Anthony J. Lisska presents a new analysis of Thomas Aquinas's theory of perception. While much work has been undertaken on Aquinas's texts, little has been devoted principally to his theory of perception and less still on a discussion of inner sense. The thesis of intentionality serves as the philosophical backdrop of this analysis while incorporating insights from Brentano and from recent scholarship. The principal thrust is on the importance of inner sense, a much-overlooked area of Aquinas's philosophy of mind, (...) with special reference to the vis cogitativa. Approaching the texts of Aquinas from contemporary analytic philosophy, Lisska suggests a modest 'innate' or 'structured' interpretation for the role of this inner sense faculty. He argues that were it not for the vis cogitativa, Aquinas would be unable to account for an awareness of the principal ontological category in his metaphysics. (shrink)

Exploring the first-person narratives of three figures from the Christian, Jewish, and Islamic mystical traditions—St. Teresa of Avila, Rabbi Dov Baer, and Rzbihn Baql—Anthony J. Steinbock provides a complete phenomenology of mysticism based in the Abrahamic religious traditions. He relates a broad range of religious experiences, or verticality, to philosophical problems of evidence, selfhood, and otherness. From this philosophical description of vertical experience, Steinbock develops a social and cultural critique in terms of idolatry—as pride, secularism, and fundamentalism—and suggests that (...) contemporary understandings of human experience must come from a fuller, more open view of religious experience. (shrink)

Moral Emotions builds upon the philosophical theory of persons begun in _Phenomenology and Mysticism _and marks a new stage of phenomenology. Author Anthony J. Steinbock finds personhood analyzing key emotions, called moral emotions. _Moral Emotions _offers a systematic account of the moral emotions, described here as pride, shame, and guilt as emotions of self-givenness; repentance, hope, and despair as emotions of possibility; and trusting, loving, and humility as emotions of otherness. The author argues these reveal basic structures of interpersonal (...) experience. By exhibiting their own kind of cognition and evidence, the moral emotions not only help to clarify the meaning of person, they reveal novel concepts of freedom, critique, and normativity. As such, they are able to engage our contemporary social imaginaries at the impasse of modernity and postmodernity. (shrink)

Gittins, Anthony J By its achievements and the transformations that would not have happened without it, Alcoholics Anonymous has always impressed me, as do the people who belong to it. And yet there is little structure, few rules, and no rush to judgment involved. It is a 'fellowship' rather than an organisation, and a society of peers rather than a clash of personalities. Its success is attributed to the sharing of experiences, the moral support of the sponsors and the (...) community, the strength and determination - rather than the weakness or the history - of its members, and the sense of hope it inspires and maintains in those who refuse to give up, one day at a time. To admit or acknowledge powerlessness over alcohol or any addiction is not to identify oneself as without all power. On the contrary, those who acknowledge weakness in one area and yet show determination succeed partly because of the power of the wider group and partly because of the power of their own personal dedication and perseverance. Members of AA know that they are only a day or a drink from disaster, and yet, curiously, this is their strength; by keeping that awareness clearly before them, they are unlikely to become arrogant or independent of a support group. (shrink)

This essay seeks to characterise the essential features of an equitable health care system in terms of the classical Aristotelian concepts of horizontal and vertical equity, the common language of “need” and the economic notion of cost-effectiveness as a prelude to identifying some of the more important issues of value that policy-makers will have to decide for themselves; the characteristics of health that can cause policy to be ineffective ; the information base that is required to support a policy directed (...) at securing greater equity, and the kinds of research that are needed to underpin such a policy. (shrink)

Addressing the matter of attention from a phenomenological perspective as it bears on the problem of becoming aware, I draw on Edmund Husserl''s analyses and distinctions that mark his genetic phenomenology. I describe several experiential levels of affective force and modes of attentiveness, ranging from what I call dispositional orientation and passive discernment to so-called higher levels of attentiveness in cognitive interest, judicative objectivation, and conceptualization. These modes of attentiveness can be understood as motivating a still more active mode of (...) reflective attention, i.e., philosophical attentiveness, and to this extent, even it would be subject to varying influences of affection. What role, if any, does affection play in a peculiar kind of reflective attention that is phenomenological? I conclude by briefly considering phenomenological reflective attentiveness and its relation to affection. (shrink)

This major new work by Anthony J. Steinbock, a leading authority in Phenomenology and Husserl Studies, explores an interrelated set of problems in Husserl's phenomenology and provides an excellent example of phenomenology in practice, demonstrating how its methods and resources shed light on philosophical problems.

From its humble beginnings in 1961, the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy has emerged as the second largest society of philosophers in the West. From a near-impromptu gathering of a couple dozen participants, those who now claim SPEP membership number into the thousands, with one recent meeting having around 750 registered participants. The fact of its size and its diversity provokes several important questions concerning the identity and orientation of SPEP—questions that are as much philosophical as they are practical: (...) Is SPEP a blanket umbrella organization, or does it have a direction and/or sense? What implications do the latter have for its place as a philosophical organization .. (shrink)

It has been proposed that performance in the think – no think task represents a laboratory analogue of the voluntary form of memory repression. The central prediction of this repression hypothesis is that performance in the TNT task will be influenced by emotional characteristics of the material to be remembered. This prediction was tested in two experiments by asking participants to learn paired associates in which the first item was either emotionally positive or emotionally negative . The second word was (...) always emotionally neutral . Consistent with the repression hypothesis, significant memory suppression was observed in both experiments following ‘no think’ instructions for memories associated with emotionally negative material. No suppression was observed for memories associated with emotionally positive information. Implications of these findings for the relationship between performance in the TNT task and the controversial notion of memory repression are considered. (shrink)

Education for Total Liberation is a collection of essays from leaders in the field of critical animal pedagogy (CAP). CAP emerges from activist educators teaching critical animal studies and is rooted in critical theory as well as the animal advocacy movement. Critical animal studies (CAS) argues for an interdisciplinary approach to understanding our relationships with nonhuman animals. CAS challenges two specific fields of theory: (1) animal studies, rooted in vivisection and testing on animals in the hard sciences and (2) human-animal (...) studies, which reinforces a socially constructed binary between humans and animals and adopts abstract theoretical approaches. In contrast, CAS takes a progressive and committed approach to scholarship and sees the exploitation of nonhuman animals as interrelated with oppression of humans based on class, gender, race, ability, sexuality, age, and citizenship. CAS promotes the liberation of all animals and challenges all systems of domination. Education for Total Liberation is appropriate for undergraduate and graduate level readers (and beyond) who wish to learn from examples of radical pedagogical projects shaped by CAS and critical pedagogy. Contributing to this collection are Anne C. Bell, Anita de Melo, Carolyn Drew, Amber E. George, Karin Gunnarsson Dinker, Sinem Ketenci, John Lupinacci, Anthony J. Nocella II, Sean Parson, Helena Pedersen, Ian Purdy, Constance L. Russell, J.L. Schatz, Meneka Repka, William E. Shanahan III, and Richard J, White. (shrink)

The significance of consciousness in modern science is discussed by leading authorities from a variety of disciplines. Presenting a wide-ranging survey of current thinking on this important topic, the contributors address such issues as the status of different aspects of consciousness; the criteria for using the concept of consciousness and identifying instances of it; the basis of consciousness in functional brain organization; the relationship between different levels of theoretical discourse; and the functions of consciousness.

We discuss the concept of spontaneous breaking of gauge symmetry in super-conductors and superfluids and, in particular, the circumstances under which the absolute phase of a superfluid can be physically meaningful and experimentally relevant. We argue that the study of this question pushes us toward the frontiers of what we understand about the quantum measurement process, and underline the need for a new theoretical framework that keeps pace with modern technological capabilities.

In this article, I address problems associated with ‘Modernity’ and those encountered at the impasse of post-modernity and the newly named phenomenon of ‘post-secularism’. I consider more specifically what I call ‘moral emotions’ or essentially interpersonal emotions can tell us about who we are as persons, and what they tell us about our experience and concepts of freedom, normativity, power, and critique. The moral emotions, and retrieving the evidence of the ‘heart’, point to the possibility of contributing to the social (...) imaginary of the Modern and its post-modern variants, playing a significant role in shaping civic life and relations of power. (shrink)

Radical Orthodoxy offers insight into the relationship between Christianity and culture. But it errs in its one-sided reading of modernity, its attempt to reduce philosophy to theology, and its prescription of a pre-modern metaphysics as the only authentic theological foundation. These suggest a fear of contingency and a desire for the immediate grasp of the divine which might circumvent history’s messiness. The result is a construal of reality that is in general inimical to an authentic Catholic reading of reality. Catholic (...) theology must be more faithful to the incarnational and eschatological structure of revelation—and thus to contingency—than either it or Radical Orthodoxy has been in the past. Aquinas’ defense of philosophy and Metz’s principle of “dangerous memory” offer ways to overcome this fear and to enjoy created contingency, secure in hope for the eschatological transformation which God in Christ has promised to all persons and all epochs. (shrink)

Major worldviews on ultimate reality and history -- Major worldviews on external reality -- Major worldviews on the nature and orientation of man -- Major worldviews concerning truth and ethics -- Major worldviews concerning the social location of religion -- The orders and root metaphors of the modern and postmodern condition -- Observations and strategies -- The true and false church.

This article contributes to a recent debate between Barnett and Block : 711–716, 2009), Bagus and Howden : 399–406, 2009), Barnett and Block, Cachanosky and Bagus and Howden regarding the conceptual distinction between demand deposits and time deposits. It is argued that from an economic perspective there is nothing inherently fraudulent or illegitimate about deposit accounts that are available ‘on demand’, but that this relies on certain contractual provisions. Particular attention is drawn to option clauses and withdrawal clauses, which “solve” (...) the problems raised by Barnett and Block, and Bagus and Howden. Previous authors have also neglected the asset side of banks balance sheets, and this is shown to further justify the legitimacy of fractional reserve banking. (shrink)

Modality specificity in priming is taken as evidence for independent perceptual systems. However, Easton, Greene, and Srinivas (1997) showed that visual and haptic cross-modal priming is comparable in magnitude to within-modal priming. Where appropriate, perceptual systems might share like information. To test this, we assessed priming and recognition for visual and auditory events, within- and across- modalities. On the visual test, auditory study resulted in no priming. On the auditory priming test, visual study resulted in priming that was only marginally (...) less than within-modal priming. The priming results show that visual study facilitates identification on both visual and auditory tests, but auditory study only facilitates performance on the auditory test. For both recognition tests, within-modal recognition exceeded cross-modal recognition. The results have two novel implications for the understanding of perceptual priming: First, we introduce visual and auditory priming for spatio-temporal events as a new priming paradigm chosen for its ecological validity and potential for information exchange. Second, we propose that the asymmetry of the cross-modal priming observed here may reflect the capacity of these perceptual modalities to provide cross-modal constraints on ambiguity. We argue that visual perception might inform and constrain auditory processing, while auditory perception corresponds to too many potential visual events to usefully inform and constrain visual perception. (shrink)

The structure of traditional fiction is essentially linear or serial. No matter how complex a given work may be, it presents information to its reader successively, one element at a time, in a sequence determined by its author. By contrast, interactive fiction is parallel in structure or, more accurately, dendritic or tree-shaped. Not one, but several possible courses of action are open to the reader. Further, which one actually happens depends largely, though not exclusively, upon the reader’s own choices. To (...) be sure, the author is still in overall control, since it is she who has set up the particular nexus of events, but the route up the narrative tree, the actual sequence of events, is generally affected, if not completely determined, by the reader’s responses to that particular reader’s specific situation. In an adventure, the sequence of action frequently depends upon the reader’s decision to go in one geographical direction rather than another. In the eliza sample, the content of the “story” depends on such particulars as whether this reader has a brother or not, whether she fears her father, and why she has consulted the terminal. In general, the text presented to the eliza-reader depends on what that reader has already said and how the computer has interpreted and stored it, and this is generally true of interactive fiction.Further, interactive fiction is, in principle , open-ended—infinite. A conversation with eliza could go on for as long as one with Woody Allen’s psychoanalyst—in principle, forever. It has no necessary terminus. The program will go one writing texts and answers on the screen as long as the reader or player chooses to supply responses. Further, the computer can act as a metafictional narrator like John Barth or Thomas Pynchon who can create a story within a story or a story that generates another story within itself which generates another story within itself and so on, fictions dizzying and dazzling. One senses one’s essential humanity wobbling in the midst of the infinite paradoxes of existence and meaning. Anthony J. Niesz, assistant professor of German at Yale University, is the author of Dramaturgy in German Drama: From Gryphius to Goethe . He is interested in the phenomenon of the meta-theater, especially in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century German drama, as well as in the literature and cultural policies of the German Democratic Republic. Norman N. Holland is Milbauer Eminent Scholar at the University of Florida. He is the author of Laughing and The I. (shrink)

The contribution that a word makes to the meaning and interpretation of a sentence depends upon access to its meaning, and to general knowledge associated with the word. Evidence is presented to support the argument that accessing lexical meaning, as with general knowledge, is a graded affair. We argue that the contribution a word makes depends upon its relevance to the context, and to focus and related variables. Extensions of the argument are made to other aspects of language processing.

In this paper, I investigate the experience of hope by focusing on experiences that seem to rival hope, namely, disappointment, desperation, panic, hopelessness, and despair. I explore these issues phenomenologically by examining five kinds of experiences that counter hope (or in some instances, seem to do so): first, by noting the cases in which hope simply is not operative, then by treating the significance of both desperation and pessimism, next by examining the experience of hopelessness, and finally, by treating the (...) experience of despair. Here despair is shown to constitute the most profound challenge to hope among these experiences and to be foundational for the others, even though it is disclosed ultimately as founded in hope. (shrink)