How should pragmatists respond to and contribute to the resolution of one of America's greatest and most enduring problems? Given that the most important thinkers of the pragmatist movement—Charles S. Peirce, William James, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead—said little about the problem of race, how does their distinctly American way of thinking confront the hardship and brutality that characterizes the experience of many African Americans in this country? In 12 thoughtful and provocative essays, contemporary American pragmatists connect ideas with (...) action and theory with practice to come to terms with this seemingly intractable problem. Exploring themes such as racism and social change, the value of the concept of race, the role of education in ameliorating racism, and the place of democracy in dealing with the tragedy of race, the voices gathered in this volume consider how pragmatism can focus new attention on the problem of race. Contributors are Michael Eldridge, Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., Judith M. Green, D. Micah Hester, Donald F. Koch, Bill E. Lawson, David E. McClean, Gregory F. Pappas, Scott L. Pratt, Alfred E. Prettyman, John R. Shook, Paul C. Taylor, and Cornel West. (shrink)

M. Tullius Cicero was the first among the Roman thinkers, who made the pro_blematic of culture and civilization his serious concern. His investigations led him to the belief that the culture, seen as a whole of traditions, norms and values, is in_separable from artes, i. e. the spiritual phenomena in science and art. From his awarness of the necesssity to create the Roman culture in this sense of inseparability resulted his ambitious philosophical project: the Romans should accept the spiritual experience (...) of the Greeks and develop it in philosophical writings in Latin language. To all doubts and prejudices hostile to this intention he thus responded by philosophical and linguistic writings based on his conviction, that the Latin language is able to express even the most complicated philosophical ideas and concepts and that the human interaction is possible. (shrink)

When individuals cannot make up their mind, they sometimes use a random decision-making aid such as a coin to make a decision. This aid may also elicit affective reactions: A person flipping a coin may (dis)like the outcome, and thus decide according to this feeling. We refer to this process as catalysing decisions and to the aid as catalyst. We investigate whether using a catalyst may not only elicit affect but also result in more affect-based decision making. We used different (...) online studies that examine affect-driven decisions by investigating scope insensitivity (indirect behavioural measure) and self-reported weight given to feelings versus reasons in hypothetical donation decisions. Study 1a showed that a catalyst (a lottery wheel) lead to more scope insensitive (i.e. affect-driven) donations. Study 1b included several changes and did not replicate these results. Study 2 (preregistered) examined scope insensitivity but did not replicate previous results; Study 3 (preregistered) looked at the weight given to feelings versus reason. Although catalyst (compared to control) participants descriptively reported relying more on feelings, this difference did not reach significance. In contrast to lay beliefs, results do not indicate support for the hypothesis that using a catalyst results in more affect-based hypothetical donation decisions. (shrink)

'Jousse - il a trouvé un filon, comme on dit', confie Bergson dans un entretien avec Lydie Adolphe. La relation que Marcel Jousse, chercheur, professeur, homme d'Église, entretient tout au long de ses quelque quarante ans d'enseignement avec le philosophe Henri Bergson est pour le moins paradoxale. Entre admiration et rejet, Jousse revendique 'sa' lecture de Bergson. Libre et inspirante, souvent critique, voire frôlant la caricature, cette lecture tonique agit en retour sur le lecteur, qu'il soit connaisseur de l'œuvre de (...) Bergson ou pas. Selon Jousse, le geste corporel-manuel, le geste global, est au cœur de la pensée du philosophe. Bergson joue sa pensée avec ses mains, avec tout son corps avant de la jeter dans ses livres. La connaissance des lois anthropologiques du Style oral formulées par Jousse permet de mieux saisir la particularité du style de Bergson, proche de celui de Péguy, et qui s'apparente au style oral des rythmo-mimeurs. Jousse, Bergson : deux noms qui ont marqué leur époque. Le lien fort qui unit les deux penseurs est au cœur de cette enquête - que l'on pourrait aussi écrire 'en quête' - à la fois philosophique et historique. Ce livre s'inscrit dans la longue liste des 'lecteurs de Bergson' qu'ils soient ou non bergsoniens."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Oncogenic hyperplasia is the first and inevitable stage of formation of a (solid) tumor. This stage is also the core of many other proliferative diseases. The present work proposes the first minimal model that combines homeorhesis with oncogenic hyperplasia where the latter is regarded as a genotoxically activated homeorhetic dysfunction. This dysfunction is specified as the transitions of the fluid of cells from a fluid, homeorhetic state to a solid, hyperplastic-tumor state, and back. The key part of the model is (...) a nonlinear reaction-diffusion equation (RDE) where the biochemical-reaction rate is generalized to the one in the well-known Schlögl physical theory of the non-equilibrium phase transitions. A rigorous analysis of the stability and qualitative aspects of the model, where possible, are presented in detail. This is related to the spatially homogeneous case, i.e. when the above RDE is reduced to a nonlinear ordinary differential equation. The mentioned genotoxic activation is treated as a prevention of the quiescent G0-stage of the cell cycle implemented with the threshold mechanism that employs the critical concentration of the cellular fluid and the nonquiescent-cell-duplication time. The continuous tumor morphogeny is described by a time-space-dependent cellular-fluid concentration. There are no sharp boundaries (i.e. no concentration jumps exist) between the domains of the homeorhesis- and tumor-cell populations. No presumption on the shape of a tumor is used. To estimate a tumor in specific quantities, the model provides the time-dependent tumor locus, volume, and boundary that also points out the tumor shape and size. The above features are indispensable in the quantitative development of antiproliferative drugs or therapies and strategies to prevent oncogenic hyperplasia in cancer and other proliferative diseases. The work proposes an analytical-numerical method for solving the aforementioned RDE. A few topics for future research are suggested. (shrink)

Greeting words of Thomas Gullickson, the Archbishop and Apostolic Nuncio in Ukraine.

Fyodor Avgustovich Stepun was one of the involuntary emigrants of 1922.1 He became particularly well known in the Federal Republic of Germany through his autobiographical writings, which for him were a form not only of remembering, but also of philosophizing. The first section of this article is devoted to the topic of “Community and totalitarianism.” In various works in the 1920s and 1930s Stepun sought to identify the mental causes of Europe and Russia’s precipitous decent into totalitarianism. He saw these (...) in the demonic absolutizing of one-sided worldviews as a primary factor. The counter-model for him was the concept of “all-unity,” as can already be found in Vladimir Solovyov. The second section is dedicated to the context of “Dialogue and culture.” Dialogicity is always the opposite of totalitarianism and is also founded in the concept of “all-unity.” The concluding section, entitled “Experiencing and remembering,” is devoted to Stepun’s autobiographical writings and his notion of “experiencing” (perezhivanie). (shrink)

A review essay of three recent publications that focus in different ways on the evolution­ary basis of religion. Asma focuses on the ways in which “religion” energizes the emotional needs of humans. Torrey pays close attention to the evolutionary stages of brain development that are necessary for the emergence of religious concepts and the attitudes that accompany them. Finally, Turner et al. develop a complex theory of different types of selection that they regard as necessary in order to account for (...) the institu­tionalization of religion: they think that biological natural selection, even though building human capacities, is insufficient to explain the sociological facts about religion. (shrink)