The first international Newman Conference took place in Luxembourg from July 23rd till July 28th, 1956. Many representatives of various countries of Europe were present. Apart from the well nigh perfect organization, it was undoubtedly this common sympathy and admiration for Cardinal Newman that explains the extremely pleasant atmosphere that prevailed throughout these days. It was not, however, a dolce far niente, because every day was filled with addresses and lectures which in various ways and from differing points (...) of view tried to estimate the importance of Newman for the modern age. Some lecturers looked back into the history of the Cardinal and showed how in fact his works still held their message, couched in terms and modes of thinking that are in harmony with the deepest needs and desires of modern man. Others went farther and indicated lines along which a still more profound influence of Newman could be expected in the future. The whole of the conference consequently was something of a stocktaking showing the capital realized and the promises for the future. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 491 adequacy of his ideas. Yet our view of a person's character can govern our view of what he is trying to do. More specifically, if we think Dewey never completely abandoned the idealistic standpoint with its emphasis upon the harmony of self and community realization, that he sought out easy solutions to tough moral problems, we will not regard his work as making an honest (...) attempt even to face these problems. (Coughlan is very sympathetic to Randolph Bourne's criticism of Dewey on this point.) Viewing Dewey in this way, one is tempted to come to Coughlan's conclusion that there is an ambiguity in Dewey's philosophy about how values are created and, moreover, that this conclusion "haunts any philosophy.., that does not allow itself to appeal to some transcendent source" (pp. 161-162). By the time we reach this latter conclusion we have forgotten that the aim of Dewey's moral philosophy is not to point to some transcendent source that tells us what is "right" to do. Indeed, to the extent that we appeal to such a source, we are apt to ignore the existent factors that are responsible for creating the problem. Put another way, Dewey's standpoint requires that we reject the view that one of the parties to a moral conflict is wrong because he holds the wrong moral rule and the other right because he holds to some rule that truly tells us what we "ought" to do. Instead, he maintains that the origin of the conflict is within the situation itself, and the only way out of the conflict (if there is a way out) is to take advantage of or even reconstruct the factors in the situation. Instrumentalism is the position, itself always open to revision and reconstruction on particular points, that the philosopher can offer an interpretation of moral and political problems that makes them more amenable to resolution. The philosopher, unlike the casuist, cannot tell us what to do. He attempts to provide a conception of ourselves and our social situation that will enable us to go about doing. On specific matters, Coughlan uncovers much new and interesting information. To list only a few items: he points to the possible influence of a minister named Newman Smyth on Dewey's short-lived philosophy of "dynamic intuitionalism" as developed toward the end of the important 1884 paper, "The New Psychology." He gives the most complete account so far of Dewey's unsuccessful "Thought News" experiment at Michigan and of the early development of the organic circuit theory. He tells us something of the details of Vermont life that would tend to dispel the simplistic notion that Dewey's interest in democracy was a product of his growing up there. And--most interesting of ail--a fascinating chapter on the early life of Mead and his friend Castle reveals that at one point Mead was so reduced to despair at the prospect of a cold universe governed by the laws of Newtonian physics that he simply rid himself of it by maintaining that space is simply a construction of the optic nerve: "the three dimensions simply rest upon it!" (p. 128). It was a tough time to try to become a successful philosopher. His tendency to speculate about Dewey's motives aside, Coughlan has given us the most complete and carefully worked out treatment of the early years of Dewey's life. DONALD F. KOCH Michigan State University Human Reafity and the Social World: Ortega's Philosophy of History. By Oliver W. Holmes. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1975. Pp. xi + 175. $12.50) Professor Holmes's study in intellectual history is an inquiry into the interrelationship of Ortega's social and intellectual experiences with the formation of his ideas. In the author's own words: "This essay attempts a systematic analysis of Ortega's philosophy of human reality, the social world, and history. The unified analysis of his philosophy drew heavily upon the traditions of historicism, phenomenology, and existentialism. Such was the influence of these philosophical traditions that Ortega became, at once, critic and representative of their respective positions, problems, and solutions" (p. vii). 492 HISTORY... (shrink)

The religious autobiography of John Henry Newman (1801-1890), in which he discusses his conversion to Roman Catholicism.

While one of John Henry Newman's principal aims in the Grammar of Assent is to explain how men can give a ‘real assent’ to the existence of God, the major part of the actual phenomenology of religious belief in the work is concentrated in the fifth of its ten chapters. Unfortunately, this section of the essay has been overshadowed by the preliminary distinction between real and notional apprehension and by the later invocation of the illative sense; but perhaps the (...) time is now ripe for a closer examination of this central part of Newman's philosophy of religion, which is in many ways the key to the successes and failures of Newman's new method in philosophical theology. (shrink)

Past research has identified a number of asymmetries based on moral judgments. Beliefs about what a person values, whether a person is happy, whether a person has shown weakness of will, and whether a person deserves praise or blame seem to depend critically on whether participants themselves find the agent's behavior to be morally good or bad. To date, however, the origins of these asymmetries remain unknown. The present studies examine whether beliefs about an agent's “true self” explain these observed (...) asymmetries based on moral judgment. Using the identical materials from previous studies in this area, a series of five experiments indicate that people show a general tendency to conclude that deep inside every individual there is a “true self” calling him or her to behave in ways that are morally virtuous. In turn, this belief causes people to hold different intuitions about what the agent values, whether the agent is happy, whether he or she has shown weakness of will, and whether he or she deserves praise or blame. These results not only help to answer important questions about how people attribute various mental states to others; they also contribute to important theoretical debates regarding how moral values may shape our beliefs about phenomena that, on the surface, appear to be decidedly non-moral in nature. (shrink)

Over the past several decades, psychological essentialism has been an important topic of study, incorporating research from multiple areas of psychology, philosophy and linguistics. At its most basic level, essentialism is the tendency to represent certain concepts in terms of a deeper, unobservable property that is responsible for category membership. Originally, this concept was used to understand people’s reasoning about natural kind concepts, such as TIGER and WATER, but more recently, researchers have identified the emergence of essentialist-like intuitions in a (...) number of other contexts, including people’s representation of concepts like SCIENTIST or CHRISTIAN. This paper develops an account that aims to capture how essentialism may operate across these varied cases. In short, we argue that while there is diversity in the forms essentialism can take, these varied cases reflect the same underlying cognitive structure. (shrink)

John Worrall recently provided an account of epistemic structural realism, which explains the success of science by arguing for the correct mathematical structure of our theories. He accounts for the historical failures of science by pointing to bloated ontological interpretations of theoretical terms. In this paper I argue that Worrall’s account suffers from five serious problems. I also show that Pierre Cruse and David Papineau have developed a rival structural realism that solves all of the problems faced by Worrall. This (...) Ramsey-sentence realism is a significant advance in the debate, but still ultimately fails for its incomplete account of reference. (shrink)

The primary aim of this essay is to explain the central elements of Locke's theory of knowledge. A secondary aim arises from the official definition of knowledge introduced in the opening lines of book IV. Though Locke's repeated statements of the definition are consistent with the initial formulation, the consensus view among commentators is that that official definition is in tension with other book IV doctrines. My broader interpretation involves an effort to render the various doctrines consistent with the official (...) definition. The order of discussion: Section 1 explicates the definition of knowledge. Section 2 explains two main divisions of knowledge – namely, its three degrees, and the four sorts of knowable truths. In Section 3, I consider whether Locke understands knowable truths on a model of analyticity. Section 4 addresses potential problems about the objectivity of knowledge, given Locke's account. Section 5 focuses on external world knowledge – Locke calls this "sensitive knowledge" and it poses special difficulties for the official definition of knowledge. (shrink)

Although the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors has published clear guidance on the authorship of scientific papers, short-term contract research workers, who perform much of the research that is reported in the biomedical literature, are often at a disadvantage in terms of recognition, reward and career progression. This article identifies several professional, ethical and operational issues associated with the assignment of authorship, describes how a university department of primary care set about identifying and responding to the concerns of its (...) contract research staff on authorship and describes a set of guidelines that were produced to deal with the ethical and professional issues raised. These guidelines include directions on how authorship should be negotiated and allocated and how short-term researchers can begin to develop as authors. They also deal with the structures required to support an equitable system, which deals with the needs of short-term researchers in ways that are realistic in the increasingly competitive world of research funding and publication, and may offer a model for more formal guidelines that could form part of institutional research policy. (shrink)

Among the more notorious of Cartesian doctrines is the bête machine doctrine – the view that brute animals lack not only reason, but any form of consciousness (having no mind or soul). Recent English commentaries have served to obscure, rather than to clarify, the historical Descartes' views. Standard interpretations have it that insofar as Descartes intends to establish the bête machine doctrine his arguments are palpably flawed. One camp of interpreters thus disputes that he even holds the doctrine. As I (...) shall attempt to show, not only does Descartes affirm the doctrine, his supporting arguments are not palpably flawed – even if they ultimately come up short. It will indeed emerge that, in making his case, Descartes employs interesting argumentative strategies that have not been duly appreciated. (shrink)

John Henry Newman was a theologian and vicar at the university church in Oxford who became a leading thinker in the Oxford Movement, which sought to return Anglicanism to its Catholic roots. Newman converted to Catholicism in 1845 and became a cardinal in 1879. He published widely during his lifetime; his work included novels, poetry and the famous hymn 'Lead, Kindly Light', but he is most esteemed for his sermons and works of religious thought. This volume, first published (...) in 1870, is an ambitious examination of the logical processes that underpin religious faith. Newman discusses how it is possible to believe what cannot be proven empirically, and postulates that the mind has the facility to bridge the logic gap to allow for humans to believe in things that they do not fully comprehend. A lucid and masterful work which remains relevant to contemporary discussions of faith. (shrink)

In this paper, we investigate the trust-based mechanisms underlying the relationship between ethical leadership and followers’ organisational citizenship behaviours (OCBs). Based on three-wave survey data obtained from 184 employees and their supervisors, we find that ethical leadership leads to higher levels of both affective and cognitive trust. In addition, we find support for a three-path mediational model, where cognitive trust and affective trust, in turn, mediate the relationship between ethical leadership and follower OCBs. That is to say, we found that (...) ethical leadership leads to the development of cognitive trust, which subsequently influences the development of affective trust. Affective trust, in turn, induces followers to exhibit OCBs as a means of reciprocating the leader’s favourable behaviour. Our findings suggest that both affective and cognitive trust plays an important role in the social exchange processes that underlie the relationship between ethical leadership and the discretionary behaviour of followers. (shrink)

Temporal binding via 40-Hz synchronization of neuronal discharges in sensory cortices has been hypothesized to be a necessary condition for the rapid selection of perceptually relevant information for further processing in working memory. Binocular rivalry experiments have shown that late stage visual processing associated with the recognition of a stimulus object is highly correlated with discharge rates in inferotemporal cortex. The hippocampus is the primary recipient of inferotemporal outputs and is known to be the substrate for the consolidation of working (...) memories to long-term, episodic memories. The prefrontal cortex, on the other hand, is widely thought to mediate working memory processes, per se. This article reviews accumulated evidence for the role of a subcortical matrix in linking frontal and hippocampal systems to select and ''stream'' conscious episodes across time (hundreds of milliseconds to several seconds). ''Streaming'' is hypothesized to be mediated by the selective gating of reentrant flows of information between these cortical systems and the subcortical matrix. The physiological mechanism proposed for this temporally extended form of binding is synchronous oscillations in the slower EEG spectrum (< 8 Hz). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Innova dies nostros, sicut a principio:Novelty and Nostalgia in Thomas of Celano's First and Second Lives of St. FrancisBarbara Newman (bio)IntroductionIn his sixth-century compendium of hagiography, Gregory of Tours argued that one should always speak of the vita patrum or vita sanctorum in the singular. According to Pliny, he noted, grammarians did not believe the noun vita had a plural. More to the point, although "there is a (...) diversity of merits and virtues among [the saints], … the one life of the body sustains them all in this world."1 Just as the Church, the body of Christ, is one, so too the saints. Their project of imitatio Christi re-presents the one and only life of Christ for each new generation. As a literary genre, hagiography fleshes out this insight, for no other genre is so steeped in self-citation. Every vita is such a tissue of biblical verses that, to edit a saint's Life before Google, one had to know Scripture by heart or spend endless hours with a concordance. After the Bible, quotations from a few classic vitae were constantly recycled: Athanasius' Life of St. Antony, Sulpicius Severus' Life of St. Martin, Gregory the Great's Life of St. Benedict. With the passage of time, newer classics joined older ones to produce one vast, self-referential monument, incarnate in the Acta Sanctorum: Gregory's vita sanctorum multiplied ad infinitum. So deep did this tendency run that, when an obscure saint needed a vita to justify a cult, shameless hagiographers would plagiarize whole paragraphs, plundering stories and miracles from earlier vitae to serve their turn.2 [End Page 169]It is small wonder, then, that the hagiographic genre is so often characterized as "traditional" or "conservative." It is nostalgic, too, in the sense that each saint's words and deeds bring a glorious Golden Age back to life—most often the apostolic age or the time of the Desert Fathers, but sometimes the graced beginnings of a religious order. Such memorials enabled later generations to idealize their glorious founders. This tendency to exalt the new as a renovation of the old has deep roots in Christianity; even the evangelist Matthew systematically represents Jesus as a new Moses. In the same vein, it is not unusual to find a saint identified as a new Jacob or a second David. On the other hand, many saints' Lives make an insistent claim to newness, renovatio. For the saints were, and are, extraordinary—not merely good men and women, but radical figures whose words and deeds shocked those around them, beginning with their parents. Like Jesus, they had not only admirers, but detractors in plenty. If their publicists held them up as exemplars of virtue, theirs was no ordinary kind, for the heroic virtue that gave saints their charisma could look much like madness. Despite the precedents of earlier vitae, their ascetic feats and challenging behavior often struck observers as new and unheard-of. In hagiography, therefore, claims of novelty play a key role that balances the familiar topoi. Sometimes the newness of a saint's charism is cause for joyful celebration. Jesus, after all, had declared ecce nova facio omnia (Rev 21:5). But "novelties" also had to be handled with care, for they could easily be condemned as heresies or extreme practices deviating from the tradition of the elders.This tension between novelty and nostalgia emerges most clearly in the vitae of saints who founded genuinely new forms of religious life. In this paper I will explore the way it plays out in two early Lives of Francis of Assisi, perhaps the most popular saint of all time. After his death in 1226, Francis set a speed record for canonization—one that would be surpassed in the Middle Ages only by his disciple, St. Anthony of Padua, and by the Dominican martyr Peter of Verona.3 Aside from his charisma and the exponential growth of the Franciscan Order, the fast-track canonization is due to Pope Gregory IX, who as Cardinal Hugolino had been personally close to Francis and supported his movement. For the ceremony in July 1228, less than two years after the... (shrink)

A long tradition of psychological research has explored the distinction between characteristics that are part of the self and those that lie outside of it. Recently, a surge of research has begun examining a further distinction. Even among characteristics that are internal to the self, people pick out a subset as belonging to the true self. These factors are judged as making people who they really are, deep down. In this paper, we introduce the concept of the true self and (...) identify features that distinguish people’s understanding of the true self from their understanding of the self more generally. In particular, we consider recent findings that the true self is perceived as positive and moral, and that this tendency is actor-observer invariant and cross-culturally stable. We then explore possible explanations for these findings and discuss their implications for a variety of issues in psychology. (shrink)

Information about celebrities is abundant in media, including bits of information about marginal events that appear in gossip columns; a media genre not sufficiently studied. This article analyzes Israeli national gossip columns in an attempt to identify stylistic and linguistic ways columnists frame information as confidential and personal. It is argued that the use of discursive strategies creates an illusion of intimacy between the reader and the column, inviting readers to participate in a deciphering game. Columnists engage readers by creative (...) use of pronouns, reported speech, use of coda and lexical inventions intended to criticize and poke fun at celebrities. The analysis traces the origins of this specific discourse in Israeli modes of communication. (shrink)

The Twin Earth thought experiment invites us to consider a liquid that has all of the superficial properties associated with water (clear, potable, etc.) but has entirely different deeper causal properties (composed of “XYZ” rather than of H2O). Debates about natural kind concepts have sought to accommodate an apparent fact about ordinary people's judgments: Intuitively, the Twin Earth liquid is not water. We present results showing that people do not have this intuition. Instead, people tend to judge that there is (...) a sense in which the liquid is not water but also a sense in which it is water. (shrink)

Paracelsus is an extraordinarily difficult author to interpret, in part because of the seemingly elusive boundary between literal and metaphorical levels of meaning in his work. The present paper argues for a literal reading of Paracelsus, based on comments that he makes in his late Philosophia de divinis operibus & factis & de secretis naturae. The article also includes a translated chapter from one of the treatises in that work, De lunaticis.

This paper examines people's reasoning about identity continuity and its relation to previous research on how people value one-of-a-kind artifacts, such as artwork. We propose that judgments about the continuity of artworks are related to judgments about the continuity of individual persons because art objects are seen as physical extensions of their creators. We report a reanalysis of previous data and the results of two new empirical studies that test this hypothesis. The first study demonstrates that the mere categorization of (...) an object as “art” versus “a tool” changes people's intuitions about the persistence of those objects over time. In a second study, we examine some conditions that may lead artworks to be thought of as different from other artifacts. These observations inform both current understanding of what makes some objects one-of-a-kind as well as broader questions regarding how people intuitively think about the persistence of human agents. (shrink)

Originally conceptualized by Bandura as the process of cognitive restructuring that allows individuals to disassociate with their internal moral standards and behave unethically without feeling distress, moral disengagement has attracted the attention of management researchers in recent years. An increasing body of research has examined the factors which lead people to morally disengage and its related outcomes in the workplace. However, the conceptualization of moral disengagement, how it should be measured, the manner in which it develops, and its influence on (...) work outcomes are areas of continued debate among researchers. In this article, we undertake a systematic review of research on moral disengagement in the workplace and develop a comprehensive research agenda that highlights opportunities for theoretical and empirical advancement of the literature. (shrink)

What shape can radical politics take today in a time abandoned by the great revolutionary projects of the past? In light of recent uprisings around the world against the neoliberal capitalist order, Saul Newman argues that anarchism - or as he calls it postanarchism - forms our contemporary political horizon. In this book, Newman develops an original political theory of postanarchism; a form of anti-authoritarian politics which starts, rather than finishes, with anarchy. He does this by asking four (...) central questions: who are we as subjects; how do we resist; what is our relationship to violence; and, why do we obey? By drawing on a range of heterodox thinkers including La Boétie, Sorel, Benjamin, Stirner and Foucault, the author not only investigates the current conditions for radical political thought and action, but proposes a new form of politics based on what he calls ontological anarchy and the desire for autonomous life. Rather than seeking revolutionary emancipation or political hegemony, we should affirm instead the non-existence of power and the ever-present possibilities of freedom. As the tectonic plates of our time are shifting, revealing the nihilism and emptiness of our political and economic order, postanarchisms disdain for power in all its forms offers us genuine emancipatory potential. (shrink)

The Explanatory Model of Scientific Understanding is a deflationary thesis recently advocated by Kareem Khalifa. EMU is committed to two key ideas: all understanding-relevant knowledge is propositional in nature; and the abilities we use to generate understanding are merely our usual logical reasoning skills. In this paper I provide an argument against both ideas, suggesting that scientific understanding requires a significant amount of non-propositional knowledge not captured by logical relations. I use the Inferential Model of Scientific Understanding to reveal how (...) we can better represent what constitutes understanding a scientific event. In particular, this model accounts for not only logical and probabilistic inferences, but also those conceptual associations and categorizations we must make to comprehend an explanation. (shrink)

Once upon a time, when there was no psychoanalysis or cultural anthro-pology or meta-ethics, most philosophers believed that there was objective truth in such statements as, ‘Murder is wrong’, ‘One should not steal’, and ‘Heliogabalus was an evil man’. Many philosophers still believe that there is, and though their view is not wholly respectable in most English-speaking philosophical circles, it probably has the important merit of being true. There are serious reasons for worrying about the traditional view: it is not (...) clear how an ‘ought’ can be derived from an ‘is’; there are problems s e in trying to translate evaluative terms into descriptive ones; reflective men disagree profoundly on ethical issues; ethical judgments appear to have an emotive component; etc. Still, there are also very good reasons for believing that murder is wrong and that Heliogabalus was an evil man. I shall not defend the objectivity of statements of the form, ‘ X is good ’, for I am not at all worried about such statements passing out of the language of rational men. Even behaviourists and relativists and emotivists still make reasonably intelligent statements of this form. But I am worried about the future of a related class of statements, those of the form, ‘ X is civilized ’. These statements have been gradually disappearing from our discourse; perhaps they have been casualties of recent revolutions in social science and philosophy. And this state of affairs is a tragic one indeed, for not only is there a need for statements of this form, but of all ethical statements, these are the ones whose descriptive content is most incontrovertible. Non-cognitivistic moral philosophers generally dismiss statements about the ‘civilized’ and ‘barbarous’ along with statements about the ‘good’, ‘evil’, ‘right’, and ‘wrong’. But social scientists have made statements about the ‘civilized’ and ‘barbarous’ special objects of attack. They have even suggested that people who make such statements are narrow-minded, naive, and ‘ethnocentric’. ‘Ethnocentrism’, an eminent social scientist tells us, ‘is the technical name for this view of things in which one's own group is the center of everything, and all others are scaled and rated with reference to it.’ Ethnocentrism is innocent enough up to a point, but reflective men should be careful not to allow it to blind their moral sense. The noted anthropologist, Herskovits, has given us the following warning: Cultures are sometimes evaluated by the use of the designations ‘civilized’ and ‘primitive’. These terms have a deceptive simplicity, and attempts to document the differences implied in them have proved to be of unexpected difficulty. (shrink)