The paper replies to Professor Alex Michalos'' keynote address, "Ethics Counsellors as a New Priesthood". Michalos argues that an intractable diversity of opinion about fundamental issues in ethical theory precludes substantive, well-founded ethical counselling. However, Michalos has inappropriately modelled his understanding of an acceptable structure and application for ethical theory on natural scientific theory. For we may countenance a less severe understanding of theory for ethical theory than in the hard sciences. In particular, instructive moral reasoning may tolerate a degree (...) of disagreement across human beings in their conception of moral good. On condition that such variance is not so considerable as to undermine a necessary commonality of language on ethical matters, there will be an adequate basis for warranted theory-construction in ethics and effective moral counselling underwritten by such theory. And, on the available historical evidence, such a condition can be met. (shrink)

My paper responds to certain themes of Professor John McMurtry's recent book, Unequal Freedoms: The Global Market as an Ethical System. Although I am in general sympathy with McMurtry's penetrating critique of conventional market theory and practice, I find Unequal Freedoms ambivalent on the critical question of whether endorsing and enacting the life-value code McMurtry proposes would require only a mitigation of the principles and definitive activities of the competitive market system or whether significant reforms within the system would have (...) to be deep structural ones. It is argued that the second alternative is inescapable. I defend my perspective from the point of view of a philosophical analysis of orthodox or neo-classical theory-construction about the competitive market order. In particular, I examine three fundamental principles of such modelling: the maximization of the satisfaction of self-interest, the unboundedness of consumer desire for material goods, and the distribution of monetized wealth. In order for McMurtry's "civil commons" to survive, the practice of each of these principles would need to be radically modified. However, in doing so, competitive capitalism would lose its essential identity as a socio-economic order. (shrink)

This collection of essays, addresses, and one interview come from the years 1966-73 and cover a wide spectrum of interest, dealing with such general topics as 'The Absence of God in Modern Culture' and 'The Future of Christianity.'.

Current thinking and research on consciousness and the brain.

When are psychologists entitled to call a certain theoretical construct "consciousness?" Over the past few decades cognitive psychologists have reintroduced almost the entire conceptual vocabulary of common sense psychology, but now in a way that is tied explicitly to reliable empirical observations, and to compelling and increasingly adequate theoretical models. Nevertheless, until the past few years most cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists avoided dealing with consciousness. Today there is an increasing willingness to do so. But is "consciousness" different from other theoretical (...) entities like "working memory" or "mental imagery"? Some argue that under no circumstances can empirical science speak of consciousness as such, while others claim that the scientific goal is "knowing what it is like to be a bat" --- to share an organism's conscious experience . The Bat Criterion is ominously reminiscent of the protracted debate on the consciousness of ants and amoebas that caused so much uneasiness in psychology around 1900. It seems to demand that we first solve the mind-body problem as a condition of doing sensible science, and thereby creates the risk of endless, fruitless controversy. The endless philosophical debate about consciousness helped trigger the Behaviorist revolution about 1913, which threw out the baby of consciousness with the bathwater of perennial, circular debate. We've been that way; let's not go back to it. This paper maintains that the position of behavioristic denial is far too restrictive, but that the Bat Criterion is far too demanding --- that in fact, we only need to specify comparable pairs of psychological phenomena that differ only in the fact that one member of any pair is conscious, while the other is not. This "method of contrastive analysis" is a generalization of the experimental method, with consciousness as a variable whose interaction with other psychological and biological phenomena can be assessed in standard ways. As usual in science, this strategy is pragmatic: If it appears to yield sensible results, it can be a stepping-stone toward further understanding . This paper describes five sets of well-established pairs of phenomena that meet these criteria. Others are presented elsewhere, with more of a theoretical interpretation . Here I simply want to show that any adequate theory of conscious experience must satisfy these demanding but achievable empirical constraints. (shrink)

In the last decade, careful studies of the living brain have opened the way for human consciousness to return to the heights it held before the behavioristic coup of 1913. This is illustrated by seven cases: the discovery of widespread brain activation during conscious perception; high levels of regional brain metabolism in the resting state of consciousness, dropping drastically in unconscious states; the brain correlates of inner speech; visual imagery; fringe consciousness; executive functions of the self; and volition. Other papers (...) in this issue expand on many of these points. . In the past, evidence based on subjective reports was often neglected . It is still true that brain evidence has greater credibility than subjective reports, no matter how reliable. What is new is increasing convergence between subjective experiences and brain observations. For that reason it is no longer rare to see the word 'consciousness' and 'subjectivity' in major science journals. No one so far has discovered a gulf dividing mind and brain. On the contrary, the new evidence supports the central role of consciousness as it was regarded over more than two millenia of written thought. In a sense this was predictable. Nature is full of unexpected convergences -- between fruit fly genes and the human body, between the arc of a tennis ball and the orbit of Mars, and between consciousness and the brain. These convergences show once again the remarkable unity of the observable universe. (shrink)

Conscious experience is one of the most difficult and thorny problems in psychological science. Its study has been neglected for many years, either because it was thought to be too difficult, or because the relevant evidence was thought to be poor. Bernard Baars suggests a way to specify empirical constraints on a theory of consciousness by contrasting well-established conscious phenomena - such as stimulus representations known to be attended, perceptual, and informative - with closely comparable unconscious ones - such (...) as stimulus representations known to be preperceptual, unattended, or habituated. Adducing data to show that consciousness is associated with a kind of global workplace in the nervous system, and that several brain structures are known to behave in accordance with his theory, Baars helps to clarify many difficult problems. (shrink)

Can we make progress exploring consciousness? Or is it forever beyond human reach? In science we never know the ultimate outcome of the journey. We can only take whatever steps our current knowledge affords. This paper explores today's evidence from the viewpoint of Global Workspace theory. First, we ask what kind of evidence has the most direct bearing on the question. The answer given here is ‘contrastive analysis’ -- a set of paired comparisons between similar conscious and unconscious processes. This (...) body of evidence is already quite large, and constrains any possible theory . Because it involves both conscious and unconscious events, it deals directly with our own subjective experience, as anyone can tell by trying the demonstrations in this article. (shrink)

The scholastic philosopher is interested in definition for a different reason than the lexicographer and linguist. The philosopher is trying to learn things. Fe defines, after investigating reality, in an attempt to describe reality clearly and to sum up some aspect of his understanding of reality. Hence, we find our scholastic philosophers adopting as a main feature of their method this insistence on defining, on precise and detailed explanation of their definitions, and on proving that their definitions da correctly express (...) what a nature or activity is. A dictionary of the language of scholastic philosophy fitted to the needs of beginners and of undergraduate students of the subject is not available in English. (shrink)

This work makes three valuable contributions to the study of human slips and errors.

entirety to contemporary readers." --Book Jacket.

Since the advent of behaviorism the question of volition or "will" has been largely neglected. We consider evidence indicating that two identical behaviors may be quite distinct with respect to volition: For instance, with practice the details of predictable actions become less and less voluntary, even if the behavior itself does not visibly change. Likewise, people can voluntarily imitate involuntary slips they have just made. Such examples suggest that the concept of volition applies not to visible behavior per se, but (...) to the control system that guides behavior. Involuntary events include both automatisms and counter voluntary actions such as slips . An adequate theory of voluntary control must account for the entire set of such pairs of voluntary/involuntary contrasts. The problem of volition highlights core psychological issues. Voluntary acts are consistent with one′s current dominant goals. Volition and consciousness are intimately related. Consciousness of an action seems to recruit unconscious resources that help in planning, executing, and monitoring a voluntary act. Conversely, losing conscious access to an action seems to produce a loss of voluntary control. However, voluntary actions are not wholly conscious. It appears that we only need conscious access to nonroutine choice-points in the flow of control; routine aspects are handled unconsciously. The goals that guide voluntary acts often encounter conflict, either from reality or from other goals, and emotions are widely believed to result from appraisals of such conflicts . Finally, there is a close connection between countervoluntary slips and the symptoms of clinical pathology, which involve a loss of voluntary control over speech, action, feeling, imagery, or thought. A modern version of William James′ ideomotor theory is proposed, based on Global Workspace theory . The theory shows how a conscious goal image could activate unconscious plans and automatisms that shape a voluntary act. Conscious feedback from the act serves to communicate success or failure to many unconscious routines, which may then adapt cooperatively to shape future actions. (shrink)

A testament to the richness of Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian War is that it has been studied for centuries with great profit by scholars of various stripes. Since the nineteenth century students of historiography have found in his narrative and methodological statements the principles by which Greeks of the fifth century BCE collected, recorded, and arranged material for their accounts of the ancient world. During the twentieth century international relations scholars, focusing on some of the more famous speeches of (...) the work's Athenians and the unsentimental tone of the author's narrative, saw in Thucydides an early advocate of realpolitik. And Thucydides's detailed accounts of political and diplomatic... (shrink)

This volume is an edited version, recreated from tapes and auditors' notes, of the ten lectures that Canadian Jesuit, Bernard Lonergan, delivered on his Insight.