Transformative unlearning: safety, discernment and communities of learningThis paper aims to stimulate awareness about the intellectual and emotional work of ‘unlearning’ in knowledge workers in the emerging learning age. The importance of providing a safe space for dialogue to promote transformative learning, through building ‘communities of learning’, is highlighted. Unlearning is conceptualized within a transformative education paradigm, one whose primary orientation is discernment, a personal growth process involving the activities of receptivity, recognition and grieving. The author utilizes (...) the metaphor of an unfolding spiral path to explore her experience of needing to ‘unlearn’ a trusted nursing practice prior to ‘learning’ new best caring practices related to infant sleep positions. Macro and micro approaches to facilitating unlearning in organizations, in learners and in nurses are suggested. (shrink)

Unlearning is a recurrent theme in Japan. To further understanding of what this entails, we focus on the view of learning laid out by a revered 13th century Zen-inspired playwright. For Zeami, learning involved a movement from the acquisition to unlearning of skills, punctuated by an experience of mushin, followed by creative reemergence. To deepen understandings of this unlearning model, we turn to draw comparison with recent discussions in the Western literature, focusing on Double-Loop Learning and Learning (...) III, both inspired by Bateson. Learning III, which Bateson utilized several Zen references to explicate, appears to gesture towards the alternative punctuation of learning envisaged by Zeami, although differences remain. We then shift to highlight empirical work on contemporary Japanese schooling, highlighting practices which suggest elements of a Zeami-like worldview continue to live on in Japan’s learning culture. Unlearning, when viewed as a living tradition embedded in culture, rather than merely a premodern past or future philosophical possibility, help sets the stage for a transnational, transdisciplinary dialogue on how we learn. We perform our own extended dialogue that led to this piece, a mode of engagement we view as methodological innovation, as we work to unlearn our past parochialisms. (shrink)

This article examines how we as researchers in a constantly changing world can challenge ourselves by ‘unlearning’ what we know, and perhaps take for granted, about children. What happens, for example, to the notion of the child in a world of transformation? To address these questions, I argue that we need to explore the act of unlearning both imagined and ‘real’ children. The act of unlearning encourages confusion, uncertainty, courage, and changes of mind as a way of (...) learning anew. Through explorations of empirical examples from research with and about children, issues such as the no-where child, the now-here child, agency, numerical age, vulnerability, and competence are discussed. The analyses do not offer a coherent alternative. The purpose is rather to shake things up and create openings and possibilities. (shrink)

"After observing the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt articulated her controversial concept of the "banality of evil", thereby one of the most chilling and divisive moral questions of the twentieth century: How can genocidal acts be carried out by non-psychopathic people? By revealing the full complexity of the trial with reasoning that defied prevailing attitudes, Arendt became the object of severe and often slanderous criticism... [This book] explores the ways in which [Arendt] "unlearned" recognized trends and patterns - both (...) philosophical and cultural - to establish a theoretical praxis all her own. Through an analysis of the social context and intellectual influences - Karl Jaspers, Walter Benjamin, and Martin Heidegger - that helped shape Arendt's process, Knott has formed a historically engaged and incisive contribution to Arendt's legacy."--Jacket. (shrink)

In The Unlearned Lessons of the Twentieth Century , the sequel to Icarus Fallen, published by ISI Books in 2003, Chantal Delsol maintains that the age in which we live—late modernity—calls into question most of the truths and beliefs bequeathed to us from the past. Yet it clings to a central belief in the dignity of the human person, the cornerstone of the doctrine of universal human rights to which even secular Westerners still cling. At the same time, the process (...) of dehumanization so evident in the ideologies and totalitarianism of the twentieth century remains at work. Delsol charges that it is not enough to proclaim human rights as a sort of incantation but that, rather, one must understand what sort of being the human person is if humans are to be genuinely respected. In other words, if the philosophy of human rights is to form the basis of Western culture, it must rest on a truer understanding of the human person than that which is taught—both explicitly and implicitly—in the contemporary West. (shrink)

We regret to inform our readers that Marianne (Tracy) Paget died of cancer in December 1989. She continued her work virtually until her death. She left a manuscript in which she writes about her own experiences with cancer. The Text from Life, which her colleagues and friends will have published. She was a courageous and remarkable scholar, a life long friend of this journal, and a dedicated phenomenologist. She will be greatly missed. The Editor.

In these three Tanner lectures, distinguished ethical theorist Allan Gibbard explores the nature of normative thought and the bases of ethics. In the first lecture he explores the role of intuitions in moral thinking and offers a way of thinking about the intuitive method of moral inquiry that both places this activity within the natural world and makes sense of it as an indispensable part of our lives as planners. In the second and third lectures he takes up the kind (...) of substantive ethical inquiry he has described in the first lecture, asking how we might live together on terms that none of us could reasonably reject. Since working at cross purposes loses fruits that might stem from cooperation, he argues, any consistent ethos that meets this test would be, in a crucial way, utilitarian. It would reconcile our individual aims to establish, in Kant's phrase, a "kingdom of ends." The volume also contains an introduction by Barry Stroud, the volume editor, critiques by Michael Bratman (Stanford University), John Broome (Oxford University), and F. M. Kamm (Harvard University), and Gibbard's responses. (shrink)

(1993). Reconciling physics and the order‐producing universe: Evolutionary competence and the new vision of the second law. World Futures: Vol. 36, Evolutionary Consciousness, pp. 165-179.

The aim of this book is to show why we should hold 'unlearning' to be a crucial ‘capability’ _in_ and _for_ education at this point in our history. The author argues that it enables to pose and take seriously the problem of ‘governmentality’: How are we governed — individually and collectively? Do we wish to be governed in this or that way, to this or that extent, so much, so little, or so badly, under these or those conditions? Or (...) do we wish instead to be self-governed and thereby practice our freedom and be more autonomous, relatively speaking? As such, it puts in question in a radical way the twin pillars of the so-called ‘contemporary consensus’ — ‘representative democracy’ and ‘capitalism’ — and makes it possible to take a critical measure of their limits, insufficiencies, and irremediable deficits. (shrink)

Bayesian modeling techniques have proven remarkably successful at representing rational constraints on agents’ degrees of belief. Yet Frank Arntzenius’s “Shangri-La” example shows that these techniques fail for stories involving forgetting. This paper presents a formalized, expanded Bayesian modeling framework that generates intuitive verdicts about agents’ degrees of belief after losing information. The framework’s key result, called Generalized Conditionalization, yields applications like a version of Bas van Fraassen’s Reflection Principle for forgetting. These applications lead to questions about why agents should coordinate (...) their doxastic states over time, and about the commitments an agent can make by assigning degrees of belief. (shrink)

༄༅ REVIEWS ༄༅ -/- « An exhilarating and lucid introduction to Buddhist thought. Sativihari begins with a sophisticated reading of the Four Noble Truths as a sacred poem and ends with a plea for more compassionate culture and politics. In between there is wisdom spiked on every page. »【Mark Kingwell, Department of Philosophy, University of Toronto】 -/- « I am deeply grateful for Rishi Sativihari's achievement in ‘Unlearning The Basics.’ Often, attempts to help Westerners understand Buddhism rely too heavily (...) on idealist philosophies, leading to a kind of mystification of the four noble truths. Because Dr. Sativihari appeals consistently to experience and is sophisticated in his understanding of Western philosophy and theology, he can present the four noble truths with profound spiritual realism. The work is very reader-friendly, showing the fruits of extensive reflection on pedagogical practice. There is genuine spiritual maturity at work in this text. »【Gilles Mongeau S.J., Regis College, University of Toronto】 -/- « ‘Unlearning The Basics’ might be understood as a sequel to the classic ‘Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind’ : gently nudging us back to what we thought we knew and helping us to discover something fresh and real — something suddenly self-evident. A rare and precious achievement. »【Kurt Spellmeyer, Department of English, Rutgers University】 -/- ༄༅༅༅༅ FROM THE FOREWORD BY MU SEONG ༄༅༅༅༅༅ « It is axiomatic that the teachings of the Buddha have found their integrity and authenticity in each generation in the lives as well as interpretative efforts of a handful of practitioners and thinkers. Rishi Sativihari’s is one of these new voices and it’s a pleasure to sit back and listen to it. Sativihari’s argument that — “the four truths were given in a certain order, not only for the sake of creating a logical system of thought, but because experientially they emerged in that way in the Buddha’s life, building progressively on one another” — never rang more true. » « If there is any “system” at all in the Buddha’s teachings, the Four Noble Truths are that system. These truths (or reflections, if you will) are secular, etiological, and universally human. They are free of the ontological promiscuities and speculative metaphysics in which so many religious systems get bogged down. Unlearning the Basics remains impeccably faithful to these orientations of the Four Noble Truths and this orientation is what makes his book an exciting read. » « This book is in many ways a model for how the teachings of the Buddha could and should be talked about in a psychologically mature and sophisticated manner, in a way congruent with recent findings in brain research and cognitive science. Sativihari touches upon these researches and findings to supplement his own innovative insights into what the Buddha was trying to convey to his audience in his explication of the Four Noble Truths. Sativihari’s commitment to using Pali and Sanskrit words as his primary frame of reference, rather than their often garbled and confusing English translations, lends a much-appreciated gravitas to his presentation. » « This is an important book… It adds much to the current discourses and also brings us much closer to a more nuanced understanding of the Buddha’s own thought processes. »【Mu Soeng, Scholar in Residence, Barre Center for Buddhist Studies】 . (shrink)

At the beginning of the Posterior Analytics, Aristotle says that “all learning and all rational teaching arises from previously existing knowledge”. How, then, can we have any knowledge? If all our knowledge is acquired by learning that depends on previously existing knowledge, then we would have an infinite regress of still prior knowledge, with the result that we cannot learn anything without having learned something else first. If we reject this possibility, then the only one that remains is that we (...) have some knowledge that we did not learn. This might happen in two ways: either we have some knowledge that we never acquired at all, or we have some knowledge that we acquired but without learning it. We would have knowledge that we never acquired if there was never a time at which we did not have it (which would entail, of course, that we were born with it). Plato held that we do have such knowledge, and indeed that all the genuine knowledge that we have is innate in this way. Aristotle, however, denies that we have innate knowledge (for instance at An. Post. II.19, 100a10). Since he nevertheless does think that we have knowledge, he must think that we have some knowledge which we did not acquire by learning. In fact, he does present such a view in Posterior Analytics II.19, where he claims that our knowledge of the principles ( ¢¡¤£¦¥¨§ ) of sciences comes to us through perception and induction and that the state of knowledge of them is “intelligence” or “thought” ( © ). Aristotle says explicitly that in this process the mind is passive; therefore, it is reasonable for us to regard it as not being a kind of learning (or at any rate as a kind of rational learning). Thus, Aristotle’s overall position is consistent. (shrink)

In celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Beauchamp and Childress’s Principles of Biomedical Ethics, a review is undertaken to compare the lists of principles in various bioethical theories to determine the extent to which the various lists can be reconciled. Included are the single principle theories of utilitarianism, libertarianism, Hippocratism, and the theories of Pellegrino, Engelhardt, The Belmont Report, Beauchamp and Childress, Ross, Veatch, and Gert. We find theories all offering lists of principles numbering from one to (...) ten. Many of the differences can be reconciled, but some critical differences remain. (shrink)

_Learning to Unlearn: Decolonial Reflections from Eurasia and the Americas _is a complex, multisided rethinking of the epistemic matrix of Western modernity and coloniality from the position of border epistemology. Colonial and imperial differences are the two key concepts to understanding how the logic of coloniality creates ontological and epistemic exteriorities. Being at once an enactment of decolonial thinking and an attempt to define its main grounds, mechanisms, and concepts, the book shifts the politics of knowledge from “studying the other” (...) toward “the thinking other”. Addressing areas as diverse as the philosophy of higher education, gender, citizenship, human rights, and indigenous agency, and providing fascinating and little-known examples of decolonial thinking, education, and art, Madina V. Tlostanova and Walter D. Mignolo deconstruct the modern architecture of knowledge—its production and distribution as manifested in the corporate university. In addition, the authors dwell on and define the echoing global decolonial sensibilities as expressed in the Americas and in peripheral Eurasia. The book is an important addition to the emerging transoceanic inquiries that introduce decolonial thought and non-Western border epistemologies not only to update or transform disciplines but also to act and think decolonially in the global futures to come. (shrink)

Margaret Archer and Pierre Bourdieu have advanced what seem at first sight to be incompatible theories of human agency. While Archer places heavy stress on conscious reflexive deliberation and the consequent choices of identity and projects that individuals make, Bourdieu's concept of habitus places equally heavy stress on the role of social conditioning in determining our behavior, and downplays the contribution of conscious deliberation. Despite this, I argue that these two approaches, with some modification, can be reconciled in a single (...) emergentist theory of human action that is sketched out in this article. It examines how human dispositions and our reflexive decisions are related to the determination of human action, linking dispositions and decisions to their neural base in human physiology and to the social factors that influence them. As a result, it argues, we can see human action as the outcome of a continuous interaction between dispositions and reflexivity. The article goes on to relate this explanation back to Bourdieu's concept of the habitus and Archer's account of reflexivity. It argues that the weaknesses in Bourdieu's theory of action can be resolved by a reasonable reinterpretation of the habitus that makes it consistent with the emergentist theory and creates space for human choices as well as social influences on our behavior. This opens up a role for the sort of reflexive deliberations advocated by Archer and thus to a reconciliation of the key contributions of both Archer and Bourdieu. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article argues against Giorgio Agamben’s use of Paul’s Epistles to align Walter Benjamin’s critique of violence with antinomian theology and anarcholibertarian politics. It focuses specifically on Benjamin’s critical inheritance of Hermann Cohen’s concepts of unintentional sin and atonement to show that he reactivates a prophetic register of education in Jewish religious ethics. The article contends that these normative and narrative elements of Talmud Torah refute a reductive view of Jewish legalism in confronting the cultural afterlives of historical violence. (...) This argument not only uncouples the reception of Benjamin’s theopolitics from contemporary continental philosophy’s revivals of Pauline messianism, but also contributes to a plural field of political theology emerging beyond the scope of secularized concepts of governance derived from a spurious universalism. This article proposes that the nonidentity between human law and divine justice can orient necessary resistance to justifications for and acts of state violence committed in a community’s name. (shrink)

Recent attempts to reconcile the ontic and epistemic approaches to explanation propose that our best explanations simply fulfill epistemic and ontic norms simultaneously. I aim to upset this armistice. Epistemic norms of attaining general and systematic explanations are, I argue, autonomous of ontic norms: they cannot be fulfilled simultaneously or in simple conjunction with ontic norms, and plausibly have priority over them. One result is that central arguments put forth by ontic theorists against epistemic theorists are revealed as not (...) only question-begging, but ultimately self-defeating. Another result is that a more nuanced reconciliation of the epistemic and ontic views is required: we should regard good explanatory practice as a dynamic process with distinct phases of epistemic and ontic success. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Reconciling Yogas: Haribhadra's Collection of Views on YogaFujinaga SinReconciling Yogas: Haribhadra's Collection of Views on Yoga. By Christopher Key Chapple, with a new translation of Haribhadra's Yogadṛṣṭisamuccaya by Christopher Key Chapple and John Thomas Casey. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. Pp. 170.Among the Jaina philosophers, Haribhadra (700-770) must be one of the most studied by both Indian and non-Indian scholars, with examinations of his work (...) going back to the early days of research on Indian thought in Europe. For example, Ṣaḍdar-śanasamuccaya, with introduction and notes by F. L. Pullé, was published in Florence in 1887. Traditionally, over one thousand books are attributed to Haribhadra. Besides commentaries on the āgamas, his writings also cover almost all other aspects of Jaina philosophy. The Yogadḍḍḍisamuccaya (hereafter YDS), as the title suggests, discusses aspects of yoga in Jainism with reference to other schools of Indian philosophy. The book under review here, Reconciling Yogas: Haribhadra's Collection of Views on Yoga, by Christopher Key Chapple, consists of seven chapters of essays on the YDS and its author, a new English translation with Sanskrit text, and notes, a bibliography, and an index.In the first chapter, which deals with the writings of Haribhadra, especially the YDS, the author reviews opinions on his dates and agrees with the view that he lived [End Page 681] in the eighth century. Chapter 2 discusses the relationship between Haribhadra and Patañjali as well as their thoughts concerning yoga. This chapter is probably the most important one in the book. Two "lost yogas," the Vedāntin Yoga of Bhagavaddasa and the Buddhist Yoga of Bhāskara, are explored in chapter 3. These are identified, as the chapter title indicates, as Vedānta yoga and Buddhist yoga.In chapter 4, on the philosophical background of the various yogas, the author points out that although Haribhadra was familiar with the thought of other schools, he proclaimed the Jaina tenet of realism and criticized Buddhist momentariness and Vedāntin monism. These criticisms may be related to the two yogas dealt with in the previous chapter. Chapter 5 discusses the notion of purity in Patañjali and Haribhadra, and chapter 6 deals with Haribhadra's criticisms of tantric yoga. In the last chapter Christopher Chapple examines Haribhadra's thoughts on yoga from a sociological standpoint; Chapple also assigns contemporary yoga movements to four groups in accordance with the types of yogins mentioned in the YDS.The author points out that in the Jaina tradition the word "yoga" fundamentally stands for any actions by living beings and the behavior required of pious Jainas (p. 28). In the YDS, however, Haribhadra uses this word to denote activities involved in reaching higher stages of spiritual awareness. This unique usage of the word shows Haribhadra's attitude toward "reconciling [the] Yoga" of Jainism and that of other schools, especially that of Patanñjali.Among the contributions made by this book to Jaina studies and Indology are (1) a clear explanation of the relationship between guḍasthāna in Jainism and Patañjali's Yoga system and (2) an attempt to recover the lost yogas, that is, the Buddhist yoga and Vedāntist yoga mentioned in the YDS. These two topics will be examined in more detail below.Guḍasthāna and YogaPatañjali's yoga system in essence is regarded as a course of spiritual purification. The Jainas also have a similar system, known as guḍasthāna, which consists of fourteen stages of spiritual development. This idea of guḍasthāna does not appear in the earlier canons, so it must be a comparatively new development in the history of Jainism. By the time of Haribhadra, guḍasthāna must have been popular among the Jainas as he explicitly uses the term in the YDS and tries to allot stages to each of eight limbs or aḍgas in Patañjali's system. Christopher Chapple explains their relationship and illustrates this with tables. A similar approach was attempted by K. K. Dixit in the introduction to his Yogadṛṣṭisamuccaya and Yogaviṃśikā (Ahmedabad, 1970). Chapple, however, has done this... (shrink)

How does teaching veer? In what ways can we tell if a literature lesson veers constructively or otherwise? How do we determine its limits and the correlations between success or failure in our teaching when — individually or collectively — we veer in a novel, a short story or a poem? If veering, as Nicholas Royle argues, can offer us a more dynamic critical vocabulary for reading literary works by developing singular responses to risk, failure, uncertainty and difficulty, then surely (...) it can also be a profitable way to determine the peripheries of pedagogical practice, what we can and cannot expect from the experience of education. Using the example of the short story ‘Powder’ by Tobias Wolff, and the responses from a given class in the specific context of reading this story, this article examines moments of veering and the difficulties of responding responsibly to the vicissitudes of what I will call moments of unlearning. The questions are, can we veer from theories of literature to theories of teaching? Have critique and difficulty (critique as an experience and practice of difficulty) run aground in our current context? Is it time, consequently, to veer away from difficulty as the purpose of teaching and learning? And if so, what would that veering look like as a practical pedagogical action? (shrink)

A study of a group of elementary school students learning to control a computer‐implemented Newtonian object reveals a surprisingly uniform and detailed collection of strategies, at the core of which is a robust “Aristotelian” expectation that things should move in the direction they are last pushed. A protocol of an undergraduate dealing with the same situation shows a large overlap with the set of strategies used by the elementary school children and thus a marked lack of influence of classroom physics (...) training on this student's naive physics. The data from these two studies are pooled and elaborated into a “genetic task analysis” of how one might come to understand Newtonian dynamics as a more or less natural evolution from the naive state. (shrink)

This paper argues that there are two compelling intuitions about conscious experience, the absorption intuition and the ubiquity intuition. The former is the claim that conscious experience consists in intentional absorption in its objects; the latter is the claim that conscious experience ubiquitously exhibits a sense that the mental subject is conscious that she is so conscious. These two intuitions are in tension with each other and it seems no single theory of consciousness can respect both. Drawing on the early (...) work of Sartre, particularly in The Transcendence of the Ego, I argue that an adverbial theory of consciousness comes closest to doing so: it explains the first intuition and respects the phenomenon that the second intuition is supposed to capture. It emerges, therefore, as the theory of consciousness that is the most explanatory overall. The argument of this paper proceeds as follows. The first section describes the distinctive features of an adverbial approach to consciousness. The second describes the first intuition that conscious experience is typically absorbed in the objects of conscious thought whereas the third describes the intuition that our conscious experience is ubiquitously self- aware. I then turn to an examination to a range of views, influenced by Brentano, that try to reconcile these intuitions and argue that none of them succeed. I conclude with a description of how an adverbialism influenced by Sartre. (shrink)

Over the past 15 years, there have been two increasingly popular approaches to the study of meaning in cognitive science. One, based on theories of embodied cognition, treats meaning as a simulation of perceptual and motor states. An alternative approach treats meaning as a consequence of the statistical distribution of words across spoken and written language. On the surface, these appear to be opposing scientific paradigms. In this review, we aim to show how recent cross-disciplinary developments have done much to (...) reconcile these two approaches. The foundation to these developments has been the recognition that intralinguistic distributional and sensory-motor data are interdependent. We describe recent work in philosophy, psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and computational modeling that are all based on or consistent with this conclusion. We conclude by considering some possible directions for future research that arise as a consequence of these developments. (shrink)

This essay is a response to the recent reemergence in the philosophical literature of direct acquaintance theories of epistemic justification and concept acquisition. A central difficulty that confronts proponents of direct acquaintance is that of providing an adequate account of the nature of the cognitive act involved in direct acquaintance. In this essay, I articulate two different approaches to this project. I distinguish those who claim that all acts of cognition involve conceptualization, subsumption of a particular under a kind, or (...) something therelike from those who think that there are non-conceptually mediated states with cognitive, phenomenal content. I locate a range of views of each kind on what I call "The Conceptual-Content Continuum" and "The Phenomenal-Content Continuum," respectively. ;I then examine both historical and contemporary direct acquaintance accounts of concept acquisition and epistemic justification. In particular I examine the work of Bertrand Russell, C. D. Broad, Howard Robinson, and Richard Fumerton. My aim is to see whether the contemporary accounts fare any better than their historical counterparts in the face of certain objections. I argue that they do not. (shrink)

A recent article in Anthropology of Consciousness entitled ‘Imaginal research for unlearning mastery: Divination with Tarot as a decolonizing methodology’ argues that the Western Tarot may be a useful tool to facilitate decolonization despite (or perhaps in spite) of the colonial and imperial imprints of the accumulating class. This response points out the Tarot is in fact a tool developed by the accumulating class, designed specifically to facilitate the imposition of elite master narratives. This letter calls into question the (...) appropriateness and effectiveness of using the Tarot as a tool for decolonization. (shrink)

Although much has been written about the vigorous debates over science and religion in the Victorian era, little attention has been paid to their continuing importance in early twentieth-century Britain. Reconciling Science and Religion provides a comprehensive survey of the interplay between British science and religion from the late nineteenth century to World War II. Peter J. Bowler argues that unlike the United States, where a strong fundamentalist opposition to evolutionism developed in the 1920s (most famously expressed in the Scopes (...) "monkey trial" of 1925), in Britain there was a concerted effort to reconcile science and religion. Intellectually conservative scientists championed the reconciliation and were supported by liberal theologians in the Free Churches and the Church of England, especially the Anglican "Modernists." Popular writers such as Julian Huxley and George Bernard Shaw sought to create a non-Christian religion similar in some respects to the Modernist position. Younger scientists and secularists—including Rationalists such as H. G. Wells and the Marxists—tended to oppose these efforts, as did conservative Christians, who saw the liberal position as a betrayal of the true spirit of their religion. With the increased social tensions of the 1930s, as the churches moved toward a neo-orthodoxy unfriendly to natural theology and biologists adopted the "Modern Synthesis" of genetics and evolutionary theory, the proposed reconciliation fell apart. Because the tensions between science and religion—and efforts at reconciling the two—are still very much with us today, Bowler's book will be important for everyone interested in these issues. Contents: Illustrations Preface Introduction: A Legacy of Conflict? Confrontation, Cooperation, or Coexistence? Victorian Background Science and Religion in the New Century Part One: The Sciences and Religion 1. The Religion of Scientists Changing Patterns of Belief Scientists and Christianity Scientists and Theism Method and Meaning Science and Values 2. Scientists against Superstition Science and Rationalism Religion without Revelation Marxists and Other Radicals Science, Religion, and the History of Science 3. Physics and Cosmology Ether and Spirit The New Physics The Earth and the Universe 4. Evolution and the New Natural Theology Science and Creation Evolution and Progress The Role of Lamarckism Darwinism Revived 5. Matter, Life, and Mind The Origin of Life Vitalism and Organicism Mind and Body Psychology and Religion Part Two: The Churches and Science 6. The Churches in the New Century The Challenge of the New The Churches’ Response 7. The New Theology in the Free Churches Precursors of the New Theology Campbell and the New Theology Modernism in the Free Churches 8. Anglican Modernism Modernism and the New Natural Theology Charles F. D’Arcy E. W. Barnes W. R. Inge Charles Raven 9. The Reaction against Modernism Evangelicals against Evolution Liberal Catholicism The Menace of the New Psychology Science and Modern Life Theology in the Thirties Roman Catholicism Part Three: The Wider Debate 10. Science and Secularism Against Idealism Popular Rationalism The Social Reformers 11. Religion’s Defenders From Idealism to Spiritualism Creative and Emergent Evolution Evolution and the Human Spirit Progress through Struggle The Christian Response Epilogue Biographical Appendix Bibliography Index. (shrink)

In this paper I study dynamical models of rational deliberation within the context of Newcomb's problem. Such models have been used to argue against the soundness of the "tickle'" defense of evidential decision theory, which is based on the idea that sophisticated decision makers can break correlations between states and acts by introspecting their own beliefs and desires. If correct, this would show that evidential decision theory agrees with the recommendations of causal decision theory. I argue that an adequate understanding (...) of rational deliberation leads to deliberative processes for which this idea works. My proposal is modest, though. Evidential decision theory cannot always be reconciled with causal decision theory along the lines suggested here, but the agreement between the two theories is broader than previously thought. (shrink)

Recent studies show that when words are correlated with the colours they are printed in , colour identification is faster when the word is presented in its correlated colour than in an uncorrelated colour . The present series of experiments explored the possible mechanisms involved in this colour-word contingency learning effect. Experiment 1 demonstrated that the effect is already present after 18 learning trials. During subsequent unlearning, the effect extinguished equally rapidly. Two reanalyses of data from Schmidt, Crump, Cheesman, (...) and Besner ruled out an account of the effect in terms of stimulus repetitions. Experiment 2 demonstrated that participants who carry a memory load do not show a contingency effect, supporting the hypothesis that limited-capacity resources are required for learning. Experiment 3 demonstrated that memory resources are required for both storage and retrieval processes. (shrink)

Review of: Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay (2019) London and New York: Verso, 656 pp., ISBN 978-1-78873-571-1, p/bk, £30.00.