In ‘Utility of Religion’, Mill argues that a wholly naturalistic religion of humanity would promote individual and social welfare better than supernatural religions like Christianity; in ‘Theism’, however, Mill defends the salutary effects of hope in an afterlife. While commentators have acknowledged this discrepancy, they have not examined the utilitarian value of what Mill terms ‘illusions’. In this essay, I explain Mill's case against the utility of supernatural religious belief and then argue that Mill cannot dismiss the utility of hope (...) in an ultimate justice since it need not pervert the intellect or morality. There are thus utilitarian grounds to support some supernatural illusions, which undermines Mill's defence of an exclusively naturalistic religion. I conclude with the suggestion that while the utility of religious belief leads Mill toward William James's view, they disagree about whether supernatural religious sentiment has any unique, intrinsic force. (shrink)

The exhilarating mix of humor, philosophy, fact and whimsy that marks these essays derives from more than 200 lectures Bruce Adolphe has given over most of the ...

Myles Brand offered a provocative defense of Intercollegiate Athletics (IA) by arguing that it is substantively similar to traditional performing arts, such as art or music, and so should be accepted by faculty as a legitimate part of university's educational mission. Randolph Feezell characterized Brand’s analogical argument as ‘sophistic’ and defended the reasonableness of what Brand termed the ‘Standard View’ of athletics whereby it is peripheral to a liberal arts education. I contend that Brand did not bring his persuasive analogical (...) argument to its logical conclusion: IA should contribute to a new, first-of-its kind academic major in Competitive Sport. Feezell’s criticisms of Brand’s analogical argument were unpersuasive, and his conception of a liberal arts education was outdated. As a result, I defend the legitimacy of a Competitive Sport major comparable to a Music Performance major and give a detailed description of its rigorous, liberal-arts based curriculum that integrates faculty and coaching instruction through shared learning objectives and outcomes. I conclude by identifying, and responding to, several practical issues if such a major were to be implemented in a US university. (shrink)

Researchers must infer “what babies know” based on what babies do. Thus, to maximize information from doing, researchers should use tasks and tools that capture the richness of infants' behaviors. We clarify Gibson's views about the richness of infants' behavior and their exploration in the service of guiding action – what Gibson called “learning about affordances.”.

In order to exhibit the unity of a subject matter, the most diverse viewpoints may be taken up. Indeed, it is to be expected that the presentation of the coherence of a matter results in greater clarity and distinctness if it is regarded from various perspectives and in different aspects.

These pages belong to the Swedish translator of Sein und Zeit, Richard Matz, who unfortunately died september 1992. The text is taken from the correspondence between Richard Matz and the Portuguese translator of Sein und Zeit, Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback, who translated it from Swedish and explained in a final note the context in which they met and discussed about Heidegger translations, invoking also the figure and personality of Richard Matz.

We defend a functionalist approach to emotion that begins by focusing on emotions as central states with causal connections to behavior and to other cognitive states. The approach brackets the conscious experience of emotion, lists plausible features that emotions exhibit, and argues that alternative schemes are unpromising candidates. We conclude with the benefits of our approach: one can study emotions in animals; one can look in the brain for the implementation of specific features; and one ends up with an architecture (...) of the mind in which emotions are fully accommodated through their relations to the rest of cognition. Our article focuses on arguing for this general approach; as such, it is an essay in the philosophy of emotion rather than in the psychology or neuroscience of emotion. (shrink)

A debate over whether God predestines to make some people reprobate broke out in the ninth century. No one taught this view, but it was presumed by several churchmen at the time to be the position of those who called themselves double predestinarians. In part, this article explains why two double predestinarians, Gottschalk of Orbais and Ratramnus of Corbie, were mistaken for proponents of this view. They had been trying to explain Augustine’s phrase, “those predestined to punishment”, which they found (...) in no fewer than ten of Augustine’s texts. Gottschalk points out Augustine used the phrase interchangeably with the term reprobate. Thus, to Gottschalk, it is not a statement about what God predestines; rather, it is a statement about the effect of predestination on certain people. Likewise, to Ratramnus, the phrase referred to the effect of God’s ordering of both the good and evil acts of persons. That Gottschalk and Ratramnus identified Augustine’s use of the phrase with a belief in double predestination was due to their reading Augustine through the lens of Isidore of Seville’s Sententiae II.6. (shrink)

Voluntary stream segregation was investigated in cochlear implant users and normal-hearing listeners using a segregation-promoting objective approach which evaluated the role of spectral and amplitude-modulation rate separations on stream segregation and its build-up. Sequences of 9 or 3 pairs of A and B narrowband noise bursts were presented which differed in either center frequency of the noise band, the AM-rate, or both. In some sequences, the last B burst was delayed by 35 ms from their otherwise-steady temporal position. In the (...) other sequences, the last B bursts were temporally advanced from 0 to 10 ms. A single interval yes/no procedure was utilized to measure participants’ sensitivity in identifying delayed vs. no-delay sequences. A higher d′ value showed the higher ability to segregate the A and B subsequences. For NH listeners, performance improved with each spectral separation. However, for CI users, performance was only significantly better for the condition with the largest spectral separation. Additionally, performance was significantly poorer for the largest AM-rate separation than for the condition with no AM-rate separation for both groups. The significant effect of sequence duration in both groups indicated that listeners made more improvement with lengthening the duration of stimulus sequences, supporting the build-up effect. The results of this study suggest that CI users are less able than NH listeners to segregate NBN bursts into different auditory streams when they are moderately separated in the spectral domain. Contrary to our hypothesis, our results indicate that AM-rate separation may interfere with the segregation of streams of NBN. Additionally, our results add evidence to the literature that CI users build up stream segregation at a rate comparable to NH listeners, when the inter-stream spectral separations are adequately large. (shrink)

Mill's analysis and philosophy of religion, expressed principally in his posthumous and neglected Three Essays on Religion, surprised his admirers and critics and are essential for a complete understanding of his views of morality, human well‐being, and social reform. As a moral and social reformer, Mill thought deeply about the value and necessity of religion since it provided ideals to guide and inspire human conduct and helped cope with suffering; however, supernatural religions, like Christianity, needed to be reformed. Contrary to (...) many commentators, Mill did not want to rid the world of religion and establish a Religion of Humanity but preserve imaginative, supernatural hope and make it compatible with a rational morality and what is known about the world. Mill's philosophy of religion can be summed up so: improve yourself and society, and if you need the motivation to do so, it is legitimate to hope in supernatural realities that are consistent with reason and moral feelings. (shrink)

One promising form of philosophical practice is to conduct workshops on philosophical counseling for counselors. Since licensed professionals, such as Marriage and Family Counselors and Licensed Clinical Social Workers sometimes confront situations that raise philosophical issues and usually have a philosophical perspective that informs their practice, they could profit from a workshop on philosophical counseling; the workshop also qualifies for continuing education units (CEUs) that are typically required to renew their licenses. This paper describes the principal purposes of a workshop (...) for counselors, the structure of two such workshops, and suggestions for improvement of future workshops. (shrink)

Over the last few decades the biological sciences have developed a strong new branch which lays down certain important prerequisites for any conception of human nature. This is the science of behavior which has found a place half-way between its sister sciences, morphology and physiology, who are often very far apart from one another. The new science has given some of its representatives the will to try out new conceptions of the organism. “Behavior” combines structure and function in a new (...) whole, and it promises to overcome the separation between individual and environment, for a larger synthesis brings more comprehensive phenomena into view. It also promises to overcome the isolation of the individual, for it makes it possible to comprehend the individual as an integral part of a whole which is of necessity supra-individual. (shrink)

The significance of the behavior of biological entities cannot be fully explained in terms of the physical and chemical processes upon which contemporary biological and medical research depends. The characteristic proper of biological entities is that they are systems marked by ‘inwardness’, that is, a capacity to interpret meanings in order to reach goals. The significance of this characteristic is given in examples from the author's morphological research. Keywords: biological research, inwardness, organism CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this?

Our approach to emotion emphasized three key ingredients. We do not yet have a mature science of emotion, or even a consensus view—in this respect we are more hesitant than Sander, Grandjean, and Scherer or Luiz Pessoa. Relatedly, a science of emotion needs to be highly interdisciplinary, including ecology, psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy. We recommend a functionalist view that brackets conscious experiences and that essentially treats emotions as latent variables inferred from a number of measures. But our version of functionalism (...) is not definitional or ontological. It is resolutely methodological, in good part because it is too early to attempt definitions. (shrink)

Based on studies with infants, we expand on Stoffregen & Bardy's explanation of perceptual motor errors, given the global array. Information pick-up from the global array is not sufficient without adequate exploratory movements and learning to support perceptually guided activity.

Theodor W. Adorno’s writings are often categorized as either political, aesthetic or critical. While all of these characteristics are legitimate, it is problematic to view Adorno from only one of these angles. In fact, many literary critics consider his thoughts about literature to be simple cultural criticism, i.e., something that leaves the realm of pure scholarship by defiling the argumentation with philosophy or politics. Political theorists and philosophers, on the other hand, often view his literary concerns as superfluous. It is (...) my thesis that Adorno’s way of thinking can only be adequately understood when these categories are not seen as mutually exclusive. In order to demonstrate this point, I will concentrate on his use of the term realism which can be seen as paradigmatic for this question. (shrink)

John Stuart Mill was one of the most important political and social thinkers of the nineteenth century, and his writings on human rights, feminism, the evils of slavery, and the environment are still widely read and influential today. Published after Mill’s death to avoid controversy, the three essays in this edition, _Nature_, _Utility of Religion_, and _Theism_, represent Mill’s considered position on religion. Mill argues that belief in a supernatural power holds us back, but that a conception of the meaning (...) and value of being human, or Religion of Humanity, could make the world a better place. Essential in understanding Mill’s views on religion and his practical philosophy, these essays are also significant contributions to the philosophy and psychology of religion. Appendices include Mill’s other writings on religion, his early influences, contemporary reviews, and other 19th century writings on religion and science. (shrink)

The psychological and neurobiological processes underlying moral judgement have been the focus of many recent empirical studies1–11. Of central interest is whether emotions play a causal role in moral judgement, and, in parallel, how emotion-related areas of the brain contribute to moral judgement. Here we show that six patients with focal bilateral damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPC), a brain region necessary for the normal generation of emotions and, in particular, social emotions12–14, produce an abnor- mally ‘utilitarian’ pattern of (...) judgements on moral dilemmas that pit compelling considerations of aggregate welfare against highly emotionally aversive behaviours (for example, having to sacrifice one person’s life to save a number of other lives)7,8. In contrast, the VMPC patients’ judgements were normal in other classes of moral dilemmas. These findings indicate that, for a selective set of moral dilemmas, the VMPC is critical for normal judgements of right and wrong. The findings support a necessary role for emotion in the generation of those judgements. (shrink)

ABSTRACT‘Sports and politics don’t mix’. This platitude has been a pervasive part of U.S. professional sport culture, but it is vague and most of the versions are untrue since politics have been, and must be, a part of professional sports. Its only plausible meaning is that professional players should not make political statements while they are on-the-job. Players have a constitutional right to make political statements outside the workplace, but this right does not apply in privately owned sport associations. I (...) argue that player political protest has ultimately been moral, not political, in nature and that players’ on-the-job political expression can be justified based on the priority of the moral-legal concept of personhood. I propose player political expression policies that U.S. professional associations should adopt. (shrink)