Nebraska University Studies, V25, No. 2-4.

A model of when and where saccades are made necessarily incorporates a model of the “When” and “Where” of target selection. We suggest that the framework proposed by Findlay & Walker does not specify sufficiently how selection processes contribute to the spatial and temporal determinants of saccade generation. Examples from across-trial priming in visual search and from the inhibition of temporally segmented distractors show linkage between the processes involved in computing when and where selection operates, so that there is cooperation (...) rather than competition between so-called Where and When pathways. Aspects of spatial selection may also determine the remote distractor effect on saccades. The detailed relations between the processes involved in selection and saccade generation may be best understood in relation to detailed computational accounts of the processes. (shrink)

Der Sammelband vereint Beitrage, die dem Andenken an den Philosophiehistoriker Thomas Ricklin gewidmet sind und an dessen Arbeit anschlieaen. Die Texte befassen sich mit der Erforschung der Philosophie- und Kulturgeschichte des Mittelalters, der Renaissance und der Fruhen Neuzeit und bieten ein Panorama der verschiedenen Dimensionen dessen, was Weisheit und Philosophie in diesen Epochen bedeuteten. Im Zentrum stehen Dante und Boccaccio, wobei insbesondere deren Lehre vom "Schleier" der poetischen Sprache, unter dem die Wahrheit verhullt sei, in einer Reihe von Studien untersucht (...) wird. In diesem Kontext widmen sich weitere Beitrage den Konzepten einiger der wichtigsten Denker des Mittelalters, wie Boethius von Dacien, Roger Bacon, Johannes von Wales, Meister Eckhart und Pietro d'Abano, dessen "Differentia prima" hier zum ersten Mal in einer kritischen Edition vorgelegt wird. Auaerdem wird die Uberlieferung und Auslegung der antiken Exempla als viel zu lange vernachlassigter Teil der Philosophiegeschichte in den Fokus geruckt. Des Weiteren thematisieren die Beitrage Autoren und Texte, die philosophische Fragen verhandeln, ohne den paradigmatischen Formen des Kommentars oder der Summa zugerechnet werden zu konnen, weil sie Sprach- und Genregrenzen uberschreiten, wie Giordano da Pisa, Jodocus Eichmann und Henry More. Weitere Beitrage, die sich mit Philosophinnen und Historikerinnen der Renaissance und Fruhen Neuzeit beschaftigen, verschaffen den weiblichen Stimmen in von Mannern dominierten Diskursen Gehor. (shrink)

The study of emotional changes after brain injury has contributed enormously to the understanding of the neural basis of emotion. However, little attention has been placed on the methods used to elicit emotional responses in people with brain damage. Of particular interest are subjects with right hemisphere [RH] cortical lesions, who have been described as presenting impairment in emotional processing. In this article, an internal and external mood induction procedure [MIP] was used to trigger positive and negative emotions, in a (...) sample of 10 participants with RH damage, and 15 healthy controls. Emotional experience was registered by using a self-report questionnaire. As observed in previous studies, internal and external MIPs were equally effective in eliciting the target emotion, but the internal procedure generated higher levels of intensity. Remarkably, participants with RH lesions were equally able to experience both positive and negative affect. The results are discussed in relation to the role of the RH in the capacity to experience negative emotions. (shrink)

Meister Eckhart is known for having developed a sophisticated form of inclusivist Christian universalism in the late Middle Ages. This universalism arose from the particular “globalizing” contexts of his times, for which there are real parallels in our own day. The author argues that in key respects, Eckhart's ethical universalism shows strong affinities with Confucian principles, and can be informed by these as set out historically by Xinzhong Yao and in a contemporary setting by Tu Weiming. In the conclusion, (...) the author sketches the possible influence of Confucianism on a future Christianity, in the light of the Eckhartian universalist inheritance. (shrink)

Aus Anlass seines 100-jährigen Bestehens richtete das Corpus Medicorum Graecorum / Latinorum eine internationale Fachtagung aus, dessen Beiträge dieser Band versammelt. Experten aus dem In- und Ausland führen u.a. die Bedeutung der antiken medizinischen Schriften vor Augen und machen die historischen Wurzeln der neuzeitlichen Medizin bewusst, auch im Hinblick auf aktuelle Fragestellungen wie Gesundheits- und Therapieforschung, ganzheitliche Medizin und medizinische Ethik.

Scholars of religion have always been fascinated by asceticism. Some have even regarded this radical way of life-- the withdrawal from the world, combined with practices that seriously affect basic bodily needs, up to extreme forms of self-mortification --as the ultimate form of a true religious quest. This view is rooted in hagiographic descriptions of prominent ascetics and in other literary accounts that praise the ascetic life-style. Scholars have often overlooked, however, that in the history of religions ascetic beliefs and (...) practices have also been strongly criticized, by followers of the same religious tradition as well as by outsiders. The respective sources provide sufficient evidence of such critical strands but surprisingly as yet no attempt has been made to analyze this criticism of asceticism systematically. This book is a first attempt of filling this gap. Ten studies present cases from both Asian and European traditions: classical and medieval Hinduism, early and contemporary Buddhism in South and East Asia, European antiquity, early and medieval Christianity, and 19th/20th century Aryan religion. Focusing on the critics of asceticism, their motives, their arguments, and the targets of their critique, these studies provide a broad range of issues for comparison. They suggest that the critique of asceticism is based on a worldview differing from and competing with the ascetic worldview, often in one and the same historical context. The book demonstrates that examining the critics of asceticism helps understand better the complexity of religious traditions and their cultural contexts. The comparative analysis, moreover, shows that the criticism of asceticism reflects a religious worldview as significant and widespread in the history of religions as asceticism itself is. (shrink)

One of postmodernism's toughest challenges to Christian thought is its wholesale rejection of metaphysics. This profound book meets the challenge squarely, offering a surer foundation for the idea of being and a new theological perspective of supreme relevance to today's world. In a brilliant turn of postmodern thought itself, Oliver Davies argues for a renewal of metaphysics based on a dynamic new understanding of ontology as narrative and performance. His repairing of the Western metaphysical tradition is grounded both (...) in the divine self-naming in Exodus -- which, for the rabbis, identified God's presence in the world with God's compassionate acts -- and in the compassionate resistance of Etty Hillesum and Edith Stein to the violence of the Holocaust. Building on a new metaphysics of compassion that is attentive to the deepest histories of the contemporary world, Davies offers a renewed systematic theology focused on divine speech and God's compassionate relation to human culture. (shrink)

Die Psychologie nimmt im Werk Christian Wolffs (1679-1754) eine zentrale Stellung ein. Sie begründet die Logik und die praktische Philosophie mit Naturrecht, Ethik, Politik und Ökonomik. Der vorliegende Band geht den vielfältigen Problemen nach, die sich mit Wolffs Konzeption einer rationalen und einer empirischen Psychologie einerseits, ihrer Grundlegungsfunktion innerhalb des Wolffschen Systems der Philosophie andererseits ergeben. Darüber hinaus stellt er die Psychologie Wolffs in den philosophie- und wissenschaftsgeschichtlichen Kontext von der Scholastik bis zur kritischen Philosophie Immanuel Kants.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Fatherhood and the Promise of EthicsKelly Oliver (bio)Both Paul Ricoeur and Emmanuel Levinas reject the Freudian/Lacanian association of father with law and instead associate fatherhood with promise. For Ricoeur, fatherhood promises equality through contracts, while for Levinas, fatherhood promises singularity beyond the law. The tension between equality and singularity, between law and something beyond the law, is what is at stake in Derrida’s The Gift of Death. There, (...) Derrida describes ethics as a paradox between the universal and the individual, between equality and singularity. Kierkegaard’s reading of the story of Abraham and Isaac from Genesis is the centerpiece of Derrida’s analysis. If we read The Gift of Death, with its focus on this story of father and son, in relation to Ricoeur and Levinas on the question of fatherhood, it reads as the culmination of a dialectical tension between the two. And if we read the Abraham story as a legend about father-son relations rather than just a parable of faith, The Gift of Death appears to uncover not just the paradoxical logic of ethics but also the uncompromising logic of patriarchy and paternal authority.Paternity Begets FraternityIn “Fatherhood: from Phantasm to Symbol” Ricoeur describes fatherhood as a battle of wills struggling for recognition. He brings together what he calls the different perspectives of psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and religion in order to rearticulate the oedipal situation as a process of recognition (rather than a structure) which moves from the father as phantasm to the father as symbol and replaces images of real murder with symbolic sacrifice. Through his dialectical analysis, Ricoeur himself attempts to articulate a recognition of fatherhood that moves us away from the phantasm of the father as castrator to the symbol of the father as compassionate. Relying on Hegelian dialectics, Ricoeur outlines a movement from psychoanalysis’s fantastic image of an omnipotent father who must be killed so that the son might live, through Phenomenology of Spirit’s master-slave dialectic, to the Christian religious representation of the loving father sacrificing Himself through His son for the sake of all His children. In this higher stage of the dialectic of paternity, the murder of the father is replaced by his sacrifice. Oddly, however, Ricoeur’s dialectic remains at the level of the master-slave fight to the death, where—without the Hegelian resolution—the only options available to insure the recognition of the father by the son (or the son by the father) are murder or suicide. For Ricoeur, recognition requires death, symbolic if not imaginary, whereas Hegel insists that recognition comes only when the master and slave are willing to risk death but also realize the necessity of avoiding it; mutual recognition cannot be maintained if one of the parties is dead.For Ricoeur, recognition does not necessitate avoiding death but rather moving away from the realm of the family and the body to the level of the social and the law. In order for the father-son relationship to be one of mutual recognition, the father must sacrifice his absolute authority so that the son might also participate in it. The goal of recognition is equality, which can be achieved only through social contracts that abstract from the particulars of embodied familial relations. One such social operation is designation, [End Page 45] which is removed from the realm of the bodily drives that motivate the oedipal scenario. Designation requires the sublimation of bodily drives into abstract laws that can equalize bodies by turning them into symbols.The move from psychoanalysis to Christianity is a move from a domestic family to a social family: through God the Father’s sacrifice of His son, we all become members of the Christian family; we all become children of God. For Ricoeur, it is not that God is the Father because He gives the Law. Rather, the law, the covenant or contract, enables Him to be recognized as father [490]. Ricoeur implicitly rejects the Lacanian association of the Father with the Law or the Name. He claims that there is no Name of the Father. “Father” is not a name but a designation [Ricoeur 485]. And the father’s proper name is... (shrink)

How may feelings of love and hate impact people’s attention? We used a modified Attentional Blink (AB) task in which 300 participants were asked to categorise a name representing a person towards whom they felt either hate, love, or neutral (first target) plus identify a number word (second target), both embedded in a rapidly presented stream of other words. The lag to the second target was systematically varied. Contrary to our hypothesis, results revealed that both hated and loved names resulted (...) in higher accuracy for the second target than neutral names, which was largely independent of lag. Also, there we observed no sustained transfer effects of love and hate onto neutral name trials. The findings differ from prior research on attentional blink and transient, non-personal, stimulus-driven emotions, suggesting that interpersonal feelings activate different attention-relevant mechanisms. Relevant to future research, we speculate that love and hate are motivators of goal-directed behaviour that facilitate subsequent information processing. (shrink)

Christianity changed the world for the better through the development of education, charity organisations, art, music, law and medical care among others. However, not all changes initiated by Christianity were positive. The Christian religion was also responsible for division, death, destruction and war. Focusing on the positive changes, nearly 500 years after the reformation though, it seems as if Christianity has lost its renewing and transformative powers. It seems as if society, politics and the economy are pressurising Christianity to (...) conform to the world and not the other way round. Therefore, the research focuses on the question whether Christians can bring about positive change and transformation to the current problems in society. What can Christians do to provide a religious response to current persistent societal problems? Change agents - people who drive positive change - are capable and competent, make use of networks, are visible and contactable and are often also outsiders in the communities they serve. Examples of the work done by change agents - Christians within their local communities - through small-scale community projects are showcased here to suggest possible ways forward for dealing with persistent problems from a Christian point of view. (shrink)

This essay compares Christian and Islamic teaching on the question of forcible humanitarian intervention and concludes that the traditions are sufficiently similar to enable agreement on how and when to intervene in a humanitarian crisis.

We have, as a theological community, generally lost a language in which to speak of the created-ness of the world. As a consequence, our discourses of reason cannot bridge the way we know God and the way we know the world. Therefore, argues Oliver Davies, a primary task of contemporary theology is the regeneration of a Christian account of the world as sacramental, leading to the formation of a Christian conception of reason and a new Christocentric understanding (...) of the real. Both the Johannine tradition of creation through the Word and a Eucharistic semiotics of Christ as the embodied, sacrificial and creative speech of God serve the project of a repairal of Christian cosmology. The world itself is viewed as a creative text authored by God, of which we as interpreters are an integral part. This is a wide-ranging and convincing book that makes an important contribution to modern theology. (shrink)