Traditional philosophical uneasiness with imagining activity is documented. The reason adduced for the ontological homelessness of imagination is the inability of most philosophers to recognize the irreducible nature and function of imaginativity.Imagining is then distinguished from sense-perceiving. imaging. and conceptual activity. Imagining, it is proposed, is the reality of making-believe; and such human, as-if functioning can both (I) characterize human deeds as imaginative acts. and (2) be a latent or active functional moment within other kinds of human acts.Why God. creational (...) ordinances, angels. and all earthly creatures can be imaginated is expounded, along with an analysis of such activity. its norm. and imaginative results huch as art). Remarks on relations of imagining to science and faith conclude the piece. (shrink)

It is a biblical faith position that followers of the Christ should give away the bread they bake freely , rather than try to force your neighbour to accept it. Maybe the others only eat cake, or hard-boiled arguments. If the neighbours, however, need and ask for nutritious bread, we rich Christians are called by God to provide wholesome food for thought as well as bellies, says Scripture, with a gentleness, respect for the stranger, and with a sound, self-critical consciousness (...) that may involve our getting hurt ourselves. (shrink)

What good is art? What is the point of a university education? Can philosophers contribute anything to social liberation? Such questions, both ancient and urgent, are the pulse of reformational philosophy. Inspired by the vision of the Dutch religious and political leader Abraham Kuyper, reformational philosophy pursues social transformation for the common good. In this companion volume to Religion, Truth, and Social Transformation, Lambert Zuidervaart presents a socially engaged philosophy of the arts and higher education. Interacting with the ideas of (...) leading Kuyperian thinkers such as Calvin Seerveld and Nicholas Wolterstorff, Zuidervaart shows why renewal in the arts needs to coincide with political and economic transformation. He also calls for education and research that serve the common good. Deeply rooted in reformational philosophy, his book brings a fresh and inspiring voice to current discussions of religious aesthetics and Christian scholarship. Art, Education, and Cultural Renewal is a testament to the practical and intellectual richness of a unique religious tradition, compelling in its call for social solidarity and cultural critique. (shrink)

Opuscula Aesthetica Nostra is a pioneering publishing effort, blazing a trail which specialists in other philosophical fields should consider following. It purports to represent what is happening in aesthetics throughout English-speaking and French-speaking Canada today, and in consequence it is an intriguing exercise in Canadian bilingualism. It purports also to show, as co-editor Calvin Seerveld says in the Preface, that “aesthetics deserves its own bona fide place in the national market place of ideas”; so the editors have reprinted (...) strong previously published papers, in addition to soliciting new material on the occasion of the Tenth International Congress of Aesthetics held in Montreal in 1984. The result is a satisfying pot-pourri of ideas. (shrink)

Why should we seek and tell the truth? Does anyone know what truth is? Many are skeptical about the relevance of truth. Truth Matters endeavours to show why truth is important in a world where the very idea of truth is contested. Putting philosophers in conversation with educators, literary scholars, physicists, political theorists, and theologians, Truth Matters ranges across both analytic and continental philosophy and draws on the ideas of thinkers such as Aquinas, Balthasar, Brandom, Davidson, Dooyeweerd, Gadamer, Habermas, Kierkegaard, (...) Plantinga, Ricoeur, and Wolterstorff. Some essays attempt to provide a systematic account of truth, while others wrestle with the question of how truth is told and what it means to live truthfully. Contributors address debates between realists and anti-realists, explore issues surrounding relativism and constructivism in education and the social sciences, examine the politics of truth telling and the ethics of authenticity, and consider various religious perspectives on truth. Most scholars agree that truth is propositional, being expressed in statements that are subject to proof or disproof. This book goes a step farther: yes, propositional truth is important, but truth is more than propositional. To recognize how it is more than propositional is crucial for understanding why truth truly matters. Contributors include Doug Blomberg (ICS), Allyson Carr (ICS), Jeffrey Dudiak (King’s University College), Olaf Ellefson (York University), Gerrit Glas (VU University Amsterdam), Gill K. Goulding (Regis College), Jay Gupta (Mills College), Clarence Joldersma (Calvin College), Matthew J. Klaassen (ICS), John Jung Park (Duke University), Pamela J. Reeve (St. Augustine’s Seminary), Amy Richards (World Affairs Council of Western Michigan), Calvin Seerveld (ICS), Ronnie Shuker (ICS), Adam Smith (Brandeis University), John Van Rys (Redeemer University College), Darren Walhof (Grand Valley State University), Matthew Walhout (Calvin College), and Lambert Zuidervaart (ICS). (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.This work is in the public domain in (...) the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Abstract:Calvin Warren talks about Heidegger's influence on Afropessimism, and about the philosophical significance of the Harlem Renaissance.

That’s Bill Calvin, whose brain is worthy of study in its own right. Technically, he’s a theoretical neurophysiologist and affiliate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Washington. But he’s also known as a scientist with a wide-ranging intellect and a prolific (and accessible) writer who constantly offers remarkable insights about the world around him. As I sat down to interview Calvin in his book-lined Seattle home last Fall, I recalled the comments of someone who (...) had come to GBN to hear Calvin speak. He said that he didn’t know—or care—what Calvin was going to talk about because everything that Bill Calvin said was not only interesting, but worth learning about. After more than three hours of conversation with Calvin, I couldn’t agree more. (shrink)

William Ockham and John Wyclif develop strikingly different accounts of the Eucharist in the light of strikingly different metaphysical assumptions. Ockham assumes that God can create or annihilate any other actual being without creating or destroying anything not a part of it and so that God can annihilate a substance while preserving its real accidents. Wyclif supposes that to annihilate a being is to annihilate not only its accidents but everything in its Porphyrian tree. Ockham takes being to be univocal, (...) Wyclif allows that there might be distinct ways of being. Both attempt to negotiate difficult terrain between their metaphysics and the theological orthodoxy of their time but with quite different results. While Ockham admits that consubstantiation (the co-presence of the bread and wine and the body and blood of Christ) is the most rationally defensible of the alternative accounts of the Eucharist available to him, he strives to develop an account both consistent with his metaphysics and with a plausible understanding of transubstantiation. Wyclif begins with a similar project but in the end concludes that consubstantiation is the best account of the Eucharist. (shrink)

The ethical restatement of the “risk and crisis communication in public health emergency” (PHERCC) matrix by Spitale et al. (2024) is a step up from mainstream approaches like the Crisis and Emerge...

Psychology's fascination with memory and its imperfections dates back further than we can remember. The first careful experimental studies of memory were published in 1885 by German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, and tens of thousands of memory studies have been conducted since. What has been learned, and what might the future of memory be?

Many accept the following three theses in animal ethics. First, although animal welfare should not be—or at least, need not be—our top moral priority, it is not a trivial one either. Second, if an animal is sentient, then it is a moral patient. Third, the extinction of an animal species is a tragic outcome that we have moral reason to prevent. I argue that a traditional (i.e., pre-modern) Buddhist perspective pushes against the first thesis and that a naturalized Buddhist perspective (...) is inconsistent with the latter two. (shrink)

I argue against pessimistic readings of the Buddhist tradition on which unawakened beings invariably have lives not worth living due to a preponderance of suffering (duḥkha) over well-being.

In _Ontological Terror_ Calvin L. Warren intervenes in Afro-pessimism, Heideggerian metaphysics, and black humanist philosophy by positing that the "Negro question" is intimately imbricated with questions of Being. Warren uses the figure of the antebellum free black as a philosophical paradigm for thinking through the tensions between blackness and Being. He illustrates how blacks embody a metaphysical nothing. This nothingness serves as a destabilizing presence and force as well as that which whiteness defines itself against. Thus, the function of (...) blackness as giving form to nothing presents a terrifying problem for whites: they need blacks to affirm their existence, even as they despise the nothingness they represent. By pointing out how all humanism is based on investing blackness with non-Being—a logic which reproduces antiblack violence and precludes any realization of equality, justice, and recognition for blacks—Warren urges the removal of the human from its metaphysical pedestal and the exploration of ways of existing that are not predicated on a grounding in Being. (shrink)

Maximize Expected Choiceworthiness (MEC) is a theory of decision-making under moral uncertainty. It says that we ought to handle moral uncertainty in the way that Expected Value Theory (EVT) handles descriptive uncertainty. MEC inherits from EVT the problem of fanaticism. Roughly, a decision theory is fanatical when it requires our decision-making to be dominated by low-probability, high-payoff options. Proponents of MEC have offered two main lines of response. The first is that MEC should simply import whatever are the best solutions (...) to fanaticism on offer in decision theory. The second is to propose statistical normalization as a novel solution on behalf of MEC. This paper argues that the first response is open to serious doubt and that the second response fails. As a result, MEC appears significantly less plausible when compared to competing accounts of decision-making under moral uncertainty, which are not fanatical. (shrink)

Neurobiologist William Calvin explores the human brain, positing that the neurons in the brain operate in an accelerated version of biological evolution, evolving ideas through random variations and selections, and supports his hypothesis with numerous ca.

Non-Archimedean population axiologies – also known as lexical views – claim (i) that a sufficient number of lives at a very high positive welfare level would be better than any number of lives at a very low positive welfare level and/or (ii) that a sufficient number of lives at a very low negative welfare level would be worse than any number of lives at a very high negative welfare level. Such axiologies are popular because they can avoid the (Negative) Repugnant (...) Conclusion and satisfy the adequacy conditions given in the central impossibility result in population axiology due to Gustaf Arrhenius. I provide a novel argument against them which appeals to the way that good and bad lives can intuitively outweigh one another. (shrink)

This article considers the relationship between utilitarianism and the ethics of Early Buddhism and classical Indian Mahāyāna Buddhism. Section 2 discusses normative ethics. I argue (i) that Early Buddhist ethics is not utilitarian and (ii) that despite the many similarities between utilitarianism and Mahāyāna ethics, it is at best unclear whether Mahāyāna ethics is consequentialist in structure. Section 2 closes by reconstructing the Buddhist understanding of well-being and contrasting it to hedonism. -/- Section 3 focuses on applied ethics. I suggest (...) that two major choice-points for the Buddhist are, first, whether to accept the doctrine of rebirth and, second, whether to adopt a pessimistic or tentatively optimistic reading of Buddhist axiology. I assess the implications of the possible resulting views for various topics in applied ethics, including cause prioritization, global health and poverty, animal welfare, existential risk, space colonization, and human biomedical enhancement, comparing Buddhist answers to contemporary utilitarian positions on these issues. Along the way, I also argue against the pessimistic reading of Buddhist axiology and in favor of a moral-patient-affecting, rather than totalist, understanding of Buddhist population ethics. (shrink)

The research ethics framework put forward by McCradden et al. to support systematic inquiry in the development of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies in healt...

OpenAI’s Chat Generative Pre-training Transformer (ChatGPT), Google’s Bard and other generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) technologies can greatly enhance the capability of healthcare profess...

[Toril] Moi says that my misunderstanding of Kristeva lies in taking the “semiotic process” 1 for the whole of “poetic language”: “He does not seem to have noticed Kristeva’s account of the symbolic, her repeated insistence that language—the signifying process—is the product of a dialectical interaction between the symbolic and the semiotic” . But how could I not notice what Kristeva herself reiterates over and over? Not notice that “textual practice is that most intense struggle toward death, which runs alongside (...) and is inseparable from the differentiated binding of its charge in a symbolic texture”—words I quoted on page 814 ? The reader will find in my essay many other statements to the same effect. I noticed, I noticed, but Moi did not notice I noticed. She’s so certain Kristeva’s book is difficult that she may underestimate the ability of others to grasp its essential points. But despite the pine-knot paroxysms of grotesqueness in the Englished version , Kristeva makes herself understood well enough through her sharp logicality and by dint of repetition. Calvin Bedient is professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. His most recent book is He Do the Police in Different Voices , a study of The Waste Land. (shrink)

We had thought that poetry was a grace beyond biology, except for the biomovements of dancers, athletes, or those we love most. We had thought it a contradictory “organic” perfection in the relatively staying realm of the symbolical. But, no, according to Kristeva’s theory, poetry is essentially antiformal—in fact, so profoundly antiaesthetic that the proper words for describing it are not beauty, inspiration, form, instinctive rightness, inevitability, or delicacy . Instead, it attracts terms drawn from politics and war: corruption, infiltration, (...) disruption, shatterings, negation, supplantation, and murder. Poetry is the chora’s guerrilla war against culture.According to Kristeva, poetry reverses the ritualistic theological sacrifice of the soma, a sacrifice subsequently exacted, like a sales tax, through the “thetic” element of discourse, its determinate articulations. For Kristeva, the “theologization of the thetic” is what culture is —and as such it has no fundamental right to be, since what is fundamental is the chora and not God. I refer here as throughout to the revolutionary Kristeva of the late sixties and early seventies, the Kristeva whose “we,” as she says in “My Memory’s Hyperbole,” was a putatively communist Parisian party for “permanent revolution.”4 Revolution in Poetic Language is a monumental, late end product of this phase of Kristeva’s thinking; indeed, there are signs that she had already surpassed it by the time the book was published. 4. See Kristeva, “My Memory’s Hyperbole,” trans. Athena Viscusi, in The Female Autograph: Theory and Practice of Autobiography from the Tenth to the Twentieth Century, ed. Domna C. Stanton , pp. 219-35. Calvin Bedient is professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. His most recent book is He Do the Police in Different Voices , a study of The Waste Land. (shrink)

We propose a friendly amendment to integrative experiment design (IED), adversarial-collaboration IED, that incentivizes research teams from competing theoretical perspectives to identify zones of the design space where they possess an explanatory edge. This amendment is especially critical in debates that have high policy stakes and carry a strong normative-political charge that might otherwise prevent free exchange of ideas.

This is a book about the human sciences. However, it is not a treatise on scientific methodology nor is it a proposal for a unification of the human sciences through an integration of their findings within a general conceptual scheme.

Sketching a new portrait of the human self in this thought-provoking book, leading American philosopher Calvin O. Schrag challenges bleak deconstructionist and postmodernist views of the self as something ceaselessly changing, without origin or purpose. Discussing the self in new vocabulary, he depicts an action-oriented self defined by the ways in which it communicates. The self, says Schrag, is open to understanding through its discourse, its actions, its being with other selves, and its experience of transcendence. In his discussion, (...) Schrag responds critically to both modernists and postmodernists, avoiding what he calls the modernists' overdetermination of unity and identity and the postmodernists' self-enervating pluralism. He agrees with postmodernist attacks on both the classical theory of the self as a metaphysical substance and the modern epistemological construal of the self as transparent mind, yet he maintains that jettisoning the self as understood in these terms does not mean jettisoning it altogether. The self as subject is not dead, nor are the constitutive features of self-formation and self-understanding. In addressing the role of culture in the dynamics of self-formation, the author offers a critique of Max Weber's and Jürgen Habermas's view of modernity as a radical differentiation of three cultural spheres: science, morality, and art; he adds religion as a legitimate fourth cultural sphere. The overview of Schrag's philosophy that _The Self after Postmodernity_ provides will appeal to readers with an interest in literary criticism and religion as well as philosophy. (shrink)