Verifying that conceptualisations of emotions are consistent across languages and cultures is a critical precondition for meaningful cross-cultural research on emotional experience. For achievement...

A certain objection to belief in God is based on the intrinsic incoherence of the concept of Divine Being or God. In particular, it questions the major traditional characteristic, notably omniscience, and its relation to omnipotence, moral unassailability, and absence of embodiment on the part of the Divine Being. In this paper, an attempt is made to counter this objection by an appeal, not to natural theology, but rather to physicalism in its application to human beings, and by extension to (...) the possible consistency of God’s omniscience with the other divine attributes, which philosophers such as Michael Martin have found to be mutually inconsistent and therefore wanting. (shrink)

This article explores the possibility of moving beyond the apparent incapacity of Karl Barth's theological anthropology to accommodate gender equality. Barth's theological anthropology is read by critics and appreciative readers alike as confining the basic form of humanity to a binary opposition from which he then derives a gender‐specific, hierarchical account of man and woman, and finally, of husband and wife as a paradigmatic ethical relationship. I first forward a close reading of Barth's account of I and Thou in order (...) to explicate the nature of the normative form that is basic to his account of human being‐in‐relation. I apply this reading as a lens through which to re‐read and re‐orient his account of Man and Woman/Husband and Wife. I argue that the inequalities that appear intrinsic to Barth's formal ordering of Man and Woman/Husband and Wife owing to the absence of a standard concept of “equal regard” might be re‐oriented, and limitations of his account surpassed, by grasping with greater precision and enunciating the orientational implications of Barth's christologically‐anchored conception of freedom as the “root and crown” of human being‐in‐relation generally, and gendered relationship in particular. (shrink)

Strohminger (2014) criticizes McGinn for his lack of attention to recent scientific findings, and for ignoring common sense. This commentary deepens both of these criticisms via an exploration of McGinn’s account of the evolution of disgust.

This book provides a detailed analysis of Aristotle's Parts of Animals. It takes its bearings from the detailed natural history observations that inform, and in many ways penetrate, the philosophical argument. This analysis raises the question of how easy it is to clearly disentangle what some might describe as the "merely" biological from the philosophical. This book explores the notion and consequences of describing the activity in which Aristotle is engaged as philosophical biology. Do readers of Aristotle have in mind (...) organisms like sea squirts (ascidians) or sea cucumbers (holuthurians) when trying to understand Aristotle's argument regarding plant-like animals? Do we need the phenomena in front of us to understand the terms of the philosophical argument in a richer way? The discussion of plant-like animals is important to Aristotle because of the apparent continuum between plant and animal life. Where does Aristotle draw the line? Plant-like animals bring this question into focus and demonstrate the indeterminacy of any potential solution to the division. This analysis of the Parts of Animals shows that the study of the nature of the organic world was Aristotle's way into such ontological problems as the relationship between matter and form, the interplay between form and function, and the heterogeneity of the many different kinds of being. (shrink)

In this article, we introduce the notion of weakly measurable cardinal, a new large cardinal concept obtained by weakening the familiar concept of a measurable cardinal. Specifically, a cardinal κ is weakly measurable if for any collection equation image containing at most κ+ many subsets of κ, there exists a nonprincipal κ-complete filter on κ measuring all sets in equation image. Every measurable cardinal is weakly measurable, but a weakly measurable cardinal need not be measurable. Moreover, while the GCH cannot (...) fail first at a measurable cardinal, I will show that it can fail first at a weakly measurable cardinal. More generally, if κ is measurable, then we can make its weak measurability indestructible by the forcing Add for any η while forcing the GCH to hold below κ. Nevertheless, I shall prove that weakly measurable cardinals and measurable cardinals are equiconsistent. © 2011 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim. (shrink)

One of the explicit objectives of Darwin's Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex was to explain cultural differences seen in human beings. Such an explanation, Darwin believed, was to rest upon an understanding of sexual selection. I examine the role that the beautiful plays within the mechanism of sexual selection as it works to differentiate isolated groups. It is suggested that an examination of the relationship between sexual selection and artificial selection — a relationship mediated by the (...) beautiful — will illuminate key issues of the Descent as well as contemporary debates regarding the relationship between evolution and ethics. The beautiful, originally rooted in sexual selection, can become de-coupled from sexual selection and utilized in some selective process which is conscious. (shrink)

Tracy, Shariff, and Cheng (2010) propose that human pride has two facets (hubristic pride [HP] and authentic pride [AP]) which, despite their similarities, diverge in important ways, including their evolutionary histories and functions. Put simplistically, AP emerged from HP. While AP and HP are thus homologous, HP continues to exist in humans, alongside AP. This is problematic on the most common interpretation of homology, in which an ancestral trait transforms into a derived trait, but does not remain present independently. I (...) suggest that construing HP and AP as serial homologues (duplicated but varying traits within single organisms) solves this problem, and also resolves some of the other tensions in their account of pride as a “single” emotion with “two” facets. (shrink)

Climate change poses real and immediate impacts to the public health of populations around the globe. Adverse impacts are expected to continue throughout the century. Emphasizing co-benefits of climate action for health, combining adaptation and mitigation efforts, and increasing interagency coordination can effectively address both public health and climate change challenges.

ABSTRACT The phrase “ambiguous utopia” was coined by Ursula K. Le Guin in the subtitle of her novel, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia. That work appeared when utopian narratives had been displaced by dystopian imaginaries. This article embarks on a comparative analysis of three short stories: Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”, Angélica Gorodischer’s “Of Navigators”, and N. K. Jemisin’s “The Ones Who Stay and Fight”. Each author installs ambiguity at the center of their open-ended (...) utopian imaginaries as a way to challenge dogma, pessimism, and complacency. Le Guin interrogates the boundary between belief and knowledge to hold the threat of authoritarianism at bay. Gorodischer, a friend and contemporary of Le Guin, is considered a central figure of Argentine science fiction and fantasy. Her story imagines the discovery of a second Earth set in 1492 and highlights the need for utopianism to challenge the legacy of colonization. Finally, Jemisin’s story is a critical homage to “Omelas.” Jemisin shares the decolonial impetus of Gorodischer’s fiction, and she constructs Um-Helat on an explicitly antiracist foundation. Instead of walking away, her characters actively fight the creeping threat of intolerance while working toward that better place. (shrink)

Remarkably, the theological discourse surrounding Hans Frei and postliberal theology has continued for nearly forty years since Frei's death. This is due not only to the complex and provocative character of Frei's work, nor only to his influence upon an array of thinkers who went on to shape the theological field in their own right. It is just as indebted to the critical responses that his thinking continues to inspire. One recurrent point of criticism takes aim at Frei's use of (...) Ludwig Wittgenstein's later work for theological ends. In his recent book Liberalism versus Postliberalism: The Great Divide in Twentieth Century Theology, John Allan Knight challenges what he sees as Frei's dependence on problematic Wittgensteinian assumptions. This article raises a few concerns about Knight's charges against Frei. Specifically, I argue that Knight's account tends to conflate the work of Wittgenstein and Frei. It does this by undervaluing two determinative features of Frei's work: (1) its basic Christological orientation; and (2) its Christologically motivated use of ad hoc apologetics. I argue that the Wittgensteinian view that Knight attributes to Frei is not Frei's view at all, and is, moreover, a problematic account of Wittgenstein on its own terms. Finally, Knight's claim that Frei's work “depends upon” and “is suffused” with the understanding of Wittgenstein that Knight attributes to him is based upon an account of Frei's treatment of the sensus literalis that is not entirely accurate. Without question, Knight does remarkable service to Frei's legacy by keeping important debates over his work alive. In what follows, I propose several points where I think Knight's account might be further enriched. The result, I hope, will be a more nuanced understanding of the ways that Frei actually appropriated and deployed Wittgenstein's thought. I will contextualize my account of Frei with reference both to Wittgenstein's writings and the literature surrounding his writings. Setting forth these accounts in tandem should help make further available Wittgenstein's work for subsequent work by postliberal theologians. (shrink)

Aristotle famously argues that friendship can serve as a normative model for the practice of citizenship, and this view has been widely accepted by neo-Aristotelians. Liberals, however, are quick to reject both Aristotle's view of friendship and his view of citizenship. Does this mean that the concept of friendship is politically irrelevant for liberalism? This essay suggests, on the contrary, that the concept of friendship is far from obsolete, even for liberals. Specifically, communicative constraints derived from the norms of friendship, (...) as interpreted by Ralph Waldo Emerson, could serve to promote the modest instrumental purposes of liberal citizenship-personal freedom, social justice, and civil peace-while simultaneously allowing the practice of liberal citizenship to develop in noninstrumental directions, enriched rather than strained by the multicultural realities of most modern societies. (shrink)

Contemporary art can be a powerful pedagogical tool in the health humanities. Students in an undergraduate course in the health humanities explore the subjective experience of illness and develop their empathy by studying three artists in the context of the AIDS epidemic: Keith Haring, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Wolfgang Tillmans. Using assignments based in narrative pedagogy, students expand their empathic response to pain and suffering. The role of visual art in health humanities pedagogy is discussed.

This report provides an overview of training individuals in public health law. This report is designed to broadly outline the issues in order to facilitate discussion at the November 2007 PHLA meeting in Washington, D.C. I found that attorneys and public health practitioners have different approaches to training and practice. Materials and programs that seek to train individuals must be designed to fit within the professional culture of the targeted group. The differences between the two professional cultures can be a (...) barrier to training if not acknowledged in the design of training programs and materials.In a selected overview of materials and programs available, I found that there is an unmet need for responsive materials and programs. I also found that networking and conference opportunities can play an important role in training that should be explored. I also discuss joint degree programs. The report concludes with a series of future recommendations to facilitate discussion. (shrink)

Recently, many critics have argued that disgust is a morally harmful emotion, and that it should play no role in our moral and legal reasoning. Here we defend disgust as a morally beneficial moral capacity. We believe that a variety of liberal norms have been inappropriately imported into both moral psychology and ethical studies of disgust: disgust has been associated with conservative authors, values, value systems, and modes of moral reasoning that are seen as inferior to the values and moral (...) emotions that are endorsed by liberal critics. Here we argue that the meta-ethical assumptions employed by the critics of disgust are highly contentious and in some cases culture bound. Given this, we should avoid adopting simplified meta-ethical positions in experimental moral psychology, as these can skew the design and interpretation of experiments, and blind us to the potential value of moral disgust harnessed in the service of liberal ends. (shrink)

In the last 10 years, several authors including Griffiths and Matthen have employed classificatory principles from biology to argue for a radical revision in the way that we individuate psychological traits. Arguing that the fundamental basis for classification of traits in biology is that of ‘homology’ (similarity due to common descent) rather than ‘analogy’, or ‘shared function’, and that psychological traits are a special case of biological traits, they maintain that psychological categories should be individuated primarily by relations of homology (...) rather than in terms of shared function. This poses a direct challenge to the dominant philosophical view of how to define psychological categories, viz., ‘functionalism’. Although the implications of this position extend to all psychological traits, the debate has centered around ‘emotion’ as an example of a psychological category ripe for reinterpretation within this new framework of classification. I address arguments by Griffiths that emotions should be divided into at least two distinct classes, basic emotions and higher cognitive emotions, and that these two classes require radically different theories to explain them. Griffiths argues that while basic emotions in humans are homologous to the corresponding states in other animals, higher cognitive emotions are dependent on mental capacities unique to humans, and are therefore not homologous to basic emotions. Using the example of shame, I argue that (a) many emotions that are commonly classified as being higher cognitive emotions actually correspond to certain basic emotions, and that (b) the “higher cognitive forms” of these emotions are best seen as being homologous to their basic forms. (shrink)

Ecological validity is key in science and laboratory experiments alone cannot fully explain complex real-world phenomena. Yet the three flaws Cesario proposes do not characterize the field and are not “methodological trickery,” designed to intentionally mislead practitioners. In school discipline alone, these alleged flaws are indeed addressed and laboratory experimentation has contributed to mitigation of a real-world problem.

This essay aims to morally evaluate psychotherapy as it is currently practiced through the lens of sales/exchange ethics. The main focus of the essay is on psychotherapists’ claims to special expertise at diagnosing and treating mental illness. I review the research evidence relevant to these claims and conclude that these claims are not supported by the available evidence. Psychotherapists do not appear to be any better than actuarial tests at diagnosing mental illnesses, and meta-analyses of psychotherapy outcome studies casts serious (...) doubt on the existence of treatment expertise. Given that the expertise that psychotherapists claim to have is lacking, those seeking psychotherapy are not adequately informed about the quality of the product that they are seeking. Using Holley’s principles of sales ethics as a springboard, I argue that this situation is morally unacceptable; thus the current practice of psychotherapy is morally impermissible. I provide and evaluate some suggestions for rectifying this problem. The most important of these is Dawes’s suggestion that psychotherapists be licensed according to their use of experimentally confirmed diagnostic and treatment methods. (shrink)

From many Aboriginal elders, such as Tjangika Napaltjani, Bob Williams and Djiniyini Gondarra, to painters, such as Arthur Boyd, Pro Hart and John Forrester-Clack, from historians, such as Manning Clark, and poets, such as Maureen Watson, Francis Webb and Henry Lawson, to celebrated novelists, such as Joseph Furphy, Patrick White and Tim Winton, the figure of Jesus has occupied an endearing and idiosyncratic place in the Australian imagination. It is evidence enough that 'Australians have been anticlerical and antichurch, but rarely (...) antiJesus'. But which Jesus? In what follows, I seek to listen to what some Australians make of Jesus, and to consider some theological implications of their contributions for the enduring quest for an Australian Jesus. (shrink)

Is the institutionalization of religious freedom through human rights jurisprudence simply a means by which the modern nation-state manufactures and regulates “religion”? Is the discourse of religious freedom principally a technology of state governance? These questions challenge the ways that scholars conceptualize the relation between states, nationalism, human rights, and religious freedom. This article forwards an approach to human rights and methodological nationalism that both counters and explores alternatives to the prevailing conceptions of human rights, nationalism, and state sovereignty in (...) the discourse on the putative impossibility—and, by some accounts, insidiousness—of religious freedom. I first explicate the interpretive and contestatory dimensions of human rights discourse concerning religious freedom. I then explore cross-cutting ambivalences within the nationalisms that states need and cultivate in effort to transmute their monopoly upon coercive force (i.e. power) into legitimated authority. I argue that these provide two dimensions in and through which state sovereignty may be opposed, criticized, held accountable, and subject to change. (shrink)

This essay clarifies and defends the methodological multidimensionality and improvisational character of Clifford Geertz’s account of interpretation and explanation. In contrast to accounts of power analysis offered by Michel Foucault and Talal Asad, I argue that Geertz’s work can simultaneously attend to meaning, power, identity, and experience in understanding and assessing religious practices and cultural formations.

An exploration of the connections between law, science, and truth, this paper argues that ‘truth’ is an evolving, rather than fixed, concept. It is a human creation, and the processes, or standards, by which it has been evaluated have changed over time. Currently knowledge production is anchored in the natural sciences but reproduced and validated by philosophical rationalisation. There are two problems with this technique of knowledge verification (or ‘veridiction’). First, the natural sciences are not, in fact, practiced according to (...) their ideal forms; and second, the Queen of Sciences, physics, underwent two fundamental paradigm shifts in the early nineteenth century. General relativity and quantum theory entered the scene, sending ripples throughout science, and the social sciences. These changes too have been slowly absorbed by philosophy, giving rise in part to the postmodernist and deconstructivist movements. I chart this gradual evolution of truth and knowledge production in physics and in law and analyse the resistance it has faced from both classical law and classical physics. Finally I argue that this resistance could be overcome, if legal theory, and especially legal positivism, would embrace a more accurate and up-to-date understanding of the science it purports to examine and emulate. (shrink)

This essay responds to four critical essays by Rosemary Kellison, Ebrahim Moosa, Joseph Winters, and Martin Kavka on the author’s recent book, Healthy Conflict in Contemporary American Society: From Enemy to Adversary (Cambridge, 2018). Parts I and II work in tandem to further develop my accounts of strategic empathy and agonistic political friendship. I defend against criticisms that my argument for moral imagination obligates oppressed people to empathize with their oppressors. I argue, further, that healthy conflict can be motivated by (...) a kind of “secular” love. This enables my position to immanently criticize and mediate the claims that one must either love (agapically) one’s opponent in order to engage them in “healthy conflict,” on one hand, or that one must vanquish, exclude, or “cancel” one’s opponent, on the other. In Part III, I demonstrate how my account mediates the challenge of an alleged standing opposition between moral imagination and socio-theoretical critique. I defend a methodologically pragmatist account of immanent prophetic criticism, resistance, and conflict transformation. Finally, I respond to one critic’s vindication of a strong enemy/adversary opposition that takes up the case of white supremacist violence in the U.S. I argue that the time horizon for healthy conflict must be simultaneously immediate and also long-term, provided that such engagements remain socio-critically self-reflexive and seek to cultivate transformational responses. (shrink)

“Parting is such sweet sorrow.” Taste metaphors provide a rich vocabulary for describing emotional experience, potentially serving as an adaptive mechanism for conveying abstract emotional concepts using concrete verbal references to our shared experience. We theorized that the popularity of these expressions results from the close association with hedonic valence shared by these two domains of experience. To explore the possibility that this affective quality underlies the semantic similarity of these domains, we used a behavioral “odd-one-out” task in an online (...) sample of 1059 participants in order to examine the semantic similarity of concepts related to emotion, taste, and color, another rich source of sensory metaphors. We found that the semantic similarity of emotion and taste concepts was greater than that of emotion and color concepts. Importantly, the similarity of taste and emotion concepts was strongly related to their similarity in hedonic valence, a relationship which was also significantly greater than that present between color and emotion. These results suggest that the common core of valence between taste and emotion concepts allows us to bridge the conceptual divide between our shared sensory environment and our internal emotional experience. (shrink)

In this work, I argue for the overall explanatory superiority of philosophical naturalism to a theistic worldview. Pursuant to that, this piece develops and defends a functionalist theory of explanation, which is then used in addressing several particular topics in the philosophy of religion: the law-governed nature of the world, the intelligibility of the world, alleged "fine-tuning", reports of religious experiences and the occurrence of evils. In each case, I argue that a naturalistic explanation is as good or superior to (...) a theistic worldview in helping us to understand such phenomena. Some original parts of the work include developing out a naturalistic explanation of religious experiences grounded in normal human perceptual and cognitive fallacies, an explanatory critique of several traditional theodicies, and a rebuttal of contemporary fine-tuning arguments on the basis of their reliance on unestablished assumptions that add no explanatory improvement. (shrink)

This article investigates the relationship between love, law, and human nature in the thought of McCabe and Aquinas. The article puts McCabe and Aquinas into conversation in order to illuminateMcCabe's estimation of the natural law as an “insufficient ethic” and a feature of ethics that sheds a “great deal of light” on the matter of human morality. The article seeks to articulate the integrity of natural morality as a feature of the Divine Wisdom that ultimately perfects natural morality via the (...) incarnation of the Son. (shrink)

I argue that trends of diagnosing anti-Muslim attitudes and activism as “Islamophobia” in European and the U.S. contexts may actually aid and abet more subtle varieties of the very stigmatization and exclusion that the “phobia” moniker aims to isolate and oppose. My comparative purpose is to draw into relief—to make explicit and subject to critical analysis— features of normative public discourse in these two sociopolitical contexts broadly perceived to be peaceful, prosperous, liberal-democratic. The features I focus on function under the (...) auspices of tolerant and nonexclusionary forms of “civic nationalism” that, in effect, fuel the conflict in question. (shrink)

This essay explores the possibility that religiously motivated intolerance and conflict can be reframed and positively utilized for constructive social-political purposes. After reviewing efforts by political philosophers over the past two decades to accommodate religious voices in political discourse, I scrutinize Charles Taylor’s attempt to improve upon the limits of “accommodationist” approaches to religious intolerance and conflict. I argue that both accommodationist and Taylor’s recognition-based approaches to religiously motivated conflict take the gravity of such conflict with insufficient seriousness. I then (...) explore the potential goods of intentional conflict by examining Chantal Mouffe’s account of agonistic pluralism as a proposal for thinking beyond tolerance as an orienting value for resolving intransigent conflict. While I argue that Mouffe’s account finally suffers from certain of the same misgivings as the accommodationist and recognition-based approaches, I conclude that agonistic pluralism’s aim to conceptually reframe (rather than eliminate) intolerance and conflict moves in an important and promising direction. (shrink)

Do free markets teach us how to construct humane social relations or do they impede us from doing so? We discuss social scientific evidence on the nature of commercialization and its consequences for moral formation. From a virtue ethics perspective, people face a need to learn and practice the good. When interactions transition into the market sphere, we argue commercialization can fundamentally alter the nature of relationships, particularly for those relations formerly based on gift, sacrifice, and obligation. While modern social (...) scientists accurately identify problems resulting from commercialization, we argue for the importance of theological social ethics, which can offer a penetrating analysis of the habits of gift and communal responsibility. Catholic social teaching in particular outlines the set of principles and institutions which foster sacrificial gift‐giving among individuals and organizations within society, providing a bulwark against the threat commercialization poses to many social relations. (shrink)

In this paper I critically explore the possibility that the hope for engaging in democratic discourse and coalition-building across deep— potentially irreconcilable— moral, religious divisions in current U.S. public life depends less upon further calls for “more tolerance,” and instead in thinking creatively and transformatively about how to democratize and constructively utilize conflict and intolerance. Is it possible to distinguish between constructive and destructive forms of intolerance? If so, what are the prospects for re-orienting analysis of democratic practices and processes (...) so that what typically appear as forms of simple intolerance (and thus, as candidates for marginalization or exclusion from political processes) might be reconceived and re-directed for the purposes of constructively transforming those practices and processes? Further, what would an analytical framework that aimed to distinguish and cultivate “healthy conflict” in contrast to degenerative or destructive conflict look like? How would such an approach facilitate efforts on the ground to recognize, understand and transform religiously-motivated conflict? I pose answers to these questions by bringing strands from the “religion in public life” debates that have unfolded over recent decades among ethicists and political philosophers into conversation with conflict transformation literature in peace studies. Bridging these resources will help to re-conceptualize basic assumptions about tolerance and conflict as a pivotal first step in constructively transforming conflicts motivated by, or identified with, moral commitments and religious identities. (shrink)