Professor Kai Nielsen is one of the most forceful proponents of the view that theological assertions have no factual reference because they are compatible with any empirical state of affairs; no evidence, it is alleged, is allowed to count as falsification of such assertions, and therefore they spuriously purport to be what they are not. In this he follows the well-known essay by Professor Antony Flew in which the same argument was advanced, and Nielsen's own most recent contribution on the (...) subject in Religious Studies should be read against the background of his earlier controversy with Professors John Hick and George Mavrodes in The Canadian Journal of Theology. In this latest article he broadens the canvas to question the significance of applying language and concepts appropriate to the realm of empirical observation to anything that is held to transcend it; and this is the substance of Part II of his paper, in which he engages in debate with Professor Ian Crombie, treading well-worn ground that has been the subject of innumerable philosophical discussions. The rest of the paper, however, is a restatement of his earlier contention, and it is with this more limited issue that I shall be concerned in what follows. For I believe that Nielsen is wrong in two quite fundamental respects: he is mistaken in supposing that theological assertions are compatible with any empirical state of affairs: he bases his critique of theological assertions on a far too uncritical appraisal of the principles of verification and falsification in the case of ordinary factual statements. If I am right, the larger questions raised in Part II will still remain open, but it is high time that the ‘verification-falsification argument’ should be shown to be unfounded. (shrink)

Substantially revised to include a wealth of new material, the second edition of this highly acclaimed work provides a concise, coherent introduction that brings structure to an increasingly fragmented and amorphous discipline. Paul R. McHugh and Phillip R. Slavney offer an approach that emphasizes psychiatry's unifying concepts while accommodating its diversity. Recognizing that there may never be a single, all-encompassing theory, the book distills psychiatric practice into four explanatory methods: diseases, dimensions of personality, goal-directed behaviors, and life stories. These (...) perspectives, argue the authors, underlie the principles and practice of all psychiatry. With an understanding of these fundamental methods, readers will be equipped to organize and evaluate psychiatric information and to develop a confident approach to practice and research. Praise for the original edition: "This brilliant book illuminates psychiatry more clearly than any other work I know.... This is the best (and the shortest) single volume on psychiatry that anyone could read."-- New England Journal of Medicine "Every psychiatry department, regardless of ideology, should build a course around this... work. Open-mindedness might become fashionable."-- Journal of Clinical Psychiatry "An elegantly reasoned and eloquently written book that enriches our understanding of clinical events.... [It provides] an opportunity to open our eyes to new possibilities."-- Hospital and Community Psychiatry. (shrink)

Conceptual combinations range from the utterly mundane to the sublimely creative. Mundane combinations include a myriad of adjective-noun and noun-noun juxtapositions that crop up in everyday speaking and writing, such as blue car, cooked carrots, and radio phone. Creative combinations include some of the most important theoretical constructions in science, such as sound wave, bacterial infection, and natural selection. Both mundane and creative conceptual combinations are essential to our attempts to make sense of the world and people's utterances about it. (...) This paper will show how the various aspects of conceptual combination discussed by Hampton (this volume), Shoben and Gagn. (shrink)

"Evidence of a flight from reason is as old as human record-keeping: the fact of it certainly goes back an even longer way. Flight from science specifically, among the forms of rational inquiry, goes back as far as science itself... But rejection of reason is now a pattern to be found in most branches of scholarship and in all the learned professions."--from the introduction In the widely acclaimed Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science, Paul R. (...) Gross and Norman Levitt offered a spirited response to the "science bashers," raising serious questions about the growing criticism of scientific practice from humanists and social scientists on the academic left. Now, in The Flight from Science and Reason, Gross and Levitt are joined by Martin W. Lewis to bring together a diverse and distinguished group of scholars, scientists, and experts to engage these questions from a wide variety of perspectives. The authors take on critics of science whose views range from moderate to extreme, from social constructivists to deconstructionists, from creationists and feminists to Afro-centrists. They discuss the rise of "alternative medicine" and radical environmentalism (here skewered as "ecosentimentalism"). They explain why the "uncertainty principle" does not work as a metaphor for ambiguity, and why "chaos theory" cannot be invoked without an understanding of mathematics. Throughout, they grapple with the paradox inherent in arguing with opponents who contend that reason itself, and thus logic, is suspect. Distributed for the New York Academy of Sciences. (shrink)

Nietzsche’s conception of eros and its role in the development of philosophers is similar to the conception of those same topics espoused by Diotima in Plato’s Symposium. Nietzsche and Diotima agree that eros is an insatiable desire to possess the beautiful, that eros aims at immortality through reproduction, and that philosophy requires an ascent beyond sexual desire to “higher” forms of eros, which nevertheless are still modeled on heterosexual reproduction. Understanding these facets of Nietzsche’s view leads to an apparent contradiction (...) in that Nietzsche thinks of philosophy on the model of reproduction and ascribes to the philosopher both the female and the male roles in heterosexual reproduction. I argue that this ambivalence reflects Nietzsche’s view that practicing philosophy requires balancing two conflicting philosophical tendencies: on the one hand, pursuit of truth, which involves dissatisfaction with oneself; on the other hand, creation, which involves acknowledgment of one’s own capacity and value. (shrink)

Causality is central to the understanding and use of data; without an understanding of cause and effect relationships, we cannot use data to answer important questions in medicine and many other fields.

In Pagans & Christians in the City, Steven D. Smith argues that in contrast to ancient Rome, ancient Christianity, following Judaism, located the sacred outside the world, desacralizing the cosmos and everything in it—including the political order. It thereby introduced a political dualism and potentially contending allegiances. Although Smith’s argument is right so far as it goes, it underplays the role of Christianity’s immanent dimension in subverting the Roman empire and the sacral pattern of antiquity. This division of authority not (...) only undermined the Roman empire and antique sacral political order more generally—it also subverts the modern state, which, in the work of Hobbes and Rousseau, sought to remarry what Western Christianity divorced. (shrink)

Many scholars view political contractarianism as a distinctly modern account of the foundations of political order. Ideas such as popular sovereignty, the right of revolution, the necessity of the consent of the governed for rightful political authority, natural equality, and a pre-civil state of nature embody the modern rupture with classical political philosophy and traditional Christian theology. At the headwaters of this modern revolution stands Thomas Hobbes. Since the American founders subscribed to the social contract theory, they are often said (...) to reject classical political philosophy and traditional Christian political theology as well. In America on Trial, Robert Reilly rejects the usual argument. He maintains that the building blocks of the American founding originate in medieval Christian political theology. In this essay, I argue that a morally and metaphysically realist contractarian tradition—one that affirms natural equality, the authority of the society over government, the necessity of consent for legitimate government, the right to resist tyrannical rulers, and the idea of a pre-civil state of nature—predates Hobbes and also that the voluntarist contractarian tradition inaugurated by Hobbes is self-referentially incoherent. A coherent political contractarianism logicially depends on the sort of metaphysics and moral ontology Hobbes rejects. (shrink)

There have been a number of attempts to apply mechanism-related concepts to the notion of extended cognition. Such accounts appeal to the idea that extended cognitive routines are realized by mechanisms that transcend some salient border or boundary. The present paper describes some of the challenges confronting the effort to develop a mechanistic account of extended cognition. In particular, it describes five problems that must be resolved if we are to make sense of the idea that extended cognition can be (...) understood via an appeal to extended mechanisms. These problems are intended to guide the philosophical effort to develop a mechanistic account of extended cognition. (shrink)

In this book Paul Hinlicky suggests that to the detriment of the church as a whole Martin Luthers legacy did not unfold as he himself would have hoped or ...

This article explores the notion of the Web-extended mind, which is the idea that the technological and informational elements of the Web can sometimes serve as part of the mechanistic substrate that realizes human mental states and processes. It is argued that while current forms of the Web may not be particularly suited to the realization of Web-extended minds, new forms of user interaction technology as well as new approaches to information representation do provide promising new opportunities for Web-based forms (...) of cognitive extension. In addition, it is suggested that extended cognitive systems often rely on the emergence of social practices and conventions that shape how a technology is used. Web-extended minds may thus depend on forms of socio-technical co-evolution in which social forces and factors play just as important a role as do the processes of technology design and development. (shrink)

The life cycle of Dictyostelium discoideum offers a unique opportunity to study signal transduction in eukaryotic cells at both the unicellular and multicellular levels of organization. Adding to the already extensive knowledge of the unicellular stages, classical and molecular genetics have begun to unravel transduction of signals controlling morphogenesis and behaviour (phototaxis and thermotaxis) in the multicellular ‘slug’ stage of the life cycle. Distributed over all seven genetic linkage groups are probably about 20, but possibly as many as 55, genes (...) of importance for slug behaviour. The encoded proteins appear from pharmacological studies and mutant phenotypes to govern transduction pathways involving the intracellular second messengers cyclic AMP, cyclic GMP, IP3 and Ca2+. Pathways from the photo‐ and thermoreceptors converge first with each other and thence, at the level of the second messengers, with those from extracellular tip activation (cyclic AMP) and inhibition (Slug Turning Factor and/or ammonia and/or adenosine) signals that control slug movement and morphogenesis. (shrink)

One of the challenges of reading ancient Chinese philosophical texts is to recognize that certain keywords have attained significantly different senses in the more recent language, and to try to reconstruct, on the basis of contemporary documents, what these terms would have meant to classical audiences. One such term is zhong å¿ , which is often mechanically translated as loyalty. Throughout the imperial period, and in many Eastern Zhou contexts, zhong did indeed mean something very similar to loyalty. However, simply (...) plugging in the word loyalty every time one encounters zhong can lead to seriously incorrect translations, especially when dealing with texts from before the third century BCE. This article discusses a range of complex early meanings including treating people right, being honest with oneself in dealing with others, and adjudicating a case fairly. In addition, the relationship with zhong 中 is explored by means of a revealing Western Zhou bronze inscription. (shrink)

Neuronal signalling involves multiple neuropeptides that are diverse in structure and function. Complex patterns of tissue‐specific expression arise from alternate RNA splicing of neuropeptide‐encoding gene transcripts. The pattern of expression and its role in cell signalling is diffecult to study at the level of single neurons in the complex vertebrate brain. However, in the model molluscan system, Lymnaea, it is possible to show that alternate mRNA expression of the FMRFamide gene is specific to single identified neurons. Two different transcripts are (...) expressed in a mutually exclusive manner in different neurons. Post‐translational processing of the two precursor proteins leads to completely distinct sets of neuropeptide transmitters. The function of these transmitter cocktails, resulting from alternate mRNA splicing, was studied physiologically in identified neurons forming part of a behaviourally important network regulating heartbeat. (shrink)

Since Plato, most philosophers have drawn a sharp line between reason and emotion, assuming that emotions interfere with rationality and have nothing to contribute to good reasoning. In his dialogue the Phaedrus, Plato compared the rational part of the soul to a charioteer who must control his steeds, which correspond to the emotional parts of the soul (Plato 1961, p. 499). Today, scientists are often taken as the paragons of rationality, and scientific thought is generally assumed to be independent of (...) emotional thinking. (shrink)

This book candidly reports the experiences of one middle school principal for 160 consecutive days with little or no editing. The material is much more than the typical case study. The events are presented in context; the results of actions taken are seen in the daily lives of all affected.

This paper argues that questions concerning the nature of concepts that are central in cognitive psychology are also important to epistemology and that there is more to conceptual change than mere belief revision. Understanding of epistemic change requires appreciation of the complex ways in which concepts are structured and organized and of how this organization can affect belief revision. Following a brief summary of the psychological functions of concepts and a discussion of some recent accounts of what concepts are, I (...) propose a view of concepts as complex computational structures. This account suggests that conceptual change can come in varying degrees, with the most extreme consisting of fundamental conceptual reorganizations. These degrees of conceptual change are illustrated by the development of the concept of an acid. (shrink)

While the dominant approaches to the current study of political philosophy are various, with some friendlier to religious belief than others, almost all place constraints on the philosophic and political role of revelation. Mainstream secular political theorists do not entirely disregard religion. But to the extent that they pay attention, their treatment of religious belief is seen more as a political or philosophic problem to be addressed rather than as a positive body of thought from which we might derive important (...) insights about the nature of politics and the truth of the human condition. In a one-of-a-kind collection, DeHart and Holloway bring together leading scholars from various fields, including political science, philosophy, and theology, to challenge the prevailing orthodoxy and to demonstrate the role that religion can and does play in political life. Contributing authors include such important thinkers as Peter Augustine Lawler, Robert C. Koons, J. Budziszewski, Francis J. Beckwith, and James Stoner. (shrink)

In The Langoliers, passengers on an airline flight wake to find that they’ve mysteriously travelled a few minutes back in time… a few minutes behind everyone else. They find that the world still exists, after ‘the present’ has moved on, but only for a short duration before the Langoliers—the timekeepers of eternity—arrive to remove it permanently from existence. This story prompts two interesting questions: How should we understand the nature of time in The Langoliers? Could the nature of time in (...) our world be the same as in The Langoliers? And, are the characters in The Langoliers really time travellers? In answering these questions, we can gain a greater understanding of the world depicted in The Langoliers, as well as of our own world. (shrink)

This chapter reviews the aspects of Mencius that did and did not interest Han-dynasty writers. With the help of digital concordances, it is easy to discover that many of the passages considered crucial today were rarely, if ever, cited in the Han. These include the parable of the infant about to fall into a well (2A.6), the debate with a Mohist named Yi Zhi 夷之 (3A.5), and the concept of liangzhi 良知 (7A.15), which, since Wang Yangming 王陽明 (1472–1528), has been (...) considered a cornerstone of Mencian ethics. The chapter discusses other key passages that are never mentioned in Han sources. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and thus one cannot simply infer that these passages were unknown in the Han dynasty, but it remains significant that they were not regarded as essential to understanding Mencius’s philosophy. The conclusion will explore the differences between Mencius’s reception in the Han dynasty and his Neo-Confucianized reception today. (shrink)