In this article, we entangle with Aaron Kuntz’s book The Responsible Methodologist, extending the conversation beyond research into the realms of teaching, learning, and daily lived practices as twenty-first century academics. Kuntz advocates for parrhesiastic living and inquiry, defined as truth-telling and intervention toward ends of disrupting normative practices of knowing and being and enacting socially just ends. We grapple with three philosophical ∼ theroetical propositions made by Kuntz: entangled knowing ∼ being; citizenship; and logics of extraction. Utilizing examples from (...) our own lived experiences, pedagogy, and inquiry, we open a series of philosophical and theoretical dialogues around these three topics to better understand their possibilities and limitations, grappling, and debating how they are jumping off points for living more parrhesiastically. (shrink)

Research into the roots of ideological extremism has traditionally focused on the social, economic, and demographic factors that make people vulnerable to adopting hostile attitudes toward outgroups. However, there is insufficient empirical work on individual differences in implicit cognition and information processing styles that amplify an individual’s susceptibility to endorsing violence to protect an ideological cause or group. Here we present original evidence that objectively assessed cognitive inflexibility predicts extremist attitudes, including a willingness to harm others, and sacrifice one’s life (...) for the group. Across two samples (N = 1,047) from the United Kingdom and United States, structural equation models demonstrated that cognitive inflexibility predicted endorsement of violence to protect the national ingroup, which in turn predicted a willingness to die for the group. These statistical models accounted for an average of 31.4% of the variance in willingness to die for the group, after accounting for demographic variables. Furthermore, cognitive inflexibility was related to greater confidence in the decision to sacrifice one’s life in an ingroup trolley problem scenario. Analysis of participants’ performance on the cognitive tasks revealed that cognitive rigidity – distinctly from other aspects of cognition – was specifically implicated as a cognitive antecedent of extremist attitudes. Implications for the study of radicalization and identity fusion throug... (shrink)

This authoritative new book details the most recent advances in clinical neuroscience, from neurogenetics to the study of consciousness.

In Who Is Ayn Rand? Nathaniel Branden boasted : "No one has dared publicly to name the essential ideas of Atlas Shrugged and to attempt to refute them." With the publication of this book, that statement no longer stands.

Studies concerning the changing landscapes of religiosity and spirituality in the lives of young people in England and Wales draw attention to decline in traditional religiosity and to growth in alternative spiritualities. The present study examined whether such alternative spiritualities occupy the same personality space as traditional religiosity. A sample of 2,950 13- to 16-year-old pupils attending 11 secondary schools in England and Wales completed the Francis Scale of Attitude toward Christianity and an index of paranormal belief, alongside the abbreviated-form (...) Junior Eysenck Personality Questionnaire Revised. The data demonstrated that these two forms of belief were related in different ways to Eysenck's dimensional model of personality space. While attitude toward Christianity occupied the space defined by low psychoticism scores and high lie scale scores, paranormal belief was related to high psychoticism scores and was independent of lie scale scores. These findings support the view that alternative spiritualities may be associated with different personalities. (shrink)

William Dean is a tireless proponent of a public role for religion in American society, most recently in his American Academy of Religion award winning book The Religious Critic in American Culture . He writes there about the importance of, and need for, both a common American spiritual culture and public intellectuals who would understand, criticize, and innovatively rework that shared American religion. Dean represents a metaphysical strand of American pragmatism. His thought is rooted in William James’s radical (...) empiricism, Bernard Meland’s and Bernard Loomer’s empirical theology, and Alfred North Whitehead’s process metaphysics. He takes seriously what I will call the problem of cosmic estrangement. The American public religion that he advocates, among other things, is supposed to resolve that problem. Its theoretical core is Dean’s version of Whiteheadian panpsychism, which he calls ontological conventionalism. (shrink)

Pragmatism is first and foremost an intellectual self-image. It is a unique way of understanding the mental abilities that distinguish we humans from other living things on earth. The pragmatist description of our mind and its relationship to the rest of the world is a relatively new one. It has its roots in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century work of Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. These philosophers, influenced by Darwinian biology among other things, redefined (...) the human mind. (shrink)

We Americans put a lot of stock in ingenuity. We admire people who come up with better mousetraps or with better ways to predict economic cycles. William James, in his early essay "Great Men and Their Environment," was the first American pragmatist to suggest that there are interesting analogies between the roles that ingenious people play in social change and bearers of genetic variations play in biological evolution.(1) He proposed that the categories in terms of which we conduct various (...) cultural activities start as idiosyncratic "brainstorms" in the heads of individual human beings, much as Darwin theorized that species start as genetic variations in ancestral organisms. When these mental variations occur in a suitable environment, they may end as new forms of science, morality, art, or religion. Such new ideas enable their bearers to cope with the world differently, and perhaps more profitably, than their ancestors did before them. Social progress when it occurs is a function of the meliorative power of this fortuitous human creativity, not of anything preprogrammed with its own logic or method. (shrink)

Sheila Davaney’s Pragmatic Historicism provides yet another opportunity for us to discuss disagreements between two kinds of pragmatism. One, which I espouse, is a non-metaphysical pragmatism. It is rooted in James’s and Dewey’s appropriation of Darwinian biology for philosophical purposes and, more recently, Donald Davidson’s philosophy of language. Richard Rorty is its most influential contemporary spokesman. The other is a metaphysical pragmatism. It is rooted in James’s radical empiricism and Whitehead’s process philosophy. In the Highlands Institute, William Dean and (...) now Davaney, among others, advocate versions of metaphysical pragmatism. (shrink)

In this essay, I explore Emmanuel Falque’s interpretation of Søren Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits (1847), specifically his quotation of “the burden is light” passage from Matthew 11:30. I argue that his use of the “Gospel of Sufferings” offers a methodological insight into Falque’s motif of transformation. The lightness of the burden is an invitation to the imitation of Christ that retains the full weight of finitude. The savior models the decision coram Deo (“before God”) that brings the “other” (...) to bear on our experience, but Falque augments this by emphasizing the concept of being cum Deo (“with God”), providing a fuller praxis in our existential habituation of eternity. The “other” is what determines the lightness of the burden and invites us to a fraternal solidarity with God and humanity. I begin my argument by offering an exposition of Falque’s philosophy of religious experience, then I survey texts where Falque employs the lightness of the burden. I conclude by focusing on Falque’s use of this passage in his recent discussions of tragedy and trauma. (shrink)

The Heythrop Journal, Volume 63, Issue 2, Page 301-314, March 2022.

The Hermopolis letters showcase the personal concerns of those writing Aramaic letters in the era of Persian Egypt. One individual named Nabuša is particularly interesting because of his familial correspondence and emotional tone. This study will examine what can be known about this writer and his complaints about an unwanted tunic and a snakebite. There have been several notable disagreements about the Aramaic translation of Nabuša’s concerns, whose discussion will help heighten our understanding of his passion.

Richard Rorty is famous, maybe even infamous, for his philosophical nonchalance. His groundbreaking work not only rejects all theories of truth but also dismisses modern epistemology and its preoccupation with knowledge and representation. At the same time, the celebrated pragmatist believed there could be no universally valid answers to moral questions, which led him to a complex view of religion rarely expressed in his writings. In this posthumous publication, Rorty, a strict secularist, finds in the pragmatic thought of John Dewey, (...) John Stuart Mill, William James, and George Santayana, among others, a political imagination shared by religious traditions. His intent is not to promote belief over nonbelief or to blur the distinction between religious and public domains. Rorty seeks only to locate patterns of similarity and difference so an ethics of decency and a politics of solidarity can rise. He particularly responds to Pope Benedict XVI and his campaign against the relativist vision. Whether holding theologians, metaphysicians, or political ideologues to account, Rorty remains steadfast in his opposition to absolute uniformity and its exploitation of political strength. (shrink)

For an explicit statement, thirty years before Lexington, of "when it is that colonies may turn independent," one must turn to the work of Francis Hutcheson, a Scottish professor of moral philosophy. That the abuse of power justified resistance was the belief of all Americans who subscribed to the Declaration of 1776. Their situation demanded action. Doctrines, even phrases, which would support and explain their claims, had already been formulated in earlier constitutional crises overseas.

In Pragmatism’s Evolution, Trevor Pearce demonstrates that the philosophical tradition of pragmatism owes an enormous debt to specific biological debates in the late 1800s, especially those concerning the role of the environment in development and evolution. Many are familiar with John Dewey’s 1909 assertion that evolutionary ideas overturned two thousand years of philosophy—but what exactly happened in the fifty years prior to Dewey’s claim? What form did evolutionary ideas take? When and how were they received by American philosophers? Although (...) the various thinkers associated with pragmatism—from Charles Sanders Peirce to Jane Addams and beyond—were towering figures in American intellectual life, few realize the full extent of their engagement with the life sciences. In his analysis, Pearce focuses on a series of debates in biology from 1860 to 1910—from the instincts of honeybees to the inheritance of acquired characteristics—in which the pragmatists were active participants. If we want to understand the pragmatists and their influence, Pearce argues, we need to understand the relationship between pragmatism and biology. (shrink)

Malformations concerning the ventral body wall constitute one of the leading categories of human birth defects and are present in about one out of every 2000 live births. Although the occurrence of these defects is relatively common, few detailed experimental studies exist on the development and closure of the ventral body wall in mouse and human. This field is further complicated by the array of theories on the pathogenesis of body wall defects and the likelihood that there is no single (...) cause for these abnormalities. In this review, we summarize what is known concerning the mechanisms of normal ventral body wall closure in humans and mice. We then outline the theories that have been proposed concerning human body wall closure abnormalities and examine the growing number of mouse mutations that impact normal ventral body wall closure. Finally, we speculate how studies in animal models such as mouse and Drosophila are beginning to provide a much‐needed mechanistic framework with which to identify and characterize the genes and tissues required for this vital aspect of human embryogenesis. BioEssays 26:1307–1321, 2004. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

The search for the Northwest Passage in the years following the Napoleonic Wars provided both a market and testing ground for marine chronometers. Long voyages and extreme temperatures challenged the best chronometers. Among the firms seeking to meet those challenges was that of William Parkinson & William James Frodsham. Their chronometers performed particularly well in the Arctic, as John and James Clark Ross, William Edward Parry, and Edward Sabine gladly recognized. The way in which chronometers were made (...) and sold, however, meant that there were sometimes controversies over who was entitled to claim credit for a particular instrument. A letter from Parkinson & Frodsham in 1821 illustrates the problem, and its causes in the nature of the trade; the text of that letter is published here in its entirety. Also problematic, and discussed here, was the craft aspect of the industry, in which the ‘mechanical construction’ of a chronometer might not reveal the process of manufacture that gave it its steady rate and accuracy. (shrink)

(1996). Samuel Taylor Coleridge on nature and reason: With a response from William Whewell. The European Legacy: Vol. 1, Science and Religion in Modern Western Thought, pp. 1683-1693.

The ANGELIC methodology was developed to encapsulate knowledge of particular legal domains. In this paper we describe its use to build a full scale practical application intended to be used internally by Weightmans, a large firm of legal practitioners with branches throughout the UK. We describe the domain, Noise Induced Hearing Loss (NIHL), the intended task, the sources used, the stages in development and the resulting application. An assessment of the project and its potential for further development is discussed. The (...) project shows that current academic research using computational models of argument can prove useful to legal practitioners confronted by real legal tasks. (shrink)

This paper examines one of the historical antecedents of Big Data, the social physics movement. Its origins are in the scientific revolution of the 17th century in Western Europe. But it is not named as such until the middle of the 19th century, and not formally institutionalized until another hundred years later when it is associated with work by George Zipf and John Stewart. Social physics is marked by the belief that large-scale statistical measurement of social variables reveals underlying relational (...) patterns that can be explained by theories and laws found in natural science, and physics in particular. This larger epistemological position is known as monism, the idea that there is only one set of principles that applies to the explanation of both natural and social worlds. Social physics entered geography through the work of the mid-20th-century geographer William Warntz, who developed his own spatial version called “macrogeography.” It involved the computation of large data sets, made ever easier with the contemporaneous development of the computer, joined with the gravitational potential model. Our argument is that Warntz's concerns with numeracy, large data sets, machine-based computing power, relatively simple mathematical formulas drawn from natural science, and an isomorphism between natural and social worlds became grounds on which Big Data later staked its claim to knowledge; it is a past that has not yet passed. (shrink)