Disorders of volition are often accompanied by, and may even be caused by, disruptions in the phenomenology of agency. Yet the phenomenology of agency is at present little explored. In this paper we attempt to describe the experience of normal agency, in order to uncover its representational content.

Recent literature comparing the works of Heidegger and Davidson suggests that one of the main differences between these two thinkers is that the latter lacks any notion of non-linguistic interpretation and understanding; the only way of making sense of a domain of entities for Davidson is theory. I argue against this common perspective and show that Davidson is committed to a primitive, pre-conceptual form of understanding that is socially mediated. This primitive form of understanding is essential to the functioning of (...) what Davidson calls 'primitive triangulation'. Properly understood, primitive triangulation shares many structural features with Dasein's comportment. (shrink)

On method, discursive logics, and epistemology -- Questions of medieval discursive practice -- From the middle ages to the (w)hole of Utopia -- Kepler, his Dream, and the analysis and pattern of thought -- Campanella and Bacon: concerning structures of mind -- The masculine birth of time -- Cyrano and the experimental discourse -- The myth of sun and moon -- The difficulty of writing -- Crusoe rights his story -- Gulliver's critique of Euclid -- Emergence, consolidation, and dominance of (...) a discourse. (shrink)

The doctrine of the Incarnation, that Jesus Christ was both truly God and truly human, is the foundation and cornerstone of traditional Christian theism. And yet this traditional teaching appears to verge on incoherence. How can one person be both God, having all the perfections of divinity, and human, having all the limitations of humanity? This is the fundamental philosophical problem of the Incarnation. Perhaps a solution is found in an analysis of what the traditional teaching meant by person, divinity, (...) and humanity, or in understanding how divinity and humanity were united in a single person. This Element presents that traditional teaching, then returns to the incoherence problem to showcase various solutions offered to it. (shrink)

At any given time, a subject has a multiplicity of conscious experiences. A subject might simultaneously have visual experiences of a red book and a green tree, auditory experiences of birds singing, bodily sensations of a faint hunger and a sharp pain in the shoulder, the emotional experience of a certain melancholy, while having a stream of conscious thoughts about the nature of reality. These experiences are distinct from each other: a subject could experience the red book without the singing (...) birds, and could experience the singing birds without the red book. But at the same time, the experiences seem to be tied together in a deep way. They seem to be unified, by being aspects of a single encompassing state of consciousness. (shrink)

A central goal of cognitive science is to develop a general theory of transfer to explain how people use and apply their prior knowledge to solve new problems. Previous work has identified multiple mechanisms of transfer including (but not limited to) analogy, knowledge compilation, and constraint violation. The central hypothesis investigated in the current work is that the particular profile of transfer processes activated for a given situation depends on both (a) the type of knowledge to be transferred and how (...) it is represented, and (b) the processing demands of the transfer task. This hypothesis was investigated in two laboratory training studies. The results from Experiment 1 show that each mechanism predicts specific behavioural patterns of performance across a common set of transfer tasks. The results from Experiment 2 show that people can adaptively shift between transfer mechanisms depending on their prior knowledge and the characteristics of the task environment. A framework for the development of a general theory of transfer based on multiple mechanisms is proposed and implications of the theory are discussed for measuring and understanding knowledge transfer. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:September 24, 2010 (10:17 pm) C:\Users\Milt\Desktop\backup copy of Ken's G\WPData\TYPE3001\russell 30,1 032 red corrected.wpd 1 Just what exactly “separated by degree” means is a bone of contention among those playing the game. But it seems to me that if you have actually met a person Xz, then you have knowledge by acquaintance of X, whereas if you meet someone who met Xz you are separated from Xz by one (...) degree. Thus, I never met the jazz great Sun Ra, but my friend Warren Allen Smith (former head of a recording studio) worked with him on several of his albums, so I am one degree of separation from Sun Ra. russell: the Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies n.s. 30 (summer 2010): 63–7 The Bertrand Russell Research Centre, McMaster U. issn 0036-01631 eu d’sprit “SIX DEGREES OF BERTRAND RUSSELL” Timothy J. Madigan Philosophy / St. John Fisher College Rochester, ny 14618, usa [email protected] One of the most quoted phrases in current popular culture is “six degrees of separation”. It expresses the idea that any human being is connected with any other human being by a chain of at most six acquaintances.1 While there is much debate as to whether this is literally true, it is an interesting thoughtexperiment, as well as the basis for many fun parlour games. One of these is entitled “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”, in which Wlm fans try to connect the aforementioned actor with any other movie star in as few links as possible. I have been thinking of launching a similar parlour game called “Six Degrees of Bertrand Russell”, in which any Wgure from the past 200 years or so could be connected with Bertie in as few steps as possible. Why Bertie rather than, say, Ludwig Wittgenstein (who after all had a stated interest in games)? For two reasons: Wrst, Russell lived to the ripe old age of 97, and thus had the time to interact with a wide variety of people; and secondly he was for most of that long life a celebrity, who rubbed elbows with all manner of individuals, many of whom were either celebrities themselves at the time or came to be celebrated later. As is often pointed out, Russell’s list of acquaintances stretched from Lenin (V.yI.) to Lennon (zJohn), from the Bloomsbury Group to the Doomsday Prophets, from William Gladstone to Harold Wilson. Russell’s grandfather, LordJohn Russell, had as a young man visited Napoleon on the island of Elba and shaken his hand. When I shake the hand of Honorary Russell Archivist Ken Blackwell, September 24, 2010 (10:17 pm) C:\Users\Milt\Desktop\backup copy of Ken's G\WPData\TYPE3001\russell 30,1 032 red corrected.wpd 64 timothy j. madigan 2 Other historical writings by Russell are discussed in Kenneth R. Stunkel, “Bertrand Russell’s Writings and ReXections on History”, Russellz 21 (2001): 129–53. who met Bertie, I often think that I am only three degrees of separation from shaking Napoleon’s hand as well. And as for Napoleonz—zwell, who knows where that hand had been? Given this strong connection to history, it is not surprising that Russell himself would write an essay entitled “How to Read and Understand History”.2 In his Autobiographyz and other works such as Portraits from Memory, Russell made it quite clear that his aristocratic and privileged background gave him access to many of the most important movers and shakers in twentieth-century politics, literature, and academia, areas in which he himself excelled. He was aware that, unlike many of his fellow philosophers, who were known only to a small coterie of fellow deep thinkers, he was an historic Wgure, one who could interact on a personal level with cabinet ministers, Nobel prize-winners in all Welds, press lords, movie stars, presidents and premiers. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, for instance, many concerned individuals tried to reach Kennedy and Khrushchev to give them advice, but Russell was one of the few outsiders whose letters actually got through, as he no doubt knew they would. For all of his concern with... (shrink)

At any given time, a subject has a multiplicity of conscious experiences. A subject might simultaneously have visual experiences of a red book and a green tree, auditory experiences of birds singing, bodily sensations of a faint hunger and a sharp pain in the shoulder, the emotional experience of a certain melancholy, while having a stream of conscious thoughts about the nature of reality. These experiences are distinct from each other: a subject could experience the red book without the singing (...) birds, and could experience the singing birds without the red book. But at the same time, the experiences seem to be tied together in a deep way. They seem to be unified, by being aspects of a single encompassing state of consciousness. (shrink)

This article compares the accounts of politics found in the work of Adriana Cavarero and Jacques Rancière. It argues that when Cavarero offers a formal account of politics she thinks politics with...

Appealing to Romans 10:17, Summa Halensis states, "'faith comes from hearing' and preaching is the exterior medium whereby people are instructed and moved to receive grace."1 Given this claim it may come as a surprise to many, that Francis of Assisi did not necessarily understand his propositum vitae to focus on the ministry of preaching. In his musings in the Testament two years before his death in 1226, he claims that the vocation of the brothers was to live according to (...) the form of the holy gospel.2 Even after Innocent III granted permission to him and his fellow paupers from Assisi in 1209 to continue their Gospel experiment and added that they could also preach penance, the exempla of lived experience took... (shrink)

Physiological studies of binocular rivalry have provided important clues to the relationship between neural activity in the brain and visual awareness.However, uncertainty about these insights has been raised by a recent study showing that the events underlying binocular rivalry occur earlier in the visual pathway than was previously thought.

This book investigates "cultural instruments," meaning normative forms of analysis and practice that are central to Western culture. It explores their history from antiquity to the early Enlightenment and their use and reworking by different cultures, moving from Europe to Africa and the Americas, especially the Caribbean, in the process giving close readings of a wide range of authors.

Individuals higher on avoidant coping may remember fewer specific autobiographical memories and more nonspecific memories on the Autobiographical Memory Test in order to protect themselves from the painful emotions accompanying some specific memories. Habitually remembering this way may be a risk factor for depression. In Studies 1 and 2, avoidant coping was associated with more specific memories and fewer overgeneral memories, at odds with the functional avoidance view. In Study 3, there were no significant relationships between AMT indices and avoidant (...) coping. Results are discussed in light of ironic process theory. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:IntroductionWhen I first came across Dieter Hattrup's analysis of the De reductione I noted that the professor from Paderborn was trying, step by step, to trace the authorship back to friars influenced by Roger Bacon – a reductio ad Baconem, if you will. Hattrup's argument that Roger Bacon was indirectly involved in the composition of the De reductione evoked the fleeting memory of a pop culture game created by (...) American college students in the 1990s called the "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon," whereby the characters in any given film must be linked to a film with the Hollywood actor, Kevin Bacon, by comparing no more than six films. To mention the esteemed theologian in such a fleeting cultural context is not meant to trivialize his argument in any way; rather, the intent is to underscore, admittedly tongue in cheek, the intricacies of his argument against Bonaventurian authorship of the De reductione as outlined in the monograph Ekstatik der Geschichte: Die Entwicklung der christologischen Erkenntnistheorie Bonaventuras and the journal article, "Bonaventura zwischen Mystik und Mystifikation: Wer ist der Autor von De reductione?" While Hattrup hesitates to claim Bacon as the author of De reductione, he does develop a systematic study that eventually leads, step by step, association by association, back to Roger Bacon. This essay examines and disputes Hattrup's claim by analyzing the historical context of his argument, the chronology and sources in question, the theme of the fourfold light and scripture, and the relationship between the sciences and theology. The numerous questions raised will underscore the fragility of his argument. Subsequent essays will treat the contemporary theological implications as well as the literary-theological genre and academic occasion of Bonaventure's De reductione.Historical ContextBefore we examine Hattrup's argument against Bonaventure as the author of the De reductione, let us first evoke the historical situation he suggests as the possible origin of the text. In 1267, Bonaventure warns his Minorite confreres of the dangers inherent in the sciences in the Collations on the Ten Commandments, and then, once again in 1268 in the Collations on Gifts of the Holy Spirit. The brothers in Bacon's circle are concerned because they contend that the sciences must be cultivated and consequently compose the De reductione. Their intent is to demonstrate how the sciences are integral to theology, such that even natural philosophy contains the wisdom of God. Hattrup sees this text stemming from Bacon's circle as a conscious attempt to subvert Bonaventure's understanding of the relationship between faith and reason in favor of the sciences by utilizing some of the General Minister's own language as mirrored in the Journey of the Soul into God and Francis of Assisi's experience of God in the natural world. The resulting text of the De reductione, according to Hattrup, is an intentional mystification of Bonaventure's own mystical or ecstatic methodology.Hattrup suggests that the De reductione came to Bonaventure's attention in 1270, but he is preoccupied with affairs in the early 1270s and only returns later to address the dangers he recognizes in the De reductione in another collation series in May of 1273, the Collations on the Six Days, or Hexaëmeron. The General Minister warns of those who entered religious life as friends of the sciences, the "hospites scientiae." They must place limits on their efforts in these fields of inquiry and not promote them as essential to theological reflection, as posited by the De reductione, if they wish to remain faithful to the ascetical-mystical vision of the Minorite Order. Unable to finish the Hexaëmeron due to ecclesial obligations, Bonaventure died unexpectedly in July of 1274 at the Council of Lyon. The text of the De reductione, found among Bonaventure's other writings, was dutifully copied and included among the Seraphic Doctor's literary corpus since at first glance this kurze Denkschrift appears to be from the deceased General Minister.Hattrup readily admits that.. (shrink)

Previous research has suggested that bodily signals from internal organs are associated with diverse cortical and subcortical processes involved in sensory-motor functions, beyond homeostatic reflexes. For instance, a recent study demonstrated that the preparation and execution of voluntary actions, as well as its underlying neural activity, are coupled with the breathing cycle. In the current study, we investigated whether such breathing-action coupling is limited to voluntary motor action or whether it is also present for mental actions not involving any overt (...) bodily movement. To answer this question, we recorded electroencephalography (EEG), electromyography (EMG), and respiratory signals while participants were conducting a voluntary action paradigm including self-initiated motor execution (ME), motor imagery (MI), and visual imagery (VI) tasks. We observed that the voluntary initiation of ME, MI, and VI are similarly coupled with the respiration phase. In addition, EEG analysis revealed the existence of readiness potential (RP) waveforms in all three tasks (i.e., ME, MI, VI), as well as a coupling between the RP amplitude and the respiratory phase. Our findings show that the voluntary initiation of both imagined and overt action is coupled with respiration, and further suggest that the breathing system is involved in preparatory processes of voluntary action by contributing to the temporal decision of when to initiate the action plan, regardless of whether this culminates in overt movements. -/- . (shrink)

Many contemporary bioethicists claim that the possession of certain psychological properties is sufficient for having full moral status. I will call this thepsychological approach to full moral status. In this paper, I argue that there is a significant tension between the psychological approach and a widely held model of Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID, formerly Multiple Personality Disorder). According to this model, the individual personalities or alters that belong to someone with DID possess those properties that proponents of the psychological approach (...) claim suffice for full moral status. If this account of DID is true, then the psychological approach to full moral status seems to entail that the two standard therapies for treating DID might, on occasion, be seriously immoral, for they may well involve the (involuntary) elimination of an entity with full moral status. This result should give proponents of the psychological approach pause, for most people find the claim that current treatments of DID are ethically suspect highly counter-intuitive. (shrink)

Davidson, truth, and triangulation -- Davidson applied -- Half truths -- Heidegger's analytic of Dasein -- Dasein and truth -- Truthful intersections -- Primitive disclosive alethism.

In the January 6, 1991, issue of theWashington Post Magazine, reporter Walt Harrington wrote a profile of Bryan Stevenson. Mr. Stevenson is a 31-year-old working-class African-American from Delaware who graduated from Harvard Law School and the Kennedy School of Government. Like the typical graduate of Harvard Law School, Mr. Stevenson had the opportunity to join the worlds of six-figure corporate law or high-visibility politics. Rather than follow his colleagues, however, Mr. Stevenson works seven-day, eighty-hour weeks as director of the Alabama (...) Capital Representation Center. He appeals death sentences, handling twenty-four death-row cases himself, supervises five other lawyers who cover about thirty cases, and raises federal government and foundation funding. He does this living a Spartan existence on a salary of $24,000, refusing even the $50,000 directorship salary offered to him. (shrink)

We propose that firms that engage in morally imaginative sensemaking will manage society's changing ethical expectations more effectively than those engaging in habituated sensemaking. Specifically, we argue that managers engaging in habituated sensemaking will tend to view changes in expectations as threats and respond to them defensively. In contrast, morally imaginative managers will tend to see these same changes as opportunities and address them by proactively or interactively engaging stakeholders in learning processes. We contribute to the literature on moral imagination (...) by highlighting the value of moral imagination relative to conventional sensemaking, and by positioning moral imagination as an ongoing mode of sensemaking. While we recognize that managers' capacity to continuously address changing ethical expectations using moral imagination is constrained by cognitive limitations, we posit that morally imaginative sensemaking may economize on cognitive resources over time by enabling managers to avoid managing ethical issues unproductively based on habit. We also contribute to the issues management literature by calling attention to two underlying factors, managerial sensemaking mode and firm enterprise strategy, that drive companies' approaches to issues management. (shrink)

The biblical healings by Jesus and the primitive Church, the liturgical development of the Roman Rite of Exorcism, and the current practice of exorcists reflect a relationship between exorcism and the medical healing arts. Since mutuality characterizes all healer–sufferer interactions, informed consent is a central concept in physician–patient and exorcist–energumen relationships. Informed consent requires adequate information, decision-maker competence, and freedom from coercion. The determination of freedom from coercion is a particular challenge in exorcism, and guidelines for its assess­ment are discussed. (...) While proxy decision making in medical care is generally driven by concerns over competence, foreseeable periods of demonic coercion will necessitate establishing proxies in exorcism. This places a moral duty on the exorcist to establish a substitute decision maker even in cases where the energumen would be considered competent. Discussion of this need through the process of informed consent builds the trust necessary for mutual decision making. (shrink)

In this paper we defend the doxastic conception of delusions against the metacognitive account developed by Greg Currie and collaborators. According to the metacognitive model, delusions are imaginings that are misidentified by their subjects as beliefs: the Capgras patient, for instance, does not believe that his wife has been replaced by a robot, instead, he merely imagines that she has, and mistakes this imagining for a belief. We argue that the metacognitive account is untenable, and that the traditional conception of (...) delusions as beliefs should be retained. (shrink)

The concern to learn and profit from the past experience of exile and restoration and to implement the command “Be holy as I am holy” underlies both the dialogue of Job and later Pharisaic theology; to reflect on one is to clarify the other.

Secondary education around the world has been significantly disrupted by covid-19. Students have been forced into new ways of independent learning, often using remote technologies, but without the social nuances and direct teacher interactions of a normal classroom environment. Using data from the School Attitudes Survey—which surveys students regarding the perceived level of difficulty, anxiety level, self-efficacy, enjoyability, subject relevance, and opportunities for creativity with regards to each of their school subjects—this study examines students' responses to this disruption from two (...) very different schools with two very different experiences of the pandemic. This paper reports on the composite attitudinal profiles of students in the senior secondary levels at each school. The findings challenged our expectation that the increased difficulty and anxiety caused by the disruption would reduce perceived opportunities for creativity. Indeed, our analyses showed that the students at both schools demonstrated generally positive attitudes toward their learning and strongly associated opportunities for creativity with other attitudinal constructs including enjoyability, subject relevance, and self-efficacy. These complex associations made by the students appear to have buffered the impacts of the disruption, and they may even have supported creative resilience. (shrink)

We will introduce a partial ordering $\preceq_1$ on the class of ordinals which will serve as a foundation for an approach to ordinal notations for formal systems of set theory and second-order arithmetic. In this paper we use $\preceq_1$ to provide a new characterization of the ubiquitous ordinal $\epsilon _{0}$.

This paper critically evaluates the arguments advanced by Hubert Dreyfus in his debate with John McDowell regarding the nature of skilled coping. The paper argues that there are significant methodological shortcomings in Dreyfus’ position. The paper examines these methodological limitations and attempts to clarify the problems by re-framing the issues in terms of intentionality, and the specific intentional structures that may or may not be present in skilled coping. The paper attempts to show that the difficulties facing Dreyfus arise from (...) his implicit adherence to a final myth of the mental. The last myth of the mental is the belief thatmental coping is fundamentally different than embodied coping because the former is characterized by mindedness while the latter is not. Dreyfus characterizes the mental as constituted by a kind of interiority while everyday expertise or embodied coping is characterized by exteriority to the exclusion of any type of interiority. I undermine this Cartesian assumption in Dreyfus’ position by showing that the criteria and phenomenological descriptions he uses to characterize embodied coping apply equally to mental coping. (shrink)

Solon's extraordinary claim, that we should call "no one happy who is still living", presents a fascinating and distinctive argument about happiness and the length of a human life. The issues Solon raises are important, and even if we think his pessimistic conclusion is an exaggeration we can still appreciate his central concern how conceptions of happiness and the length of a human life are connected. The purpose of this paper is to explore a few of these problems, in particular (...) the reason why Aristotle's reply to Solon in the Nicomachean Ethics is somewhat ambiguous. We find Aristotle addressing Solon's claim at the outset of Eth. Nic. A 10, troubled in one sense by its conclusion, yet struck by its partial truth. On the one hand, he thinks that requires a "complete life" or at the very least, a sufficient and "complete span of time", both of which are compatible with Solon's advice that we should postpone calling someone happy until a later point in life. But on the other hand Aristotle defines in such a way that raises the question whether he needs to accept Solon's claim in any form. In particular, if happiness is defined in terms of excellent activity as Aristotle repeatedly claims, why should we wait until a person dies to call him or her happy? Why shouldn't excellent actions, at the very time they are performed, count someone as happy? The puzzle, in short, is the fact that Aristotle defines happiness in terms of activities that are complete without developing over time, and yet also claims that happiness requires a "complete lifetime". (shrink)

The following analysis demonstrates that G.H. Mead's understanding of human speech is remarkably consistent with today's interdisciplinary field that studies speech as a natural behavior with an evolutionary history. Mead seems to have captured major empirical and theoretical insights more than half a century before the contemporary field began to take shape. In that field the framework known as “Tinbergen's Four Questions,” developed in ecology to study naturally occurring behavior in nonhuman animals, has been an effective organizing framework for research (...) on human speech. It is used in this paper to organize the comparison of Mead with contemporary scholars. The analysis concludes that Mead was, in a sense, “beyond” the Four Questions by recognizing the limitations of reductionist methods in understanding the nature of conscious phenomena, especially language. Mead's socially situated model of the nature of human speech makes him relevant to today's field where some see an undervaluation of the treatment of language as a social process. (shrink)

The erstwhile sedentary Parisian theologian, Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, traveled extensively throughout Europe after his election as Minister General of the Minorite Order in 1257. In the fall of 1259 he arrived on Mount La Verna in Tuscany. As he ruminated on the stigmatized flesh of Francis of Assisi, Bonaventure composed the classical mystical text, Itinerarium mentis in Deum. Utilizing Michel de Certeau's work on prayer, travel narratives and spatial practices, this essay explores how Bonaventure rereads the story of the Poverello (...) in the Itinerarium mentis in Deum as a mystic narrative of peripatetic prayer. (shrink)

In this article I present Aquinas's 5 ways in their logical structure and provide some discussion of the contentious premises or inferences.