This paper explores the relationship between intuition and flow from a neurodynamics perspective. Flow and intuition represent two cognitive phenomena rooted in nonconscious information processing; however, there are clear differences in both their phenomenal characteristics and, more broadly, their contribution to action and cognition. We propose, extrapolating from dual processing theory, that intuition serves as a rapid, nonconscious decision-making process, while flow facilitates this process in action, achieving optimal cognitive control and performance without [conscious] deliberation. By exploring these points of (...) convergence between flow and intuition, we also attempt to reconcile the apparent paradox of the presence of enhanced intuition in flow, which is also a state of heightened cognitive control. To do so, we utilize a revised dual-processing framework, which allows us to productively align and differentiate flow and intuition (including intuition in flow). Furthermore, we draw on recent work examining flow from an active inference perspective. Our account not only heightens understanding of human cognition and consciousness, but also raises new questions for future research, aiming to deepen our comprehension of how flow and intuition can be harnessed to elevate human performance and wellbeing. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life by Kristen R. GhodseeMark A. AllisonKristen R. Ghodsee. Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2023. 352 pp., hardcover, $29.99. ISBN 9781982190217.Kristen R. Ghodsee has written a wide-ranging, highly readable, and commendably radical vindication of utopian thought and experimentation. Everyday (...) Utopia is aimed at the educated lay reader—itself, perhaps, a utopian projection—rather than specialists. Nevertheless, all but the most erudite and cosmopolitan of scholars will encounter unfamiliar and compelling utopiana within its pages. While her earlier book, Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence (2018), concentrated on "state-sponsored solutions" to the deprivations of capitalism and patriarchy, the present volume sets its sights squarely on the private sphere, and utopian visions "for rearranging our domestic lives" (17).Ghodsee situates this turn to the domestic in two contexts. The first is the COVID-19 pandemic, which revealed the frangibility of the international commitment to gender equality. "Women around the globe woke up and realized that decades of feminism had done little to reverse the social expectation that mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters should provide care for young children, elderly parents, and sick relatives, as well as perform the emotional labors that hold families together in times of crisis," she laments (xii). Everyday Utopia's second context is the spate of recent works of "popular neo-utopianism," including Rutger Bregman's Utopia for Realists (2017), Aaron Bastani's Fully Automated Luxury Communism (2019), and Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler's Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think (2012) (14). What Ghodsee finds wanting in this discourse is its myopic focus on the public sphere, and its unspoken presupposition that our private and domestic lives have no such need of utopian renovation. But it is just this presupposition [End Page 285] that the COVID-19 lockdown discredited, although many other indicators (runaway housing and childcare costs, the environmental crisis, the epidemic of loneliness) already suggested as much. Ghodsee rightly insists that "where we reside, how we raise and educate our children, our personal relationship to things, and the quality of our connections to friends, families, and partners impact us as much as tax policies, the price of energy, or the way we organize formal employment" (14). As utopian thinkers from Plato forward have understood, moreover, it is short-sighted to suppose that sweeping economic and political transformations are possible without a concomitant rethinking of the "intimate worlds" that subtend these public domains (15).Accordingly, Everyday Utopia devotes its succeeding chapters to examining alternatives to the dominant institutions of the contemporary private sphere, including the single-family household, the monogamous couple paradigm of childrearing and mating, and the institution of private property. In each case, Ghodsee plumbs the past and limns the present to highlight utopian alternatives to contemporary norms. Among this book's greatest strengths is its consistently international range of examples and admirably sustained commitment to feature "experiments that have received relatively less attention" in the extant literature (xv).Take, for example, the chapter on communal alternatives to single-family homes. Ghodsee includes many of the usual (and eminently worthy) suspects: Buddhist and Christian cenobite monasteries, Fourierist phalansteries, Israeli kibbutzim, and the Corbusier-inspired "microdistricts" of the former Eastern bloc (47). But we also learn of less canonical phenomena, such as the Neolithic proto-city of Çatalhöyük, "one of the first major settlements in the world," where as many as eight thousand people lived in an essentially contiguous structure, in highly egalitarian and likely non-consanguineous households (32). Or consider the Beguine nuns, a lay order founded in 1190 that survived, albeit in attenuated form, into the twentieth century. The Beguine lived communally in urban areas, enjoying liberties unthinkable not only to their cloistered counterparts, but to virtually all their female contemporaries: they brewed beer, made lace, taught school—and traversed the streets unchaperoned. The chapter concludes with a discussion of contemporary cohousing. In Denmark, roughly one percent of the population was living in co... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:146 BOOK REVIEWS the years passed since Father Garrigou-Lagrange last published his De Revelatione would have allowed Thomistic scholars to retrieve and de· velop Aquinas's theological insights in their fullness. The danger of apologetics is that it can lead one to develop a teaching only along the lines set by those challenging the traditional teaching of the Church. In this particular instance, the Catholic apologists of the antimodernist period (...) were led to overstress the epistemological dimension of the theology of Revelation, leaving unstated that for Saint Thomas the primary term of analysis in this question is the knowledge of God. The need of Revelation for Saint Thomas stems from the call to man to share in the beatific vision. A paper on the relation of finality between faith and the beatific vision would have underlined the originality and true significance of the Thomistic tradition in theology. Saint John's Priory Laredo, Texas JOSEPH D'AMECOURT, F.J. The Eternity of the World in the Thought of Thomas Aquinas and his Contemporaries. Edited by J. B. M. WISSINK. Studien und Texte zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters, edited by A. ZIMMERMAN, vol. 27. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1990. Pp. viii+ 100. $28.75 (paper). This volume contains six short studies by five different scholars from the Netherlands on a topic accurately indicated by its title. These studies are a product of a symposium held by the Thomas Aquinas Workgroup, a scholarly association dedicated to investigating the thesis " that Aquinas first of all has to be understood as a theologian " and to " a rediscovery of the original Aquinas and his authentic thought" (p. vii). The topic chosen for these studies is a suitable one for the aims of the Workgroup, for it is one that requires a clear dis· tinction to be made between the realms of philosophy and theology, and it is one that has generated much interest and dispute-in the Middle Ages no less than today. This small collection of studies makes a con· tribution to scholarship, although there are weaknesses in some of the studies, as I shall note. F. J. A. de Grijs (pp. 1-8) argues that Thomas's purpose in writing the De aeternitate mundi was theological rather than philosophical in that Thomas provides a meditation on the meaning of eternity. This meditation, so de Grijs argues, is not only about the temporal eternity of the world but is even more about God's eternity. It shows us how BOOK REVIEWS 147 little we grasp of God's duration, or how we do not understand it rather than how we do understand it. J. A. Aertsen (pp. 9-19) ·responds to de Grijs by arguing that the work has a philosophical character. First, Aertsen explains, the fact that Thomas begins the De aeternitate mundi with the supposition on faith that the world had a temporal beginning in the past does not of itself (as de Grijs had thought) mean that the work is theological. Rather, it simply means that all believers agree that in fact the world had a temporal beginning, but the question at issue remains a philosophical one: could the world possibly have existed eternally in the past? Second, Aertsen points out that the reasoning in the De aeternitate mundi is much like that of Thomas's Disputed Question De potentia Dei, q. 3, a. 14, which has an explicitly philosophical character. Third, Thomas has already made it clear in his Commentary on the Sentences, bk. 2, d. 1, q. 1, a. 2, that the doctrine of creation, excluding the part of the doctrine that the world had a temporal beginning, is philosophically knowable in principle and known to philosophers in fact. Since the fact of creation is philosophically knowable and can he demonstrated without prejudice to the question of eternity, it cannot he said that an eternal past existence is incompatible with creation. Hence, the question of the compatibility of being eternal and being created-the very question for the De aeternitate mundi-is regarded by Thomas as philosophical rather than as theological. Aertsen's criticisms of de Grijs are sound, yet de Grijs's central point can he saved. De Grijs... (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 55, Issue 1, Page 186-203, February 2021.

Beware of the abysses and the gorges, but also of the bridges and the barriers.It is fair to say that many philosophical interpretations of the Daoist classics have proceeded, or continue to proceed, to read into these works the quest for a transcendental, foundational principle, a permanent moment of rest beyond the turmoil of ever-changing things. According to this interpretation the Daoist sages are those who have for all time found this metaphysical ground of all things—"The Way" (dao 道)—and who (...) have tried (in vain, though, since language cannot convey this ultimate ground) to find ways of expressing this transcendental ground to their audience.To quote one instance of how easily such metaphysical .. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Trungpa's Barbarians and Merton's Titan:Resuming a Dialogue on Spiritual EgotismSteven R. ShippeeA Dialogue Begun: The Meeting of Chögyam Trungpa and Thomas MertonMuch of the dialogue on the spiritual life between Buddhists and Christians has centered on two locations in the United States. The first is Naropa Institute (now University) in Boulder, Colorado. This institution was founded in 1974 by Chögyam Trungpa, a Tibetan master and lineage holder of both (...) the Nyingma and Kagyü traditions, two of the four major schools of Tibetan Buddhism. Under Trungpa's guidance, Naropa hosted an important series of Buddhist-Christian contemplative dialogues in the 1980s.1 A second significant place is Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky, the Trappist monastery that became home to Thomas Merton in 1941. Since 1996, and through the efforts of several of the same people who had worked on the Naropa dialogues, the abbey has hosted three interreligious "encounters" sponsored by the Monastic Interreligious Dialogue.2An important link between these dialogues, as well as the initial inspiration for the first of them,3 is the meeting of the two men most famously associated with each of the hosting institutions, Trungpa and Merton. As many of their respective readers know, the two men met in Calcutta on 19 October 1968, and spent several days together.4 This contact was very stimulating to them both and seemed the beginning of a deep friendship. Merton was so impressed with Trungpa that he immediately determined to visit Trungpa's new monastery in Scotland. Trungpa later said, "Meeting Thomas Merton was wonderful,"5 and that he felt he "was meeting an old friend, a genuine friend."6 Despite the brevity of their relationship, during his last talk on 10 December, Merton said he likewise considered Trungpa "a good friend."7 Later that same day, their friendship and dialogue were terminated by Merton's death. Not two months had passed since the meeting in Calcutta. Trungpa called Merton's death "a tremendous loss, to me personally and to the world of genuine spirituality."8Judith Simmer-Brown has provided the fullest picture thus far of the relationship between Trungpa and Merton.9 One of the facts that most intrigues Trungpa's [End Page 109] followers is his own recollection, shared with participants at the third Naropa dialogue, that the two discussed what he called "spiritual materialism" (his most common phrase for spirituality co-opted by ego) at some length over dinner and drinks.10 This article picks up where that recollection leaves off. While we do not know more about the specific content of that discussion, we do have a body of writings from each man on topics relating to the quest and pitfalls of authentic spirituality. A comparative analysis of these proves worthwhile, as further elucidation of what made possible their meeting of the minds and the immediate affection they felt for each other, and certainly as wisdom that still has the power to deepen our spiritual experience today by exposing the manipulations and deceptions to which ego11 subjects even our noblest spiritual aspirations.The challenges to authentic spiritual life were major concerns for both Trungpa and Merton, a leitmotif that characterized almost all of their respective teachings and written works.12 As an extensive examination of these is not possible here, I have set side by side one symbol from each: Trungpa's modification of the traditional Tibetan teachings on the Lalos (kla.klo, literally "barbarians"), which he translated as the "Three Lords of Materialism," and Merton's reflections on the tragic Titan Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods. These two symbols, while certainly not exhaustive of their insights, nonetheless effectively crystallize their respective thoughts on the matter, and thereby allow us to see that Trungpa and Merton shared very striking insights both about the malady of spiritual egotism and about its necessary antidotes.Chögyam Trungpa on Spiritual MaterialismIn talks given from 1970 to 1973, Trungpa gave teachings to his students on "the Three Lords of Materialism," symbolic personifications of the trap to which he referred as spiritual materialism.13 Believing that most of his students were sincere about the spiritual path, he... (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that Arnauld’s conception of God is more radical than scholars have been willing to allow. It is not the case that, for Arnauld, God acts for reasons, with His will guided by wisdom (much as the God of Malebranche and Leibniz acts), albeit by a wisdom impenetrable to us. Arnauld’s objections to Malebranche are directed not only at the claim that God’s wisdom is transparent to human reason, but at the whole distinction between will and (...) wisdom in God, even if that wisdom were “hidden.” Arnauld’s God, in fact, approaches the extreme voluntarist God of Descartes, and thus transcends practical rational agency altogether. (shrink)

From young children, with their guileless, searching questions, to the recently bereaved, trying to make sense of tragic loss, humans wrestle with our relationship to God--and with God's essence, motivations, and power--throughout our lives: Why does God permit catastrophe and senseless tragedy, again and again? Is God's power limited in any way? Can He change the past? Does He know the future? Why does God require prayer? Why does He not provide stronger evidence of His presence? Whom does God consign (...) to hell, and why? Does God change? Suffer? What can we make of the conflicting diversity within world religions, of the many gods of different religious traditions? Such questions engage, confront, and perplex us on a daily basis. In this rich, concise volume, leading philosophers who have long pondered God's nature and ways take on these core problems and present their findings in a manner likely to engage believer and non-believer, general reader and specialist alike. (shrink)

In the not too distant past, it was common to treat Hume's skeptical doubts regarding the justification of our beliefs in causal connections—understood as necessary connections between objects or events—as having appeared per conceptionem immaculatam in his post-Cartesian mind. Thanks to recent efforts by scholars in early modern philosophy, however, we are now more informed about the roots of Hume's conclusions in Cartesian thought itself, especially the influence of Malebranche and his arguments for occasionalism. And by the research of historians (...) of Medieval philosophy we are reminded that many aspects of seventeenth-century occasionalism, in turn, have their ancestry in Latin and Arabic thought of the Middle Ages. In this paper I offer a small contribution to the overall project of illuminating the precedents in Medieval philosophy for the theses and arguments in Malebranche that so clearly influenced the most important and influential philosophical analysis of causation ever. There is a tradition here, where the goal is to undermine claims to discover real causal relations or powers in nature. I will concentrate on one particular aspect or tool of that tradition: the negative argument that we can never perceive a sufficiently necessary connection between any two natural objects or events. (shrink)

Nevin & Grace's behavioral-momentum model accommodates a large body of data. This commentary highlights some experimental findings that the model does not always predict. The model does not consistently predict resistance to change when response-independent food is delivered simultaneously with response-contingent food, when drugs are used as response disrupters, and when responding is reinforced under single rather than multiple schedules of reinforcement.

This volume is an introduction to the underpinnings of journalism ethics, and a guide for journalists and journalism teachers looking for ways to form consistent and informed ethical decisions.

International law and ethics share a common goal of helping us understand the norms and institutions needed to promote a just world order. Yet each of the two fields has approached this shared task with little regard for the insights of other, and interdisciplinary collaboration is now imperative. This essay shows the complementary nature of inquiries in political and moral philosophy, on the one hand, and international law, on the other, by examining the so-called New Haven School (or policy-oriented jurisprudence), (...) an international law method that explicitly considers values as both inputs and outputs of the process of making law. It finds that the School’s sociological orientation does not adequately integrate ethical inquiries essential to prescribing law, in particular questions about the scope of duties that individuals and states owe those abroad. Using the current legal debate over the extraterritorial application of human rights as an example, the paper shows how approaches from moral and political philosophy can help provide a rigorous and principled basis for the prescription of law, as well as link seemingly unrelated questions of international law to each other. (shrink)

Massive geopolitical shifts and dramatic developments in computerization and biotechnology are heralding the transformation from the modern to the postmodern age. We are confronted with altered modes of work, communication, and entertainment; new postindustrial and political networks; novel approaches to warfare; genetic engineering; and even cloning. This compelling book explores the challenges to theory, politics, and human identity that we face on the threshold of the third millennium. It follows on the success of Best and Kellner s two previous books: (...) Postmodern Theory, acclaimed as the best critical introduction to the field, and The Postmodern Turn, which provides a powerful mapping of postmodern developments in the arts, politics, science, and theory. In The Postmodern Adventure, Best and Kellner analyze a broad array of literary, cultural, and political phenomena--from fiction, film, science, and the Internet, to globalization and the rise of a transnational image culture. They use the best of modern and postmodern perspectives to illuminate contemporary life and to strive for a just and viable future. Gold Medal Winner in Philosophy--ForeWord Magazine's Book of the Year Awards. (shrink)

The art of living idiom suits well a practice-oriented approach in ethics of technology. But what remains or becomes of the functioning and use of reason in ethics? In reaction to the comments by Huijer this reply elaborates in more detail how Foucault’s art of living can be adapted for a critical contemporary ethics of technology. And the aesthetic-political rationality in Foucault’s ethics is compared with Wellner’s suggestions of holding on to the notion of code but with a new meaning. (...) Foucault’s fourfold scheme of subjectivation and a distinction of “below and above reason” structure the argument. (shrink)

Though Kierkegaard never explicitly formulated a theory of religious doctrine, he did have a clear position on the role that Christian doctrine ought to play in the lives of believers. Briefly stated, he maintained that Christianity, as a human activity, involves more than merely believing certain propositions about matters of fact. The doctrines of Christianity take on a true religious significance only when they are given the power to transform the lives of those who accept them; only when they are (...) given expression in the existence of the believer. This was, however, far from evident to Kierkegaard's theological contemporaries who, in the collective absentmindedness of the age, sought to replace the Christian virtue of faith with the philosophical ideal of objective knowledge. (shrink)

The Netherlands’ colonial empire was a source of wealth, pride and prestige, being seen by some as an essential element of Dutch identity and the key to the Netherlands’ status as a European power....

The aim of this paper is to show how, by developing apparatus that has roots in Russell's own early work, it is possible to vindicate a version of his notorious "multiple relation" theory of judgment by formally reducing it to a plausible representationalist theory. Various adequacy conditions on such a reductive vindication are introduced and motivated. The theories in question are then axiomatized, and bridge principles are provided to effect the desired reduction. Finally, the reduction is shown to be a (...) vindication in virtue of meeting all of the aforementioned adequacy conditions. (shrink)

The inability of reformist socialism to cape with the rise of fascism and the Great Depression led to a significant challenge by neo-socialists.In Belgium, this challenge was led by De Man and Spaak. In 1933, the POB accepted De Man's Plan as its program of action; in 1935 it entered into the Van Zeeland government. Although in many ways, theneos showed greater understanding of the nature of advanced capitalist society than the orthodox reformists, they displayed an alarming tendency to try (...) to preempt fascism by emulating certain fascist positions.De Man and Spaak broke with socialist internationalism and collective security. De Man became convinced of the bankruptcy of democratic institutions and of the democratic states. This attitude ultimately led him from neutralism to collaboration, in the belief that fascism was indeed the wave of the future. (shrink)

The ontological implications of the Peircean Categories, as set forth most clearly in Peirce’s summative architectonic statement, “New Elements,” and referenced elsewhere in Peirce’s body of writings, are examined with reference to the existent or physical universe. The Peircean universal ontological Categories Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness are shown to give rise to a cosmos that is triadic and representational in essence. This immanently representational cosmos, denominated the “Book Universe,” is shown to be evidenced by the representational contours of both the (...) mathematical and of the conceptual framing of the three broad domains of theoretical physics, the quantum, classical, and relativistic domains. This triadic “Book Universe” model is both characterized and also contrasted with the “Block Universe” model, and is seen to incorporate both time and space as emergent representational characteristics, and to be manifest, qua triadic Representamen, in terms of a “foliated eternalism” that requires both antecedent and parallel cosmoi. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Dante’s Poetics Of The Sacred WordSteven BotterillI hope to make a case that, until recently, would probably have seemed self-evident, or at least uncontroversial: namely, that a positive valuation of the power of human language to express and to represent informs the textual practice of Dante’s Commedia—or, to put it more bluntly, that Dante believes in words.1The language of poetry was, for Dante, the supremely demanding and supremely rewarding (...) form of human eloquence. This much is made clear in his significantly titled treatise De vulgari eloquentia (On Eloquence in the Vernacular), which, having set out—and failed—to identify a truly noble form of the Italian vernacular, takes it as axiomatic that if (or rather when) such a language is brought into being, it will primarily be used by poets in the composition of their poetry. Despite the many subsequent developments in his thought, and despite, above all, the drastic and often underestimated effects of his shift after 1300 from lyric to narrative-dramatic forms and techniques, nothing in Dante’s later works gives us any reason to think that he ever modified this view.Within the narrative of the Commedia, the overriding importance of eloquence is amply demonstrated by the fact that, without it, Dante-character’s journey would never have taken place. It is to poetic eloquence that Dante owes both his visionary experience and his eventual salvation. Confirmation of this initially startling proposition occurs in canto II of Inferno, where Virgil describes his commission from Beatrice to come to the aid of her errant admirer, and explains that he is charged to do so through the use of his “parola ornata” (“ornamented [End Page 154] word”: Inf., II. 67)—not merely a word plucked from the dictionary, however potently charged with salvific meaning, but a word (or, by synecdoche, a language) that is perceptibly embellished with the technical and rhetorical devices recognized by its hearers as constituting eloquence. Virgil, then, is not just to speak the saving word but to pay attention, as both his historical identity and his creator’s agenda require, to the aesthetic and intellectual implications of its usage; and the efficacy of his speech is manifestly dependent on the elegance and persuasiveness of its formulation.Dante-character’s initial recognition of his mysterious interlocutor in Inferno I as “quella fonte / che spandi di parlar sì largo fiume” (“that spring / that pours forth so rich a stream of speech”: Inf., I. 79–80) is thus retrospectively justified: this is the immediately relevant aspect of Virgil’s historical personality, the one that best equips him to become Dante-character’s guide and mentor in Hell and (most of) Purgatory. Likewise, it is under the auspices of another renowned possessor of eloquence, Bernard of Clairvaux, that Dante’s journey reaches its appointed end. The narrative movement through the Commedia is, among much else, a movement from one “parola ornata” to another, from Virgil’s eloquence to Bernard’s, from the pagan word that offers worldly renown to the Christian word that both transfigures the believer in this life and promises bliss in the life to come. The former, however, grounds the process that leads to the latter; and at both ends of the journey the functional significance of the word and its usage remains paramount.We need, however, to be careful at this point, lest we begin too quickly to entertain the notion that the centrality of eloquence in Dante’s thought immediately justifies the conclusion that he accepted the intrinsic validity of poetic language, or, more controversial still, its supremacy over other forms of eloquent discourse. Firstly, Virgil’s is not the only word in the poem distinguished as “ornata.” The epithet recurs in the bolgia of the seducers, as part of the tale of Jason, who “con segni e con parole ornate” (“with signs and with ornamented words”: Inf., XVIII. 91) led Hypsipyle astray and earned himself damnation. Clearly, Jason’s “parole ornate” are morally quite different from Virgil’s: instead of saving they betray, instead of embodying the truth they act as a vehicle of deceit. Their ornamental quality is specious, employed to conceal their... (shrink)