Marking a close, genre-specific reading of the multiple "languages" within al-Ghaz l 's writings, this book seeks to excavate his most intimate thoughts on life and death. In doing so, it takes the reader into the very heart of the master's epistemology, psychology, and eschatology.

At any given time, a subject has a multiplicity of conscious experiences. A subject might simultaneously have visual experiences of a red book and a green tree, auditory experiences of birds singing, bodily sensations of a faint hunger and a sharp pain in the shoulder, the emotional experience of a certain melancholy, while having a stream of conscious thoughts about the nature of reality. These experiences are distinct from each other: a subject could experience the red book without the singing (...) birds, and could experience the singing birds without the red book. But at the same time, the experiences seem to be tied together in a deep way. They seem to be unified, by being aspects of a single encompassing state of consciousness. (shrink)

In this paper we defend the doxastic conception of delusions against the metacognitive account developed by Greg Currie and collaborators. According to the metacognitive model, delusions are imaginings that are misidentified by their subjects as beliefs: the Capgras patient, for instance, does not believe that his wife has been replaced by a robot, instead, he merely imagines that she has, and mistakes this imagining for a belief. We argue that the metacognitive account is untenable, and that the traditional conception of (...) delusions as beliefs should be retained. (shrink)

The good in nature and humanity brings together 20 leading thinkers and writers - including Ursula Goodenough, Lynn Margulis, Dorion Sagan, Carl Safina, David Petersen, Wendell Berry, Terry Tempest Williams, and Barry Lopez - to examine the divide between faith and reason, and to seek a means for developing an environmental ethic that will help us confront two of our most imperiling crises: global environmental destruction and an impoverished spirituality. The book explores the ways in which science, spirit, and religion (...) can guide the experience and understanding of our ongoing relationship with the natural world and examines how the integration of science and spirituality can equip us to make wiser choices in using and managing the natural environment. The book also provides compelling stories that offer a narrative understanding of the relations among science, spirit, and nature. Grounded in the premise that neither science nor religion can by itself resolve the prevailing malaise of environmental and moral decline, contributors seek viable approaches to averting environmental catastrophe and, to achieving a more harmonious relationship with the natural world. (shrink)

Drawing upon the collective action model of institutional change, I reconceptualize moral imagination as both a social process and a cognitive one. I argue that moral outcomes are not produced by individual actors alone; rather, they emerge from collective action processes that are influenced by political conditions and involve behaviors that include issue framing and resource mobilization. I also contend that individual moral imagination involves the integration of moral sensitivity with consideration of collective action dynamics. I illustrate my arguments with (...) a case study of the Chad-Cameroon oil project. The paper suggests new directions in teaching and research on moral imagination. (shrink)

Disorders of volition are often accompanied by, and may even be caused by, disruptions in the phenomenology of agency. Yet the phenomenology of agency is at present little explored. In this paper we attempt to describe the experience of normal agency, in order to uncover its representational content.

Contemporary epistemology has been moving away from classical foundationalism—the thesis that our empirical knowledge is grounded in perceptual beliefs we know with certainty. McGrew reexamines classical foundationalism and offers a compelling reconstruction and defense of empirical knowledge grounded in perceptual certainty. He articulates and defends a new version of foundationalism and demonstrates how it meets all the standard criticisms. The book offers substantial rebuttals of the arguments of Kuhn and Rorty and demonstrates the value of the classical analytic approach to (...) philosophy. 'Foundations' will interest philosophers of science, language, and the mind. (shrink)

Traditional treatments of accountant ethics make implicit assumptions inconsistent with a sociological perspective. This paper identifies the ways in which accountant ethics have been approached both in literature pertaining to practice and the classroom. The boundaries of the topic, when its definitions are left tacit, systematically preclude many important features of ethics. Included in these are sociological treatments of the accounting profession as a group, extra-personal aspects of decision making, the stratification of accounting practice, and a sense of ethical action. (...) The paper concludes with an illustration of how institutional theory has the potential to create a systematic sociological interpretation of accountant ethics. (shrink)

This article addresses a difficult case at the intersection of philosophical theology and truthmaker theory. I show that three views, together, lead to difficultiesin providing truthmakers for truths of contingent predication, such as that the bread is white. These three views are: the Catholic dogma of transubstantiation, astandard truthmaker theory, and a trope view of properties. I present and explain each of these three views, at each step noting their connections to the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. After presenting the (...) three views, I show why they entail a difficulty for providing truthmakers for truths of contingent predication,drawing on two cases that are not impossible, for all we know. I then present four ways that one can respond to this difficulty, afterward noting some shortcomingsof those responses. (shrink)

We discuss three varieties of affective dynamics. In each case, we suggest how these affective dynamics should be operationalized and measured in daily life using time-intensive methods, like ecological momentary assessment or ambulatory assessment, and recommend time-sensitive analyses that take into account not only the variability but also the temporal dependency of reports. Studies that explore how these affective dynamics are associated with psychological disorders and symptoms are reviewed, and we emphasize that these affective processes are within a nexus of (...) other components of emotion regulation. (shrink)

The doctrine of the Incarnation, that Jesus Christ was both truly God and truly human, is the foundation and cornerstone of traditional Christian theism. And yet this traditional teaching appears to verge on incoherence. How can one person be both God, having all the perfections of divinity, and human, having all the limitations of humanity? This is the fundamental philosophical problem of the Incarnation. Perhaps a solution is found in an analysis of what the traditional teaching meant by person, divinity, (...) and humanity, or in understanding how divinity and humanity were united in a single person. This Element presents that traditional teaching, then returns to the incoherence problem to showcase various solutions offered to it. (shrink)

One of the fundamental components of the concept of economic rationality is that preference orderings are “complete,” i.e., that all alternative actions an economic agent can take are comparable. The idea that all actions can be ranked may be called the single utility assumption. The attractiveness of this assumption is considerable. It would be hard to fathom what choice among alternatives means if the available alternatives cannot be ranked by the chooser in some way. In addition, the efficiency criterion makes (...) sense only if one can infer that an individual's choice reflects the best, in expected welfare terms, among all choices that individual could have made. The possibility that a rearrangement of resources could make someone “better off” without making others “worse off” can be understood only if the post-rearrangement world is comparable with the pre-rearrange-ment world. (shrink)

Secondary education around the world has been significantly disrupted by covid-19. Students have been forced into new ways of independent learning, often using remote technologies, but without the social nuances and direct teacher interactions of a normal classroom environment. Using data from the School Attitudes Survey—which surveys students regarding the perceived level of difficulty, anxiety level, self-efficacy, enjoyability, subject relevance, and opportunities for creativity with regards to each of their school subjects—this study examines students' responses to this disruption from two (...) very different schools with two very different experiences of the pandemic. This paper reports on the composite attitudinal profiles of students in the senior secondary levels at each school. The findings challenged our expectation that the increased difficulty and anxiety caused by the disruption would reduce perceived opportunities for creativity. Indeed, our analyses showed that the students at both schools demonstrated generally positive attitudes toward their learning and strongly associated opportunities for creativity with other attitudinal constructs including enjoyability, subject relevance, and self-efficacy. These complex associations made by the students appear to have buffered the impacts of the disruption, and they may even have supported creative resilience. (shrink)

On method, discursive logics, and epistemology -- Questions of medieval discursive practice -- From the middle ages to the (w)hole of Utopia -- Kepler, his Dream, and the analysis and pattern of thought -- Campanella and Bacon: concerning structures of mind -- The masculine birth of time -- Cyrano and the experimental discourse -- The myth of sun and moon -- The difficulty of writing -- Crusoe rights his story -- Gulliver's critique of Euclid -- Emergence, consolidation, and dominance of (...) a discourse. (shrink)

In this study, three individual descriptions of anxiety as experienced in social situations were analyzed so that a general structure representing social anxiety could potentially be obtained. The descriptions analyzed produced results that not only overlapped with already existing literature from various perspectives on the topic, but also highlighted certain key factors that have largely been unaccounted for by prior studies. By utilizing the Descriptive Phenomenological Method in Psychology , these factors were brought to light in more depth and clarity (...) than if the same phenomenon were studied using a third person approach. Specifically, six constituents of social anxiety were revealed; including factors related to inter-subjectivity, the relationship between fear and anxiety, and the relationship between desire and self-lack. (shrink)

This collection of essays on the philosophy of Foucault assesses his various work from a variety of perspectives: his place in the history of philosophy; his style and method of philosophical expression; his notions of political power; his ethical thought; and his attitude to psychoanalysis.

The Uncertainty of Analysis pursues key issues raised in the author's earlier Discourse of Modernism, a ground-breaking work which focused attention on the nature of discourse and the ways in which one culturally dominant "discursive class" may be replaced by another. In this timely and provocative collection of his essays, Timothy J. Reiss shows how efforts to reconfirm the force and power of modernist, analytico-referential discourse in the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries have actually brought to the fore (...) internal contradictions, have made clear the problematic nature of the dominant discourse, and have precipitated the emergence of competing discourses. Reiss considers the explorations in foundational logic by Frege and Peirce; examinations of language and its relations to mind by Saussure, Greimas, and Chomsky; work in linguistic and scientific epistemology by Wittgenstein and Heisenberg; and the attempts to analyze the nature of society by Sartre and other Western Marxists. Reiss turns to some practitioners of literary criticism and theory who have sought to escape past constraints, and he points to what appear to be erroneous routes away from the dilemmas raised by these philosophers and critics. (shrink)

Selected articles from the Naval War College Press on ethics and the twenty-first-century military professional."--Provided by publisher.

This volume focuses on naval leadership and ethics with respect to the individual leader and how his or her values and actions affect military cohesion, mission success, and the profession of arms. Moving beyond the "right and wrong" of personal ethics to examine the broader field of professional military ethics, this carefully selected collection of relevant materials from the Naval Institute's vast collection of articles recognizes the range of experience, perspectives, and opinions that are found in the sea services and (...) argues that diversity does not preclude acceptance of common core values and standards of performance within any unit."--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is the chapter's first paragraph: ONE OF THE MOST QUOTED PHRASES in current popular culture is "six degrees of separation." It expresses the idea that, on average, any human ^being is connected with any other human being by at most six acquaintances. While there is much debate as to whether this is literally true, it is an interesting thought-experiment, as well as the basis for many fun parlor games. One of these is entitled "Six (...) Degrees of Kevin Bacon," in which film fans try to connect the aforementioned actor with any other movie star with as few links as possible. (shrink)

Two long-standing arguments in cognitive science invoke the assumption that holistic inference is computationally infeasible. The first is Fodor’s skeptical argument toward computational modeling of ordinary inductive reasoning. The second advocates modular computational mechanisms of the kind posited by Cosmides, Tooby and Sperber. Based on advances in machine learning related to Bayes nets, as well as investigations into the structure of scientific and ordinary information, I maintain neither argument establishes its architectural conclusion. Similar considerations also undermine Fodor’s decades-long diagnosis of (...) artificial intelligence research as confounded by an inability to circumscribe the amount of information relevant to inferential processes. This diagnosis is particularly inapposite with respect to Bayes nets, since one of their strengths as machine learning systems has been their capacity to reason probabilistically about large data sets whose size overwhelms the capacities of individual human reasoners. A general moral follows from these criticisms: Insights into artificial and human cognitive systems are likely to be cultivated by focusing greater attention on the structure and density of connections among items of information that are available to them. (shrink)

We will introduce a partial ordering $\preceq_1$ on the class of ordinals which will serve as a foundation for an approach to ordinal notations for formal systems of set theory and second-order arithmetic. In this paper we use $\preceq_1$ to provide a new characterization of the ubiquitous ordinal $\epsilon _{0}$.

Physiological studies of binocular rivalry have provided important clues to the relationship between neural activity in the brain and visual awareness.However, uncertainty about these insights has been raised by a recent study showing that the events underlying binocular rivalry occur earlier in the visual pathway than was previously thought.

In this paper, I seek to diagnose the sources of our dissatisfaction with answers to the question of the meaning of life. I contend that some of these have to do with the question (its polyvalence and persistent vagueness) and some have to do with life and meaningfulness themselves. By showing how dissatisfaction arises and the extent to which it is in-eliminable even by God, I hope to show that we should be satisfied with our dissatisfaction.

We will investigate patterns of resemblance of order 2 over a family of arithmetic structures on the ordinals. In particular, we will show that they determine a computable well ordering under appropriate assumptions.

David Lewis proved in 1974 that all logics without iterative axioms are weakly complete. In this paper we extend Lewis's ideas and provide a proof that such logics are canonical and so strongly complete. This paper also discusses the differences between relational and neighborhood frame semantics and poses a number of open questions about the latter.