Signs in the early stages of research (e.g. pathways, thoughts/ideas, and structured feedback) form a web that we call the semiotic web of the research proposal. This web is based on the unlimited semiosis of signs, the semiotic square of education, and the semiotic web of law. We start weaving this web by formulating a raw thought and a number of research ideas. Βy travelling various pathways, we develop patterns of thinking which in turn lead to several potential research proposals, (...) one of which will become the chosen research proposal. We use the concept “semiotics of education” as our theoretical base for a heuristic tool, the semiotic web of the research proposal, to explore an aspect of educational research methodologies. Recognizing that overcoming habitual dualisms is a distinguishing feature of the semiotics of education, we open up the discussion about the extent to which the research proposal should be an integral part of the main supervision process and explore some of the possibilities surrounding this goal. The study highlights the evidence arising from a lifelong distance-learning programme in research proposal development and provides illustrative examples of the way in which educational principles have been translated into practice in a Greek university. This article is based on our presentation “The semiotic web of the research proposal” delivered at the conference Semiosis in Communication – Knowing and Learning, Bucharest, June 16–18, 2016. (shrink)

The precarious rights of senior citizens, especially those who are highly educated and who are expected to counsel and guide the younger generations, has stimulated the creation internationally of advocacy associations and opinion leader groups. The strength of these groups, however, varies from country to country. In some countries, they are supported and are the focus of intense interest; in others, they are practically ignored. For this is reason we believe that the creation of a network of all these associations (...) is essential. The proposed network would act as a support for the already-existing policies of the United Nations’ High Commission for Human Rights, of independent experts, and of the Global Alliance for the Rights of Older People. All three have long ago recommended the creation of a recognized instrument for uniting presently scattered efforts. The proposed network, therefore, will seek to promote the international exchange of relevant expertise, and it will reinforce the commitments and actions that single countries are currently taking to meet these objectives. For example, informative public events can be organised to promote particular support initiatives and to provide an opportunity for new members of the network to be presented. The network will promote health for senior citizens, disease prevention, senior mobility, safe free time for seniors, alimentary education, protection against new risks and dangers, as well as equity in the services necessary for seniors to adopt new information and communication technologies. In the case of retired academic members, the network will promote equality with respect to continuing use of digital technologies (particularly email), continuing access to research libraries, and the guaranteed ability for seniors to fund their own research programs and to deliver free seminars. (shrink)

This paper is a critical discussion of the recent tendency to moralize various aspects of life that were previously viewed as private and discretionary. The paper takes as its starting point six recently unearthed moral prohibitions, and it examines the prospects for defending each as an extension of some familiar moral requirement. Its conclusion is not only that none of the extended prohibitions are defensible, but also that each impedes morality's function by limiting the ability of those whose lives it (...) governs to pursue their own aims as they see fit. (shrink)

In his response to my essay “Out of Control,” Neil Levy contests my claims that (1) we are often responsible for acts that we do not consciously choose to perform, and that (2) despite the absence of conscious choice, there remains a relevant sense in which these actions are within our control. In this reply to Levy, I concede that claim (2) is linguistically awkward but defend the thought that it expresses, and I clarify my defense of claim (1) by (...) distinguishing my position from attributionism. (shrink)

Without question, Process Philosophy and Political Liberalism: Rawls, Whitehead, Hartshorne, is Daniel Dombrowski's most important and well-argued treatise to date within his growing, prolific literary corpus. Bringing his expertise on John Rawls's political thought to bear on the process thinking of A. N. Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne, he explores commonalities of approach and ventures the interpretive hypothesis that Rawls is, at least broadly speaking, a process philosopher. He also argues that each of these philosophers appropriately shares the appellation “political liberal” (...) when that term is carefully defined. I find this strongly plausible. (shrink)

Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race understands Black embodiment within the context of white hegemony within the context of a racist, anti-Black world. Yancy demonstrates that the Black body is a historically lived text on which whites have inscribed their projections which speak equally forcefully to whites' own self-conceptualizations.

Drawing from the lives of Ossie Davis, Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, and W. E. B. Du Bois, as well as his own experience, and fully updated to account for what has transpired since the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, Yancy provides an invaluable resource for students and teachers of courses in African American Studies, African American History, Philosophy of Race, and anyone else who wishes to examine what it means to be Black in America.

ABSTRACT The question that this paper seeks to answer is that of whether the resistance to change that characterizes the conservative temperament has any rational basis. More precisely, my question is whether we have good grounds for accepting any version of the principle that if something exists then we need a reason to change it but don’t need a reason to keep it. The paper defends a version of this principle whose scope is restricted to familiar traditions and customs on (...) the one hand, and aging artifactual objects (houses, cars, toasters, and the like) on the other. The argument for that principle is that our current traditions and artifacts stand in various relations to the purposive activities of past agents—a different relation in each case—that give rise to presumptive but easily overridden reasons for their preservation. (shrink)

Most authors who discuss willpower assume that everyone knows what it is, but our assumptions differ to such an extent that we talk past each other. We agree that willpower is the psychological function that resists temptations – variously known as impulses, addictions, or bad habits; that it operates simultaneously with temptations, without prior commitment; and that use of it is limited by its cost, commonly called effort, as well as by the person's skill at executive functioning. However, accounts are (...) usually not clear about how motivation functions during the application of willpower, or how motivation is related to effort. Some accounts depict willpower as the perceiving or formation of motivational contingencies that outweigh the temptation, and some depict it as a continuous use of mechanisms that interfere with re-weighing the temptation. Some others now suggest that impulse control can bypass motivation altogether, although they refer to this route as habit rather than willpower.It is argued here that willpower should be recognized as either or both of two distinct functions, which can be calledresolveandsuppression. Resolve is based on interpretation of a current choice as a test case for a broader set of future choices, which puts at stake more than the outcome of the current choice. Suppression is inhibiting valuation of (modulating) and/or keeping attention from (filtering) immediate alternatives to a current intention. Perception of current choices as test cases for broader outcomes may result in reliable preference for these outcomes, which is experienced as an effortlesshabit– a successful result of resolve, not an alternative method of self-control. Some possible brain imaging correlates are reviewed. (shrink)

Fraudulent financial reporting, financial statements with errors so material as to require restatement, and biased reporting marred by defects such as managed earnings have plagued financial reporting in many countries in recent years. All of those failures are ethics failures that represent breaches of fiduciary duties by individuals who accepted responsibilities but did not fulfill them. The financial reporting system practiced in America is viewed by the parties involved in it as generally satisfactory. However, according to another view, the interests (...) of those primarily and secondarily responsible for those reports conflict with the interests of the intended beneficiaries, or users, of the corporate financial statements. A more realistic view of the actual operation of that reporting system shows that it is fundamentally flawed. Primary responsibility for failures rests with top management and financial management of the reporting corporation who are so strongly motivated to render favorable reports on their stewardship that they neglect their fiduciary responsibilities to investors. Secondary responsibility falls on independent auditors who are so heavily influenced by enterprise management that they, too, fail in carrying out their responsibilities to users of the audited financial statements. Ethics compromises are also found in the performances of academic accountants and members of accounting standards-setting bodies. The conflict between managements interest in reporting its performance in a favorable light and investors interest in decision-useful financial information will always exist and require regulation. However, changes in those regulations and in the basic governance arrangements involving shareholders, management, and auditors could reduce the opportunities and temptations for failures in carrying out fiduciary responsibilities. Most importantly, the close relationships between auditors and management must be loosened in favor of closer relationships between auditors and investors. (shrink)

Leading thinkers from both traditions explore common philosophical topics.

At one point or another, most of us have been accused of not trying our hardest, and most of us have leveled similar accusations at others. The disputes that result are often intractable and raise difficult questions about effort, ability, and will. This essay addresses some of these questions by examining six representative cases in which the accusation is leveled. The questions discussed include what trying one's hardest involves, and the conditions under which complaints about lack of effort are true, (...) and how much their truth matters. One conclusion that emerges is that both the relevant form of effort and the impediments to making it can vary greatly, while another is that trying one's hardest is less important than trying as hard as one could reasonably be expected to try. (shrink)

Psychedelic drugs such as psilocybin, LSD and DMT are known to induce powerful alterations in phenomenology. Perhaps of most philosophical and scientific interest is their capacity to disrupt and even “dissolve” one of the most primary features of normal experience: that of being a self. Such “peak” or “mystical” experiences are of increasing interest for their potentially transformative therapeutic value. While empirical research is underway, a theoretical conception of the mechanisms underpinning these experiences remains elusive. In the following paper, psychedelic-induced (...) ego-dissolution is accounted for within an active inference framework, as a collapse in the “temporal thickness” of an agent’s deep temporal model, as a result of lowered precision on high-level priors. The argument here is composed of three moves: first, a view of the self-model is proposed as arising within a temporally deep generative model of an embodied organism navigating an affordance landscape in the service of allostasis. Next, a view of the action of psychedelics as lowering the precision of high-level priors within the generative model is unpacked in terms of a high Bayesian learning rate. Finally, the relaxation of high-level priors is argued to cause a “collapse” in the temporal thickness of the generative model, resulting in a collapse in the self-model and a loss of the ordinary sense of being a self. This account has implications for our understanding of ordinary self-consciousness and disruptions in self-consciousness present in psychosis, autism, depression, and dissociative disorders. The philosophical, theoretical and therapeutic implications of this account are touched upon. (shrink)

This chapter reiterates the point that thinking about God as a counter-movement to technology is not the same as rejecting technology, but as contributing to the attempt to live humanly with technology. The idea of God explored in the book is of God as free and giving freedom, as the one who is pure possibility and yet a possible object of active remembrance within the movement of historical time. However, the question remains open whether this God will be identical to (...) the God of Christian faith. (shrink)

This chapter explores the philosophy of Heidegger, for whom the question of technology was central, and whose views typify a wide range of critical views. Heidegger sees technology as the ultimate outworking of Greek metaphysics, with Nietzsche as its ultimate ideologue. In technology, the world is subject to enframing by the goals of the technological project as the condition of its experienceability. This approach permeates the contemporary university, including the humanities. The poetry of Hölderlin, however, provides Heidegger with another perspective, (...) one in which, in dialogue with the Pre-Socratics, we are invited to thinking as a radical counter-movement to technology. (shrink)

Language must be led by what is extra-linguistic. This chapter explores ideas of vision that might inform thinking about God in language. Drawing from Bakhtin and Tillich, from an icon of Andrei Rublev, and from the film After Life, the idea of a reverse vision is developed; vision that flows back upon itself, as offering one idea of vision that might aid non-technological thinking. In light of P. Florensky’s reflections on truth, this is connected with the notion of liturgy as (...) a site of active remembrance and hope. (shrink)

This chapter surveys the history of modern radical theology from John Robinson through the theology of the Death of God, to deconstruction and radical orthodoxy. It argues that even when positioning itself as answering to contemporary concerns, theology has typically overlooked the technological nature of contemporary society. This undermines any claims theology might have to leadership in the contemporary thought.

This chapter explores the ideas of theologians who have attended to the question of theology. Classically, theology sought the subordination of technology to spiritual values. Despite some techno-optimists such as Teilhard de Chardin, the pessimism of Jacques Ellul has had most influence in recent periods, particularly on green, liberation, and feminist theologies. A narrativist approach to the question is examined but found wanting.

Since early modern times, art has paralleled religion in its response to technology as illustrated by Ruskin’s thoughts on the colour purple. Heidegger also turned to art, especially the poetry of Hölderlin, as an alternative to technology. Against the background of Benjamin’s essay on ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproducibility’, the question is asked whether the thoroughly technicized art of film can become a focus for such creative counter-technological thinking. A positive answer is developed with reference (...) to Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Nostalgia. (shrink)

This chapter sketches possibilities for thinking about God as a counter-movement to technology, that nevertheless accepts the reality of the technological society. One still remains free to think about God, even if it is uncertain that one’s thinking answers to anything ‘real’. Such thinking is allowed by the power to think beyond any provisional world-picture that fails to do justice to the wholeness of one’s experience of the world. In mysticism, there is a perennial emphasis on allowing ourselves to be (...) led by the mind’s longing for God. Yet, rather than self-assertion, thinking about God would have to wait upon the self-revealing gift of its object. (shrink)

This expanded edition of John Stuart Mill's _Utilitarianism_ includes the text of his 1868 speech to the British House of Commons defending the use of capital punishment in cases of aggravated murder. The speech is significant both because its topic remains timely and because its arguments illustrate the applicability of the principle of utility to questions of large-scale social policy.

This chapter asks what blaming someone adds to believing that he has acted badly. It examines three of the most popular accounts of the additional element: roughly, those which construe it as a public expression of one’s disapproval, as a belief that the agent’s misdeeds have marred his moral record, and as a negative emotional reaction. Of these familiar accounts, each is shown to be inadequate.

This chapter examines the Humean thesis that agents can only be blamed for their bad acts insofar as those acts are manifestations of defects in their characters. Several versions of this thesis are distinguished and criticized. The criticisms include both the familiar charge that the Humean can’t explain how someone can deserve blame for an act whose badness is “out of character” and the less familiar charge that on the Humean account, the badness of the act itself drops out as (...) irrelevant. It is argued, however, that although Hume was wrong to say that every blameworthy act reflects a flaw in the agent’s character, it may be right to say that every blameworthy act is rooted in the agent’s character. (shrink)

In this essay I argue that Malone-France’s anti-realistic interpretation of the Hartshorne-Peirce theory of possibles can be challenged in a number of ways. While his interpretation does suggest that there are in fact two distinct accounts of possibility in Hartshorne’s philosophy, one that is vulnerable to an antirealistic interpretation and one that is not, Hartshorne does have a consistent and defensible doctrine of possibles. I argue that Whitehead’s contrasting “nonprotean” theory of possibles or “eternal objects” has its own set of (...) conundrums to face, including problems with the coherence of the notion of the completeness of eternal objects and problems with infinite regresses. Whether Whitehead’s or Hartshorne’s account of possibles is correct, I concur with Malone-France that the Molinist doctrine of divine knowledge of future contingents is flawed. (shrink)

This paper is a brief reply to Henry Simoni's ‘Divine passibility and the problem of radical particularity: does God feel your pain?’ in Religious Studies, 33 (1997). I treat his discussion of my paper entitled ‘Hartshorne and Creel on impassibility’, Process Studies, 21 (1992). I argue that Simoni's examples used to illustrate the purportedly contradictory nature of the experiences of a God who universally feels creaturely states fail. For Simoni tacitly employs an inadequate notion of the law of non-contradiction, and (...) thereby misses the relevant phenomenological fact that it is possible for human beings to have integrated mental states that contain spatially distinctive but conflicting hedonic properties. Thus, it is possible for God (at least under Hartshornean descriptions) to have such experiences. I also argue that I have not ‘exploited an isolated passage’ in Hartshorne to make his views seem more palatable. The point of the passage in question is in fact repeated by Hartshorne and is systematically connected with his doctrine of the ‘objective and subjective form of feeling’. (shrink)

This review article critically examines the anthology Resurrecting the Death of God: The Origins, Influence, and Return of Radical Theology, edited by Daniel Peterson and G. Michael Zbaraschuk (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014). After making brief but largely appreciative summary comments on a number of essays, the article focuses attention on contributions by John Cobb on the theology of Altizer, John Roth on Levinas, and J. W. Robbins on the politics of de Tocqueville's concept of God. Suggestions (...) are provided for inclusion of a wider swath of theologies that might be considered. (shrink)