Wirklichkeit auf diese Weise verstanden. Romane konnten daher beanspruchen, in ihrer Zielstrebigkeit die Wirklichkeit abzubilden. Durch Charles Darwin geriet diese Weltsicht in eine Krise. Die Studie zeigt, wie sich das Erzählen in einer als ziellos und zufällig aufgefassten Wirklichkeit veränderte. Wie können Romane die so verstandene Wirklichkeit abbilden? Diese Frage wird beispielhaft an literarischen (...) und ästhetischen Texten von Friedrich Theodor Vischer und Gottfried Keller erörtert. (shrink)

Limitations of Dienes & Perner's (D&P's) theory are traced to the assumption that the higher-order thought (HOT) theory of consciousness is true. D&P claim that 18-month-old children are capable of explicitly representing factuality, from which it follows (on D&P's theory) that they are capable of explicitly representing content, attitude, and self. D&P then attempt to explain 3-year-olds' failures on tests of voluntary control such as the dimensional change card sort by suggesting that at this age children cannot represent content and (...) attitude explicitly. We provide a better levels-of-consciousness account for age-related abulic dissociations between knowledge and action. (shrink)

The claims of Mt. 5:17—20 are often taken to provide the interpretive key to the ethical claims of the Sermon on the Mount as a whole. The theological issue at stake here is the determinative relation between Christ's person and work and his teaching. This article explores the vital role played by the identity of Christ as the `fulfiller of the law' and `bringer of the Kingdom' in the exegesis of the Sermon offered by Eduard Thurneysen and Dietrich Bonhoeffer in (...) their respective works Die Bergpredigt (1936) and Nachfolge (1937). Both readings assert that the force and nature of the claims of the Sermon cannot be understood aright apart from constant attention to the difference made by the fact that Christ is the preacher. Out of this shared conviction, both theologians advance a reading of the Sermon as `the gospel itself' in the light of the eschatological identity of Jesus. Such readings of the Sermon, arising amidst the German Kirchenkampf of the 1930s, represent substantial contributions to the `responsible interpretation' of the Barmen Declaration (1934) whose second article states that, `As Jesus Christ is God's assurance of the forgiveness of all our sins, so in the same way and with the same seriousness is he also God's mighty claim upon our whole life.'. (shrink)

Philip Percival; X*—Absolute Truth, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 94, Issue 1, 1 June 1994, Pages 189–214, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelia.

This is a book about the aesthetics of wonder, about wonder as it figures in our relation to the visual world and to rare or new experiences.

(No abstract is available for this citation).

The case of pain asymbolia is a case study that provides evidence of the mechanisms underlying the relationship between bodily experience, affective experience, and self-awareness. On one account pain asymbolia is the result of an affective deficit. Sensory signals of bodily damage are not associated with characteristic negative affect. Cochrane endorses this account as part of his version of a “conceptual act” theory of affective experience. In contrast, I propose an active inference account of affect in general and pain asymbolia (...) in particular. In the active inference framework the self is inferred as the endogenous cause of bodily and affective experience in the process of organismic regulation. This preserves Cochranes ambition to ground affect in bodily regulation but avoids the problem for affective deficit accounts of asymbolia that cannot do justice to the neural correlates. (shrink)

Jennifer Radden has drawn attention to two features of delusion, ambivalence and subjectivity, which are problematic for theories of delusion that treat delusions as empirical beliefs. She argues for an ‘attitude’ theory of delusion. I argue that once the cognitive architecture of delusion formation is properly described the debate between doxastic and attitude theorists loses its edge. That architecture suggests that delusions are produced by activity in the ‘default mode network’ unsupervised by networks required for decontextualized processing. The cognitive properties (...) of these networks explain the features of delusion which generate the debate between doxastic and attitude theorists. (shrink)

In this paper I consider a theory developed within cognitive neuropsychiatry to explain two delusions of misidentification, the Capgras and the Cotard delusions. These delusions are classified together with others in which the subject misidentifies persons, places or objects, including parts of her own body. Strictly speaking, the Cotard may not, at the level of content, be a delusion of misidentification, but I have described it as such because the theory I discuss treats it as sharing a causal and a (...) conceptual structure with the Capgras delusion. That theory, associated particularly with the work of Andy Young, raises a Wittgensteinian echo in its claim that, at the subpersonal, information-processing, level, perceptual recognition of familiar faces and scenes is laden with affect. Where affect is absent or distorted as a result of neurological damage the subject “feels” strange in the presence of familiar scenes or people. Thus Young and Leafhead in their discussion of the Cotard delusion: “What the patients often give as evidence of their nonexistence or death is that they don’t have proper feeling.”. (shrink)

Strong forms of dualism and eliminative materialism block any significant dialogue between the neurosciences and theology. The present article thus challenges the Sufficiency Thesis, according to which neuroscientific explanations will finally be sufficient to fully explain human behavior. It then explores the various ways in which neuroscientific results and theological interpretations contribute to an overall theory of the person. Supervenience theories, which hold that mental events are dependent on their physical substrata but not reducible to them, are explained. Challenging the (...) determinism of “strong” supervenience, I defend a version of “soft” supervenience that allows for genuine mental causation. This view gives rise in turn to an emergentist theory of the person. Still, I remain a monist: there are many types of properties encountered in the world, although it is only the one nature that bears all these properties. The resulting position, emergentist monism, allows for diversity within the context of the one world. This view is open at the top for theological applications and interpretations while retaining the close link to neuroscientific study and its results. Theology offers an interpretation of the whole world based on a yet higher order of emergence, although the notion of God moves beyond the natural order as a whole. It therefore supplements the natural scientific study of the world without negating it. (shrink)

Panpsychism is the view that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical world. This chapter outlines two major arguments for panpsychism, one in terms of its role in solving the hard problem of consciousness, and two the intrinsic nature argument. It also responds to the worry that panpsychism is too counterintuitive to be true.

On the question of the conclusion of a piece of practical reasoning, few have been willing to follow Aristotle's lead. He said the conclusion was an action. These days, the conclusion is usually described either as a proposition about what one ought to do, or as a psychological state or event, such as a decision to do something, an intention to do something, or a belief about what one ought to do. Why favor these options over the action-as-conclusion view? By (...) far the most oft-repeated answer is that these views, unlike Aristotle's, can accommodate the case in which a conclusion is drawn but not acted upon. The conclusion cannot be an action, it is said, because it is possible to reach a conclusion about what to do without doing the action. My thesis is that this objection fails, and that as a consequence no radical departure from Aristotle's proposal is warranted. (shrink)

In response to the dozen essays published here, which relate my 1964 paper on “The Nature of Belief Systems in the Mass Publics” to normative requirements of democratic theory, I note, inter alia, a major misinterpretation of my old argument, as well as needed revisions of that argument in the light of intervening data. Then I address the degree to which there may be some long‐term secular change in the parameters that I originally laid out. In the final section, I (...) provide a case study of public understanding of factual trends in federal tax policy in recent decades which seems commendably veridical on average. The preferences of the public thereon add up to a remarkably clear popular mandate. But this mandate seems to disappear rather magically in the voting booth, probably due to a combination of limited contextual information on the public side, and considerable skill on the elite side in manipulating apparent political realities. (shrink)

We survey a variety of possible explications of the term “Individual Risk.” These in turn are based on a variety of interpretations of “Probability,” including classical, enumerative, frequency, formal, metaphysical, personal, propensity, chance and logical conceptions of probability, which we review and compare. We distinguish between “groupist” and “individualist” understandings of probability, and explore both “group to individual” and “individual to group” approaches to characterising individual risk. Although in the end that concept remains subtle and elusive, some pragmatic suggestions for (...) progress are made. (shrink)