Should the assessment of decision‐making capacity (DMC) be risk sensitive, that is, should the threshold for DMC vary with risk? The debate over this question is now nearly five decades old. To many, the idea that DMC assessments should be risk sensitive is intuitive and commonsense. To others, the idea is paternalistic or incoherent, or both; they argue that the riskiness of a given decision should increase the epistemic scrutiny in the evaluation of DMC, not increase the threshold for DMC. (...) We respond to the critics’ main concerns by providing a comprehensive account of how risk‐sensitive DMC is coherent, avoids paternalism, and best fulfills the epistemic goal of DMC evaluations. (shrink)

We summarize the recent progress made by probabilistic programming as a unifying formalism for the probabilistic, symbolic, and data-driven aspects of human cognition. We highlight differences with meta-learning in flexibility, statistical assumptions and inferences about cogniton. We suggest that the meta-learning approach could be further strengthened by considering Connectionist and Bayesian approaches, rather than exclusively one or the other.

Despite their diversity, human languages share consistent properties and regularities. Wherefrom does this consistency arise? And does it tell us something about the problem that all languages need to solve? The authors provide an intriguing analyses which focuses on the “communicative function of ambiguity” whose resolution entailed an equally intriguing “speaker–listener cross‐entropy objective for measuring the efficiency of linguistic systems from first principles of efficient language use.”.

One hundred eighty trauma-focused dissertations published in the United States were examined to determine the variation in risk language used in the informed consents. Level of risk proposed in the informed consents was poorly related to ratings of risk by graduate coders and virtually unrelated to vulnerability factors such as the age of participants and clinical or nonclinical status. Risk language in the informed consents was markedly elevated over that rated by the coders, with more than one third of the (...) dissertations presenting the risk of participation as severe (i.e., associated with substantial risk of reactivity and lasting discomfort). These statements are not in keeping with the literature and raise ethical concerns in relation to (a) nocebo effects, (b) distortion of correlational findings, and (c) discouragement of participants from disclosing trauma in other settings. (shrink)

Emotion Review, Ahead of Print. The question “what is emotion?” has long been at the core of theoretical debates. The IAC-E is a useful framework for understanding relationships among responses in emotional situations. However, this approach cannot address the nature of emotion. Researchers determine what counts as emotion in the IAC-E, and this decision impacts the relationships detected and inferences made. The assumptions of researchers about emotion change the output. Further, the model is not theoretically agnostic and is best suited (...) to examine emotion perception/knowledge, as in the simulations presented. According to some theories, experienced emotion is qualitatively different than situations that involve perceiving others' emotion or semantic knowledge. Addressing the nature of emotion requires empirical examination of the assumptions made in each theory. (shrink)

An important, but relatively neglected, aspect of human theory of mind is emotion inference: understanding how and why a person feels a certain why is central to reasoning about their beliefs, desires and plans. The authors review recent work that has begun to unveil the structure and determinants of emotion inference, organizing them within a unified probabilistic framework.

Machines that learn and think like people must be able to learn from others. Social learning speeds up the learning process and – in combination with language – is a gateway to abstract and unobservable information. Social learning also facilitates the accumulation of knowledge across generations, helping people and artificial intelligences learn things that no individual could learn in a lifetime.

Emotion Review, Volume 14, Issue 2, Page 114-116, April 2022. The question “what is emotion?” has long been at the core of theoretical debates. The IAC-E is a useful framework for understanding relationships among responses in emotional situations. However, this approach cannot address the nature of emotion. Researchers determine what counts as emotion in the IAC-E, and this decision impacts the relationships detected and inferences made. The assumptions of researchers about emotion change the output. Further, the model is not theoretically (...) agnostic and is best suited to examine emotion perception/knowledge, as in the simulations presented. According to some theories, experienced emotion is qualitatively different than situations that involve perceiving others' emotion or semantic knowledge. Addressing the nature of emotion requires empirical examination of the assumptions made in each theory. (shrink)

Political polarisation in the United States offers opportunities to explore how beliefs about candidates – that they could save or destroy American society – impact people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviour. Participants forecast their future emotional responses to the contentious 2020 U.S. presidential election, and reported their actual responses after the election outcome. Stronger beliefs about candidates were associated with forecasts of greater emotion in response to the election, but the strength of this relationship differed based on candidate preference. Trump supporters’ (...) forecast happiness more strongly related to beliefs that their candidate would save society than for Biden supporters. Biden supporters’ forecast anger and fear were more strongly related to beliefs that Trump would destroy society than vice versa. These forecasts mattered: predictions of lower happiness and greater anger if the non-preferred candidate won predicted voting, with Biden supporters voting more than Trump supporters. Generally, participants forecast more emotion than they experienced, but beliefs altered this tendency. Stronger beliefs predicted experiencing more happiness or more anger and fear about the election outcome than had been forecast. These findings have implications for understanding the mechanisms through which political polarisation and rhetoric can influence voting behaviour. (shrink)

The language we use over the course of conversation changes as we establish common ground and learn what our partner finds meaningful. Here we draw upon recent advances in natural language processing to provide a finer‐grained characterization of the dynamics of this learning process. We release an open corpus (>15,000 utterances) of extended dyadic interactions in a classic repeated reference game task where pairs of participants had to coordinate on how to refer to initially difficult‐to‐describe tangram stimuli. We find that (...) different pairs discover a wide variety of idiosyncratic but efficient and stable solutions to the problem of reference. Furthermore, these conventions are shaped by the communicative context: words that are more discriminative in the initial context (i.e., that are used for one target more than others) are more likely to persist through the final repetition. Finally, we find systematic structure in how a speaker's referring expressions become more efficient over time: Syntactic units drop out in clusters following positive feedback from the listener, eventually leaving short labels containing open‐class parts of speech. These findings provide a higher resolution look at the quantitative dynamics of ad hoc convention formation and support further development of computational models of learning in communication. (shrink)

I address an objection to inference to the best explanation due to Bas C. van Fraassen, according to which explanatory virtues cannot confirm a theory, since they make the theory more informative and thus less likely to be true given the probability axioms. I try to show that van Fraassen’s argument, once made precise, is deductively invalid, and that even an ampliative version of the argument (i) implies, absurdly, that no theory is confirmed by its fit with empirical data; (ii) (...) fails to account for confirmatory closure under deduction; and (iii) falsely presupposes that a theory and its sub-theories can be competing explanations. (shrink)

The health co-benefits of CO2 mitigation can provide a strong incentive for climate policy through reductions in air pollutant emissions that occur when targeting shared sources. However, reducing air pollutant emissions may also have an important co-harm, as the aerosols they form produce net cooling overall. Nevertheless, aerosol impacts have not been fully incorporated into cost-benefit modeling that estimates how much the world should optimally mitigate. Here we find that when both co-benefits and co-harms are taken fully into account, optimal (...) climate policy results in immediate net benefits globally, overturning previous findings from cost-benefit models that omit these effects. The global health benefits from climate policy could reach trillions of dollars annually, but will importantly depend on the air quality policies that nations adopt independently of climate change. Depending on how society values better health, economically optimal levels of mitigation may be consistent with a target of 2 °C or lower. (shrink)

To meet the luck objection to incompatibilism, philosophers such as Timothy O’Connor, Randolph Clark, and William Rowe resurrected the Reidian notion of agent causation, which implies the “Substance-Causal Thesis” (SCT): some causes are fundamentally substances, not events. I examine an objection to SCT by C. D. Broad, developed by Carl Ginet, that substances cannot cause events because substances cannot explain why events happen when they do. The objection fails as it rests on a demand for contrastive explanations of free actions. (...) However, I show that a slightly different objection succeeds in showing SCT false. (shrink)

In athletics, coaches and athletes share a unique and important relationship. Recently Jowett and her colleagues (Jowett & Cockerill, 2003; Jowett & Meek, 2000; Jowett & Ntoumanis, 2003, 2004; Jowett & Timson-Katchis, 2005) utilized relationship research (focusing on, for example, marital, familial and workplace relationships) from conjoining fields, and in particular social and cognitive psychology, to develop and test a four-component model (4 C’s) that depicts the most influential relational and emotional components (closeness, commitment, complementarity and co-orientation) of coach-athlete relationships. (...) Proceeding from a review of the literature on human touch communication to examine research on the power of touch to exchange relational and emotional messages (Hertenstein et al., 2006), the present study explores coaches’ and athletes’ collective experiences of communicating via touch, utilizing in-depth interviews with eight college coaches and athletes. A phenomenological approach was used to gather, analyze and interpret the data, drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s (1945/1962) philosophical exploration of perception and human experience, which emphasizes the body as a means of communicating with the world. The findings indicate that touch between coaches and athletes increased at major events when emotions and tensions ran high. In addition, touch involved showing appreciation, instructing, comforting and giving attention, and affected perceptions of relationships. The findings also show that touch communication is influenced by societal factors, such as gender, relational stage, and what spectators, parents and other athletes may think. By illustrating how touch is enacted and experienced by a group of college coaches and athletes, the study represents an initial step toward understanding touch communication in the coach-athlete dyad. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume 7, Edition 2 September 2007. (shrink)

For the past thirty years, the late Tom Regan bucked the trend among secular animal rights philosophers and spoke patiently and persistently to the best angels of religious ethics in a stream of publications that enjoins religious scholars, clergy, and lay people alike to rediscover the resources within their traditions for articulating and living out an animal ethics that is more consistent with their professed values of love, mercy, and justice. My aim in this article is to showcase some of (...) the wealth of insight offered in this important but under-utilized archive of Regan’s work to those of us, religious or otherwise, who wish to challenge audiences of faith to think and do better by animals. (shrink)

Books Reviewed in this Article: Transforming Bible Study. By Walter Wink. Pp.175, London, SCM Press, 1981, £3.50. Isaiah 1–39. By R.E. Clements. Pp.xvi. 301, London, Marshall, Morgan and Scott, 1980, £3.95. Isaiah 40–66. By R.N. Whybray. Pp.301, London, Marshall, Morgan and Scott, 1975, Reprinted 1981, £3.95. Die Gestalt Jesu in den synoptischen Evangelien. By Heinrich Kahlefeld. Pp.264, Frankfurt, Verlag Josef Knecht, 1981, no price given. Following Jesus: Discipleship in the Gospel of Mark. By Ernest Best. Pp.283, Sheffield, JSOT Press, 1981, (...) £15.00, £5.95. The Origin of Paul's Gospel. By Seyoon Kim. Pp.xii, 391, Tübingen, J.C.B. Mohr, 1981, 78 DM. An die Römer. By Ernst Käsemann. Pp.xvi, 411, Tübingen, J.C.B. Mohr, 1980, 48 DM. Les Récits de Resurrection des Morts dans le Nouveau Testament. By Gerard Rochais. Pp.xv, 252, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981, £15.00. Prêtres Anciens, Prétre Nouveau selon le Nouveau Testament. By Albert Vanhoye. Pp.366, Paris Editions du Seuil, 1980, no price given. Woman in the World of Jesus. By Evelyn and Frank Stagg. Pp.292, Edinburgh, The St Andrew Press, 1981, no price given. Jesus, Man and the Church. By Karl Rahner. Pp.260, London, Darton Longman & Todd, 1981, £14.50. Jesus Lord and Savior: A Theopathic Christology and Soteriology. By William M. Thompson. Pp.ix, 287, Leominster, Fowler Wright, 1981, £7.45. God and World in Schleiermacher's ‘Dialektik’ and ‘Glaubenslehre’. Criticism and the Methodology of Dogmatics. By John E. Thiel. Pp.xiv, 239, Bern, Frankfurt and Las Vegas, Peter Lang, 1981, SF 49.50. Ministry: A Case for Change. By Edward Schillebeeckx. Pp.ix, 165, London, SCM Press, 1981, £4.95. The Sacraments: Readings in Contemporary Sacramental Theology. Edited by Michael J. Taylor. Pp.274, New York, Alba House, 1981, $7.95. Believing in the Church: The Corporate Nature of Faith. A Report by the Doctrine Commission of the Church of England. Pp.ix, 310, London, SPCK, 1981, £8.50. Confessing the Faith in the Church of England Today. By R.T. Beckwith. Pp.36, Oxford, La timer House, 1981, £1.00. A Kind of Noah's Ark? The Anglican Commitment to Comprehensiveness. By J.I. Packer. Pp.39, Oxford, Latimer House, 1981, £1.00. Reasonable Belief: A Survey of the Christian Faith. By Anthony Hanson and Richard Hanson. Pp.xii, 283, Oxford University Press, 1981, £8.50. Doctrine in the Church of England. The 1938 Report with a new introduction by G.W.H. Lampe. Pp.lx, 242, London, SPCK, 1982, £8.50. The Divine Right of the Papacy in Recent Ecumenical Theology. By J. Michael Miller. Pp.xvi, 322, Rome, Università Gregoriana Editrice, 1980, 18,000 Lire. Der heilige Geist in der Theologie von Heribert Mühlen: Versucheiner Darstellung und Würdigung. By John B. Banawiratma. Pp.ix, 310, Frankfurt and Bern: Peter D. Lang, 1981, SFr. 60.00. Standing Before God: Studies on Prayer in Scriptures and Tradition with Essays in Honor of John M. Oesterreicher. Edited by Asher Frinkel and Lawrence Frizzell. Pp.410, New York, Ktav Publishing House, 1981, $29.50. Judaism and Healing. By J. David Bleich. Pp.xiii, 199, New York, Ktav, 1981, $15.00. The Diversity of Moral Thinking. By Neil Cooper. Pp.x, 303, Oxford, Clarendon Press: Oxford University Press, 1981, £15.00. L'Homme: Sujet ou Objet? By Jacques Croteau. Pp.260, Montreal, Bellarmin: Tournai, Desclée et Cie, 1981, $15.00. The Texture of Knowledge: An Essay on Religion and Science. By James W. Jones. Pp.97, Washington, University Press of America, 1981, no price given. Cosmos and Creator. By Stanley L. Jaki. Pp.xii, 168, Edinburgh, Scottish Academic Press, 1980, £6.75. Dante, Philomythes and Philosopher: Man in the Cosmos. By Patrick Boyde. Pp.vii, 408, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981, £30.00. Dissidence et Philosophie au Mayen Âge. By E.L. Fortin. Pp.201, Montreal, Bellarmin, 1981, $12.00. The Philosophy of John Norris of Bemerton. By Richard Acworth. Pp.x, 388, Hildesheim, Georg Olms, 1979, 74 DM. Philosophy and Ideology in Hume's Political Thought. By David Miller. Pp.xii, 218, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1981, £15.00. Hegelianism. By John Edward Toews. Pp.x, 450, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1980, £25.00. One Hundred Years of Thomism. Edited by V.B. Brezik. Pp.210, Houston, Centre for Thomistic Studies, 1981, no price given. Gramsci's Political Thought: Hegemony, Consciousness and the Revolutionary Process. By J.V. Femia. Pp.xiii, 303, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1981, £17.50. Greek and Roman Slavery. By Thomas Wiedemann. Pp.xvi, 284, London, Croom Helm, 1981, £10.95, £5.95. Prophecy and Millenarianism. Essays in Honour of Marjorie Reeves. Edited by Ann Williams. Pp.x, 355, London, Longman, 1980, £25.00. Of Prelates and Princes: A Study of the Economic and Social Position of the Tudor Episcopate. By Felicity Heal. Pp.xv, 353, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1980, £17.50. Radical Religious Movements in Early Modern Europe. By Michael Mullett. Pp.xxiv, 193, London, George Allen & Unwin, 1980, £10.50. The Jesuits. By J.C.H. Aveling. Pp.390, London, Blond and Briggs, 1981, £16.95. The Beginnings of Ideology. By Donald R. Kelley. Pp.xv, 351, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981, £24.00. Utopia and the Ideal Society: A Study of English Utopian Writing 1516–1700. By J.C. Davis. Pp.x, 427, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981, £25.00. Eastern Politics of the Vatican 1917–1979. By Hansjakob Stehle. Pp.466, Athens, Ohio University Press, 1981, £16.20, £8.10. Structuralism or Criticism? By Geoffrey Strickland. Pp.viii, 209, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981, £17.50. The Call of God: The Theme of Vocation in the Poetry of Donne and Herbert. By Robert B. Shaw. Pp.xiii, 123, Cambridge, Mass., Cowley Publications, 1981, $5.00. John and Charles Wesley: Selected Prayers, Hymns, Journal Notes, Sermons, Letters and Treatises. Edited by Frank Whaling. Pp.xx, 412, London, SPCK, 1981, £8.95. The Trickster in West Africa: A Study of Mythic Irony and Sacred Delight. By Robert D. Pelton. Pp.312, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1980, £15.00. (shrink)

This roundtable brings together contributions from nine senior, mid-career and junior scholars who work on the history of science in pre-1800 Islamicate societies. The contributions reflect upon some of the challenges that have historically constrained the subfield, how they have sought to overcome them, and what they see as some of the more productive and fruitful turns the field has taken and/or should take in the future. A central trend in all contributions is how they seek to confront the combined (...) weight of colonialism, Orientalism, and the teleological history of science that continues to haunt contemporary discussions in both academia and the general public with regards to science in pre-1800 Islamicate societies. Without diminishing the pioneering achievements of the generations of historians who have preceded us, and upon whose work we continue to rely, this combined weight has tended a) to marginalize the study of occult sciences in Islamicate societies; b) to emphasize investigations of content from an etic perspective of how we got to the present, which is primarily seen as how the scientific content is connected to the rise of modern science in Europe; and c) to concomitantly marginalize the study of science in post-1200 Islamicate societies, particularly those with little to no connection to the rise of “Western” science. The contributions build upon conversations that took place among participants in December 2019 at a workshop at New York University (NYU), Abu Dhabi Institute in New York City, funded by a grant from NYU Abu Dhabi. (shrink)

This book, in language accessible to the general reader, investigates twelve of the most notorious, most interesting, and most instructive episodes involving the interaction between science and Christianity, aiming to tell each story in its historical specificity and local particularity. Among the events treated in When Science and Christianity Meet are the Galileo affair, the seventeenth-century clockwork universe, Noah's ark and flood in the development of natural history, struggles over Darwinian evolution, debates about the origin of the human species, (...) and the Scopes trial. Readers will be introduced to St. Augustine, Roger Bacon, Pope Urban VIII, Isaac Newton, Pierre-Simon de Laplace, Carl Linnaeus, Charles Darwin, T. H. Huxley, Sigmund Freud, and many other participants in the historical drama of science and Christianity. (shrink)

This treatise deals with Philo's allegory of Genesis 9:20 (And Noah began to be a husbandman). The first part of the treatise deals with Noah as a someone who "cultivates" the soul, and the second part with Noah as one who has set out on the path towards spiritual and ethical perfection.

Searching for God draws upon the traditional categories of systematic theology as it guides readers through the Catholic theological thought process involved in the search for God. At each step we examine the work of a past thinker from the time of the early church up to the early twentieth century, and a present thinker whose works are often required reading in theology courses. Not only do readers have the opportunity to critically evaluate several important theological works in the Catholic (...) tradition, they can also enter into dialogue with those works as they engage in their own search for God. Among the ten categories represented are: Bible: Hearing God--Past: Hugh of St. Victor, Noah's Ark (ca. 1130) Present: Sandra Schneiders, The Revelatory Text (1999) Christ II: Understanding God (Dogmatic Approach)--Past: Cyril of Alexandria, On the Unity of Christ (429) Present: Roger Haight, Jesus: Symbol of God (1999) Religions of the World: Listening for God Past: Jean Daniélou, The Salvation of the Nations (1946) Present: Raimon Panikkar, The Experience of God (2006) +. (shrink)

The feeling that one was ‘born in the wrong time’ we call malchronia. This is distinct from mere nostalgia, in that it may generate the longing to transcend the temporal present in favor of a time of which one has had no experience, or even a timeless state of being. Implicit in malchronetic longing is the rejection of one’s experience of one’s own time, making it a revolutionary and utopian inclination. In this article we examine two dominant strategies—primitive weapons in (...) the war on time, really—that have been developed in the hopes of delivering individuals to a future beyond the reach of their natural life spans: cryonics and bionics. (shrink)

When the Neo- or "New Atheist" publishing frenzy climaxed with Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell, Sam Harris's The End of Faith, Christopher Hitchens' god is not Great and subsequent titles; New Atheists repeatedly denounced the Bible as dangerously false, suppressive to scientific inquiry, and as inculcating and promoting problematic, contemptible, even abhorrent moral values. The Genesis 1-11 and 19 Creation, Noah, and Lot narratives persist among the New Atheists' favorite targets. Heretofore there has (...) been no systematic examination of New Atheist treatments of Genesis generally or Genesis 1-11 and 19 particularly. This article scrutinizes leading New Atheist interpretations of Genesis 1-11 and 19 articulated by Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens. Part one documents these New Atheist renderings of Genesis 1-11 and 19 through the entire corpus of their published books. Part two synthesizes, applies, and extends relevant Genesis 1-11 and 19 scholarship to appraise and respond to the most serious New Atheist allegations, concluding that a more rigorous analysis of Genesis 1-11 and 19 nullifies and potentially reverses New Atheist criticisms. (shrink)

Literary sources In the closing days of his life Adam sends his son Seth to Earthly Paradise in order to find the soothing Oil of Mercy. However, Seth receives a twig from the Tree of Life to be planted on Adam's grave. The Jews will use the wood for the construction of Christ's Cross. In 1962 Esther C. Quinn publishes the first monograph on the Seth-personage in the context of the Legend of the Crosswood. In 1977 A.F.J. Klijn studies the (...) Seth-personage as it appears in the commentaries on Genesis, in the apocrypha of the life of Adam, in gnostic writings. While the Jewish apocrypha already considered the Seth-personage as a new Abel and a new Adam, patristics also typified him as a forerunner of Christ. Created after the image of Adam, he also was the pivot in the apocrypha on the life of Adam and Eve after the expulsion and the christian Gospel according to Nicodemus ). Two motives from that have persistently survived: the journey of Seth to Paradise and the Divine knowledge that was attached to two columns. Iconographical sources The fresco-cycle of Agnolo Gaddi in the Santa Croce in Florence at the beginning of the iconographical part of this article is not an arbitrary choice. It is here that the Seth-personage is visualized for the first time in the context of the Legend of the Crosswood. Subsequently it remains firmly bound to the fresco-medium and Franciscan donors in Italy. In this context the iconography of the Legend of the Crosswood is being transformed in function of an exegesis of the history of salvation. The Book of Hours of Catherine of Cleve from the middle of the 15th century is an isolated case, because its iconography of the Crosswood remains exceptional within the Netherlands. In the usual way the mass on Fridays concentrates upon the Cross or the Crucifixion in the text as well as in the iconography, but unusually by means of the long office of Gods Mercy and moreover illustrated by the Legend of the Crosswood culminating in an image of the Man of Sorrows. The choice of the subject might refer to a Franciscan background. From an iconographical point of view it is of considerable value that the Lutwin 14th-century German variant of the Vita Adae et Evae has been illustrated in a 15th-century manuscript. An existing tradition may be assumed, because the same iconography appears in three from the Vitae interpolated scenes in a Bavarian manuscript of the chronicle of Rudolf von Ems. This insertion in the Genesis-part of a worldchronicle allows it to presume that the Seth-personage could be found in 'classical' Genesis iconography. The southern porch of the choir in Schwabisch Gmünd and the northern friezes of the cathedral of Toledo bear witness to this. The second seems to use a Legenda-source. The representation of the Seth-vision seems to be confined to the one of Toledo, although Spanish variants of the Legenda-source have not been discovered as yet. Finally, the Seth-of-the-columns passage, as described in the Vita and included in medieval worldchronicles through Flavius Josephus, symbolizes the transmission of Divine knowledge to humanity. The Geometria Divina that was assigned to Adam, is destroyed by the Flood. This is shown in a miniature in a 14th-century manuscript of Rudolf von Ems, where Adam's column acts as counterpart of Noah's ark. The knowledge of astrology, Seth's learning, lives on. In this way the Chronica Regia Coloniensis wants to found the Holy Roman Empire on these columns: Seth and Adam represented as the 'authors' of the Civitas Dei. (shrink)

Hume after arguing for the compatibility of liberty and necessity, a view now known as soft determinism or compatibilism , noted that it is not ‘possible to explain distinctly, how the Deity can be the mediate cause of the actions of sin and moral turpitude’. It seems that Hume is correct if the explanation must show specifically why an omnipotent and omnibenevolent deity must permit certain actions that to human reason seem to be unnecessary evils. On the other hand if (...) such specifity is not required, the soft determinist who also happens to be a theist can argue that it is possible that the actual world is the best of all possible worlds even though the reason for any specific apparent evil cannot be known. If seemingly evil choices are free in the soft determinist's sense but determined by an omnipotent and omniscient deity, then either that deity is not omnibenevolent or that deity has determined the world to have the maximum possible goodness through including seemingly evil choices in the scheme of things. Consequently if, as the traditional theist believes, the creator is omnibenevolent as well as omnipotent and omniscient, the occurrence of seemingly evil choices are necessary for maximizing the goodness of the whole. (shrink)

Upshot: My answer focuses on two issues raised by the commentaries that it is essential to clarify in order to understand what radical neurophenomenology implies: Does radical neurophenomenology means stopping doing science? Does radical neurophenomenology require an intersubjective agreement on a method for investigating lived experience?

The preparation of layers of amorphous Se by plasma-enhanced CVD using the hydride H2Se as precursor gas is described. Information concerning the structure of the films was obtained from Raman spectroscopy. The spectra of amorphous Se indicated that the dominant molecular structure is the eight-membered ring and/or a chain with Se8 molecular fragments. This material exhibited reversible photodarkening when illuminated at 77 K. In order to explain this phenomenon, we propose a mechanism which takes into account the role of the (...) lone-pair electron orbitals of Se in their contribution to structural ordering. Illumination can cause a distortion in the normal bonding direction between nearest-neighbour Se atoms and induce in this way intrinsic defect states located at the band edges. In the photo-darkened state, optical transition will occur between these defect states. (shrink)

In this book, C. G. Prado addresses the difficult question of when and whether it is rational to end one's life in order to escape devastating terminal illness. He specifically considers this question in light of the impact of multiculturalism on perceptions and judgements about what is right and wrong, permissible and impermissible. Prado introduces the idea of a 'coincidental culture' to clarify the variety of values and commitments that influence decision. He also introduces the idea of a 'proxy premise' (...) to deal with reasoning issues that are raised by intractably held beliefs. Primarily intended for medical ethicists, this book will be of interest to anyone concerned about the ability of modern medicine to keep people alive, thereby forcing people to choose between living and dying. In addition, Prado calls upon medical ethicists and practitioners to appreciate the value of a theoretical basis for their work. (shrink)

This book examines the reactions of the friends and family of those who elect to die due to terminal illness. These surviving spouses, partners, relatives, and friends, in addition to coping with the death of a loved one, must also deal with the loved one's decision to die, thus severing the relationship. C. G. Prado examines how reactions to elective death are influenced by cultural influences and beliefs, particularly those related to life, death, and the possibility of an afterlife. Understanding (...) the role of these cultural influences on the grieving processes of survivors is a crucial step in allowing them to accept both intellectually and emotionally the finality of elective death and to deal with the decision of their loved one. (shrink)