This paper outlines elements of a biblically informed theology for faith-based activists. First, it examines the historical reality of Jesus as the defining sign of the Word made flesh (Jn 1:14) and an important bridge to seventy years of biblical studies on the historical Jesus and his Palestinian context. Second, it argues that Jesus’s baptism “of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” (Mk 1:4b) functions as a highly symbolic public action defining his message, mission, and identity as God’s loving response (...) to the sinful decimation of Israel’s institutions. Third, it asserts that Jesus’s choice to accept responsibility for the sins of his people is the first step of a new exodus leading to the confrontation at the Temple in Jerusalem and the question every disciple must face: How is God moving and acting in history now, and how am I called to collaborate with those movements in my historical context? (shrink)

Ignacio Ellacuría reconstructs three aspects of Karl Rahner’s metaphysics and fundamental theology for a Latin American context. First, Ellacuría reframes Rahner’s focus on the metaphysics of being, arguing instead that historical reality is the proper object of a truly Latin American theology and philosophy. Second, Ellacuria builds upon and diverges from aspects of Rahner’s use of the hylomorphic theory and the role of the agent intellect in his theory of knowing, using Xavier Zubiri’s analysis of the role of sentient intelligence (...) in order to reconstruct Rahner’s theological epistemology. And third, Ellacuría appropriates and reframes Rahner’s supernatural existential, situating it within the larger horizon of historical reality, which he says the tradition asserts has been transformed by grace. (shrink)

ABSTRACTNegative feedback has paradoxical features to it. This form of feedback can have informational value under some circumstances, but it can also threaten the ego, potentially upsetting behaviour as a result. To investigate possible consequences of the latter type, two experiments presented positive or negative feedback within a sequence-prediction task that could not be solved. Following feedback, participants had to control their behaviours as effectively as possible in a motor control task. Relative to positive feedback, negative feedback undermined control in (...) a manner suggesting emotional upset. These reactions lasted for at least three seconds and were especially pronounced among people reporting that they typically lose control in the context of their negative emotions. The findings document a novel form of behavioural dysregulation that occurs in response to negative feedback while also highlighting the utility of motor control perspectives on self... (shrink)

I. Les facultés qui se rapportent à l'image des objets en nous, — l'imagination au sens large, — constituent, selon une tradition qui vient d'Aristote, l'intermédiaire entre la sensibilité et l'intellect. Le moyen âge les désigna par le nom de sens intérieurs ; leur liste fut reprise et modifiée par Ficin (dont la source directe n'est pas Avicenne, mais Albert le Grand) et par Bruno. Dans l'interprétation des néoplatoniciens, la série des facultés connaissantes représente le chemin de l'âme dans la (...) conversion ; la phantasia y joue un rôle eminent (Plotin, Hugues de Saint-Victor, Ficin, Bruno) ; d'autre part, on fait correspondre à la faculté intermédiaire une âme intermédiaire qui lui sert de substrat (Lulle), et un « premier corps » ou « véhicule » de l'âme (le spiritus phantasticus ou őχημα-πνεῦμα de Synesius). L'idée reparaît, modifiée, chez Hugues de Saint-Victor, Ficin, Bruno. Ce dernier met le spiritus phantasticus en relation avec l'âme du monde, qui lui est consubstantielle, la « lumière précédant toute Création » qui nous fait voir les images de nos rêves. Sources : Porphyre, Cusanus repris par Ficin, le panthéisme médiéval. Le lien entre le spiritus phantasticus et le destin de l'âme, esquissé chez Plotin, Porphyre, le Pseudo-Jamblique, Synesius, est affirmé sous différentes formes par Hugues, Ficin et Bruno : le sujet des peines infernales, qui sont d'ailleurs chez Ficin et Bruno de nature imaginaire, est un corps subtil. Ces peines correspondent exactement à ce que nos appétits et notre imagination ont fait de la substance de notre âme. Le spiritus phantasticus se rapproche, notamment chez Ficin, d'une sorte de karma. II. Dans la branche descendante de la connaissance, l'application de l'universel au particulier est forcément liée au sens intérieur et on l'attribue à une faculté spéciale, la Urteilskraft au sens kantien. Bruno en fait une fonction de l'imagination. D'autre part, les arts universels ou lulliens ont pris de plus en plus, durant la Renaissance, l'aspect de topiques généralisées ; le nerf de la méthode y était donc toujours cette Urteilskraft. Il s'en suit, chez Bruno, que le sujet de l'art universel est l'imagination, qui devient ainsi la source première de tout acte de l'intellect, principe de la fécondité infinie de la pensée. (Pratiquement, d'ailleurs, les artes de Bruno sont des ensembles d'images). III. Aux théories de l'imagination répondent les théories de l'image, « vêtement » et « premier corps » de la pensée. On vérifie cette correspondance, d'une part, dans la théorie du symbole, — avec ses variantes métaphysiques, pansymbolisme, magie, — et, d'autre part, dans celle du concetto (rapport entre la pensée et l'expression), où l'on va jusqu'à l'idée d'un universel de l'imagination, et du dessin comme concept. — Une importante différence entre la nature du symbolisme selon Pic et l'idée que s'en fait Bruno s'explique par leurs conceptions différentes de l'imagination. La théorie de l'art et l'évolution du goût artistique sont, dans leurs grandes lignes, en concordance avec ce qu'impliquent ou suggèrent à ce sujet les théories de l'imagination et de l'image. (shrink)

Attempts to reconstruct the “psychology” of a past era always have a specious side which should properly be mistrusted. Was the “Renaissance man” a visualizer? Arguments for and against this thesis have been found, but nothing can be solved, because it will always be impossible to prove that a phenomenon, even if it is very widespread and completely characteristic of a given period, is symptomatic of a particular psychic constitution of the men of that time. If the writings and the (...) art of the sixteenth century seem to us to include the elements of a complete logic of figurative thought, which would certainly be of interest for the history of intellectual methods, the fact as such must not be translated into terms of the psychology of individuals. (shrink)

Taking stock of interdisciplinarity as it nears its century mark, the Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity constitutes a major new reference work on the topic of interdisciplinarity, a concept of growing academic and societal importance.

Book reviewed in this article: Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in Seventeenth Century England. By Michael MacDonald. Making It Crazy: An Ethnography of Psychiatric Clients in an American Community. By Sue E. Estroff. Mind, Mood, and Medicine: A Guide to the New Biopsychiatry. By Paul H. Wender, M.D. and Donald F. Klein, M.D.

Based on instructions people can form task representations that shield relevant from seemingly irrelevant information. It has been documented that instructions can tie people to a particular way of performing a task despite that in principle a more efficient way could be learned and used. Since task shielding can lead to persistence of inefficient variants of task performance, it is relevant to test whether individuals with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder – characterized by less task shielding – are more likely and quicker (...) to escape a suboptimal instructed variant of performing a task. The paradigm used in this online study builds on the observation that in many environments different covarying features could be used to determine the appropriate response. For instance, as they approach a traffic light, drivers and pedestrians monitor the color and/or the position of the signal. Similarly, we instructed participants to respond to the color of a stimulus without mentioning that color covaried with the position of the stimulus. In order to assess whether with practice participants would use the non-instructed feature position to an increasing extent, we compared reaction times and error rates for standard trials to trials in which color was either ambiguous or did not match the usual covariation. Results showed that the covariation learning task can be administered online to adult participants with and without ADHD. Performance differences suggested that with practice ADHD participants might increase attention to non-instructed stimulus features. Yet, they used the non-instructed covarying stimulus feature to a similar extent as other participants. Together the results suggest that participants with ADHD do not lag behind in abandoning instructed task processing in favor of a learned alternative strategy. (shrink)

Trust in vaccination is eroding, and attitudes about vaccination have become more polarized. This is an observational study of Twitter analyzing the impact that COVID-19 had on vaccine discourse. We identify the actors, the language they use, how their language changed, and what can explain this change. First, we find that authors cluster into several large, interpretable groups, and that the discourse was greatly affected by American partisan politics. Over the course of our study, both Republicans and Democrats entered the (...) vaccine conversation in large numbers, forming coalitions with Antivaxxers and public health organizations, respectively. After the pandemic was officially declared, the interactions between these groups increased. Second, we show that the moral and non-moral language used by the various communities converged in interesting and informative ways. Finally, vector autoregression analysis indicates that differential responses to public health measures are likely part of what drove this convergence. Taken together, our results suggest that polarization around vaccination discourse in the context of COVID-19 was ultimately driven by a trust-first dynamic of political engagement. (shrink)

Robert Rupert is well-known as an vigorous opponent of the hypothesis of extended cognition (HEC). His Cognitive Systems and the Extended Mind is a first-rate development of his “systems-based” approach to demarcating the mind. The results are impressive. Rupert’s account brings much-needed clarity to the often-frustrating debate over HEC: much more than just an attack on HEC, he gives a compelling picture of why the debate matters.

Medical-legal partnerships connect legal advocates to healthcare providers and settings. Maintaining effectiveness of medical-legal partnerships and consistently identifying opportunities for innovation and adaptation takes intentionality and effort. In this paper, we discuss ways in which our use of data and quality improvement methods have facilitated advocacy at both patient (client) and population levels as we collectively pursue better, more equitable outcomes.

During the last decades, the psychology of reasoning has identified experimentally many fallacies committed by spontaneous reasoners. Given these experimental results, some theories have been developed about this phenomenon, mainly algorithmic theories. This paper develops instead a computational modelling of these current fallacies which appear as simplifications in the treatment of information that do not respect the formal rules of classical propositional logic. These fallacies are explained as crushes in the Klein group structure and so, in squares of opposition. (...) These crushes are an effect of not to take into account the dual of the binary operator at work in the major premise of the inference. This analysis allows predictions on fallacies not identified before, which are fallacies produced when reasoning with incompatibilities. The paper concludes with consequences of the analysis on pedagogical strategies for the teaching of logic. (shrink)

The clinical relationship has been underexplored in dementia care. This is in part due to the way that the clinical relationship has been articulated and understood in bioethics. Robert Veatch’s social contract model is representative of a standard view of the clinical relationship in bioethics. But dementia presents formidable challenges to the standard clinical relationship, including ambiguity about when the clinical relationship begins, how it weathers changes in narrative identity of patients with dementia, and how the intimate involvement of (...) family fits alongside a paradigmatically dyadic relationship. Drawing on work in recent feminist theory, a critique is offered of the standard clinical relationship in bioethics as underwritten by an individualistic conception of autonomy. An alternative view of the clinical relationship in dementia, one that embraces a relational account of autonomy, is put forward. (shrink)

Rejecting Klein's claims that normative epistemology and naturalism are mutually exclusive, I defend the normative naturalism of my "Epistemology in an Age of Cognitive Science". When insisting that epistemic standards simultaneously external to, superior to, and independent of those of science do not exist, I hold neither that science exhausts standards of rationality nor that relevant extra-scientific considerations do not exist. Cognitive science may transform how we pose some normative questions in epistemology. Concurring with Klein that the burden (...) of evidence resides with normative naturalism, I explore suggestive proposals that Churchland and Thagard have offered on just this front. (shrink)

Robert Rupert is well-known as a vigorous opponent of the hypothesis of extended cognition . His Cognitive Systems and the Extended Mind is a first-rate development of his "systems-based" approach to demarcating the mind. The results are impressive. Rupert's account brings much-needed clarity to the often-frustrating debate over HEC: much more than just an attack on HEC, he gives a compelling picture of why the debate matters.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Pragmatism's Evolution: Organism and Environment in American Philosophy by Trevor PearceAlexander KleinTrevor Pearce. Pragmatism's Evolution: Organism and Environment in American Philosophy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2020. Pp. 384. Paperback, $35.00.Pragmatist pioneers were young lions in the days of Darwin. Evolutionary-biological thinking infused this philosophical movement from the start. And yet the last time a major monograph appeared on classic pragmatism and evolutionary biology—Philip Wiener's Evolution and (...) the Founders of Pragmatism (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1949)—the author could personally thank Ralph Barton Perry, William James's junior colleague and eventual biographer. John Dewey himself wrote the foreword.Almost seventy-five years later, we have Trevor Pearce's painstakingly researched Pragmatism's Evolution. The author has graduate training in both biology and philosophy and is a former student of William Wimsatt and Robert Richards's (343). The book offers an intricate portrait of how debates about evolutionary biology informed the thinking of a loose-knit group of pragmatists between the years 1860 and 1910. While a remarkable variety of figures are discussed, ten pragmatists command the most attention: Chauncey Wright, C. S. Peirce, Francis Ellingwood Abbot, John Fiske, William James, Josiah Royce, John Dewey, Jane Addams, G. H. Mead, and W. E. B. Du Bois (18). Call them "the American Ten."Without downplaying Darwin, an overarching theme is the special significance of Herbert Spencer. Despite many specific disagreements with him (see e.g. 74, 207–8, 253–54, 281), the American Ten all accepted something more fundamental from Spencer: an intellectual framework that explains mind and morality in terms of functional relationships between organism and environment.After an introduction outlining what Pearce identifies as four chronological "cohorts" of pragmatists (more on this concept below), he examines the 1860s and 1870s reception of Darwin (chapter 1) and Spencer (chapter 2), showing how senior pragmatists like Wright, Peirce, and James defended evolution during this period. In chapter 2, we meet the Metaphysical Club's arch Spencerian, John Fiske, and we get a reading of James's critique of Spencer's psychology and sociology. Chapter 3 gives a highly detailed, reference-work-like portrait of the second cohort's training in evolutionary biology during the 1880s—chiefly Royce, Dewey, Addams, Mead, and Du Bois. In chapter 4, we learn that in the 1880s and 1890s, idealists like Edward Caird, Samuel Alexander, David George Ritchie, and Josiah Royce all co-opted ideas from evolutionary biology, which they apparently thought compatible with Hegelian dialectics. Chapter 5 shows that central planks of Peirce's metaphysics and Dewey's ethics are responsive to an 1890s dispute over the causes of the biological variation upon which selection acts (the so-called "factors" debate). The final two chapters show how pragmatist ethics (chapter 6) and epistemology (chapter 7) were infused with substantive ideas about evolution and about scientific experiment more generally.The depth and use of historical scholarship on offer here are both remarkable. On depth, Pearce draws from nineteen special collections and archives housed at institutions from California to Manchester, UK. The reference list (published on Pearce's website) runs [End Page 160] to 118 pages and was apparently too long for inclusion in the book. Archival research and lengthy bibliographies are to be expected in today's history of philosophy. But the sheer range of sources Pearce draws from is, by any measure, impressive.The use to which he puts those sources is provocative. Close reading, and in particular argument reconstruction, is usually the stock in trade for historians of philosophy. Pearce takes a different approach (7), seeking interpretive insight through a kind of philosophical network analysis. The nodes are mainly philosophers, scientists, and social critics. Unlike digital network analyses, Pearce connects his nodes by hand, via a great multiplicity of social, educational, and intellectual relations. We learn who studied evolution where, with whom, and when; what specific texts were assigned in classes taken, in classes taught; who attacked whom, who sided with whom; and so on.The resulting networks are rich, though they can be difficult to track due to their complexity. At its best, the book uses networks to produce genuine insights that... (shrink)