Argumentation as the public exchange of reasons is widely thought to enhance deliberative interactions that generate and justify reasonable public policies. Adopting an argumentation-theoretic perspective, we survey the norms that should govern public argumentation and address some of the complexities that scholarly treatments have identified. Our focus is on norms associated with the ideals of correctness and participation as sources of a politically legitimate deliberative outcome. In principle, both ideals are mutually coherent. If the information needed for a correct deliberative (...) outcome is distributed among agents, then maximising participation increases information diversity. But both ideals can also be in tension. If participants lack competence or are prone to biases, a correct deliberative outcome requires limiting participation. The central question for public argumentation, therefore, is how to strike a balance between both ideals. Rather than advocating a preferred normative framework, our main purpose is to illustrate the complexity of this theme. (shrink)

BackgroundEverybody has the right to decide whether to receive specific medical treatment or not and to provide their free, prior and informed consent to do so. As dementia progresses, people with Alzheimer’s dementia (PwAD) can lose their capacity to provide informed consent to complex medical treatment. When the capacity to consent is lost, the autonomy of the affected person can only be guaranteed when an interpretable and valid advance directive exists. Advance directives are not yet common in Germany, and their (...) validity is often questionable. Once the dementia diagnosis has been made, it is assumed to be too late to write an advance directive. One approach used to support the completion of advance directives is ‘Respecting Choices’®—an internationally recognised, evidence-based model of Advance Care Planning (ACP), which, until now, has not been evaluated for the target group of PwAD. This study’s aims include (a) to investigate the proportion of valid advance directives in a memory clinic population of persons with suspected AD, (b) to determine the predictors of valid advance directives, and (c) to examine whether the offer of ACP can increase the proportion of valid advance directives in PwAD.MethodWe intend to recruit at leastN = 250 participants from two memory clinics in 50 consecutive weeks. Of these, the first 25 weeks constitute the baseline phase (no offer of ACP), the following 25 weeks constitute the intervention phase (offer of ACP). The existence and validity of an advance directive will be assessed twice (before and after the memory clinic appointment). Moreover, potential predictors of valid advance directives are assessed.DiscussionThe results of this study will enhance the development of consent procedures for advance directives of PwAD based on the ACP/Respecting Choices (R) approach. Therefore, this project contributes towards increasing the autonomy and inclusion of PwAD and the widespread acceptance of valid advance directives in PwAD.Trial RegistrationDRKS, DRKS00026691, registered 15th of October 2021,https://www.drks.de/drks_web/navigate.do?navigationId=trial.HTML&TRIAL_ID=DRKS00026691. (shrink)

The fact that Oswald T. Avery (1877-1955) did not become a Nobel Laureate for his discovery of DNA as the genetic material has frequently been cited as a prime example of a mistake made in the awarding of the Nobel Prizes. The late Nobel Laureate Arne Tiselius explained the oversight away by saying that Avery "was an old man when he made his discovery" (Litell 1967)—although Avery was actually younger than several others who won the Nobel Prize around the (...) same time. Later, in somewhat of a contradiction, Tiselius said that Avery was the most deserving scientist not to have received the Nobel Prize for his work (Judson 2003).The opening of the Nobel archives 50 years after Avery's name was cited gives insights into .. (shrink)

Due to the increasingly heterogeneous trajectories of aging, gerontology requires theoretical models and empirical methods that can meaningfully, reliably, and precisely describe, explain, and predict causes and effects within the aging process, considering particular contexts and situations. Human behavior occurs in contexts; nevertheless, situational changes are often neglected in context-based behavior research. This article follows the tradition of environmental gerontology research based on Lawton’s Person-Environment-Interaction model and the theoretical developments of recent years. The authors discuss that, despite an explicit time (...) component, current P-E models could be strengthened by focusing on detecting P-E interactions in various everyday situations. Enhancing Lawton’s original formula via a situationally based component not only changes the theoretical perspectives on the interplay between person and environment but also demands new data collection approaches in empirical environmental research. Those approaches are discussed through the example of collecting mobile data with smartphones. Future research should include the situational dimension to investigate the complex nature of person environment interactions. (shrink)

BackgroundThe UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and the reformed guardianship law in Germany, require that persons with a disability, including people with dementia in Alzheimer’s disease (PwAD), are supported in making self-determined decisions. This support is achieved through communication. While content-related communication is a deficit of PwAD, relational aspects of communication are a resource. Research in supported decision-making (SDM) has investigated the effectiveness of different content-related support strategies for PwAD but has only succeeded in improving understanding, (...) which, although one criterion of capacity to consent, is not sufficient to ensure overall capacity to consent. The aim of the ‘spatial intervention study’ of the DECIDE project is to examine an innovative resource-oriented SDM approach that focuses on relational aspects. We hypothesise that talking to PwAD in their familiar home setting (as opposed to a clinical setting) will reduce the complexity of the decision-making process and enhance overall capacity to consent. MethodsPeople with a suspected or confirmed diagnosis of dementia in Alzheimer’s disease will be recruited from two memory clinics (N = 80). We will use a randomised crossover design to investigate the intervention effect of the decision-making place on capacity to consent. Besides reasoning capacity, which is part of overall capacity to consent and will be the primary outcome, various secondary outcomes (e.g., other aspects of capacity to consent, subjective task complexity, decisional conflict) and suspected moderating or mediating variables (e.g., meaning of home, demographic characteristics) will be assessed.DiscussionThe results of the study will be used to develop a new SDM strategy that is based on relational resources for PwAD. If a change in location achieves the anticipated improvement in capacity to consent, future research should focus on implementing this SDM strategy in a cost-effective manner in clinical practice.Trial registration: DRKS00030799. (shrink)

For three decades Frank Cioffi has been at the center of the debate over Freud's legacy and the legitimacy of psychoanalysis.

We enter here upon a history of conversational traffic between the respective departments of philosophy and law in the old academy of liberalism, where lawyers hear much from philosophers, yes-and philosophers hear from lawyers, too, in what has fruitfully been a both-ways exchange. Our philosophical protagonist is John Rawls. This book comprises a study of the rise and workings, within the Rawlsian political-liberal philosophy, of the idea of a country's higher-legal constitution as a public platform for the justification of political (...) coercion. A study of Rawls on constitutionalism can help us, I believe, in scoping out and managing a cluster of constitutional lawyers' debates-interminable ones, it seems, in the constitutional-democratic precincts of our times-that I will catalogue soon below. But conversely, I believe, those seeking the best and truest readings of Rawls might have something to learn from the controversies of the lawyers. My approach to Rawls has accordingly been that of a critically leavened (while no doubt broadly sympathetic) exegesis, while with the legal-discursive materials I take more of a diagnostic turn. My hope is that a treatment of these two discourses in relation to each other will prove an aid to both political-philosophical and legal-practical reflection. (shrink)

What is it that troubles and preoccupies us about the anxieties and anguishes of social and private life? Have advances in the disciplines of psychoanalysis, psychology or the social sciences in general ministered to our needs in these areas? In this forcefully argued collection of essays, Frank Cioffi examines Wittgenstein's reflections on the comparative claims of clarification and empirical enquiry. Though writing out of admiration and indebtedness, he expresses reservations as to the limits Wittgenstein places on the relevance and (...) desirability of empirical knowledge. His discusssions extend from Wittgenstein's reflections on human sacrifice and other ritual practices dealt with by Frazer to Freud's account of the sources of anxiety, depression, dreams and laughter. He asks both whether it is empirical investigation or more lucid reflection that these phenomena demand, and what kind of question this itself is. (shrink)

a critical introduction Frank Cunningham. economic 200; and globality/ globalism 200, 204 group loyalties 62-3 group representation 95-100; challenges 97-100; modes 97; types 96 guild socialism 137 hegemony 190-1,213 Hobbesist 73, ...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Wellspring or Circuit?Commentary on Dewey and the Aesthetic UnconsciousnessFrank X. RyanEditor's note: This article contains material similar to a book review by the same author previously published in The Pluralist, vol. 18, no. 2, pp 114–21. The present article represents a further critical use of this material that we deem worthy of publication.in this vital and splendidly crafted work, Bethany Henning recovers a philosophy of aesthetic wisdom far richer (...) than the narrow epistemological lens dominant today. From its start, American philosophy looked beyond Europe's atomistic empiricism toward a continuity between our thought and nature's aesthetic splendor. Jonathan Edwards found beauty in the structure of being reflected in relations among ideas. For Emerson, each of us is a "transparent eyeball" in which nature's beauty fortifies our moral and spiritual agency. At the apex of this tradition is John Dewey, for whom "aesthetic experience [is] the highest mode of human experience" (Henning 55).Although aesthetic theory is usually associated with the cognitive evaluation of art, Dewey explores a broader non-reflective or unconscious dimension. Henning's appropriation of "unconscious"—the cradle of Freud's infantile id—is intentionally provocative. American culture, reflected in academic thought, has largely resisted appeals to subterranean urges and drives. In doing so, however, we perpetuate a myth of rational and moral exceptionalism masking a history of colonialism, oppression, and crass commercialism. In accepting the unconscious, European thought has taken strides to acknowledge and address such ills. Henning wonders whether America might accept "a dynamic unconscious, were it presented with an alternative mythology" (10) and finds a viable candidate in Dewey's underappreciated notion of qualitative immediacy: an "aesthetic (directly felt) connection between ourselves and [End Page 77] the world" (Henning 5). In affirming the unconscious depth of experience, this American reconfiguration welcomes "aesthetic experience back into our philosophical lives" (Henning 5).When embodied meaning supplements cognitive reflection, we come to champion "the sensuous, lived body" as "the primary reality" of qualitative immediacy—a felt aesthetic unity punctuated by "impulsions" arising from an organism's needs (Henning 69). As "a site of adaptive adjustments," Henning continues, "the body is responsive to the brink of coalescence at the point of contact with the world, in which things that are 'outside of it' belong to it" (71). "To move adeptly into aesthetic experience means to be skilled at loosening focal consciousness" so as to cultivate "the essential porousness of the world" (130).With this, the body-mind relation becomes a problem of normative aesthetics, not epistemology. The Cartesian detachment of intellect from nature perpetuated our cultural alienation from our bodies, our environments, and one another (Henning 81–84). With the re-emergence of the body, however, we can begin to acknowledge and heal this trauma.In tapping the significance of qualitative immediacy, of "having" beyond "knowing," Dewey and the Aesthetic Unconscious strives to recover Dewey's remarkable insight into our essential situatedness in the world. This alone establishes its importance. But Henning's book is equally ambitious in suggesting how Dewey's aesthetic understanding can(1). reconfigure the shadowy daemons of Freud's id;(2). replace the myth of American exceptionalism with authentic relationships rooted in pluralist values;(3). rehabilitate the body as an authentic vehicle of expression and communication;(4). vindicate the bold claim that all unified experience is aesthetic; and(5). identify and promote connections forged in shared human experiences.These aims are of inestimable value. I pledge to do whatever I can to defend and advance them. At the outset, however, I feel we must shore up the relationship between two different approaches to thinking about our situatedness in the world: (1) of organic beings existing in a porous world they dynamically interact with, and (2) a phenomenology of experience wherein nonreflective having is an unanalyzed totality from which thought and thing, subject and object, organism and environment, functionally emerge in what Dewey calls the pattern of inquiry. [End Page 78]The general consensus that Dewey failed to reconcile these two approaches—of existence with experience—was dubbed the "deep crack" in Dewey's thought, by Richard Bernstein in 1961. Bernstein laments Dewey's being caught between (1... (shrink)

In The Democratic Horizon: Hyperpluralism and the Renewal of Political Liberalism, Alessandro Ferrara seeks a philosophical breakthrough from what looks like it could be a pending dead-end for democracy. The best hope, Ferrara superbly maintains, lies through an extension or updating – a “renewal,” as he calls it – of lines of thought bequeathed to us, by John Rawls and others, under the name of political liberalism. Somewhere near the crux of Ferrara’s reflection stands a class of institutional fixtures whose (...) name is missing from his title. I mean the class “constitution.” I use that word to name a country’s scriptural basic law, its publicly cognizable corpus of canonically worded sentences ordaining the country’s basic institutional framework. My suggestion will be that it is no less tellingly a “constitutional” than a “democratic” horizon that Ferrara’s work, in conjunction with Rawls’s, shows us to be facing. (shrink)

John Rawls proposed, as what he called “the liberal principle of legitimacy,” that coercive exercises of political power can be justified to free and equal dissenters when “in accordance with a constitution (written or unwritten) the essentials of which all citizens, as reasonable and rational, can endorse.” Does “unwritten constitution” there refer to norms of constitutional import, but that subsist only as custom, not as law? To norms that subsist as common law but not as code law? To empirical regularities (...) of political practice, as opposed to normative rules and standards? Which interpretation is best? (shrink)

This article reconstructs Badiou’s oeuvre from the vantage point of the last volume of his Being and Event trilogy. It determines the perspective and task of The Immanence of Truths and demonstrates in what way an “absolute ontology” is the result of an act of forcing that serves as the measure for a truth’s truthness. This allows to argue that Badiou’s is and always was a philosophy of freedom.

In a modern, plural society, there can be no settled agreement on the concrete legal content of a country's constitution. The idea of the constitution is nonetheless pivotal in contemporary, liberal‐minded theories of political justification, such as the ones advanced by Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls. Justification in these theories depends finally on “constitutional patriotism,” a consciously shared sentiment arising from an ethical assessment of their country by the country's people, according to which the country credibly pursues a certain regulative (...) political ideal for which the constitution stands. (shrink)

Secular change in sex ratios is examined in relation to experience in the family. Two theoretical perspectives are outlined: Guttentag and Secord’s (1983) adaptation of social exchange theory, and sexual selection theory. Because of large-scale change in number of births and typical age differentials between men and women at marriage, low sex ratios at couple formation ages existed in the U.S. between 1965 and the early 1980s. The currently high sex ratios, however, will persist until the end of the century. (...) High sex ratios appear to be associated with lower divorce rates, male commitment to careers that promise economic rewards, male willingness to engage in child care, higher fertility, and higher rates of sexual violence. Sexual selection theory calls attention to intrasexual competition in the numerically larger sex. (shrink)

For several decades, renewed interest in the connection between perception and knowledge has sustained a robust debate over external world skepticism. Recently, however, a growing consensus claims the skeptical challenge has been substantially met, and that realism in some robust form has emerged a clear victor. I invite us to rethink this consensus in a two-part response. The first forges a temporary alliance with skepticism against prominent forms of contemporary realism. That these fail to rebuff ews bolsters Barry Stroud’s call (...) for a new paradigm of objectivity. In the second part I sketch such a paradigm based upon a transactional interpretation of John Dewey’s pragmatism, and indicate its resilience to skeptical attacks. (shrink)

The term “judicial restraint,” applied to courts engaged in judicial constitutional review, may refer to any one or more of three possible postures of such courts, which we here will distinguish as “quiescent,” “tolerant,” and “weak-form.” A quiescent court deploys its powers sparingly, strictly limiting the agenda of social disputes on which it will pronounce in the constitution’s name. A tolerant court confirms as valid laws whose constitutional compatibility it finds to be reasonable sustainable, even though it independently would conclude (...) to the contrary. A weak-form court acts on the understanding that its pronouncements on matters constitutional will be duly open to considered rejection by other political agencies. Theory commonly tends to treat the question of judicial restraint as turning on a bedrock political value of democracy. We may also, however, understand debates over judicial restraint in the light of a different bedrock value, that of political legitimacy. Where democracy is the focal concern, debaters may tend toward conflating into one measure the three dimensions of judicial restraint. A focus on legitimacy rather tends toward a dis-bundling of the three dimensions, thus complicating the choices while also clarifying the stakes. The political philosophy of John Rawls helps us to see how and why this occurs. (shrink)

Our intention here is to present the essential character of classical, sunnm within a strictly formal perspective and to set out its basic aspects. It was conceived by the mutakallimm differed in a number of basic concepts and constructs and in its analytic system, the topical organisation of the major compendia parallels that of metaphysics as understood in the contemporary Aristotelian tradition. The debates between kalm, however, is theological in the strict sense of the term and it is as such (...) that its problematic and its procedures are primarily to be understood. Thus seen, the object of kalām is to rationalise the cognitive content presented to Believers in the symbolic language of the koranic revelation. It has, then, four principal tasks, sc, to conceptualise, to order, to explain, and where possible to justify the primary doctrines of the community whose belief is held to be normative. Within this framework the differences that characterise the major schools as such and the various tendencies of individual masters within each school may readily be brought to light. (shrink)

The question of what is truly just in the matter of a country's currently established human-rights interpretations appears not to be the same as the question of what it is morally right to do by way of coercively effectuating a given set of such interpretations. There are grounds for contending that acts of support for a coercive political regime can be justified morally on the condition that the regime's prevailing human-rights interpretations are made continuously available to effective, democratic critical re-examination. (...) However, it is not possible ever finally to know whether that condition is satisfied. (shrink)

What is honor? Is it the same as reputation? Or is it rather a sentiment? Is it a character trait, like integrity? Or is it simply a concept too vague or incoherent to be fully analyzed? In the first sustained comparative analysis of this elusive notion, Frank Stewart writes that none of these ideas is correct. Drawing on information about Western ideas of honor from sources as diverse as medieval Arthurian romances, Spanish dramas of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, (...) and the writings of German jurists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and comparing the European ideas with the ideas of a non-Western society—the Bedouin—Stewart argues that honor must be understood as a right, basically a right to respect. He shows that by understanding honor this way, we can resolve some of the paradoxes that have long troubled scholars, and can make sense of certain institutions that have not hitherto been properly understood. Offering a powerful new way to understand this complex notion, _Honor_ has important implications not only for the social sciences but also for the whole history of European sensibility. (shrink)

A re-examination of determinism and compatibilism and incompatibilism in free will debates.

This paper articulates the commitments, contours and justifications for a pluralist but non-eclectic critical, realist, reflexive social science with emancipatory aims. In it, we stress that social science can and should be used to guide the conceptualization of desirable and viable forms of social organization and their conditions of realization. In this regard, we advocate explanatory theorizing as an ethical duty of social scientists and as a moral good in itself as well as being an inherent epistemological component of scientific (...) practice. This entails that we take seriously the research strategies apposite to our disciplinary, intertextual and interdiscursive locations to make a serious theoretical case and practical case for the kind of social science here advocated. In our view, such a social science must acknowledge the path-breaking work of Roy Bhaskar, but must also recognize that the arguments deployed in texts as a resource in intellectual work can never be treated as the axiomatic grounds for further thought, but must be interrogated thoroughly and in each case what is to be retained must be defensible. No position has a monopoly of relevant insights and the development of science often involves syntheses. Syntheses must not be syncretic but reflexively interrogated to assess epistemological, ontological and conceptual coherence to avoid eclecticism. Development in critical realist philosophy will, we believe, continue to confront and offer plausible resolutions to a range of battles within and pertinent to philosophy and social-scientific metatheory. However, realists must recognize the continuing importance and discursive effects of a variety of critical and realist work in being able to defend, sustain and develop rigorous social-scientific research with emancipatory commitments. (shrink)

In the spirit of the pragmatic account of quotation and reporting offered by Macagno and Walton (2017), we outline a systematic pragmatic account of rephrasing. For this purpose, we combine two interrelated methods of inquiry into the variety of uses of rephrase as a persuasive device: (i) the annotation of rephrase types to identify locutionary and illocutionary aspects of rephrase, (ii) the crowd–sourced examination of rephrase types to investigate their perlocutionary effects. As it draws on Waltonian insights and on empirical (...) and experimental research on the (mis)use of rephrase, our approach allows us to ground a novel theoretically–informed and data–driven pragmatic account of rephrase. (shrink)

In the spirit of the pragmatic account of quotation and reporting offered by Macagno and Walton (2017), we outline a systematic pragmatic account of rephrasing. For this purpose, we combine two interrelated methods of inquiry into the variety of uses of rephrase as a persuasive device: (i) the annotation of rephrase types to identify locutionary and illocutionary aspects of rephrase, (ii) the crowd–sourced examination of rephrase types to investigate their perlocutionary effects. As it draws on Waltonian insights and on empirical (...) and experimental research on the (mis)use of rephrase, our approach allows us to ground a novel theoretically–informed and data–driven pragmatic account of rephrase. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Dewey and the Aesthetic Unconsciousness: The Vital Depths of Experience by Bethany HenningFrank X. RyanDewey and the Aesthetic Unconsciousness: The Vital Depths of Experience Bethany Henning. Lexington Books, 2022.In this important and splendidly crafted book, Bethany Henning recovers a philosophy of aesthetic wisdom distinct from the narrow epistemological lens dominant today. Unlike the psychological atomism of European Empiricism, from its outset, American philosophy embraced nature's aesthetic splendor and (...) the continuity between our thought and our world. Jonathan Edwards held that relations among ideas reflect beauty in the structure of being. For Ralph Waldo Emerson, each of us is a "transparent eyeball" where the cultivation of nature's spontaneous beauty fortifies our moral and spiritual agency. At the apex of this tradition is John Dewey, for whom Henning touts "aesthetic experience as the highest mode of human experience" (55).Although the aesthetic is generally associated with the cognitive evaluation of art, of special significance for Dewey is its non-reflective or unconscious dimension. Henning's appropriation of "unconscious"—the cradle of Freud's infantile id—is intentionally provocative. American culture, reflected in academic thought, has largely resisted appeals to subterranean urges and drives. In so doing, however, we perpetuate a myth of rational and moral exceptionalism that masks our history of colonialism, oppression, and crass commercialism. In accepting the unconscious, European thought has taken strides to acknowledge and address such ills. Despite America's disdain for psychoanalysis, Henning wonders whether it "could have accepted a dynamic unconscious, were it presented with an alternative mythology" (10).Dewey's alternative, says Henning, arises from his underappreciated notion of qualitative immediacy. In Henning's interpretation of this, meaning is embodied as a "sense of fulfillment" among accumulated habits—a "coming to terms with the world around us" through an "aesthetic (directly felt) connection between ourselves and the world." As such, to appreciate meaning, we must affirm the tacit, unconscious depth of experience; that is, we must "welcome aesthetic experience back into our philosophical lives" (5).Embodied meaning signifies that "the sensuous, lived body" is "the primary reality" (69). In this reality, qualitative immediacy is a non-reflective, aesthetic unity punctuated by "impulsions" arising from an organism's needs. Such needs are satisfied in organism-environment interactions where, says Dewey, "the epidermis is only in the most superficial way an indication of where an organism ends and its environment begins" (LW 10:61). As "a site of adaptive adjustments," Henning continues, "the body is responsive to the [End Page 114] brink of coalescence at the point of contact with the world, in which things that are 'outside of it' belong to it" (71). As such, the body-mind relation is a problem of aesthetics, not epistemology. For Dewey, as for Merleau-Ponty, the body "is the organic and dynamic condition of my thought" (75). The body is not a thing, however, but a process "always organically involved in exchanges" (86).Following the feminist thought of Susan Bordo, Henning agrees that the ascendance of the body amounts to a kind of philosophical recovery. Seventeenth-century science eviscerated the organic "female" universe of the Middle Ages. But this loss of an integrated world evoked existential fright, which Descartes tried to calm by subjugating feminine vagaries of the body to a masculine cognitive certitude bent upon controlling the whole of nature. In America today, this neurosis perpetuates our cultural alienation from our bodies, our environments, and one another (81–84). With the re-emergence of the body, however, it is possible to acknowledge and address this trauma."Feeling," in Dewey's sense, is unconsciously affective: a constant rhythm of disequilibrium and equilibrium, of need and resolution noticed only when a problem rises to the point of requiring our conscious attention. This affective "charge," this rhythm of sensed need and the desire to overcome it, is Dewey's appropriation of Plato's Erōs. Thomas Alexander casts Dewey's Erōs broadly as humanity's aesthetic investment in our world—our collective effort "to transform a biophysical environment into a world filled with meaning" (Alexander 11). But Henning turns to the more familiar sense of Erōs attuned not to the world at... (shrink)

We have developed a process model that learns in multiple ways while finding faults in a simple control panel device. The model predicts human participants' learning through its own learning. The model's performance was systematically compared to human learning data, including the time course and specific sequence of learned behaviors. These comparisons show that the model accounts very well for measures such as problem‐solving strategy, the relative difficulty of faults, and average fault‐finding time. More important, because the model learns and (...) transfers its learning across problems, it also accounts for the faster problem‐solving times due to learning when examined across participants, across faults, and across the series of 20 trials on an individual participant basis. The model shows how learning while problem solving can lead to more recognition‐based performance, and helps explain how the shape of the learning curve can arise through learning and be modified by differential transfer. Overall, the quality of the correspondence appears to have arisen from procedural, declarative, and episodic learning all taking place within individual problem‐solving episodes. (shrink)

In this paper I examine some logical features of Marxist/Christian compatibilist projects. I use Arthur McGovern’s Marxism: An American Christian Perspective as my chief stalking horse. As an heuristic device, I distinguish the views in Marx’s early writings (Marxist humanism--M-I)from the more mature theory of historical materialism (M-2), where the latter is construed primarily as a social scientific method for the explanation of historical change. I also distinguish C-1, the moral teachings of Jesus, from C-2, Christian theology. I argue that (...) the logic of Christian compatibilism requires the acceptance of C-1, C-2, and M-2, while it must reject or downplay M-l, Marxist humanism. Similarly, the logic of a Marxist compatibilism requires the acceptance of M-1, M-2, end C-1, while it must reject C-2, Christian theology. I conclude that, while Christian and Marxist compatibilists can work together in seeking to overcome capitalism and imperialism, it is more difficult to see how thedisagreements over Marxist humanism vs. Christian theology could ever be transcended. (shrink)

Wittgenstein's genius, John Wisdom has suggested, was uniquely revealed in his ability to formulate such questions as ‘Could one play chess without the queen? Would it still be chess?’ The central questions raised by Richard Rorty's work may be cast in a parallel form: ‘Could one do philosophy without the notion of truth as “correspondence with the Real”? Would it still be philosophy?’ Both pairs of questions, Wittgenstein' and Rorty's, are quintessentially anti-essentialist. The scope and ingenuity of Rorty's ‘philosophy without (...) mirrors’ has challenged philosophers to reconf ront basic questions about the nature and purposes of philosophical inquiry. (shrink)

Global Philosophy of Religion is a constructive approach to the philosophy of religion. It aims to incorporate various religious perspectives to diversify the field’s theoretical and practical resources. Proponents of this approach hope that these diverse resources may aid in the progress of the traditional problems of the field. In this introductory chapter, we discuss how the perspectives from Southeast Asia, particularly those from what we call “appropriated religions,” may help in this endeavor.

The Experience of Human Communication approaches everyday communication as a philosophical and psychological matter. Using insights from Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and Foucault, Frank Macke stresses that human communication—and with it, the human body—is, first and foremost, a relational phenomenon involving friends and family.