For Dietrich von Hildebrand beauty invites us to transcendence and leads us before the face of God, or in conspectu Dei. In order to elucidate what this means attention will be focused first on the objective importance of beauty, which carries with it according to von Hildebrand a message such that it speaks to us. The meaning of beauty as a “word” needs to be grounded in a metaphysics of the Logos which is in fact Light and Beauty, making everything (...) a participant in its light and beauty. If beauty as that which is important in itself or as value speaks to us, then a response is needed on our part, but responses to beauty can vary as von Hildebrand indicates in distinguishing between appropriate and inappropriate responses; why this is so will occupy briefly the second part of this paper. And lastly, the “call” of beauty to us is related to the final perfection of the human person, where true identity is achieved and where we will at last stand before the face of God. (shrink)

Introduction by Ralph McInerny The essays in this volume, indebted in great part to Jacques Maritain and to other Neo-Thomists, represent a contribution to an understanding of beauty and the arts within the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition. As such they constitute a different voice in present-day discussions on beauty and aesthetics, a voice which nonetheless shares with many of its contemporaries concern over questions such as the relationship between beauty and morality, public funding of the arts and their educational role, objective and (...) universal standards of what is beautiful. In the tradition in which the contributors of this volume reflect, beauty manifests itself in the order of the universe, an order that provides human reason with a window onto the transcendent. For Aristotle and Aquinas the natural order grounds both art and morality, and yet it is this very order which has been called into question by modern science and philosophy. Instead of pointing us to a suprahuman order, the beautiful then points to the order of human freedom and creativity. Reflection on the beautiful since the modern philosopher Immanuel Kant has thus often taken a subjectivistic turn. Because of the importance of beauty and art in human existence, in man's education and life as a moral and political being, an alternative should be sought to any reduction of the beautiful to a purely subjective experience or cultural construct. The Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition, in dialogue with modern and contemporary conceptions of the beautiful, provides us with just that alternative, and thus the essays herein represent a decisive step in the "journey for Thomistic aesthetics." THE CONTRIBUTORS: In addition to the editor, the contributors to the volume are: Brian J. Braman, Matthew Cuddeback, Christopher M. Cullen, S.J., Patrick Downey, Desmond J. FitzGerald, Donald Haggerty, Wayne H. Harter, Jeanne M. Heffernan, Thomas S. Hibbs, Gregory J. Kerr, Joseph W. Koterski, S.J., Daniel McInerny, Ralph McInerny, James P. Mesa, John F. Morris, Ralph Nelson, Katherine Anne Osenga, Carrie Rehak, Stephen Schloesser, S.J., Francis Slade, John G. Trapani, Jr., and Henk E. S. Woldring. ABOUT THE EDITOR: Alice Ramos is associate professor of philosophy at St. John's University. (shrink)

Upshot: According to Biology of Cognition and Language (Maturana’s approach) the immune system is not a cognitive system and defining of a cognitive paradigm is not what we understand as a Maturanian approach to immunology. The true cognitive actions in immunology are performed by immunologists acting as observers, not by body organs or systems. Stimuli and responses are not adequate concepts in the description of systems. As a closed network of cellular/molecular interactions, the immune system yields patterns of activity as (...) is transparent in robust conserved profiles of reactivity of natural immunoglobulins, as investigated by Nóbrega et al. and Cohen et al., which offer the opportunity to unravel its natural, spontaneous activity. Dietary materials, products of the commensal microbiome are the most abundant and common elements continuously incorporated to the network activity and, thus, also represent an important avenue of investigation. (shrink)

Audio description remains the cornerstone of accessibility for visually impaired audiences to all sorts of audiovisual content, including porn. Existing work points to the efficacy of audio description to guarantee immersion and emotional engagement, but evidence on its role in sexual arousal and engagement in porn is still scant. The present study takes on this challenge by comparing sighted and visually impaired participants’ experiences with porn in terms of their physiological response [i.e., cortisol and heart rate ] and self-report measures (...) of affect [Positive and Negative Affect Schedule ; Watson et al., 1988], anxiety [State-Trait Anxiety Inventory ; Spielberger et al., 1970], sexual reactivity and arousal [Sexual Inhibition/Sexual Excitation Scale ; Moyano and Sierra ; and the Ratings of Sexual Arousal ; Mosher ], and narrative engagement or transportation [The Transport Narrative Questionnaire, Green and Brock ]. 69 Spanish participants were allocated into three different groups: 25 sighted participants who watched and heard the porn scenes in their audio-visual version ; 22 sighted participants who listened to the audio described version without images ; and 22 visually impaired participants who also listened to the audio described version without images. Overall, results on physiological and self-report measures revealed no significant differences between groups or different versions of the clips. The analysis of cortisol reactivity to porn as the maximum increase or decrease in cortisol with respect to baseline values revealed no significant differences between the groups, but pointed to a higher percentage of non-responders than responders in the three groups, the highest being found in the ONCE group. As for participants’ cardiac response to the clips, no significant differences were found across the groups, with the highest HR levels being registered in the baseline phase. Self-report measures revealed significant between-group differences in negative affect. The ONCE group displayed the highest pre-task levels of negative affect and was the only group that showed a decrease in negative affect after exposure to the clips. Sighted and visually impaired participants reported to be moderately aroused and immersed in the films, regardless of exposure to AV or AD porn. In addition, correlations found between participants’ levels of self-report sexual arousal and transportation and post-task affect pointed to a positive relationship between exposure to porn and perceived levels of sexual arousal and affect. Results from the study reflected the efficacy of audio description in providing sighted and visually impaired audiences with a similar experience to that offered by original AV porn scenes. This study is exploratory but provides valid, initial groundwork for further research on the impact of audio description on porn reception. (shrink)

The impact of induced mild positive feelings on working memory and complex decision making among older adults (aged 63–85) was examined. Participants completed a computer administered card task in which participants could win money if they chose from “gain” decks and lose money if they chose from “loss” decks. Individuals in the positive-feeling condition chose better than neutral-feeling participants and earned more money overall. Participants in the positive-feeling condition also demonstrated improved working-memory capacity. These effects of positive-feeling induction have implications (...) for affect theory, as well as, potentially, practical implications for people of all ages dealing with complex decisions. (shrink)

Food images are useful stimuli for the study of cognitive processes as well as eating behavior. To enhance rigor and reproducibility in task-based research, it is advantageous to have stimulus sets that are publicly available and well characterized. Food Folio by Columbia Center for Eating Disorders is a publicly available set of 138 images of Western food items. The set was developed for the study of eating disorders, particularly for use in tasks that capture eating behavior characteristic of these illnesses. (...) It contains foods that are typically eaten, as well as those typically avoided, by individuals with eating disorders. Each image has now been rated across 17 different attributes by a large general United States population sample via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Ratings included subjective attributes as well as estimates of nutrient content. Each participant rated a subset of stimulus set food items on all 17 dimensions. Additional description of the image set is provided in terms of physical image information and accurate nutritional information. Correlations between subjective ratings were calculated and an exploratory factor analysis and exploratory cluster analysis completed. Outcomes of the factor analysis suggested foods may be described along three latent factors of healthiness, tastiness, and umami taste; the cluster analysis highlighted five distinct clusters of foods varying on these same dimensions. Descriptive outcomes indicated that the stimulus set includes a range of foods that vary along multiple dimensions and thus is likely to be useful in addressing various research questions surrounding eating behavior and cognition in healthy populations, as well as in those with eating disorders. The provision of comprehensive descriptive information allows for stimulus selection that is optimized for a given research question and promotes strong inference. (shrink)

We welcome Ballantyne & Schaefer’s discussion of the issues concerning consent and use of health data for research. In response to their acknowledgement of the need for public debate and discussion, we provide evidence from our own public consultation on this topic.

Tool use research has suffered from a lack of consistent theoretical frameworks. There is a plethora of tool use definitions and the most widespread ones are so inclusive that the behaviors that fall under them arguably do not have much in common. The situation is aggravated by the prevalence of anecdotes, which have played an undue role in the literature. In order to provide a more rigorous foundation for research and to advance our understanding of the interrelation between tool use (...) and cognition, we suggest the adoption of Fragaszy and Mangalam's (2018) tooling framework, which is characterized by the creation of a body-plus-object system that manages a mechanical interface between tool and surface. Tooling is limited to a narrower suite of behaviors than tool use, which might facilitate its neurocognitive investigation. Indeed, evidence in the literature indicates that tooling has distinct neurocognitive underpinnings not shared by other activities typically classified as tool use, at least in primates. In order to understand the extent of tooling incidences in previous research, we systematically surveyed the comprehensive tool use catalog by Shumaker et al. (2011). We identified 201 tool use submodes, of which only 81 could be classified as tooling, and the majority of the tool use examples across species were poorly supported by evidence. Furthermore, tooling appears to be phylogenetically less widespread than tool use, with the greatest variability found in the primate order. However, in order to confirm these findings and to understand the evolution and neurocognitive mechanisms of tooling, more systematic research will be required in the future, particularly with currently underrepresented taxa. (shrink)

Despite countless anecdotes and the historical significance of insight as a problem solving mechanism, its nature has long remained elusive. The conscious experience of insight is notoriously difficult to trace in non-verbal animals. Although studying insight has presented a significant challenge even to neurobiology and psychology, human neuroimaging studies have cleared the theoretical landscape, as they have begun to reveal the underlying mechanisms. The study of insight in non-human animals has, in contrast, remained limited to innovative adjustments to experimental designs (...) within the classical approach of judging cognitive processes in animals, based on task performance. This leaves no apparent possibility of ending debates from different interpretations emerging from conflicting schools of thought. We believe that comparative cognition has thus much to gain by embracing advances from neuroscience and human cognitive psychology. We will review literature on insight and discuss the consequences of these findings to comparative cognition. (shrink)

An important debate in the reasoning literature concerns the extent to which inference processes are domain-free or domain-specific. Typically, evidence in support of the domain-specific position comprises the facilitation observed when abstract reasoning tasks are set in realistic context. Three experiments are reported here in which the sources of facilitation were investigated for contextualised versions of Raven's Progressive Matrices (Richardson, 1991) and non-verbal analogies from the AH4 test (Richardson & Webster, 1996). Experiment 1 confirmed that the facilitation observed for the (...) contextualised matrices was in part due to extraneous aspects of commentaries originally intended to activate domainspecific processes. Experiments 2 and 3 indicated that the remainder of the facilitation for the matrices, and all of the facilitation for the analogies, could be explained by visual salience: Converting the item elements into realistic objects had enabled them and their transitions to be identified more easily. Hence, performance at simplified abstract items was as good as, or better than, at contextualised items. It is concluded that facilitation effects cannot be interpreted as showing that domain-specific processes constitute a self-contained system separate from domain-free processes. In turn, this means that domain-free processes cannot be dismissed as being unimportant for reasoning. (shrink)

Este estudio examina la influencia de la tradición neoplatónica en el pensamientode Santo Tomás con respecto a la causalidad de la bondad divina. El axioma “bonum est diffusivum sui,” atribuido en general al Pseudo-Dionisio, será puesto de relieve e interpretado en el sentido de la causalidad final.

In the essay, I want to disscuss Maritain's concept of freedom. If we want to understand some obscure thoughts about Maritain, we have to understand Thomas's thoughts. In the essay entitled "The Conquest of Freedom.", Maritain illustrates what freedom means. He indicates it is inseparable between the notions of personality and independent freedom. It is therefore necessary to study the Thomistic concepts of the will as nature and the will as reason . My purpose in this paper will be twofold: (...) to consider first of all the differences which Maritain establishes between individuality and personality, and secondly, to understand what he says about freedom by placing it within the Thomistic context which is both philosophical and theological. (shrink)

En este artículo intento mostrar cómo en el pensamiento de Santo Tomás de Aquino la creación expresa o manifiesta a la divinidad, posibilitando así nuestro conocimiento de Dios sin recurrir a la fe. El Aquinate insiste en que la creación de todas las cosas es por el Verbo o el Logos, cuyo ser luminoso hace que todo sea inteligible y participe en la luz del Verbo. Esta luz divina es además la fuente de la luz del conocimiento natural –luz en (...) la que participan todos los hombres–. Dada esta participación en el hombre, la razón natural no sólo es capax entis, sino también capax Dei. In this article I seek to show how in the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas creation expresses or manifests the divine, making possible our knowledge of God without recourse to faith. Aquinas insists that the creation of all things is through the Word or Logos, whose luminous being makes everything intelligible and renders all a participant in the light of the Word. This divine light is also the source of the light of natural knowledge participated in by all men. Given this participation in man, natural reason is not only capax entis but also capax Dei. (shrink)

An interpretation of God as exemplary cause is in consonance with Aristotle's biological works, although in the Metaphysics Aristotle does shy away from such an interpretation. It is possible to conceive the order of the world in Aristotle as "an expression of desire of God." The rational order that is present in the universe is dependent on God, on his thought. Each organism desires to realize its form, to become intelligible, and to thus imitate God's thought. Such an interpretation of (...) Aristotle coincides with and is completed by Aquinas's treatment of the truth as the origin and end of the universe in the Summa contra Gentiles. (shrink)

St. Anselm provides us with a metaphysics of the Logos, whereby things are true in relation to the Divine Intellect, or by the one first truth. Anselm will, as Aquinas after him, consider whether things are more true in the Divine Word than they are in themselves. This question seems to be closely related to the human person’s desire for God, a desire which makes possible the person’s return to God and which involves not only being created true but also (...) doing the truth, or being as the person ought to be. The questions I will treat in this paper will show that Anselm’s metaphysical and ethical thought is heavily indebted to Neoplatonic themes such as measure and order. (shrink)

El artículo presenta una reflexión sobre la manera en que en los últimos veinte años la promoción de un determinado tipo de solidaridad en Chile ha contribuido a la conformación de una gubernamentalidad liberal avanzada, necesaria para la instalación de un programa neoliberal. La reflexión se enmarca en los aportes teóricos de Michel Foucault y tiene por objeto empírico piezas de publicidad de promoción de la solidaridad emitidas en Chile entre los años 2009 y 2010, que han sido analizadas en (...) el contexto del proyecto Fondecyt 1090534. Se presentan tres tipos de resultados: (a) se describen los sectores sociales que se construyen como agentes de la solidaridad, (b) se reflexiona sobre las prácticas solidarias más promovidas y (c) se indaga en la forma en que se interpela a los sujetos a ser solidarios. (shrink)

Much of the literature on clinical ethical conflict has been specific to a specialty area or a particular patient group, as well as to a single profession. This study identifies themes of hospital nurses’ and physicians’ clinical ethical conflicts that cut across the spectrum of clinical specialty areas, and compares the themes identified by nurses with those identified by physicians. We interviewed 34 clinical nurses, 10 nurse managers and 31 physicians working at four different Canadian hospitals as part of a (...) larger study on clinical ethics committees and nurses’ and physicians’ use of these committees. We describe nine themes of clinical ethical conflict that were common to both hospital nurses and physicians, and three themes that were specific to physicians. Following this, we suggest reasons for differences in nurses’ and physicians’ ethical conflicts and discuss implications for practice and research. (shrink)

St. Anselm provides us with a metaphysics of the Logos, whereby things are true in relation to the Divine Intellect, or by the one first truth. Anselm will, as Aquinas after him, consider whether things are more true in the Divine Word than they are in themselves. This question seems to be closely related to the human person’s desire for God, a desire which makes possible the person’s return to God and which involves not only being created true but also (...) doing the truth, or being as the person ought to be. The questions I will treat in this paper will show that Anselm’s metaphysical and ethical thought is heavily indebted to Neoplatonic themes such as measure and order. (shrink)

St. Anselm provides us with a metaphysics of the Logos, whereby things are true in relation to the Divine Intellect, or by the one first truth. This type of metaphysics has ethical implications, for the truth of man’s essence needs to be brought to completion through right action. Rectitude of the rational creature’s will is necessary for man’s doing the truth or standing in the truth. This paper shows that the actualization of man’s essence can only be achieved through the (...) return of the rational creature to the divine Truth, which is its exemplary and final cause. (shrink)