Jeffrey (1983) proposed a generalization of conditioning as a means of updating probability distributions when new evidence drives no event to certainty. His rule requires the stability of certain conditional probabilities through time. We tested this assumption (“invariance”) from the psychological point of view. In Experiment 1 participants offered probability estimates for events in Jeffrey’s candlelight example. Two further scenarios were investigated in Experiment 2, one in which invariance seems justified, the other in which it does not. Results were in (...) rough conformity to Jeffrey (1983)’s principle. (shrink)

Este artículo se propone realizar un análisis histórico, filosófico y político de la concepción del comunismo de Jean-Luc Nancy (1940-2021). Con ese fin, se toma como referencia una serie de textos del autor, publicados entre 1986 y 2021, donde la cuestión del comunismo es abordada en relación con temáticas tales como el totalitarismo, la comunidad, lo común, la literatura, la democracia y la civilización capitalista. A lo largo del trabajo se indaga el desarrollo de su planteo hasta el momento en (...) que alcanza su forma más o menos definitiva, a mediados de la década del 2000, en el marco del debate sobre “la Idea del comunismo” (Alain Badiou). La interpretación de la posición que Nancy adopta en este debate de alcance internacional desemboca en los dos principales aportes del artículo. En primer lugar, la caracterización de una comprensión ontológica o existencial del comunismo que se diferencia radicalmente de otros posicionamientos actuales y que no registra antecedentes dentro de las tradiciones teóricas comunistas. En segundo lugar, la identificación de un umbral en el pensamiento de Nancy, y por extensión en el pensamiento contemporáneo, donde el sentido del “comunismo”, como la exigencia de otorgar un valor inestimable a cada existencia, se comunica con la búsqueda de otro “espíritu” para nuestro tiempo. (shrink)

The topic of my dissertation is satire. This seems to excite many people, and over the past four years I have heard many variations of a similar refrain: “Oh, wow. You’re studying satire? That’s very topical. You must have a lot of material to work with.” There is a way in which this is true, though I suspect in a way that diverges from the way that most of my interlocutors believed. I suspect that the material they imagined me to (...) be working with was the output of Donald Trump, first a candidate for and now holder of the office of President of the United States. That is not the material I find interesting. More interesting to me is their statement. It evinces a number of beliefs that I find interesting, chief among them that Trump makes the current period particularly apt for satire, as if a doddery and incompetent ruling class is somehow a recent phenomenon. And I suspect that underneath this belief in the aptness of satire is a belief in the power of satire. Satire is somehow how people are going to strike back at the vice-governed fools who rule us. Those beliefs are the material I want to work with. This is my interest in satire, then: not so much what it is about satire that makes it powerful, but what is it about satire that makes people think it is powerful? And what is it about satire that makes people think it is powerful when there is pretty powerful evidence that it is not? Unfortunately, here is where I run into the problem that in a very important way I do not have a lot of material to work with. There is not an awful lot on satire within the analytic tradition: outside of a few references to satire, analytic discussions of satire are limited to two short articles. Accordingly, I have taken the task of my dissertation to be to create an account of satire that helps to bring forward why satire is a thing that people can imagine to be powerful, that they can imagine to be politically effective. My dissertation will effectively have two halves, one where I build my account and one where I begin to apply it. The purpose of applying my account, which will comprise the final two chapters, will not be to show its implications so much as how it can be used. My goal will not so much be to give definitive answers about the nature of satire, but rather to give a demonstration of how my account facilitates engaging questions about the role of satire in social and political context. (shrink)

Deleuze’s philosophy of immanence, because it vigorously rejects every appeal to the beyond, is often presumed to be indifferent to the concerns of religion. This book argues against such a presumption. It does so, first of all, by emphasising how both Deleuze’s thought and the notion of religion are motivated by a demand to create new modes of existence, or to imagine and enact a future that would substantively break with the present configuration of being. If Deleuze’s thought and the (...) notion of religion intersect in this regard, then their divergence must be located elsewhere, namely in the distinction between immanence and transcendence. The book thus argues that the enemy of Deleuze’s thought is not religion in general but instead the specific operation of transcendence. Furthermore, it argues that since Deleuze’s thought is not simply anti-religious, it cannot be identified with secularism. Along these lines, the book shows how Deleuzian immanence is able both to oppose religious transcendence and to enter an allliance with immanent accounts of the name of God. The effect of this is to suspend the paralysing debate between religion and the secular in order to attend to the ways in which immanence – whether “religious” or “secular” – is able to break with the present and to create the future. (shrink)

Víctor A. Sánchez Azanza, Raúl López Penadés y Daniel Adrover-Roig Dept. de Pedagogía Aplicada y Psicología de la Educación, Universidad … Read More →.

This study deals with the ontological background reference of religious experience in general, and it aimed to demonstrate how our existential condition of finitude is imposed to understand the most varied forms of manifestations of religious phenomena that arise in the contemporary world. Thus, we will start from the distinction between a hermeneutic-phenomenological conception of the religious experience in its essence and the empirical approaches on its diverse concrete configurations. In the end, we will try to point out that the (...) possibilities of apprehension of religious phenomena in general lack an existential element that is essentially constitutive for us, namely, the condition of the precariousness of the finite being faced with the opening of meaning that exceeds it in its horizon of transcendence. As general contribution, this way of understanding must foreclose every claim to make absolute a background meaning that should remain open as the most radical condition of possibility for the religious phenomena. (shrink)

Asim Barut once,en passant, asked the question “For what transitions of the hydrogen atom do the spectral lines coincide”? It is a pleasure for us to give the answer in this paper.

Acupuncture, herbs, and bodywork are fast becoming accepted as complements to standard healing methods. This riveting personal story of the unconventional education of an alternative healer provides extraordinary insight into how and why such methods work. Blending Chinese medicine, the martial arts, and Native American knowing, Daniel Santos challenges us to view the body and its healing in an exciting new way.

J.P. Moreland’s (2009) so-called Argument from Consciousness (AC) for the existence of God is examined. One of its key premises, the contingency of the mind-body relation, is at odds with the possibility of mental causation. The AC may be rescued from this problem by adapting some of the lessons learned in chapter three concerning one of the Non-Reductive Physicalist solutions to the Supervenience Argument.

Individualists and externalists about language take themselves to be disagreeing about the basic subject matter of the study of language. Are linguistic facts are really facts about individuals, or really facts about language use in a community?The right answer to this question, I argue, is ‘Yes’. Both individualistic and social facts are crucial to a complete understanding of human language. The relationship between the theories inspired by these facts is analogous to the relationship between anatomy and ecology, or between micro- (...) and macro-economics: both types of facts are important objects of study in their own right, but we need a theory that accounts for the complex relationship between the two. I argue that modern extensions of the signaling-games approach of Lewis (1969) do just this, defusing the conflict while preserving the core positive insights of both sides of this debate.The upshot is that arguments for social externalism and the normativity of meaning pose no threat to individualist explanations and can be accountedfor within a naturalistic theory of language. A good externalist theory will make crucial reference to individualistic facts, but go further by examining language users’ interactions in a systematic way. (shrink)

In contrast to his Anglican writings and practice—where fasting played a prominent role—Newman as a Roman Catholic was practically silent about fasting. This essay suggests that there were many reasons for Newman’s silence on fasting as a Roman Catholic, such as his health, his Oratorian vocation, and the presence of an established communal practice of fasting in the Roman Catholic Church.

La comprensión del lenguaje desplegada en Ser y tiempo puede ser identificada como un trayecto que parte de la recepción crítica por parte de Heidegger de la tradición filosófica sobre el lenguaje, se desarrolla temáticamente en Ser y tiempo como ontología del habla y, finalmente, se proyecta, sobre la base establecida ya en la obra misma, como una propuesta de comprensión del lenguaje cuyo último horizonte es la topología del ser. Esta comprensión del lenguaje, así identificada y caracterizada, puede servir, (...) asimismo, como base apropiada para la discusión de la relación con otros enfoques respecto del lenguaje, sea en la comparación directa entre ellos, sea por vía del análisis temático de cuestiones desde distintas posiciones y orientaciones. (shrink)

This book shows that the breakoff of narrative causal explanation in physics, although remarkable, is no basis for the negative view of scientific knowledge.

Systematic cross-national analyses of political debates on the admission of refugees and asylum seekers require a theoretically coherent and empirically comprehensive typology of frames and arguments used. The paper proposes such a typology of frames and arguments used by governments, opposition parties and social movements in public debates on the admission of refugees. We argue that the collective identity and characteristics of the receiving country on the one hand and refugees’ characteristics on the other constitute the key dimensions to which (...) frames in political discourse about the admission of refugees refer. We distinguish between six different frames – economic, cultural, moral, legal, security-related and international – of how the “we” and the “others” can be interpreted. Furthermore, we specify typical arguments associated with the respective frames for or against the admission of refugees. Given that the typology was developed based on a discourse analysis of a very diverse set of countries, including some of the so-called “Global South”, we claim that it can be used to analyze political debates on the admission of refugees in other countries as well and can thus contribute to an accumulation of knowledge. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper discusses competing notions of the concept of ‘order’ in the Admonition Controversy with respect to the interpretation of the decorum of 1 Corinthians 14:26-30, a text principally concerned with order in worship. As the controversy ensued the understanding of ‘order’ broadened to include church discipline and polity, both Puritan and Conformist alike constructed their polemic with a rhetorical appeal to the Pauline text in question-interpretations at odds with each other. Furthermore, both sides understood their interpretation as standing (...) faithfully in the tradition of Calvin. This paper follows the appeals to 1 Corinthians 14:26-40 by Advanced Protestants and Conformists from its use in the treatise ‘Of Ceremonies’ found in the Book of Common Prayer, through the Admonition to the Parliament, the responses of John Whitgift and Thomas Cartwright, and finally Richard Hooker’s Preface to the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie. (shrink)

This article proposes a new account of causal asymmetry and of how it relates to temporal asymmetry. The key concept on which the account is based is that of inclusion, i.e. of an object being “in” another. Thus, part I develops the notion of what is “possible with respect to” a given object, and what is not, based on what is included in it. This leads to a counterfactual dependence asymmetry which is independent of the direction of time. Part II (...) provides a crash course in local time, describing how to derive temporal precedence (“before”) and time’s characteristic asymmetry in terms only of states of physical objects called “recorders”, a derivation which yields a relativistically correct model of time’s arrow. Putting the counterfactual and temporal asymmetries together allows, in part III, to propose an explanation of why causes are observed to precede their effects in time. The upshot is that, even though many of our intuitions about causal asymmetry are profoundly connected to our temporal perspective, there remains a robust counterfactual asymmetry whereby a change in an object requires something distinct from it. (shrink)

In this addition to the award-winning Church and Postmodern Culture series, respected theologian Daniel Bell compares and contrasts capitalism and Christianity, showing how Christianity provides resources for faithfully navigating the postmodern global economy. Bell approaches capitalism and Christianity as alternative visions of humanity, God, and the good life. Considering faith and economics in terms of how desire is shaped, he casts the conflict as one between different disciplines of desire. He engages the work of two important postmodern philosophers, Deleuze (...) and Foucault, to illuminate the nature of the postmodern world that the church currently inhabits. Bell then considers how the global economy deforms desire in a manner that distorts human relations with God and one another. In contrast, he presents Christianity and the tradition of the works of mercy as a way beyond capitalism and socialism, beyond philanthropy and welfare. Christianity heals desire, renewing human relations and enabling communion with God. (shrink)