This paper concerns Aristotle's kind‐crossing prohibition. My aim is twofold. I argue that the traditional accounts of the prohibition are subject to serious internal difficulties and should be questioned. According to these accounts, Aristotle's prohibition is based on the individuation of scientific disciplines and the general kind that a discipline is about, and it says that scientific demonstrations must not cross from one discipline, and corresponding kind, to another. I propose a very different account of the (...) prohibition. The prohibition is based on Aristotle's scientific and metaphysical essentialism, according to which a scientific demonstration must take as its starting point a set of per se properties of a subject, if these make up a single, unitary definition. The subject of demonstration here is a kind, although not the general kind associated with a discipline, but rather the particular kind that the particular demonstration is about. (shrink)

At some point in the Incessu Animalium, Aristotle appeals to some geometrical claims in order to explain why animal progression necessarily involves the bending (of the limbs), and this appeal to geometrical claims might be taking as violating the recommendation to avoid “kind-crossing” (as found in the Posterior Analytic). But a very unclear notion of kind-crossing has been assumed in most debates. I will argue that kind-crossing in the Posterior Analytics does not mean any (...) employment of premises from a discipline other than that to which the explanandum belongs. Kind-crossing was meant to cover a specific sort of employment of premises from a different discipline, namely, the case in which premises from a discipline X are taken as the most important explanatory factor that delivers the fullest appropriate explanation of an explanandum within discipline Y. If this is so, the employment of geometrical premises in the Incessu Animalium is not an instance of the prohibited kind-crossing, but something that is in line with the theory of the Posterior Analytics. (shrink)

Most realist theories of legitimacy are internalist theories, meaning that they regard legitimacy as a function of how subjects view their own rulers. However, some realists seek to qualify their internalism by holding that legitimacy is not simply a matter of whether subjects accept their rulers’ exercise of power. According to one such view, legitimacy requires that rulers’ power be ‘acceptable’ to subjects, in the sense that it can be justified on the basis of values that they accept. Call this (...) acceptability internalism. In this article, I argue that realists should reject acceptability internalism. I first argue that acceptability internalism has the disadvantage of separating the concept of legitimacy from the interests of rulers. I then consider two arguments in favour of acceptability internalism, and argue that both should be rejected. (shrink)

The article evaluates the Domain Postulate of the Classical Model of Science and the related Aristotelian prohibition rule on kind-crossing as interpretative tools in the history of the development of mathematics into a general science of quantities. Special reference is made to Proclus’ commentary to Euclid’s first book of Elements , to the sixteenth century translations of Euclid’s work into Latin and to the works of Stevin, Wallis, Viète and Descartes. The prohibition rule on kind-crossing formulated (...) by Aristotle in Posterior analytics is used to distinguish between conceptions that share the same name but are substantively different: for example the search for a broader genus including all mathematical objects; the search for a common character of different species of mathematical objects; and the effort to treat magnitudes as numbers. (shrink)

Contents: 1) Peter Kung, Why We Need Something Like Imagery; 2) Derek Lam, An Imaginative Person’s Guide to Objective Modality; 3) Rebecca Hanrahan, Crossing Rivers: Imagination and Real Possibilities; 4) Michael Omoge, Imagination, Metaphysical Modality, and Modal Psychology; 5) Joshua Myers, Reasoning with Imagination; 6) Franz Berto, Equivalence in Imagination; 7) Christopher Badura, How Imagination Can Justify; 8) Antonella Mallozzi, Imagination, Inference, and Apriority; 9) Margherita Arcangeli, Narratives and Thought Experiments: Restoring the Role of Imagination; 10) Margot Strohminger, Two (...) Ways of Imagining Galileo’s Experiment; 11) Eric Peterson, Attention to Details: Imagination, Attention, and Epistemic Significance; 12) Amy Kind, Bridging the Divide: Imagining Across Experiential Perspectives; 13) Julia Langkau, On Imagining Being Someone Else; 14) Luke Roelofs, “Imagine If They Did That to You!”: The Complexity of Empathy; 15) Nick Wiltsher and Bence Nanay, Imagination, Selves, and Knowledge of Self: Pessoa’s Dreams in The Book of Disquiet . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reply to Jiwei CiBen Cross (bio)I am very grateful to Jiwei Ci for his thoughtful and considerate response to my article. I think my understanding of Weber, legitimacy, political realism, and Ci's own work has benefited greatly as a result.I. What's the Problem with Performance Legitimacy?Ci and I both accept that legitimacy is best understood in terms of Weber's "descriptively de jure legitimacy." Put simply, we both think that (...) a state is legitimate if and only if a large enough number of its constituents think it is legitimate. According to this view, therefore, a source of legitimacy is any type of belief—or narrative, as many political realists tend to prefer—that constituents take to give them sufficient reason for regarding the state as legitimate.On the surface, understanding legitimacy in this way seems open to the possibility of a very wide variety of sources of legitimacy. All that matters is whether the source of legitimacy can persuade people to regard the state as legitimate. Weber's study of legitimacy focuses on three particular sources: [End Page 165] legal, traditional, and charismatic. However, as Ci (2024, pp. 149–150) rightly points out, Weber can allow for other sources of legitimacy as well, provided that they have the requisite persuasive power.1The question that Ci and I are interested in here is whether the state's good performance can be a viable source of legitimacy. In my view, it might be possible for a government to secure its legitimacy in this fashion if two conditions are met:(1). the state can reliably maintain good performance—or at least can reliably convince its constituents that it maintains good performance.(2). the state has a sufficiently large constituency of people who possess a shared interest that is served by good performance.I previously expressed doubts about whether the second condition can be reliably met (Cross 2024, pp. 139–143). Hence, I am somewhat skeptical about the possibility of performance legitimacy, but this skepticism does not stem from a categorical distinction between performance and legitimacy. Nor does this skepticism stem from doubts about the ability of any state to maintain good performance. Rather, it stems from doubts about whether the existence of a shared interest is a reliable basis for identifying the constituency of legitimacy.Ci, on the other hand, does think that good performance and legitimacy are categorically distinct, albeit interrelated. He holds that good performance can enhance an existing source of legitimacy. He also holds that it can offer some compensation for the absence of an existing source of legitimacy. However, he denies that good performance can ever count as a source of legitimacy in its own right. Furthermore, Ci's arguments for this claim, as I understand them, are not reducible to the further claim that it is unlikely that any state can reliably sustain the kind of unwaveringly good performance that reliably serves the shared interests of its constituency. That is, although he appears highly skeptical of the state's capacity to satisfy (1) and (2), this skepticism is not, strictly speaking, essential to his arguments.Our main disagreement, then, concerns the correct basis for skepticism about performance legitimacy. Although I think it would be fair to say that Ci's skepticism is stronger and more general than my own, this appears to stem from our different reasons for this skepticism. In what follows, I will try to briefly summarize Ci's objections to performance legitimacy and the extent of my disagreements with them.II. The Genealogical ArgumentI previously suggested that Ci's distinction between performance-enhancing legitimacy and performance that ameliorates a lack of legitimacy may be a distinction without a difference (Cross 2024, pp. 132–135). What reason do rulers have to prefer the former to the latter? [End Page 166]Ci's response helpfully clarifies what he takes to be at stake in this distinction. Legitimacy, he argues, is meant to provide a justification specifically for the state's monopoly of violence. As Ci rightly notes, I did not address the significance of this point. I did not distinguish between a justification for the state's monopoly of... (shrink)

In a recent article, J. Angelo Corlett criticises what he takes to be the ‘offensiphobic’ practices characteristic of many universities. The ‘offensiphobe’, according to Corlett, believes that offensive speech ought to be censured precisely because it offends. We argue that there are three serious problems with Corlett’s discussion. First, his criticism of ‘offensiphobia’ misrepresents the kinds of censorship practiced by universities; many universities may in some way censure speech which they regard as offensive, but this is seldom if ever a (...) manifestation of ‘offensiphobia’. Second, we attempt to reconstruct Corlett’s criticism of ‘offensiphobia’ as a criticism of the practice of censuring hate speech, and show that this argument is unsuccessful. Third, we offer some brief reflections on how labelling universities as ‘offensiphobic’ is especially problematic in light of the current climate of political interference in university research and teaching. (shrink)

In “Backward Causation and the Stalnaker–Lewis Approach to Counterfactuals,” Analysis 62:191–7, (2002), Michael Tooley argues that if a certain kind of backward causation is possible, then a Stalnaker–Lewis comparative world similarity account of the truth conditions of counterfactuals cannot be sound. In “Tooley on Backward Causation,” Analysis 63:157–62, (2003), Paul Noordhof argues that Tooley’s example can be reconciled with a Stalnaker–Lewis account of counterfactuals if the comparative world similarity relation on which the Stalnaker–Lewis account relies is allowed to be (...) antecedent-relative. In this paper I show that taking comparative world similarity to be antecedent-relative results in a formal semantics which is a comparative world similarity semantics in name only. (shrink)

I argue that, if it is thought desirable to avoid the collapse of disability into generic social disadvantage, it is necessary to draw a distinction between impairment (a bodily configuration) and disability (the way in which the environment prevents someone with an impairment from undertaking certain kinds of activities), as in social models of disability. I show how to draw such a distinction by utilizing a distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic properties. I argue further that, using this distinction, it is (...) possible to define ‘impairment’ in ways that do not appeal to notions of the normal, and to define ‘disability’ in terms of ‘impairment.’. (shrink)

According to a well-known interpretation, Henry of Ghent holds that possible but non-existent essences – items merely with what Henry labels ‘ esse essentiae ’ – have some reality external to the divine mind, but short of actual existence ( esse existentiae ). I argue that this reading of Henry is mistaken. Furthermore, Henry identifies any essence, considered independently of its existence as a universal concept or as instantiated in a particular as an item that has some kind of (...) reality in the divine intellect, and that constitutes an object of thought for that intellect. This object is distinguished from the universal concepts of creaturely cognition. (shrink)

According to a well-known interpretation, Henry of Ghent holds that possible but non-existent essences – items merely with what Henry labels ‘esse essentiae’ – have some reality external to the divine mind, but short of actual existence (esse existentiae). I argue that this reading of Henry is mistaken. Furthermore, Henry identifies any essence, considered independently of its existence as a universal concept or as instantiated in a particular as an item that has some kind of reality in the divine (...) intellect, and that constitutes an object of thought for that intellect. This object is distinguished from the universal concepts of creaturely cognition. (shrink)

In "Backward causation and the Stalnaker-Lewis approach to counterfactuals," Analysis 62 (2002): 191–97, Michael Tooley argues that if a certain kind of backward causation is possible, then a Stalnaker-Lewis style comparative world similarity account of the truth conditions of counterfactuals cannot be sound. Tooley’s target is one particular type of semantics, but, as I show, the significance of Tooley’s example goes well beyond its consequences for any one semantics for the conditional.

Aquinas distinguishes four types of part included in a hypostasis (’suppositum’): (1) kind-nature; (2) individuating feature(s); (3) accidents; (4) concrete parts. (1) - (3) in some sense contribute ’esse’ to the ’suppositum’. Usually Aquinas holds that Christ’s human nature does not contribute ’esse’ to its divine ’suppositum’, since it is analogous to a concrete part of its ’suppositum’. This effectively commits Aquinas to the Monophysite heresy. In ’De Unione’ Aquinas argues instead that Christ’s human nature contributes ’secondary ’esse‘ to (...) its divine ’suppositum’. This account is coherent and orthodox, but sacrifices explanatory power. (shrink)

According to Henry of Ghent (d. 1293), it is impossible for the second person of the Trinity to assume into unity of person an irrational nature (e.g., a stone nature), or to assume a rational nature that does not enjoy the beatific vision. He argues that the assumption of a nature to a divine person entails both that the nature has the sort of powers that could exercise supernatural activities and that these powers are exercised. Henry’s Franciscan opponents argue against (...) this. Existent irrational natures (like existent rational natures) are not necessarily subsistent and belonging to a kind does not require the opportunity to exercise the causal powers associated with that kind. (shrink)

This article highlights five areas of Scotus' philosophy that have recently been the subject of scholarly discussion. (1) Metaphysics : I outline the most current accounts of Scotus on individuation (thisness or haecceity) and the common nature. (2) Modal theory : I consider recent accounts both of Scotus' innovations in spelling out the notion of the logically (and broadly logically) possible, and of his account of the independence of modality. (3) Cognitive psychology : I examine recent views of Scotus' theory (...) of intentionality and the nature of mental content. (4) Semantics : I look at contemporary expositions of Scotus' view that words signify things. (5) Metaethics and ethics : I briefly describe conflicting interpretations of Scotus' metaethics, and discuss whether Scotus should be thought of as adopting some kind of divine-command theory or not. I note too Scotus' claim that virtues and passions can be located in the will. (shrink)

The chapter shows that Scotus defends the view that ‘God exists’ is both metaphysically and logically necessary. Thus, Scotus maintains that denying that God exists involves asserting a contradiction, and that this can be shown to be the case. But while Scotus believes that it can be shown that there is a concept in virtue of which ‘God exists’ is self-evident, he also believes that human beings in the current run of things can have no access to the content of (...) this concept. The chapter also relates the claims that God is both metaphysically and logically necessary to the kind of causally dependent modalities that Scotus employs in his attempt to prove God’s existence. (shrink)

This chapter highlights a well-known problem for defenders of transubstantiation: namely, the apparent impossibility of supposing that accidents can be separated from their substance. It begins by arguing that Aquinas’s account of accidents, in which the truth-making function of accidents relative to their substances is understood in terms of the existence of such accidents, is highly susceptible to this kind of objection. The next section considers Giles of Rome’s attempts to overcome this worry, most specifically by distinguishing the existence (...) of an accident from its truth-making function, both of which are described. Giles maintains that the existence of an accident is to be identified with the existence of its substance. According to Scotus, this means that Giles is scarcely better off than Aquinas in defending himself against the worry about separated accidents, since a separated accident needs its own existence and, Scotus avers, there is no way for an accident to gain existence when separated. Scotus agrees with Giles that the truth-making function of accidents is to be distinguished from their existence, and holds that accidents, even when united to their substances, have their own proper existence. Overall, the tale is one of the increasing hypostatization of accidents in the light of pressures from Eucharistic doctrine. (shrink)

John of Ripa’s (fl. 1350s) Christology is highly unusual in the context of late medieval theology, since it is a form of the old “homo assumptus (assumed man)” Christology found in St. Augustine and the Victorines, but not generally in later theologians. Ripa explains the Incarnation by supposing that the divine essence is in some sense the form of the human nature, such that both “God” and the whole panoply of divine properties can be predicated of it. This move allows (...) Ripa to secure the truth of claims mandated by the authoritative Council of Chalcedon, such as “this human being is eternal.” Ripa appeals to a kind of relative identity to argue that the human being is (non-classically) identical with the divine person, such that positing something that “is God, but not the deity” does not result in an additional God or additional divine person. (shrink)

Giles of Rome systematically distinguishes two kinds of modes, which in this essay are labelled ‘conjunction modes’ and ‘category modes’. The latter - according to which a substance might have the mode of an accident, and an accident the mode of a substance - are ontologically innocent, and predications about them are parasitic on conjunction modes. Conjunction modes are features of the universe, and are deposited in their subjects by things united to but really distinct from their subjects. For example, (...) a quantity-thing, united to a substance, deposits a quantity-mode in the substance; and an existence-thing, united to a particular essence, deposits an existence-mode in the essence. In this essay, some attempt is made to defend this view against objections raised by Ockham. (shrink)

Giles of Rome systematically distinguishes two kinds of modes, which in this essay are labelled ‘conjunction modes’ and ‘category modes’. The latter - according to which a substance might have the mode of an accident, and an accident the mode of a substance - are ontologically innocent, and predications about them are parasitic on conjunction modes. Conjunction modes are features of the universe, and are deposited in their subjects by things united to but really distinct from their subjects. For example, (...) a quantity-thing, united to a substance, deposits a quantity-mode in the substance; and an existence-thing, united to a particular essence, deposits an existence-mode in the essence. In this essay, some attempt is made to defend this view against objections raised by Ockham. (shrink)

Corporate gifts – from philanthropic donations to individual reward schemes – attract considerable attention from scholars for the kinds of moral, economic and political logics that motivate them. This article considers the gifts that transnational corporations give to producers and draws from Marilyn Strathern’s writings on exchange and personhood in order to reverse dominant analyses. Focused on the gifting of gold coins to industrial workers at a global manufacturing unit in India, it brings together field-based observations with a diverse field (...) of literature on the gift in anthropology. Against an analysis that sees the corporate gift harnessed directly to a corporate bottom line, this article proposes an alternative accounting that uses Strathern’s notions of ‘elicitation’, ‘revelation’ and ‘detachment’ to explore the contours of knowledge, personhood and relationality in the transaction. If corporate gifts have powerful effects, the article argues, it is because they establish difference between the person of the giver and the person of the recipient and because they materialize actions, desires and capacities that accrue to and transform the recipients rather than simply because they are vessels for the interests of global capital. As social theory confronts the political economy of corporate giving, Strathern’s writings prompt provocative questions about agency and power that challenge the hegemonic status of the modern corporation. (shrink)

The synergies between viral and bacterial infections are well established. Most studies have been focused on the indirect mechanisms underlying this phenomenon, including immune modulation and alterations to the mucosal structures that promote pathogen outgrowth. A growing body of evidence implicates direct binding of virus to bacterial surfaces being an additional mechanism of synergy at the host–pathogen interface. These cross‐kingdom interactions enhance bacterial and viral adhesion and can alter tissue tropism. These bacterial–viral complexes play unique roles in pathogenesis and can (...) alter virulence potential. The bacterial–viral complexes may also play important roles in pathogen transmission. Additionally, the complexes are recognized by the host immune system in a distinct manner, thus presenting novel routes for vaccine development. These synergies are active for multiple species in both the respiratory and gastrointestinal tract, indicating that direct interactions between bacteria and virus to modulate host interactions are used by a diverse array of species. (shrink)

This article highlights five areas of Scotus’ philosophy that have recently been the subject of scholarly discussion. (1) Metaphysics: I outline the most current accounts of Scotus on individuation (thisness or haecceity) and the common nature. (2) Modal theory: I consider recent accounts both of Scotus’ innovations in spelling out the notion of the logically (and broadly logically) possible, and of his account of the independence of modality. (3) Cognitive psychology: I examine recent views of Scotus’ theory of intentionality and (...) the nature of mental content. (4) Semantics: I look at contemporary expositions of Scotus’ view that words signify things. (5) Metaethics and ethics: I briefly describe conflicting interpretations of Scotus’ metaethics, and discuss whether Scotus should be thought of as adopting some kind of divine‐command theory or not. I note too Scotus’ claim that virtues and passions can be located in the will. (shrink)

Advances in machine learning and the development of very large knowledge graphs have accompanied a proliferation of ontologies of many types and for many purposes. These ontologies are commonly developed independently, and as a result, it can be difficult to communicate about and between them. To address this difficulty of communication, ontologies and the communities they serve must agree on how their respective terminologies and formalizations relate to each other. The process of coming into accord and agreement is called “harmonization.” (...) The Ontology Summit 2021 examined the overall landscape of ontologies, the many kinds of ontology generation and harmonization, as well as the sustainability of ontologies. The Communiqué synthesizes and summarizes the findings of the summit as well as earlier summits on related issues. One of the major impediments to harmonization is the relatively poor quality of natural language definitions in many ontologies. The summit surveyed the state of the art in natural language definition development, based on lexicographic principles, as well as examples of ongoing projects that are explicitly dealing with harmonization and sustainability. (shrink)

I present the concept of cross-disciplinary legitimacy: the fieldwork which an anthropologist has done is considered legitimate fieldwork in another discipline as well. Also, I present a puzzle regarding how the anthropologist untrained in another discipline can do such fieldwork and a response.

Classically, Christians have professed the saving efficacy of the cross. Does Karl Rahner? Recent commentary on Foundations of Christian Faith has described Rahner as conflating “atonement” generally with penal substitutionary theories of a changing God, as ruling out the redemptive significance of Christ’s death, and as denigrating the normativity of Scripture in order to do so. This article responds to these claims, unfolding Rahner’s soteriology and arguing that he advances a theology of the cross which affirms its saving efficacy, including (...) in the last decade of his work. (shrink)

On the basis of what Aristotle says in the Posterior Analytics about how sciences are differentiated and about the impermissibility of ‘kind-crossing’, many commentators suppose that when it comes to his scientific practice, Aristotle treats the boundaries of the sciences as impermeable, so that if subject-matter X is the business of one science, it simply cannot be the business of another. I call this the impermeable boundary theory of the sciences: knowledge is divided into watertight compartments, determined by (...) their distinct genera, and what goes on in one compartment cannot turn up in another. I argue that, even if this is a correct account of Aristotle’s position in the Analytics, the view that he accepts the impermeable boundary theory when it comes to his scientific and philosophical work outside the Analytics is simply untenable. (shrink)

This paper provides a categorization of cross-modal experiences. There are myriad forms. Doing so allows us to think clearly about the nature of different cross-modal experiences and allows us to clearly formulate competing hypotheses about the kind of experiences involved in different cross-modal phenomena.

Schutz’s references to literature and arts in his theoretical works are manifold. But literature and theory are both a certain kind of a finite province of meaning, that means they are not easily accessible from the paramount reality of everyday life. Now there is another kind of referring to literature: metaphorizing it. Using it, as may be said with Lakoff and Johnson, to understand and to experience one kind of thing in terms of another. Literally metapherein means (...) “to carry over”. Metaphorizing in this view is then a specific kind of border-crossing between different provinces of meaning. That poses two questions: 1. What means finiteness of those provinces of meaning, what kind of border crossings are possible? What is the ground for metaphorizing meaning? 2. Could this concept used for founding a theory of the constitution of the societal and of society, that overcomes the dichotomy of structure/agency? These questions will be answered with one example in view: Schutz’ report to Kaufmann of his first visit of Husserl describing his experience as feeling like Wilhelm Meister at the Society of the Tower. In a first step this metaphor is presented together with some crumbs of metaphor theory. In a second step these crumbs will be connected to Husserl’s concept of experience. After developing a short overview over Schutz’ “finite provinces of meaning,” the relation of experience, metaphors to the intersubjectivity of these provinces in their dependence from writing and printing is discussed. (shrink)

In Concepts, Kinds, and Cognitive Development, Frank C. Keil provides a coherent account of how concepts and word meanings develop in children, adding to our understanding of the representational nature of concepts and word meanings at all ages. Keil argues that it is impossible to adequately understand the nature of conceptual representation without also considering the issue of learning. Weaving together issues in cognitive development, philosophy, and cognitive psychology, he reconciles numerous theories, backed by empirical evidence from nominal kinds studies, (...) natural-kinds studies, and studies of fundamental categorical distinctions. He shows that all this evidence, when put together, leads to a better understanding of semantic and conceptual development. The book opens with an analysis of the problems of modeling qualitative changes in conceptual development, investigating how concepts of natural kinds, nominal kinds, and artifacts evolve. The studies on nominal kinds document a powerful and unambiguous developmental pattern indicating a shift from a reliance on global tabulations of characteristic features to what appears to be a small set of defining ones. The studies on natural kinds document an analogous shift toward a core theory instead of simple definition. Both sets of studies are strongly supported by cross cultural data. While these patterns seem to suggest that the young child organizes concepts according to characteristic features, Keil argues that there is a framework of conceptual categories and causal beliefs that enables even very young children to understand kinds at a deeper, theoretically guided, level. This account suggests a new way of understanding qualitative change and carries strong implications for how concepts are represented at any point in development. A Bradford Book. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Missing the Cross?Types of the Passion in Early Christian ArtS. Mark Heim (bio)René Girard has frequently contended that the core of his best known theories is already contained in the Bible, that in the end he is "only a kind of exegete" (Girard and Treguer 1994, 196). To those who object that the Bible had to wait two thousand years to be read as he reads it, he (...) protests that this is a gross exaggeration: "three quarters of what I say can be found in Saint Augustine" (196). In the introduction to I See Satan Fall like Lightning, Girard puts it like this:The Passion accounts reveal a phenomenon that unbeknownst to us generates all human cultures and still warps our human vision in favor of all sorts of exclusions and scapegoating. If this analysis is true, the explanatory power of Jesus's death is much greater than we realize, and Paul's exalted idea of the cross as the source of all knowledge is anthropologically sound.(2001, 3)In other words, Girard's insight comes only in the train of revelation. The revelation in the biblical sources was not perfectly grasped in the religious traditions that flowed from them, and was frequently betrayed through the construction of sacrificial theologies. But Girard insists that its power was in significant measure perceived and effective from the beginning. His view of the meaning of the passion cannot be correct if he is the first one to see it. So it is no minor matter to ask whether in fact early Christians saw the connection of the cross with scapegoating that is so central for Girard.One point that appears to tell against Girard's case is the absence of images of the cross and crucifixion in the first four Christian centuries. A brutal realism about this specific event is the keystone of Girard's understanding of the passion narratives. The fact that the sight is literally hidden from view throughout this formative Christian period hardly appears consistent with his claims.There is a notable early Christian work of art, the so-called Brescia Casket (see fig. 1), that sheds some important light on the general question of the [End Page 183] representation of the passion and, even more dramatically, upon its interpretation in Girardian terms. The casket indicates that the widespread use of Old Testament types as representations of Christ, and specifically as representations of his passion, may partly explain the absence of literal depiction of the crucifixion. And the particular types involved fit extremely well with Girard's outlook. This essay draws out the connection—so far unremarked—between this significant work of early Christian art and Girard's reading of the passion. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 1.Brescia Casket. Ivory, late fourth century.Christ's passion and death were described in stark terms in the gospels and recounted explicitly from the beginning in the church's liturgy, teaching, and preaching. On this plane, there is no question of the centrality of the cross. Yet no literal depictions of the crucifixion survive in art from the first four Christian centuries. There is no entirely satisfactory explanation of why the cross would figure so centrally in Christian faith and worship, but be visually absent. Representations of Jesus in early Christian art most often display a healer, wonderworker, or teacher. In fact, the early centuries offer an odd inversion in creed and art. Early creeds focus on Jesus's beginnings and endings, "skipping right from 'born of the Virgin Mary' to 'suffered under Pontius Pilate,' with no mention of Jesus's life and work, while the art appears to take an opposite tack" (Jensen 2000, 131–32). Perhaps the frequent Christian use [End Page 184] of images of anchors and ship's masts, or of the chi-rho sign, served as their image of the cross. Perhaps the reality the scriptures described was too gruesome to easily picture, too readily ridiculed by outsiders, or too awesome and mysterious to present directly. Perhaps, in a persecuted and at times martyred church, such a sign would be realistically terrifying to many and dangerously seductive to some.That the... (shrink)

Nobody doubts that culture plays a decisive role in understanding human forms of life. But it is unclear how this decisive role should be integrated into a comprehensive explanatory model of human behaviour that brings together naturalistic and social-scientific perspectives. Cultural difference, cultural learning, cultural determination do not mix well with the factors that are normally given full explanatory value in the more naturalistic approaches to the study of human behaviour. My purpose in this paper is to alert to some (...) of the theoretical vulnerabilities or concerns that the cross-cultural study of mind and behaviour might entail. I classify these theoretical concerns into three, loosely defined, categories: epistemological, ontological and ethical. The first have to do with what in anthropology was once labelled as ‘butterfly collecting’. What kind of supplementary, or additional, general theoretical knowledge do we produce when we add to the research different, particularistic, culturally determined, ways of knowing? Ontological concerns refer to the underlying reality that those ways of knowing are meant to disclose. If there are so many ways of knowing the world, where is the reality to be known? Ethical concerns are those entailed in the forms of ‘othering’ that unqualified cross-cultural research is likely to produce in research participants. (shrink)

‘Religion’ has been subjected to two kinds of reduction: one from the various branches of religious studies, the other being the mutual ‘reduction’ among religions. We advocate a cross-cultural religiology and try to take a middle path between reductionism and anti-reductionism, responding to both kinds of reduction separately. As for the former reduction, we agree with a moderate reduction of religion by various religious disciplines on the one hand, and on the other hand, we propose to respect the religious whole (...) as an integrate human activity, and try to learn to face and study religion with a holistic attitude and method. For the latter reduction, we propose three points to overcome the merely reductive cognitive approach in inter-religious understanding without falling into some kind of anti-intellectualism. Firstly, we insist that we should face the other religions with a pluralistic confidence without giving up understanding, and engage both ‘dialogical dialogue’ and ‘dialectical dialogue’ with other religions. Secondly, we advocate learning from the wisdom of Buddha, Confucius and Jesus, giving priority to practice, and being concerned about our most urgent life practice of the moment. Thirdly, we propose that cross-cultural research can be carried out thematically, which is exemplified with the author’s cross-cultural research on ‘the other shore’. Contribution: In the field of religious studies, there is constant dispute between reductionism and anti-reductionism. This article tries to place cross-cultural religiology between reductionism and anti-reductionism, avoid the debate between the two, emphasise the integrity of religion as a whole human activity, and propose some practical and usable methods for cross-cultural religiology, hoping to have some inspiration for academic colleagues. (shrink)

A cross-cultural analysis of trust and cooperation networks in Northern Ghana (NGHA) and Oaxaca (OAX) was carried out by means of ego networks and interviews. These regions were chosen because both are inhabited by several ethnic groups, thus providing a good opportunity to test the cultural group selection hypothesis. Against the predictions of this approach, we found that in both regions cooperation is grounded in personal trust groups, and that social cohesion depends on these emotional bonds. Moreover, in agreement with (...) Fiske's notion of “evolved proclivities”, we also found two distinct kinds of trust networks, one for each region, which vary in terms of the degree of ethnic interrelation. This pattern suggests that social cohesion increases when environmental resources are scarce. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Crossing Borders: Love between Women in Medieval French and Arabic LiteraturesCary Howie (bio)Sahar Amer, Crossing Borders: Love between Women in Medieval French and Arabic Literatures. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2008, xii + 254 pp.Sahar Amer’s Crossing Borders adds to the expanding bibliography on medieval sexualities by showing the resonances between certain female same-sex relationships in medieval French literature and analogous, though generally more explicit, (...) relationships between women in the medieval Arabic tradition. In the process, sexuality becomes a way of talking about the porous boundaries that constitute the field of Old French, and perhaps even Western, literature as such.Amer’s book couldn’t have arrived at a better time, as Sarkozy’s French government once again, in the name of French values, intervenes in the debates around religion and clothing in the public sphere, debates in which the old divides between France and its constitutive others—in this case, certain kinds of Islam and certain kinds of women— have once again come to the fore. By proposing that “medieval French writing is essentially a hybrid, cross-cultural project” (163), Amer contributes not just to the emerging sense of the Middle Ages’ postcoloniality (as articulated by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Sharon Kinoshita, among others) but also to the work being done by intellectual historians and cultural theorists such as Joan Scott and Diane Rubenstein on the fantastic investments that take place within and around French universalism (which could be said to inform the idea of the literary no less than the idea of the citizen).Crossing Borders begins with the notion of borders as “fluid spaces of cultural exchange, adaptation, and collaboration” (ix), and it is the emphasis on a more general sense of cultural exchange, more than the fact of borders per se, that will permeate the chapters that follow. (In fact, the border, like “the lesbian,” Amer’s polemical term of choice for the women she describes, may be important for her argument precisely insofar as it resists visibility, as it remains to some extent difficult to locate.) Amer’s reading of Old French texts, in dialogue with a handful of medieval Arabic narratives and erotic compilations, proceeds from an understanding of medieval culture in which there is “a continuity rather than a rupture between medieval and modern conceptions of alternative [End Page 156] sexualities” (9), and in which it is possible to argue for influences that are tough, if not impossible, to trace empirically. According to this logic, ideas and stories may have circulated “next to” more tangible material goods taken to and from the Arab Islamicate world (13), and French authors may have “culled some elements from Arabic material and wove[n] them into a literary fabric to suit their audience’s sensibilities” (163). This attentiveness to what “may have” happened (e.g., 44, 110) is one of the signature gestures of Amer’s critical poetics, which I am tempted to describe as an imaginative historicism, committed at once to the explanatory power of historical context and to what Amer will repeatedly call the “imagination of the audience” (e.g., 79).After an initial chapter outlining this “cross-cultural” poetics of contextualization and imaginative investment, chapter 2, “Crossing Linguistic Borders,” is dedicated to seven stanzas of a late twelfth-century poem, Étienne de Fougères’s Livre des manières, in which a long description is given of women who go “against Nature” by “join[ing] shield to shield without a lance” (32). Amer reads these military metaphors for female homoeroticism in light of Arabic sources including, for example, al-Jurjani’s eleventh-century Anthology of Metonymic Devices, in which one of the cited commonplaces observes, “They [lesbians] manifest a war in which there is no spear-thrusting” (36). Most provocatively, Amer argues for the Arabic provenance of two otherwise untranslatable words in Étienne’s text, “trutennes,” which she traces to an Arabic root meaning “the mons of the beloved” (40), and “eu,” which she interprets as an orgasmic onomatopoeia. From mons to moans, the “medieval French literary lesbian” is a condensation of forms and fantasies—and noises—that come from before and beyond medieval France. In fact, the... (shrink)

This study investigates processing of interrogative filler-gap dependencies in which the filler integration site or gap is not directly subcategorized by the verb. This is the case when the wh-filler is a structural adjunct such as how or when rather than subject or object. Two self-paced reading experiments in English and Slovenian provide converging cross-linguistic evidence that wh-adjuncts elicit a kind of memory storage cost similar to that previously shown in the literature for wh-arguments. Experiment 1 investigates the storage (...) costs elicited by the adjunct when in Slovenian, and Experiment 2 the storage costs elicited by how quickly and why in English. The results support the class of theories of storage costs based on the metric in terms of incomplete phrase structure rules or incomplete syntactic head predictions. We also demonstrate that the endpoint of the storage cost for a wh-adjunct filler provides valuable processing evidence for its base structural position, the identification of which remains a rather murky issue in current grammatical research. (shrink)

This essay briefly explores the phenomenon of nepantla in three representative cross-cultural encounters, in both initial and later phases: Spain-Latin America, England-India, and the West-Japan. Nepantla is a mode of in-betweenness rooted in the historical encounter between cultures and leading to mediation of various kinds. For Latin America, the essay focuses on Columbus, the Cortés-Moctezuma encounter, the Aztec-Franciscan dialogues of 1524, Gabriel García Márquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa. For India, the essay comments on the East India Company, English education in (...) India, Lord Macaulay, Dean Mahomet, Rabindranath Tagore, Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul, and a number of other writers from the early, mid and late twentieth century. For Japan, the essay considers, first, Japanese reactions to missionary activities in the sixteenth century, then the opening up of Japan in the nineteenth century, the Meiji Restoration and its literature, and in particular authors like Fukuzawa, Sōseki, Endō, Kawabata, and Ōe. The essay argues, finally, that nepantla is a useful and dynamic approach to intercultural encounters that complements approaches indicated by terms like colonialism, imperialism, contact zones, hybridity or métissage, liminality, de-colonization, or post-coloniality. (shrink)

The passion narratives have often been read in ways that reinforce victimization of abused persons, particularly women, who accept any kind of suffering as their way of “carrying the cross” in the footsteps of Jesus. Yet these narratives can also help to galvanize communities of believers toward transformative change. The Johannine Jesus, who goes to calamity's depths for his friends, is one image that offers liberative possibilities.

Some philosophers argue that we should eschew cross-explanatory integrations of mechanistic, dynamicist, and psychological explanations in cognitive science, because, unlike integrations of mechanistic explanations, they do not deliver genuine, cognitive scientific explanations. Here I challenge this claim by comparing the theoretical virtues of both kinds of explanatory integrations. I first identify two theoretical virtues of integrations of mechanistic explanations—unification and greater qualitative parsimony—and argue that no cross-explanatory integration could have such virtues. However, I go on to argue that this is (...) only a problem for those who think that cognitive science aims to specify one fundamental structure responsible for cognition. For those who do not, cross-explanatory integration will have at least two theoretical virtues to a greater extent than integrations of mechanistic explanations: explanatory depth and applicability. I conclude that one’s views about explanatory integration in cognitive science cannot be segregated from one’s views about the explanatory task of cognitive science. (shrink)

Research on cultural transmission among Americans has established a bias for transmitting stories that have disgusting elements. Conceived of as a cultural evolutionary force, this phenomenon is one type of emotional selection. In a series of online studies with Americans and Indians we investigate whether there are cultural differences in emotional selection, such that the transmission process favours different kinds of content in different countries. The first study found a bias for disgusting content among Americans but not among Indians. Four (...) subsequent studies focused on how country interacts with kind of emotional content in reactions to transmission of stories or information. Whereas Indian participants, compared to Americans, tended to be less interested in, and excited by, transmission of stories and news involving common disgust-elicitors, the opposite pattern held for transmission of happy surprises and good news. We discuss various possible explanations and implications. (shrink)

Generic noun phrases (e.g. 'bats live in caves') provide a window onto human concepts. They refer to categories as 'kinds rather than as sets of individuals. Although kind concepts are often assumed to be universal, generic expression varies considerably across languages. For example, marking of generics is less obligatory and overt in Mandarin than in English. How do universal conceptual biases interact with language-specific differences in how generics are conveyed? In three studies, we examined adults' generics in English and (...) Mandarin Chinese. The data include child-directed speech from caregivers interacting with their 19-23-month-old children. Examples of generics include: 'baby birds eat worms' (English) and da4 lao3shu3 yao3 bu4 yao3 ren2 ('do big rats bite people or not?') (Mandarin). Generic noun phrases were reliably identified in both languages, although they occurred more than twice as frequently in English as in Mandarin. In both languages, generic usage was domain-specific, with generic noun phrases used most frequently to refer to animals. This domain effect was specific to generics, as non-generic noun phrases were used most frequently for artifacts in both languages. In sum, we argue for universal properties of 'kind' concepts that are expressed with linguistically different constructions. However, the frequency of expression may be influenced by the manner in which generics are expressed in the language. (shrink)

Experiencing a stimulus in one sensory modality is often associated with an experience in another sensory modality. For instance, seeing a lemon might produce a sensation of sourness. This might indicate some kind of cross-modal correspondence between vision and gustation. The aim of the current study was to provide explore whether such cross-modal correspondences influence cross-modal integration during perceptual learning. To that end, we conducted 2 experiments. Using a speeded classification task, Experiment 1 established a cross-modal correspondence between visual (...) lightness and the frequency of an auditory tone. Using a short-term priming procedure, Experiment 2 showed that manipulation of such cross-modal correspondences led to the creation of a crossmodal unit regardless of the nature of the correspondence (i.e., congruent, Experiment 2a or incongruent, Experiment 2b). However, a comparison of priming-effects sizes suggested that cross-modal correspondences modulate cross-modal integration during learning and thus leading to new learned units that have different stability over time. We discuss the implications of our results for the relation between cross-modal correspondence and perceptual learning in the context of a Bayesian explanation of cross-modal correspondences. (shrink)

Nobody doubts that culture plays a decisive role in understanding human forms of life. But it is unclear how this decisive role should be integrated into a comprehensive explanatory model of human behaviour that brings together naturalistic and social-scientific perspectives. Cultural difference, cultural learning, cultural determination do not mix well with the factors that are normally given full explanatory value in the more naturalistic approaches to the study of human behaviour. My purpose in this paper is to alert to some (...) of the theoretical vulnerabilities or concerns that the cross-cultural study of mind and behaviour might entail. I classify these theoretical concerns into three, loosely defined, categories: epistemological, ontological and ethical. The first have to do with what in anthropology was once labelled as ‘butterfly collecting’. What kind of supplementary, or additional, general theoretical knowledge do we produce when we add to the research different, particularistic, culturally determined, ways of knowing? Ontological concerns refer to the underlying reality that those ways of knowing are meant to disclose. If there are so many ways of knowing the world, where is the reality to be known? Ethical concerns are those entailed in the forms of ‘othering’ that unqualified cross-cultural research is likely to produce in research participants. (shrink)

Cross-cultural communication is about generating dialogical positions across cultural barriers. Communication is achieved when participants are able to construct meaning across varied sign systems. Oral communication makes use of a wide range of signs that contribute to make meaning, from eye contact to gestures and speech. In written/printed communication, together with the reproduction of visual images through painting, photography, etc., the most important resource is the textual format. Texts are grounded on a cognitive deictic basis and work alongside the cause-effect (...) relationship that links events in human working memory. This relationship frequently posits a hierarchical dependency between the understanding of visual images, textuality and narrativity. Although texts are vehicles of contextualized information and cultural positions are often presented in a historiographical way, culture is not just about textuality; it is also about multimodality, that is, the use of symbolic forms that employ simultaneously several material-semiotic resources to create a kind of common framework of socially acceptable behaviours and customs which arise both from individual personal experiences and from shared cultural and ethical values. Signs areused to represent these values and, in turn, these representations affect their further emotional interiorization. This creates particular strong moments of remembrance and recollection in human memory. In addition, the production, distribution and reception of culture has always been dependent on changing material formats and technologies, from manuscripts to printed books, from mural painting to photography, and from architecture to virtual recreations on a computer screen. In recent years, the interest in intertextual and intermedial configurations is mostly due to the growth of hypermedia paradigms, and is reflected in the increasing number of disciplinary publications and conferences devoted to the topic. This paper shall explore the reasons behind a renewed interest in intertextual and intermedial manifestations in cross-cultural communication. (shrink)

Organisms leave a variety of traces in the fossil record. Among these traces, vertebrate and invertebrate paleontologists conventionally recognize a distinction between the remains of an organism’s phenotype and the remains of an organism’s life activities. The same convention recognizes body fossils as biological structures and trace fossils as geological objects. This convention explains some curious practices in the classification, as with the distinction between taxa for trace fossils and for tracemakers. I consider the distinction between “parallel taxonomies,” or parataxonomies, (...) which privileges some kinds of fossil taxa as “natural” and others as “artificial.” The motivations for and consequences of this practice are inconsistent. By comparison, I examine an alternative system of classification used by paleobotanists that regards all fossil taxa as “artificially” split. While this system has the potential to inflate the number of taxa with which paleontologists work, the system offers greater consistency than conventional practices. Weighing the strengths and weaknesses of each system, I recommend that paleontologists should adopt the paleobotanical system more broadly. (shrink)

Recent trends in psychiatry involve a transition from categorical to dimensional frameworks, in which the boundary between health and pathology is understood as a difference in degree rather than as a difference in kind. A major tenet of dimensional approaches is that no qualitative distinction can be made between health and pathology. As a consequence, these approaches tend to characterize such a threshold as pragmatic or conventional in nature. However, dimensional approaches to psychopathology raise several epistemological and ontological issues. (...) First, we review major sources of evidence usually recruited in support of the dimensional trend (focusing on clinical observation and biological data), and we show that these are connected to different conceptualizations of how dimensional traits extend across health and pathology. Second, we criticize two unquestioned assumptions that stand at the core of the dimensional trend: a) that there is continuity from health to pathology at the symptomatic level; b) that such continuity reflects an underlying continuity in the genetic liability for pathological conditions. Third, we argue against the idea of a conventional threshold by showing that such a view implies a linear relationship between the genotype and the phenotype. Fourth, drawing on epigenetics and developmental biology, we offer a characterization of mental disorders as stable and dynamic constellations of multi-level variables that differ qualitatively from ‘healthy states’. We conclude by showing that our account has several theoretical advantages over both categorical and dimensional approaches. Notably, it provides crucial insights into psychological development over time and individual differences, with major implications in terms of intervention and clinical decision-making. (shrink)

Four different kinds of grammars that can define crossing dependencies in human language are compared here: (i) context sensitive rewrite grammars with rules that depend on context, (ii) matching grammars with constraints that filter the generative structure of the language, (iii) copying grammars which can copy structures of unbounded size, and (iv) generating grammars in which crossing dependencies are generated from a finite lexical basis. Context sensitive rewrite grammars are syntactically, semantically and computationally unattractive. Generating grammars have a (...) collection of nice properties that ensure they define only “mildly context sensitive” languages, and Joshi has proposed that human languages have those properties too. But for certain distinctive kinds of crossing dependencies in human languages, copying or matching analyses predominate. Some results relevant to the viability of mildly context sensitive analyses and some open questions are reviewed. (shrink)

The organizational account of biological functions interprets functions as contributions of a trait to the maintenance of the organization that, in turn, maintains the trait. As has been recently argued, however, the account seems unable to provide a unified grounding for both intra- and cross-generation functions, since the latter do not contribute to the maintenance of the same organization which produces them. To face this ‘ontological problem’, a splitting account has been proposed, according to which the two kinds of functions (...) require distinct organizational definitions. In this article, we propose a solution for the ontological problem, by arguing that intra- and cross-generation functions can be said to contribute in the same way to the maintenance of the biological organization, characterized in terms of organizational self-maintenance. As a consequence, we suggest maintaining a unified organizational account of biological functions. (shrink)

Abstract The phenomenological approach to racialization needs to be supplemented by a hermeneutics that examines the history of the various categories in terms of which people see and have seen race. An investigation of this kind suggests that instead of the rigid essentialism that is normally associated with the history of racism, race predominantly operates as a border concept, that is to say, a dynamic fluid concept whose core lies not at the center but at its edges. I illustrate (...) this by an examination of the history of the distinctions between the races as it is revealed in legal, scientific, and philosophical sources. I focus especially on racial distinctions in the United States and on the way that the impact of miscegenation was negotiated leading to the so-called one-drop rule. (shrink)