Retrieval practice, relative to further study, leads to long-term memory enhancement known as the “testing effect.” The neurobiological correlates of the testing effect at retrieval, when the learning benefits of testing are expressed, have not been fully characterized. Participants learned Swahili-English word-pairs and were assigned randomly to either the Study-Group or the Test-Group. After a week delay, all participants completed a cued-recall test while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging. The Test-Group had superior memory for the word-pairs compared to the Study-Group. (...) While both groups exhibited largely overlapping activations for remembered word-pairs, following an interaction analysis the Test-Group exhibited differential performance-related effects in the left putamen and left inferior parietal cortex near the supramarginal gyrus. The same analysis showed the Study-Group exhibited greater activations in the dorsal MPFC/pre-SMA and bilateral frontal operculum for remembered vs. forgotten word-pairs, whereas the Test-Group showed the opposite pattern of activation in the same regions. Thus, retrieval practice during training establishes a unique striatal-supramarginal network at retrieval that promotes enhanced memory performance. In contrast, study alone yields poorer memory but greater activations in frontal regions. (shrink)

The essays in this book, by a variety of leading Augustine scholars, examine not only Augustine's multifaceted philosophy and its relation to his epoch-making theology, but also his practice as a philosopher, as well as his relation to other philosophers both before and after him. Thus the collection shows that Augustine's philosophy remains an influence and a provocation in a wide variety of settings today.

An infinite lottery machine is used as a foil for testing the reach of inductive inference, since inferences concerning it require novel extensions of probability. Its use is defensible if there is some sense in which the lottery is physically possible, even if exotic physics is needed. I argue that exotic physics is needed and describe several proposals that fail and at least one that succeeds well enough.

There can be no mistaking the importance of Caputo's work." —Edith Wyschogrod "No one interested in Derrida, in Caputo, or in the larger question of postmodernism and religion can afford to ignore this pathbreaking study.

"Against Ethics is beautifully written, clever, learned, thought-provoking, and even inspiring." —Theological Studies "Writing in the form of his ideas, Caputo offers the reader a truly exquisite reading experience.... his iconic style mirrors a truly refreshing honesty that draws the reader in to play." —Quarterly Journal of Speech "Against Ethics is, in my judgment, one of the most important works on philosophical ethics that has been written in recent years.... Caputo speaks with a passion and a concern that are rare (...) in academic philosophy. His profound sense of humor deepens the passion of the viewpoints he develops." —Mark C. Taylor "Obligation happens!" declares Caputo in this brilliant and witty postmodern critique of ethics, framed as a contemporary restaging of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. (shrink)

Most bioethicists and professional medical societies condemn the practice of ?slow codes.? The American College of Physicians ethics manual states, ?Because it is deceptive, physicians or nurses should not perform half-hearted resuscitation efforts (?slow codes?).? A leading textbook calls slow codes ?dishonest, crass dissimulation, and unethical.? A medical sociologist describes them as ?deplorable, dishonest and inconsistent with established ethical principles.? Nevertheless, we believe that slow codes may be appropriate and ethically defensible in situations in which cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) is likely (...) to be ineffective, the family decision makers understand and accept that death is inevitable, and those family members cannot bring themselves to consent or even assent to a do-not-resuscitate (DNR) order. In such cases, we argue, physicians may best serve both the patient and the family by having a carefully ambiguous discussion about end-of-life options and then providing resuscitation efforts that are less vigorous or prolonged than usual. (shrink)

This article draws on the sociology of expectations to examine the construction of expectations of ‘ethical AI’ and considers the implications of these expectations for communication governance. We first analyse a range of public documents to identify the key actors, mechanisms and issues which structure societal expectations around artificial intelligence and an emerging discourse on ethics. We then explore expectations of AI and ethics through a survey of members of the public. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings for (...) the role of AI in communication governance. We find that, despite societal expectations that we can design ethical AI, and public expectations that developers and governments should share responsibility for the outcomes of AI use, there is a significant divergence between these expectations and the ways in which AI technologies are currently used and governed in large scale communication systems. We conclude that discourses of ‘ethical AI’ are generically performative, but to become more effective we need to acknowledge the limitations of contemporary AI and the requirement for extensive human labour to meet the challenges of communication governance. An effective ethics of AI requires domain appropriate AI tools, updated professional practices, dignified places of work and robust regulatory and accountability frameworks. (shrink)

It is proposed that we use the term “approximation” for inexact description of a target system and “idealization” for another system whose properties also provide an inexact description of the target system. Since systems generated by a limiting process can often have quite unexpected, even inconsistent properties, familiar limit systems used in statistical physics can fail to provide idealizations, but are merely approximations. A dominance argument suggests that the limiting idealizations of statistical physics should be demoted to approximations.

1. Introduction. David Malament has described a natural and satisfying resolution of the traditional problems of Newtonian cosmology—natural in the sense that it effects the escape by altering Newtonian gravitation theory in a way that leaves its observational predictions completely unaffected. I am in full agreement with his approach. There is one part of his account, however, over which Malament has been excessively modest. The resolution requires a modification to Newtonian gravitation theory. Malament presents the modification as so straightforward as (...) to be automatic. This trivializes the crucial postulate, which I shall call the “relativity of acceleration.” It is a significant physical statement in its own right and requires careful justification. Moreover the postulate proved easy to overlook for decades of discussion of the paradox. It really only becomes natural from the perspective of the newer geometric methods Malament exploits. There the postulate has become a commonplace. My purpose here is to develop the following: While Newtonian cosmology can be repaired satisfactorily, in its traditional form it remains deeply troubled. These troubles can be expressed most vividly as the paradoxical contradictions indicated below. They persist in both the integral and differential formulations of Newtonian gravitation theory. Malament's careful geometric treatment is necessarily dense. By taking some liberties with precision, his core result can be expressed in a far simpler form. Attempts to avoid the resolution Malament describes do lead to disaster. Therefore this episode can be inverted and used as the strongest extant argument for the relativity of acceleration in Newtonian gravitation theory. (shrink)

The epistemic state of complete ignorance is not a probability distribution. In it, we assign the same, unique, ignorance degree of belief to any contingent outcome and each of its contingent, disjunctive parts. That this is the appropriate way to represent complete ignorance is established by two instruments, each individually strong enough to identify this state. They are the principle of indifference (PI) and the notion that ignorance is invariant under certain redescriptions of the outcome space, here developed into the (...) ‘principle of invariance of ignorance' (PII). Both instruments are so innocuous as almost to be platitudes. Yet the literature in probabilistic epistemology has misdiagnosed them as paradoxical or defective since they generate inconsistencies when conjoined with the assumption that an epistemic state must be a probability distribution. To underscore the need to drop this assumption, I express PII in its most defensible form as relating symmetric descriptions and show that paradoxes still arise if we assume the ignorance state to be a probability distribution. *Received February 2007; revised July 2007. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260; e-mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Moral Motivation and the Development of Francis Hutcheson’s PhilosophyJohn D. BishopHutcheson was an able philosopher, but philosophical analysis was not his only purpose in writing about morals. 1 Throughout his life his writings aimed at promoting virtue; his changing philosophical views often had to conform, if he could make them, to that rhetorical end. But a mind which understands philosophical argument cannot always control the conclusions at which it (...) arrives. The result for Hutcheson was often tension in his thought—which in the end produced a farrago when he tried to create a system of moral philosophy.Throughout his writing career, Hutcheson’s views on the problem of moral motivation were a combination of change and development against a background of certain constant views. A close examination of his views on moral motivation throws light on the development of his thought, including his growing Stoicism, and some of the changes he made to the moral sense theory.The phrase “moral motivation” can refer to either of two issues. On the one hand there is the question of what motivates virtuous actions, and the usual answer for Hutcheson is benevolence. Because they are approved by the moral sense, actions motivated by benevolence are morally good or virtuous (terms which I will use interchangeably). Hutcheson in his late writings calls such actions “formally good” to distinguish them from actions which do in fact promote the greatest happiness, or the natural good, of others; these latter actions are “materially good.” 2 On the other hand there is [End Page 277] the question of how our knowledge of the virtuousness of certain actions can motivate and how in particular such knowledge can motivate morally good actions. For Hutcheson we know which actions are morally good because we have a moral sense, but how this knowledge motivates morally good actions is a question Hutcheson made several attempts to answer. This second question, how the moral sense can motivate morally good actions, is the focus of this paper. The development of Hutcheson’s idea of benevolence will be commented on briefly, but first we need to look at some of the unchanging aspects of Hutcheson’s thought and purposes to provide background to the issue of motivation.Virtuous actions are the result of virtuous character. Hutcheson maintained this from his earliest publications (Reflections, par. 5) to his posthumous System. 3 A virtuous character cannot be directly chosen, even if we wanted to, because we cannot choose to have benevolent desires: “[N]either benevolence nor any other affection or desire can be directly raised by volition” (Inquiry, IV, 139; revised from first edition).But virtue can be cultivated:... virtue, itself, or good dispositions of mind, are not directly taught, or produced by instruction; they must be originally planted in our nature by its great Author, and afterwards strengthened and confirmed by our own cultivation.(Inquiry, IV, 271. Changed from I, 253, with reference to cultivation added; cf. also Introduction, 13, 25, 38, 39, 58–59, etc.)We can cultivate virtue in ourselves; and through writing, teaching, conversation, and social interaction, we can cultivate it in others. 4 At the start of his career, when announcing in Reflections the purpose of his writing on [End Page 278] moral theory, Hutcheson regrets that the moral systems common in his day are not conducive to promoting virtue: they are written, he says, by moralists who are “sour and morose in their deportment;... easily put out of humour...; dejected with common calamities, and insolent upon any prosperous change in fortune” (Reflections, par. 4). He promises that his forthcoming Inquiry will not have this fault. In the preface to the Essay he complains about the writings of the ethical egoists because “many [people] have been discouraged from all attempts of cultivating kind generous affections in themselves, by a previous notion that there are no such affections in nature...” (I, v; III, v). Throughout all the rest of his writings on morality Hutcheson advocates both the private and communal cultivation of virtue, and at the same time he contributes to that cultivation.The other constant which dominates the moral motivation issue is Hutcheson’s rejection of egoism. Benevolence is a... (shrink)

ALTHOUGH hailed as a sign of a thaw in the cold war between Anglo-American and continental philosophy, Richard Rorty's beguiling appropriation of the thought of Heidegger in his recent writings has produced no small measure of confusion. How seriously, one wonders, has Rorty moved towards Heidegger? Or contrariwise, just how close does Heidegger come to saying the sorts of things Rorty does? Is Rorty just trying to shock the Anglo-American community by invoking the name of Heidegger? Is he being intentionally (...) outrageous in order to draw attention to what he takes to be the more sober part of his argument? Is there only a grain of truth to this assimilation of Heidegger, while the real positions of the two thinkers are vastly different? (shrink)

In the exuberance that followed Einstein’s discoveries, philosophers at one time or another have proposed that his theories support virtually every conceivable moral in ontology. I present an opinionated assessment, designed to avoid this overabundance. We learn from Einstein’s theories of novel entanglements of categories once held distinct: space with time; space and time with matter; and space and time with causality. We do not learn that all is relative, that time in the fourth dimension in any non-trivial sense, that (...) coordinate systems and even geometry are conventional or that spacetime should be reduced ontologically to causal, spatio-temporal or other relations. (shrink)

Contrary to formal theories of induction, I argue that there are no universal inductive inference schemas. The inductive inferences of science are grounded in matters of fact that hold only in particular domains, so that all inductive inference is local. Some are so localized as to defy familiar characterization. Since inductive inference schemas are underwritten by facts, we can assess and control the inductive risk taken in an induction by investigating the warrant for its underwriting facts. In learning more facts, (...) we extend our inductive reach by supplying more localized inductive inference schemes. Since a material theory no longer separates the factual and schematic parts of an induction, it proves not to be vulnerable to Hume's problem of the justification of induction. (shrink)

The essays in this volume are concerned with our everyday and developed scientific systems of explanation of human behavior in terms of beliefs, attitudes,...

The inaugural title in the new, Open Access series BSPS Open, The Material Theory of Induction will initiate a new tradition in the analysis of inductive inference. The fundamental burden of a theory of inductive inference is to determine which are the good inductive inferences or relations of inductive support and why it is that they are so. The traditional approach is modeled on that taken in accounts of deductive inference. It seeks universally applicable schemas or rules or a single (...) formal device, such as the probability calculus. After millennia of halting efforts, none of these approaches has been unequivocally successful and debates between approaches persist. The Material Theory of Induction identifies the source of these enduring problems in the assumption taken at the outset: that inductive inference can be accommodated by a single formal account with universal applicability. Instead, it argues that that there is no single, universally applicable formal account. Rather, each domain has an inductive logic native to it. Which that is, and its extent, is determined by the facts prevailing in that domain. Paying close attention to how inductive inference is conducted in science and copiously illustrated with real-world examples, The Material Theory of Induction will initiate a new tradition in the analysis of inductive inference. (shrink)

I am grateful to Peter Achinstein, Don Howard, and the other participants at the conference, 'The Role of Experiments in Scientific Changer', Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 30 March to 1 April, 1990, for helpful discussion, and especially to Ron Laymon for his discussion comments presented at the conference on an earlier version of this paper.

Ever since Copernicus, scientists have continually adjusted their view of human nature, moving it further and further from its ancient position at the center of Creation. But in recent years, a startling new concept has evolved that places it more firmly than ever in a special position. Known as the Anthropic Cosmological Principle, this collection of ideas holds that the existence of intelligent observers determines the fundamental structure of the Universe. In its most radical version, the Anthropic Principle asserts that (...) "intelligent information-processing must come into existence in the Universe, and once it comes into existence, it will never die out." This wide-ranging and detailed book explores the many ramifications of the Anthropic Cosmological Principle, covering the whole spectrum of human inquiry from Aristotle to Z bosons. Bringing a unique combination of skills and knowledge to the subject, John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler--two of the world's leading cosmologists--cover the definition and nature of life, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and the interpretation of the quantum theory in relation to the existence of observers. The book will be of vital interest to philosophers, theologians, mathematicians, scientists, and historians, as well as to anyone concerned with the connection between the vastness of the universe of stars and galaxies and the existence of life within it on a small planet out in the suburbs of the Milky Way. (shrink)

Context Conflicts over treatment decisions have been linked to physicians' emotional states. Objective To measure the prevalence of emotional exhaustion and conflicts over treatment decisions among US obstetrician/gynaecologists (ob/gyns), and to examine the relationship between the two and the physician characteristics that predict each. Methods Mailed survey of a stratified random sample of 1800 US ob/gyn physicians. Criterion variables were levels of emotional exhaustion and frequency of conflict with colleagues and patients. Predictors included physicians' religious characteristics and self-perceived empathy. Results (...) Response rate among eligible physicians was 66% (1154/1760). 36% of ob/gyns reported high levels of emotional exhaustion, and majorities reported conflict with colleagues (59%) and patients (61%). Those reporting conflict were much more likely to report emotional exhaustion (58% vs 29% who never conflict, OR, 95% CI 2.8, 1.6 to 4.8 for conflict with colleagues; 55% versus 26%, OR, 95% CI 2.2, 1.4 to 3.5 for conflict with patients). Physicians with lower self-perceived empathy were more likely to report physician-patient conflicts (65% vs 58% with higher empathy, OR, 95% CI 1.4, 1.0 to 1.9), as were female ob/gyns (66% vs 57% of males, OR, 95% CI 1.5, 1.1 to 2.0). Foreign-born physicians were less likely to report such conflicts (47% vs 64% of US born, OR, 95% CI 0.5, 0.4 to 0.8). Physicians' religious characteristics were not significantly associated with reporting conflict. Conclusions Conflicts over treatment decisions are associated with physicians' empathy, gender, immigration history and level of emotional exhaustion. With respect to the latter, conflict in the clinical encounter may represent an overlooked source or sign of burnout among ob/gyns. (shrink)

The replicability of experiment is routinely offered as the gold standard of evidence. I argue that it is not supported by a universal principle of replicability in inductive logic. A failure of replication may not impugn a credible experimental result; and a successful replication can fail to vindicate an incredible experimental result. Rather, employing a material approach to inductive inference, the evidential import of successful replication of an experiment is determined by the prevailing background facts. Commonly, these background facts do (...) support successful replication as a good evidential guide and this has fostered the illusion of a deeper, exceptionless principle. (shrink)

iinstein oered the prin™iple of gener—l ™ov—ri—n™e —s the fund—ment—l physi™—l prin™iple of his gener—l theory of rel—tivityD —nd —s responsi˜le for extending the prin™iple of rel—tivity to —™™eler—ted motionF „his view w—s disputed —lmost immedi—tely with the ™ounterE™l—im th—t the prin™iple w—s no rel—tivity prin™iple —nd w—s physi™—lly v—™uousF „he dis—greeE ment persists tod—yF „his —rti™le reviews the development of iinstein9s thought on gener—l ™ov—ri—n™eD its rel—tion to the found—tions of gener—l rel—tivity —nd the evolution of the ™ontinuing de˜—te (...) over his viewpointF.. (shrink)

In these spirited essays, John D. Caputo continues the project he launched with Radical Hermeneutics of making hermeneutics and deconstruction work together.

Applying an ever more radical hermeneutics, John D. Caputo breaks down the name of God in this irrepressible book. Instead of looking at God as merely a name, Caputo views it as an event, or what the name conjures or promises in the future. For Caputo, the event exposes God as weak, unstable, and barely functional. While this view of God flies in the face of most religions and philosophies, it also puts up a serious challenge to fundamental tenets (...) of theology and ontology. Along the way, Caputo’s readings of the New Testament, especially of Paul’s view of the Kingdom of God, help to support the "weak force" theory. This penetrating work cuts to the core of issues and questions—What is the nature of God? What is the nature of being? What is the relationship between God and being? What is the meaning of forgiveness, faith, piety, or transcendence?—that define the terrain of contemporary philosophy of religion. (shrink)

John D. Caputo explores the very roots of religious thinking in this thought-provoking book. Compelling questions come up along the way: 'What do I love when I love my God?' and 'What can Star Wars tell us about the contemporary use of religion?' Why is religion for many a source of moral guidance in a postmodern, nihilistic age? Is it possible to have 'religion without religion'? Drawing on contemporary images of religion, such as Robert Duvall's film _The Apostle_, Caputo (...) also provides some fascinating and imaginative insights into religious fundamentalism. (shrink)

John D. Schaeffer shows how the seventeenth-century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico synthesized Greek and Roman ideas of what "sensus communis" and what ...

The Insistence of God presents the provocative idea that God does not exist, God insists, while God’s existence is a human responsibility, which may or may not happen. For John D. Caputo, God’s existence is haunted by "perhaps," which does not signify indecisiveness but an openness to risk, to the unforeseeable. Perhaps constitutes a theology of what is to come and what we cannot see coming. Responding to current critics of continental philosophy, Caputo explores the materiality of perhaps and (...) the promise of the world. He shows how perhaps can become a new theology of the gaps God opens. (shrink)

Part I. Gnosticism and other religious movements of antiquity -- part II. Crossing boundaries : Gnosticism and Platonism.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:RECENT BARTHIANA 1 JOHN D. GODSEY Wesley Theological Seminary Washington, D.C. N 0 ONE CAN responsibly do theology today without reckoning with the prodigious legacy of Karl Barth, the Swiss Reformed theologian who was born in 1886, began theological studies in 1904, entered a full-time pastorate in 1911, taught dogmatics successively at Gottingen, Munster, Bonn, and Basel between 1921 and 1962, and died in 1968. From his electrifying (...) Commentary on Romans through his multivolumed but unfinished Church Dogmatics he wrote unceasingly in the areas of exegetical, historical, ethical, practical, and dogmatic theology, and ventured from time to time into the realms of politics and culture. Helper in organizing textile workers while pastor in Safenwil, questioner of major assumptions of neoProtestant liberal theology, spiritual leader of the German Confessing Church's struggle against Nazism, principal author of the Barmen Confession, participant in the 1948 Amsterdam Assembly of the World Council of Churches, and invited guest of Pope Paul VI in Rome in 1966-these are some of the highlights of Barth's colorful career. The books under review provide impressive testimony to Barth's ongoing significance for modern theology. One is a work 1 Karl Barth, The Gottingen Dogmatics: Instruction in the Christian Religion, vol. I, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Eerdmans, 1991). 490 pp. $39.95 cloth. George Hunsinger, How To Read Karl Barth: The Shape of His Theology (Oxford Univ. Press, 1991). 298 pp. $32.50 cloth. John Macken, S.J., The Autonomy Theme in the Church Dogmatics: Karl Barth and his Critics (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990). 232 pp. $54.50 cloth. S. W. Sykes, ed., Karl Barth: Centenary Essays (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989). 171 pp. $39.50 cloth. 269 270 JOHN D. GODSEY by Barth himself, two grew out of doctoral dissertations, and the other contains interpretative essays by five theologians who wished to honor Barth on the occasion of his centenary year in 1986. To appreciate properly the surprising appearance of Barth's Gottingen Dogmatics requires a bit of history. After ten years as a pastor in the village of Safenwil in north-central Switzerland, Barth was called in 1921 to be "Honorary Professor of Reformed Theology" on the theological faculty of the University of Gottingen in Germany. Having neither doctorate nor teaching experience, he was offered the cp_air on the basis of the first edition of Romans ( 1919) with the expectation that he would represent the Reformed tradition in this German Lutheran stronghold. During his first years he presented exegetical lectures on biblical texts as well as historical lectures that would help him learn his own tradition: the Heidelberg Catechism, Calvin, Zwingli, the Reformed Confessions, and Schleiermacher. Not until 1924-25 did he dare attempt to lecture on dogmatics, and even then he was not allowed to use the title "dogmatics," which was reserved strictly for Lutherans, so he chose to name his lecture series " Instruction in the Christian Religion," recalling Calvin's chief work, Institutio religionis christianae. Unlike his second cycle of lectures in Munster in 1926 (published as Prolegomena to Die Christliche Dogmatik in 1927) and the magisterial Church Dogmatics that began in 1932, these first lectures on dogmatics were never published during Barth's life time. Preserved in his own handwriting, they were edited and finally made public in 1990 in the Swiss edition of his Collected Works. The first of two volumes has now appeared in English and comprises four of seven chapters : three on the doctrine of the Word of God (as Revelation, as Holy Scripture, and as Christian Preaching) plus one on the doctrine of God. Three other major loci (Anthropology, Reconciliation, and Redemption) will appear in Volume Two. Professor Daniel L. Migliore of Princeton Seminary has written a 48-page Introduction to the whole, which provides brilliant insights into Barth's theology and points RECENT BARTHIANA 271 out the particular characteristics and peculiarities of this first (and only completed!) set of lectures on dogmatics. Why should one read the Gottingen Dogmatics rather than, say, the Church Dogmatics? First, Barth's basic theology, at least the lineaments thereof, is to be found here in what is perhaps its most accessible form; in relatively short compass he sets forth his... (shrink)

That past patterns may continue in many different ways has long been identified as a problem for accounts of induction. The novelty of Goodman’s ”new riddle of induction” lies in a meta-argument that purports to show that no account of induction can discriminate between incompatible continuations. That meta-argument depends on the perfect symmetry of the definitions of grue/bleen and green/blue, so that any evidence that favors the ordinary continuation must equally favor the grue-ified continuation. I argue that this very dependence (...) on the perfect symmetry defeats the novelty of the new riddle. The symmetry can be obtained in contrived circumstances, such as when we grue-ify our total science. However, in all such cases, we cannot preclude the possibility that the original and grue-ified descriptions are merely notationally variant descriptions of the same physical facts; or if there are facts that separate them, these facts are ineffable, so that no account of induction should be expected to pick between them. In ordinary circumstances, there are facts that distinguish the regular and grue-ified descriptions. Since accounts of induction can and do call upon these facts, Goodman’s meta-argument cannot provide principled grounds for the failure of all accounts of induction. It assures us only of the failure of accounts of induction, such as unaugmented enumerative induction, that cannot exploit these symmetry breaking facts. (shrink)

In a fair, infinite lottery, it is possible to conclude that drawing a number divisible by four is strictly less likely than drawing an even number; and, with apparently equal cogency, that drawing a number divisible by four is equally as likely as drawing an even number.

Constructivists, such as Harvey Brown, urge that the geometries of Newtonian and special relativistic spacetimes result from the properties of matter. Whatever this may mean, it commits constructivists to the claim that these spacetime geometries can be inferred from the properties of matter without recourse to spatiotemporal presumptions or with few of them. I argue that the construction project only succeeds if constructivists antecedently presume the essential commitments of a realist conception of spacetime. These commitments can be avoided only by (...) adopting an extreme form of operationalism. (shrink)

This, the first of two linked papers, presents the Buddha's analysis of the nature and origins of dukkha (suffering) as a basis for understanding the ways in which mindfulness can transform suffering. The First and Second of the Buddha's Four Noble Truths are presented in a way that has proved helpful to teachers of mindfulness-based applications. These Truths offer a framework of understanding that can guide the application of mindfulness to stress and emotional disorders, while stressing the continuity and inevitability (...) of the experience of dukkha in clients, teachers, and those primarily seeking a new way of being. The crucial involvement of self-view and identification with experience are emphasized. (shrink)