Ideas of love within religion are usually driven by one of two mythologies – either a personal God who commands love or a mystical God of ineffable love – but both are inadequate for motivating love of neighbour. The first tends towards legalism and the second offers no cognitive guidance. The situation is further complicated by there being different understandings of love of neighbour in the various Abrahamic religions, as exemplified in the approaches of two philosophers, Søren Kierkegaard and Emmanuel (...) Levinas. A better approach is therefore to explore actual practices of love in everyday life, and to discover how love might be performed openly and creatively. One such practice is recognition of vulnerability, and this too is often driven by a mythology, in this case one marked by fear, and by a violence either imposed or avoided. One paradigmatic example is the vulnerability felt by speakers, especially women, in front of an audience. A turning from wilful ignorance of vulnerability and a turning to reliance on collective work, modelled on an awareness of mutual vulnerability and openness to the unknown, will help to change our philosophical and social imaginary. The dark myth of vulnerability can be transformed into finding opportunities in vulnerability for openness to affection and so to an enhancement of life. It is only from the perspective of this new imaginary, and from everyday practices of it, that the double love-command – love of God and love of neighbour – will function as any kind of common ground between religions. (shrink)

Cognitive science has converged in many ways with cognitive psychology, but while also maintaining a distinctive interdisciplinary nature. Here we further characterize this existing state of the field before proposing how it might be reconceptualized toward a broader and more distinct, and thus more stable, position in the realm of sciences.

This chapter contains sections titled: Recurrence‐Awareness Recurrence‐Evidence Recurrence‐Significance Recurrence‐Time Recurrence‐Coherence Conclusion.

The theme that God suffers with his world has become a familiar one in recent years, but a careful examination is needed of what it means to talk about the suffering of God, avoiding the danger of a merely sentimental belief. This book offers a consistent way of thinking about a God who suffers supremely and yet is still the kind of God to whom the Christian tradition has witnessed, and also about a God who suffers universally and yet is (...) still present uniquely in the cross of Christ. It is at once both a survey of recent thought about the suffering of God and a proposal for a way forward in this important area of Christian theology. The author surveys four main trends of recent thought: the 'theology of the cross' in modern German theology ; American process theology; 'the death of God' theology; and finally, the rejection of the whole idea of divine passibility by modern followers of classical theism. He draws upon these schools of thought in the course of reflecting upon various aspects of the main theme of the study. This thematic structure enables an idea of divine suffering to be developed throughout the book, affirming that God freely chooses to limit himself, to suffer change, to journey through time and even to experience death while remaining the living God. (shrink)

Recent Anglophone scholarship has successfully shown that Nietzsche's thought makes important contributions to a wide range of contemporary philosophical debates. In so doing, however, scholarship has lost sight of another important feature of Nietzsche's project, namely his desire to challenge the very conception of philosophy that has been used to assess his merits as a philosopher. In other words, contemporary scholarship has overlooked Nietzsche's contributions to metaphilosophy, i.e. debates around the nature, methods, and aims of philosophy. This important new collection (...) of essays brings together an international group of distinguished scholars to explore and discuss these contributions and debates. It will appeal to anyone interested in metaphilosophy, Nietzsche studies, German studies, or intellectual history. (shrink)

This essay is one of ten contributions to a special editorial feature in The Journal of Nietzsche Studies 49.2, in which authors were invited to address the following questions: What is the future of Nietzsche studies? What are the most pressing questions its scholars should address? What texts and issues demand our urgent attention? And as we turn to these issues, what methodological and interpretive principles should guide us? The editorship hopes this collection will provide a starting point for discussions (...) about the most fruitful directions for Nietzsche scholarship to take and the most promising avenues for building on the best recent work. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 2, February 2020, Page 49-50.

Volume 19, Issue 5, May 2019, Page 22-24.

The biblical image of Wisdom as the power who “orders all things well” in nature and in human life can be read in the light of contemporary information theory. Some current scientific speculation offers an interpretation of reality as a vast information‐processing system, in which informational situations are continuously transformed through algorithmic operations. This interpretation finds a metaphysical counterpart in the distinction between “nature natured” and “nature naturing” in the philosophical theology of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. This confluence of religious, metaphysical, (...) and scientific imagery suggests a picture of the world in which the processes of “nature naturing,”“human humaning,” and “God Godding” inform and recur in each other. (shrink)

According to Lou Salomé, Nietzsche’s philosophy is essentially autobiographical and is best understood as a kind of personal confession, memoir, or self-portrait. In my view, however, this approach is radically mistaken and the textual evidence actually shows the opposite of what Salomé thinks. In these passages, Nietzsche is actually criticizing past philosophers for committing a falsifying cognitive error when they projected themselves and their personal prejudices into all of reality.

Exploring the 'roads less travelled', MacDonald continues his monumental essay in the history of ideas. The history of heterodox ideas about the concept of mind takes the reader from the earliest records about human nature in Ancient Egypt, the Ancient Near East, and the Zoroastrian religion, through the secret teachings in the Hermetic and Gnostic scriptures, and into the transformation of ideas about the mind, soul and spirit in the late antique and early medieval epochs. These transitions include discussion of (...) the influence of Central Asian shamanism, Manichean ideas about the soul in light and darkness, and Neoplatonic theurgy, 'working-on-god-within'. Sections on the medieval period are concerned with the rediscovery of magical practices and occult doctrines from Roger Bacon to Francis Bacon, the adaptation of Neoplatonic and esoteric ideas in the medieval Christian mystics, and the survival of these ideas mixed with natural science in the works of von Helmont, Leibniz and Goethe. The book concludes with an investigation of the many forms of dualism in accounts of the human mind and soul, and the concept of dual-life which underpins our aspiration to understand how humans could have an immortal nature like the gods. (shrink)

This study attempts to refine and test a theory of social influences on ethical decisions of journalists. The theoretical model proposes that several social factors influence any given decision, and that a hierarchy of influences assigns relative value to each: individual, small group, organization, competition, occupation, extramedia, and law. Print and broadcast journalists reacted to 3 hypothetical scenarios that raised ethical problems. The journalists then rated the salience of various reasoning statements, each representing 1 of the 7 social influences. No (...) single source of ethical guidance appeared; in many cases different influences emerge as powerful under different circumstances. But of the 7 proposed influences, 5 showed consistent strength in predicting the decision the journalist makes. The individual influence was the weakest of the 7, despite its prominent strength in the literature. The organizational and small-group strength suggests company-level strategies for media policy-makers who wish to increase journalists'ethical awareness. Overall, the study seems to challenge a traditional assumption that in ethical dilemmas journalists are autonomous moral agents, acting on the basis of their own values alone. The data support the notion of a far more dynamic and complex pattern of social influences. (shrink)

(2002). Clarifying the Ethics of Clinical Research: A Path toward Avoiding the Therapeutic Misconception. The American Journal of Bioethics: Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 22-23.

Brian Leiter’s second book on Nietzsche brings together ideas and arguments that have already had a significant influence on the field through their earlier formulations in his articles from the past two decades. It is thus indispensable reading for anyone interested in Leiter’s evolving project of showing that Nietzsche has the correct naturalistic approach to issues in moral philosophy and moral psychology. As usual with Leiter’s scholarship, this monograph is extremely clear, densely argued, and philosophically sophisticated.Leiter nicely frames this book (...) with an introduction in which he offers his latest thoughts on Nietzsche’s naturalistic approach and with a concluding chapter in which he joins Joshua Knobe... (shrink)

The target article does not address the neural mediation of complex social behavior. I review evidence that such mediation may be compatible with proposed Bayesian information-processing principles. Notably, however, such mediation occurs subcortically as well as cortically, concerns reward uncertainty and information uncertainty, and impacts culture via group-level payoff structures that define individualism and collectivism.

: Responding to the paper by Miller and Joffe, we review the development of the concept of therapeutic misconception (TM). Our concerns about TM's impact on informed consent do not derive from the belief that research subjects have poorer outcomes than persons receiving ordinary clinical care. Rather, we believe that subjects with TM cannot give an adequate informed consent to research participation, which harms their dignitary interests and their abilities to make meaningful decisions. Ironically, Miller and Joffe's approach ends up (...) largely embracing the very position that they inaccurately attribute to us: the belief that, with some exceptions, it is only the prospect of poorer outcomes that should motivate efforts to dispel TM. In the absence of empirical studies on the steps required to dispel TM and the impact of such procedures on subject recruitment, it is premature to surrender to the belief that TM must be widely tolerated in clinical research. (shrink)

Mary's plaintive questions about the “where” of Jesus punctuate the Easter story in John's Gospel. A discovery of the significance of this question of “where” is of prime importance for understanding Johannine theology, Christology, and ethics.

Presents the first book-length study of the profound influence of Descartes' philosophy on Husserl's project for phenomenology.

In this consensus report by a diverse group of academics who conduct and/or are concerned about social and behavioral genomics (SBG) research, the authors recount the often‐ugly history of scientific attempts to understand the genetic contributions to human behaviors and social outcomes. They then describe what the current science—including genomewide association studies and polygenic indexes—can and cannot tell us, as well as its risks and potential benefits. They conclude with a discussion of responsible behavior in the context of SBG research. (...) SBG research that compares individuals within a group according to a “sensitive” phenotype requires extra attention to responsible conduct and to responsible communication about the research and its findings. SBG research (1) on sensitive phenotypes that (2) compares two or more groups defined by (a) race, (b) ethnicity, or (c) genetic ancestry (where genetic ancestry could easily be misunderstood as race or ethnicity) requires a compelling justification to be conducted, funded, or published. All authors agree that this justification at least requires a convincing argument that a study's design could yield scientifically valid results; some authors would additionally require the study to have a socially favorable risk‐benefit profile. (shrink)

When a community has risked its life by confessing its faith, when the cumulative pressures of existence in the world have made faith that dubious, an internal dialogue develops which can be called a dialogue between credulity and skepticism.

DNA double‐strand breaks (DSBs) are extremely hazardous lesions for all DNA‐bearing organisms and the mechanisms of DSB repair are highly conserved. In the eukaryotic mitotic cell cycle, DSBs are often present following DNA replication while, in meiosis, hundreds of DSBs are generated as a prelude to the reshuffling of the maternally and paternally derived genomes. In both cases, the DSBs are repaired by a process called homologous recombinational repair (HRR), which utilises an intact DNA molecule as the repair template. Mitotic (...) and meiotic HRR are managed by ‘checkpoints’ that inhibit cell division until DSB repair is complete. Here we attempt to summarise the substantial recent progress in understanding the checkpoint management of HRR in mitosis (focussing mainly on mammals) and then go on to use this information as a framework for understanding the presumed checkpoint management of HRR in mammalian meiosis. BioEssays 29:974–986, 2007. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Taking the story of Jesus seriously means relocating holy people, holy city, holy land on our map of reality.