The giving up of the body or suicide for spiritual reasons has been dealt with by James Benn and D Max Moermane. The relationships of the dead and the living are discussed by Bryan J Cuevas, John Cliff ord Holt, and Matthew T Kapstein, while Hank Glassman, Mark Rowe, and Jason A Carbine talk about different funeral practices. With glossaries for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters and an elaborate index, this book is a unique peek into Buddhist practices (...) regarding the dead and deserves attention by researchers, students, and admirers of this religion. (shrink)

Peter Hanks defends a new theory about the nature of propositional content, according to which the basic bearers of representational properties are particular mental or spoken actions. He explains the unity of propositions and provides new solutions to a long list of puzzles and problems in philosophy of language.

In this essay Michael Glassman and Jonathan Burbidge explore the idea of a dialectical relationship between the traditional place(s) of teaching/learning settings and the challenges to our perceptions created by the new spaces of the Internet. The authors examine this topic in the context of a three-stage evolution of humans' relationship with new technologies: (1) fear of how new technologies will change our everyday actions, (2) recognition of emerging technologies as tools capable of offering new possibilities in our activities, (...) and (3) integration of new technologies into productive everyday activities. The Internet is moving quickly through all three stages, but this process takes different forms with disparate populations. What makes recognition of the fast-moving integration of Internet technology important in the field of education is that students and educators are often at different points in this process. It is critical that we are aware of the role technology is playing in the classroom, in particular the dynamic dialectical relationship between space and place. (shrink)

In this paper I defend an account of the nature of propositional content according to which the proposition expressed by a declarative sentence is a certain type of action a speaker performs in uttering that sentence. On this view, the semantic contents of proper names turn out to be types of reference acts. By carefully individuating these types, it is possible to provide new solutions to Frege’s puzzles about names in identity- and belief-sentences.

The conference where this article was originally presented solicited recommendations for the “right questions” to ask regarding education and technology. The author of this article suggests that we already know what the right questions are for illuminating technology and its social meaning. What the author wants to know is why those questions in fact are not being asked more widely—why is widespread disinclination to enter explicit deliberation on the proper place of technology so resilient? Langdon Winner uses the term “technological (...) somnambulism” to describe the predominant stance toward technology in our culture, that “we so willingly sleepwalk through the process of reconstituting the conditions of human existence” via the adoption of new technologies. The basic institutional and ideological forces shaping the development and use of technology are not mysterious. But, scrutiny of those forces remains limited to a relative handful of academics and activists. How can technological somnambulism be countered? (shrink)

Geary suggests that implicit mathematical principles exist across human cultures and transcend sex differences. Is such knowledge present in animals as well, and is it sufficient to account for performance in all species, including our own? I attempt to trace the implications of Gearys target article for comparative psychology, questioning the exclusion of “subitizing” in describing human mathematical performance, and asking whether human researchers function as cultural agents with animals, elevating their implicit knowledge to secondary domains of numerical performance.

This book bridges media, technocultural, urban and journalism studies to examine the role of journalism in relation to a smart city project on Toronto’s waterfront. From the announcement of the public-private partnership called Sidewalk Toronto to the project’s termination, a mediatized controversy unfolded. Through an assemblage approach and a comprehensive case study of the Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star, it follows the actors and chronicles the Quayside project story as a conversation about the promise and perils of a (...) future “smart” neighbourhood. In the news of Waterfront Toronto, Sidewalk Labs, other actors, events and developments, there were multiple voices and views, interpretations and arguments, that manifested conflicting interests and values. As a situated actor, journalism produced a porous discourse where the prognostic value of the project to come could be expressed. The Quayside story not only described the project and the process with an active propose-and-public pushback movement but articulated relations of transparency and trust, governance and accountability. Journalist’s work of mediation conditioned the project’s emergence and dissolution within asymmetrical relations of power. Sidewalk Lab’s bid for legitimacy would face an oppositional dimension that indented the project’s enactment. Moreover, a time lag between project time and governmental policymaking made the mediatized controversy intractable. With their residual symbolic power, quality journalism contributed to dialogical urban learning. (shrink)

One of the prominent debates of post-Tridentine scholasticism addressed probability, often expressed by the term “moral” (or adverbially, “morally”), originally motivated by the epistemology of decision-making and the debates on predestination and “middle knowledge”. Puente (or Pedro) Hurtado de Mendoza (1578–1641), an Iberian Jesuit and the author of one of the earliest Jesuit philosophy courses, entered this debate in the early-seventeenth century. This paper presents his 1610s and 1620s analyses of different forms or degrees of evidence, certainty, and necessity or (...) impossibility, addressing the commonly-used trichotomy of the “metaphysical”, “physical”, and “moral”, in which “moral” is the weakest form of a modality, together with the paradigmatic examples and interesting applications of the framework. (shrink)

This paper discusses operationalization of open educational practices (OEP) using innovative, Internet-influenced pedagogies to expose dangers of post-truth narratives. The first part reviews interpretations of OEP (associated with open-access and tools, collaboration, problem-centered learning, and democratic pedagogy) and explores possibilities for creating educational initiatives where students learn to create problem-solving communities mirroring an informationally healthy society. The second part suggests our society has reached a post-truth crossroads. Post-truth was initially discussed in the 1990s—a reification of critical theorists’ pessimism of social (...) structures, controlling narratives and ways members react to critical events, whether through obedience to institutional authority or support for destructive adventurism, creating situations producing cybernetic double binds. The third part contextualizes OEP as ecologically grounded pedagogies through an open source educational processes framework focusing on productive many-to-many online communication and community formation, offering practical examples of open source educational processes curricula implemented in a higher education setting. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the early sixteenth-century epistemic logic developed by John Mair’s circle and discusses iterated epistemic modalities, epistemic closure and Bradwardinian semantics related to the logic of epistemic statements. These topics are addressed as part of setting up and solving epistemic sophisms based on traditional scenarios which can be traced back to fourteenth-century British epistemic logic. While the ultimate source for the debate appears to be the second chapter of William Heytesbury’s Regule solvendi sophismata, the immediate source is (...) the Italian editorial, commentarial and philosophical tradition, notably Paul of Venice and Cajetan of Thiene. (shrink)

(2013). What are the primary bearers of truth? Canadian Journal of Philosophy: Vol. 43, Essays on the Nature of Propositions, pp. 558-574.

In Hanks I defend a theory of propositions that locates the source of propositional unity in acts of predication that people perform in thought and speech. On my account, these acts of predication are judgmental or assertoric in character, and they commit the speaker to things being the way they are represented to be in the act of predication. This leads to a problem about negations, disjunctions, conditionals, and other kinds of embeddings. When you assert that a is F or (...) b is G you do not assert that a is F, nor do you commit yourself to a’s being F. According to my theory, however, in uttering the disjunction you predicate F of a. What is going on? I account for these cases using the concept of cancellation. In uttering the disjunction, the act of predicating F of a is cancelled, and when an act of predication is cancelled it does not count as an assertion and does not commit the speaker to anything. But what is it for an act of predication to be cancelled? One immediate concern is that cancelled predication won’t provide a unified proposition to be the input to disjunction. In this paper I answer this and related objections by explaining and defending my concept of cancellation. (shrink)

Zen is not just about what we do in the meditation hall, but what we do in the home, the workplace, and the community. That's the premise of this book: how to cook what Zen Buddhists call "the supreme meal"—life. It has to be nourishing, and it has to be shared. And we can use only the ingredients at hand. Inspired by the thirteenth-century manual of the same name by Dogen, the founder of the Japanese Soto Zen tradition, this book (...) teaches us how we can "enlarge the family we're feeding" if we just use some imagination. Bernie Glassman founded Greyston Bakery in Yonkers, New York, in 1982 to employ those whom other companies deem unemployable—the homeless, ex-cons, recovering addicts, low-skill individuals—with the belief that investing in people, and not just products, does pay. He was right. Greyston has evolved into an $8 million-a-year business with clients all over New York City. It is the sole supplier of brownies to Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream, and has even sold cakes to the White House. But financial profit is only one of two bottom lines that Greyston is committed to. The other one is social impact, and this goal is certainly being met. The bakery enterprise has led to the creation of the Greyston Foundation, an integrated network of organizations that provide affordable housing, child care, counseling services, and health care to families in the community. Using entrepreneurship to solve the problems of the inner city, Greyston has become a national model for comprehensive community development. Its giving back is more than just sloughing off a percentage of its profits and donating it to charity; it's about working with the community's needs right from the beginning—bringing them from the margins to the core. As its company motto goes, "We don't hire people to bake brownies. We bake brownies to hire people." This book is as much a self-manual as a business manual, addressing such concepts as • Beginner's mind • The Middle Way of Sustainability • The "hungry ghosts" of Buddhism as a picture of all humanity • Working with our faults • Indra's Net and the interconnectedness of life • Leaving no trace. (shrink)

Johann Eck (1486–1543) has been introduced to modern scholarship as a prominent figure of the pre-Tridentine Counter-Reformation. As part of the curricular transformations of the University of Ingolstadt, he wrote commentaries on logical and scientific works by Aristotle and Peter of Spain. Utilising a variety of sources, the two volumes dedicated to physics and natural philosophy published in 1518 and 1519 were self-contained textbooks including annotated translations of the texts and quaestio-commentaries. These developed the doctrines of the Oxford Calculators mediated (...) through Continental sources, reproducing their conceptual and mathematical apparatus, including the famous middle degree theorem and Bradwardine’s law. (shrink)

Propositions, the abstract, truth-bearing contents of sentences and beliefs, continue to be the focus of healthy debates in philosophy of language and metaphysics. This article is a critical survey of work on propositions since the mid-90s, with an emphasis on newer work from the past decade. Topics to be covered include a substitution puzzle about propositional designators, two recent arguments against propositions, and two new theories about the nature of propositions.

To date, a wide range of interdisciplinary scholarship has done little to clarify either the why or the how of empathy. Preston & de Waal attempt to remedy this, although it remains unclear whether empathy consists of two discrete processes, or whether a perceptual and motor component are joined in some sort of behavioral inevitability. Although it is appealing to offer a neuroanatomy of empathy, the present level of neuropsychology may not support such reductionism.

These texts were created as part of a federally funded project (R305A200364) funded by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), targeted towards the use of low-tech immersive learning for social studies instruction in Ohio's fourth and fifth grade classrooms. Texts and materials created as part of the Digital Civic Learning curriculum are free for use for educational purposes.

In the first half of the fifteenth century, the Italian logician, natural philosopher, and doctor of medicine Cajetan of Thiene wrote a commentary on William Heytesbury’s Regulae solvendi sophismata, which later became a part of the printed edition of Heytesbury’s treatises. Several late fifteenth century reprints sustained its circulation and further influence. Following Heytesbury, Cajetan listed four alternative treatments of paradoxes, where the first three were formulated in general logico-semantic terms and the last one in terms of obligationes. The present (...) analysis reconstructs the first three positions in terms of the theories of logical operators endorsed as part of the solution to paradoxes. This reconstruction uncovers different underlying views of operators, namely context-sensitive, value-functional, and supervaluationist.Priore dimidia parte saeculi 15 Caietanus de Thiena, logicus, physicus et medicus, commentarium super G. Hentisberi Regulis solvendi sophismata conscripsit, quod posterius una cum Hentisberi tractatibus typis impressum est. Cuius commentarii notitiam auctoritatemque continuam iteratae nonnullae eius editiones in fi ne 15 saeculi factae sustinebant. Caietanus quattuor vias tractandi insolubilia distinxit, quarum tres primae conceptibus generalibus logico-semanticis, quarta doctrina de obligationibus innixae sunt. In analysi hic proposita auctor primas tres vias reconstruit, doctrinas varias de logicis coniunctionibus vel notis reserans, super quibus illae viae solvendi paradoxa fundantur. Quarum prima vim notarum a contextu sermonis dependentem facit. Altera notas pure “compositionaliter” tractat. Tertia iuxta modum doctrinae de “supervaluatione” omnes formales tautologias servat, aliis considerationibus neglectis. (shrink)

In this paper we try to provide the beginning of an analysis of some of the crises of our time. We do so by arguing that a certain account of the individual blocks our ability to think about solutions at the individual and the social levels. As an example we take the industrialization of housework in the United States and its effects on women’s identity and on notions of “home.” We suggest that the rise of liberal individualism, the industrialization of (...) public and private life, and the predomination of capitalism are central to the disintegration of the individual/self, and that they limit the possiblities of some to determine the content, and direction of self change. We argue that a notion of self as integrated and in process is needed in order to address our rapidly changing world. (shrink)

This article provides an Anselmian interpretation of the theme of the congress, Pleasures of Knowledge. First, it shows the practical character of Anselm’s epistemology, according to his dialogue De veritate: cognition is conceived as a process characterised by an internal normative claim – called rectitudo – on the one hand, and practical acts supposed to meet this claim on the other hand. Secondly, the same structure is analysed in Anselm’s ethics especially in his soteriological work Cur deus homo, which serves (...) as a link to connect the emotional mood of the Orationes sive Meditationes with the former considerations on epistemology. Thus, it is shown that emotions play a significant systematic role in Anselmian thought. (shrink)

The so-called “Trinitarian paralogisms” are apparently legitimate instances of syllogistic inference-schemes with premises and conclusions containing expressions of the language of the Trinity doctrine, which fail to be truth- or acceptability-preserving. The logical problem of the Trinity splits into two levels of analysis. First, the technical aspects of Trinitarian paralogisms are analysed in terms of logical innovations in theories of “suppositio” and “distributio”. Second, the philosophical aspect of Trinitarian paralogisms translates into the question of formality as general applicability of logic. (...) The sixteenth century tradition can be reconstructed as a reaction to the fourteenth century nominalist logical analysis. As opposed to post-medieval scholasticism developing the medieval approach, humanism and reformation criticise scholastic logic in terms of diff erent specifi c anthropological theories. (shrink)

In 1910 Bertrand Russell abandoned the theory of propositions that he advocated in 1903 in The Principles of Mathematics because of the problem of the unity of the proposition. This is the problem of explaining how the constituents of a proposition are bound together into a unified, representational whole. This problem has largely been ignored by contemporary advocates of Russellian propositions. I argue that this problem is the result of the Fregean distinction between content and force, the arguments for the (...) content-force distinction are inconclusive and there is independent linguistic evidence against the content-force distinction. For these reasons I think that Frege's distinction between content and force should be abandoned; this is the main negative conclusion of the dissertation. ;The main positive component of the dissertation is an account of structured propositions that individuates propositions in terms of force or mood. On the account I defend, propositions are types of representational actions or states. The proposition expressed by 'Jones loves Smith', for example, is a type of representational state, tokens of which are particular assertions that Jones loves Smith or belief-states that Jones loves Smith. The proposition expressed by 'Does Jones love Smith?', on the other hand, is a type of interrogative action or state, tokens of which are instances of asking whether Jones loves Smith or wondering whether Jones loves Smith. This account solves the problem of the unity of proposition by locating the unifying element in a proposition in an act of the subject. In addition, this account provides an empirical foundation for semantics. A semantic theory, on this view, is a theory of what speakers do with sentences in contexts. To say that a sentence S expresses a proposition p in context c is to record a fact about the literal and direct illocutionary act that could be performed using S in c. (shrink)

In May 1968, Gilles Deleuze was an established philosopher teaching at the innovative Vincennes University, just outside of Paris. Félix Guattari was a political militant and the director of an unusual psychiatric clinic at La Borde. Their meeting was quite unlikely, yet the two were introduced in an arranged encounter of epic consequence. From that moment on, Deleuze and Guattari engaged in a surprising, productive partnership, collaborating on several groundbreaking works, including _Anti-Oedipus_, _What Is Philosophy?_ and _A Thousand Plateaus_. François (...) Dosse, a prominent French intellectual known for his work on the Annales School, structuralism, and biographies of the pivotal intellectuals Paul Ricoeur, Pierre Chaunu, and Michel de Certeau, examines the prolific if improbable relationship between two men of distinct and differing sensibilities. Drawing on unpublished archives and hundreds of personal interviews, Dosse elucidates a collaboration that lasted more than two decades, underscoring the role that family and history—particularly the turbulent time of May 1968—play in their monumental work. He also takes the measure of Deleuze and Guattari's posthumous fortunes and the impact of their thought on intellectual, academic, and professional circles. (shrink)

Religion persists, even within enlightened secular society, because it has adaptive functions. In particular, Ralph Wendell Burhoe's theory holds that religion is the repository of cultural wisdom that most encourages mutual altruism among nonkin, long-term social survival, and human progress. This article suggests a variant of Burhoe's rationalized naturalistic view. Cognitive theism is a proposal that secularists sometimes take religion on its own terms by suspending disbelief about God. If we consider particular human capacities and limitations in memory, perception, personality, (...) and motivation, the regulated “mind expansion” of cognitive theism may help us to evaluate, coordinate, and invigorate things in a modern environment. In this environment, communicative and travel technologies have led to a high loading of consciousness with a historically unusual diverse range of experiences and responsibilities, a high rate of cultural change relative to biological evolution, and a tendency to factionalize. Burhoe's extension of the concept of symbiosis to the coevolution of culture and genes is modified here in recognition of individual differences and of individuals' potential for choosing strategies, recombining in groups, and learning. In human biocultural symbiont pools, cultural phenomena can evolve while changing partners in a dance with genetic substrates, a dance that broadly supports these substrates. In the context of diversity and incessant change in a large predominantly secular community, Judeo-Christian monotheism can have a valuable advisory unifying function. (shrink)

. Ably marshalling ideas from theology, philosophy, and neurology, personality theorist Joseph F. Rychlak criticizes mechanistic psychologists' neglect of will and responsibility; these human qualities involve dialectically considering alternatives. I disagree with Rychlaks suggestion of fundamental mystery in the minds transcendence of the body and believe transcendent mind is intimately related to biological evolution and the brain. For example, dialectics, seen in simpler forms in lower animals, may require neural inhibition, feedback circuits, and topographic mappings. However, epistemologically speaking, neuroscientists strongly (...) need the human insights of work such as Rychlak's to understand the alternatives, in planning investigation at more microscopic levels. (shrink)