(2012). A Review of “Lowering Higher Education: The Rise of Corporate Universities and the Fall of Liberal Education”. Educational Studies: Vol. 48, No. 5, pp. 485-489.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Go's Command by John HareJoshua T. MauldinGod's Command John Hare OXFORD: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2015. 368 pp. $110.00Divine command theory has received a significant amount of high-powered philosophical attention in recent years, notably in works by C. Stephen Evans, Robert Adams, and Philip Quinn. John Hare's book God's Command joins this [End Page 197] discussion and advances it by attending not only to the Christian tradition but also (...) to Judaism and Islam, and by engaging with evolutionary psychology. Central to Hare's account of divine command theory is the claim that human nature is a "mixture," characterized by the dual affections for advantage and for justice. Against theories that assume a single-source account of motivation (e.g., eudaimonism), Hare contends that human beings experience the pull of competing motivations, toward morality and self-interest. Any adequate moral theory will account for both motivations and indicate how they can be reconciled. Hare contends that his version of divine command theory is up to this task.It is on this point that Hare most clearly adheres to his claim at the beginning and the end of God's Command that the book "defends the thesis that what makes something morally obligatory is that God commands it, and what makes something morally wrong is that God commands us not to do it" (1). Elsewhere in the book, this kind of philosophical defense recedes. After an initial chapter describing divine command theory in general, and two chapters on eudaimonism and naturalistic deductivism, Hare provides three chapters illustrating how divine command theory is worked out by representative thinkers in the traditions of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, followed by a chapter on how divine command theory can accommodate the findings of evolutionary psychology. The book ends with a summary, showing how the various pieces of the book, which at times read like a series of independent essays, constitute a single picture. In these latter chapters, Hare seems to leave behind the philosophical defense of divine command theory, turning instead toward a discussion of what kind of divine command theory theists should adopt, given their predetermined commitment to theism and divine command theory in general.In one sense, this shift can be understood in terms of audience. Initially, Hare addresses anyone interested in ethics. By the second half of the book, Hare has shifted to convincing theistic ethicists that the best way to hold together their various commitments is to adopt a divine command theory, as opposed to other options such as Eudaimonism. This shift arises as an attempt to fend off a potential criticism of divine command theory—the possibility that people will do terrible things in the name of God's command. Hare suggests that Kant provides one solution to this problem, which is that if we think God is commanding us to do something that is at odds with practical reason, we ought to doubt that God is really commanding us to do this thing. Hare is sympathetic to Kant here, but he also seems to think that Kant's solution would undermine his own project, insofar as it makes God's command appear superfluous. Hare's alternative approach involves acknowledging that religious traditions possess safeguards to protect against the possibility that appeal to a divine command is used to justify horrendous evils. For Hare, the Abrahamic traditions provide historical evidence that the benefits of divine command ethics can be enjoyed without accepting the apparently bad aspects. [End Page 198]Hare himself notes that there is a kind of circularity here. He has made the point as a kind of hypothetical: If you already believe in God as the divine commander, and adhere to one of the Abrahamic traditions, you will possess resources to overcome this problem. As he admits at the end of chapter 5, he has not addressed the question of why someone who does not already believe in God as the source of morality ought to begin to do so. Nevertheless, the question of whether thinkers within religious traditions have provided compelling answers to the epistemological problems at the center of divine command theory will be of interest to... (shrink)

The origin of the pluperfect is the biggest remaining hole in our understanding of the Ancient Greek verbal system. This paper provides a novel unitary account of all four morphological types - alphathematic, athematic, thematic, and the anomalous Homeric form 3sg. ᾔδη (ēídē) 'knew' beginning with a 'Jasanoff-type' reconstruction in Proto-Indo-European, an 'imperfect of the perfect.'.

End-of-life disputes in Ontario are currently overwhelmingly assessed through the singular lens of patient autonomy. The current dispute resolution mechanism does not adequately consider evidence-based medical guidelines, standards of care, the patient’s best interests, expert opinion, or distributive justice. We discuss two cases adjudicated by the Consent and Capacity board of Ontario that demonstrate the over emphasis on patient autonomy. Current health care policy and the Health Care Consent Act also place emphasis on patient autonomy without considering other ethically defensible (...) factors. We argue that current policy and legislation require amendment, and unless there are measures undertaken to modify them, both the quality of care provided and the long-term capabilities of the health care system to remain publicly-funded, comprehensive and equitable, are at stake. (shrink)

In this paper I present two new arguments against the possibility of an omniscient being. My new arguments invoke considerations of cardinality and resemble several arguments originally presented by Patrick Grim. Like Grim, I give reasons to believe that there must be more objects in the universe than there are beliefs. However, my arguments will rely on certain mereological claims, namely that Classical Extensional Mereology is necessarily true of the part-whole relation. My first argument is an instance of a problem (...) first noted by Gideon Rosen and requires an additional assumption about the mereological structure of certain beliefs. That assumption is that an omniscient being’s beliefs are mereological simples. However, this assumption is dropped when I present my second argument. Thus, I hope to show that if Classical Extensional Mereology is true of the part-whole relation, there cannot be an omniscient being. (shrink)

The final hymn of the Rigveda, 10.191, the last three stanzas of which are dedicated to saṃjñānam ‘unity’, plays in a remarkable way with the preposition/prefix sam(-) ‘with; together’ and the phonetic sequence mā̆n. Some of the words with mā̆n go back to Proto-Indo-European *men ‘think’ (mánas- ‘mind, intellect, thought’, mántra- ‘utterance, spell’, and mantraye ‘I utter an utterance, recite a spell’); others are forms of the adjective samāná- ‘common, the same’. This brief communication shows that the display of phonetic (...) fireworks has analogs in our earliest hymns in Avestan and Greek, in which both reflexes of *men and etymologically unconnected words that have the same pattern of sounds are frequently found in the most “privileged positions”: the beginning and/or end of a section, poem, or entire poetic collection. (shrink)

Among the many parodic elements in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes is the day-old baby's fart-omen. As is well-known, sneezing was considered prophetic in the ancient world, and the humour of the scene comes from the immediately preceding fart and the fact that Hermes’ bodily emissions are deliberate . Apollo has, in fact, gone in search of his baby brother on the basis of a standard bird-omen and confronted with Hermes’ signs, he recognizes that the crepitation is just as much (...) an omen as the sneeze, witness the plural τoúτoιζ oìωυoîσι a few lines later . We may compare a passage in Aristophanes’ Knights where the Sausage-seller reports that he took courage before speaking to the Council from a good omen: a man farted to the right, ༐κ δπξιâζ ᾤπέπαρδε . Aristophanes’ formulation suggests to me that the composer of the hymn may be intentionally setting up a play on words : the only difference between the verbal form ༐πέπταδε ‘sneezed’ is the reversal of the liquid and the dental stop. (shrink)

One of the most famous scenes in classical literature is theDichterweiheat the beginning of theTheogony: when Hesiod was tending his sheep below Mount Helicon, the Muses approached him, provided him with a staff and a divine voice, and told him to sing of the blessed, everlasting gods.

Among the many parodic elements in theHomeric Hymn to Hermesis the day-old baby's fart-omen. As is well-known, sneezing was considered prophetic in the ancient world, and the humour of the scene comes from the immediately preceding fart and the fact that Hermes’ bodily emissions are deliberate (σɉυ… øρασσάμευoζ ‘contriving’). Apollo has, in fact, gone in search of his baby brother on the basis of a standard bird-omen (note 2131 ‖ oìωυɂυ and 215 ‖༐σσυμέυωζ, echoed exactly in the later passage) and (...) confronted with Hermes’ signs, he recognizes that the crepitation is just as much an omen as the sneeze, witness the plural τoúτoιζ oìωυoîσι a few lines later (303). We may compare a passage in Aristophanes’Knights(638—42) where the Sausage-seller reports that he took courage before speaking to the Council from a good omen: a man farted to the right, ༐κ δπξιâζ ᾤπέπαρδε (639). Aristophanes’ formulation suggests to me that the composer of the hymn may be intentionally setting up a play on words (or even the possibility for a slip of the tongue or mishearing): the only difference between the verbal form ༐πέπταδε ‘sneezed’ (aorist to ༐πι-πτάρυuμαι, -πταíρω and its near-homophone ༐πέπαρδε ‘farted’ (aorist to ༐πι-πρδoμαι) is the (cross-linguistically trivial) reversal of the liquid and the dental stop. (shrink)

Among the many parodic elements in theHomeric Hymn to Hermesis the day-old baby's fart-omen. As is well-known, sneezing was considered prophetic in the ancient world, and the humour of the scene comes from the immediately preceding fart and the fact that Hermes’ bodily emissions are deliberate (σɉυ… øρασσάμευoζ ‘contriving’). Apollo has, in fact, gone in search of his baby brother on the basis of a standard bird-omen (note 2131 ‖ oìωυɂυ and 215 ‖༐σσυμέυωζ, echoed exactly in the later passage) and (...) confronted with Hermes’ signs, he recognizes that the crepitation is just as much an omen as the sneeze, witness the plural τoúτoιζ oìωυoîσι a few lines later (303). We may compare a passage in Aristophanes’Knights(638—42) where the Sausage-seller reports that he took courage before speaking to the Council from a good omen: a man farted to the right, ༐κ δπξιâζ ᾤπέπαρδε (639). Aristophanes’ formulation suggests to me that the composer of the hymn may be intentionally setting up a play on words (or even the possibility for a slip of the tongue or mishearing): the only difference between the verbal form ༐πέπταδε ‘sneezed’ (aorist to ༐πι-πτάρυuμαι, -πταíρω and its near-homophone ༐πέπαρδε ‘farted’ (aorist to ༐πι-πρδoμαι) is the (cross-linguistically trivial) reversal of the liquid and the dental stop. (shrink)

Neoliberal ideology and exclusionary policies based on racialized identities characterize the current contexts in North America and Western Europe. Nursing knowledge cannot be abstracted from social, political and historical contexts; the task of examining the influence of race and racial ideologies on disciplinary knowledge and inquiry therefore remains an important task. Contemporary analyses of the role and responsibility of the discipline in addressing race‐based health and social inequities as a focus of nursing inquiry remain underdeveloped. In this article, we examine (...) nursing's engagement with ideas about race and racism and explore the ways in which nursing knowledge and inquiry have been influenced by race‐based ideological discourses. Drawing on Henry and Tator's framework of democratic racism, we consider how strategic discursive responses—the discourses of individualism, multiculturalism, colour‐blindness, political correctness and denial—have been deployed within nursing knowledge and inquiry to reinforce the belief in an essentially fair and just society while avoiding the need to acknowledge the persistence of racist discourses and ideologies. Greater theoretical, conceptual and methodological clarity regarding race, racialization and related concepts in nursing inquiry is needed to address health and social inequities. (shrink)

Decades of psychological research have been aimed at modeling how people learn features and categories. The empirical validation of these theories is often based on artificial stimuli with simple representations. Recently, deep neural networks have reached or surpassed human accuracy on tasks such as identifying objects in natural images. These networks learn representations of real‐world stimuli that can potentially be leveraged to capture psychological representations. We find that state‐of‐the‐art object classification networks provide surprisingly accurate predictions of human similarity judgments for (...) natural images, but they fail to capture some of the structure represented by people. We show that a simple transformation that corrects these discrepancies can be obtained through convex optimization. We use the resulting representations to predict the difficulty of learning novel categories of natural images. Our results extend the scope of psychological experiments and computational modeling by enabling tractable use of large natural stimulus sets. (shrink)

This study examines the cross‐cultural generality of Hering's (1878/1964) color‐opponent theory of color appearance. English‐speaking and Somali‐speaking observers performed variants of two paradigms classically used to study color‐opponency. First, both groups identified similar red, green, blue, and yellow unique hues. Second, 25 English‐speaking and 34 Somali‐speaking observers decomposed the colors present in 135 Munsell color samples into their component Hering elemental sensations—red,green,blue, yellow, white, and black—or else responded “no term.” Both groups responded no term for many samples, notably purples. Somali (...) terms for yellow were often used to name colors all around the color circle, including colors that are bluish according to Hering's theory. Four Somali Grue speakers named both green and blue elicitation samples by their term for green. However, that term did not name the union of all samples called blue or green by English speakers. A similar pattern was found among three Somali Achromatic speakers, who called the blue elicitation sample black or white. Thus, color decomposition by these Somali‐speaking observers suggests a lexically influenced re‐dimensionalization of color appearance space, rather than a simple reduction of the one proposed by Hering. Even some Somali Green‐Blue speakers, whose data were otherwise similar to English, showed similar trends in yellow and blue usage. World Color Survey data mirror these results. These within‐ and cross‐cultural violations of Hering's theory do not challenge the long‐standing view that universal sensory processes mediate color appearance. However, they do demonstrate an important contribution of language in the human understanding of color. (shrink)

A longish (12 page) discussion of Richard Sorabji's excellent book, with a further discussion of what it means for a theory of emotions to be a cognitive theory.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Religion and Public Policy: Human Rights, Conflict, and Ethics ed. by Sumner B. Twiss, Marian Simion, and Rodney L. PetersenJoshua T. MauldinReligion and Public Policy: Human Rights, Conflict, and Ethics Edited by Sumner B. Twiss, Marian Simion, and Rodney L. Petersen NEW YORK: CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2015. 372 PP. $99.00This festschrift in honor of David Little canvasses the range of topics Little explored during a distinguished career. The (...) breadth of Little's research interests is reflected in the diversity of essays represented in the volume. Some of the seventeen chapters reflect directly on issues within Little's corpus while others discuss the influence Little had on various fields of inquiry or draw on his ideas for new areas of research.John Witte and Gene Outka provide essays of the first sort: Witte examines Little's work on the religious origins of human rights, while Outka raises questions about how Little's historical work on Reformed Protestantism relates to his work in human rights. Outka raises broader questions about methodology in religious ethics, questions also explored in a chapter by John Kelsay. These include foundationalism, the role of normativity in the study of religion, and the role of expressly theological concepts in religious ethics. The questions are intertwined but played out in different ways in Little's scholarly career; the first [End Page 224] two issues arose in response to the 1978 volume, Comparative Religious Ethics: A New Method, which was foundationalist in orientation. It sought to find the "basic" norm that was the ground of all other moral ideas in a religious system, whether Christianity, Buddhism, or the religion of the Navajo. Jeffrey Stout's critique of the book's foundationalist assumptions struck a serious blow to the project; in response, Little conceded so many of Stout's points that Stout questioned whether the methodology of the volume was meant to be taken seriously. As Kelsey notes in his chapter, some wondered whether the rigid methodology of Comparative Religious Ethics was created primarily to give religious ethicists a respectable job to do in an academic environment in which the study of religion was otherwise suspect. It sought to create a neo-Weberian study of religious ethical systems in which the scholar bracketed out her own ethical assumptions. Through this "value-free" descriptive science, the comparative ethicist hoped to gain admission to the secular academy. Foundationalism was meant to provide the kind of objectivity that gave the religious ethicist something objective to study. Giving up foundationalism would mean giving up the hope of comparative religious ethics as a science.This brings us to the role of distinctly theological claims in Little's work. When putting on the normative hat of the ethicist, Little preferred to bracket out theological assumptions, precisely in order to maintain conversation with his nonreligious interlocutors. The benefits of such a method are evident in this volume. Little managed to engage in moral and political conversation with scholars across a variety of religious, political, and national locations. As is clear in Little's afterword to this volume, he believes that bracketing out his first-order theological assumptions made this dialogue possible. But how can we be sure that this is the case? Perhaps other intellectual and moral virtues allowed this dialogue to flourish, and perhaps Little's virtues would have made such a dialogue possible, even had he been more open about his theological assumptions all along the way. It's hard to know for sure. But in light of the difficulties involved in bracketing out first-order theological assumptions, perhaps the better option is to make one's assumptions explicit while remaining willing to change one's mind when given compelling reasons to do so. That, it seems to me, is what it means to be reasonable—and this is compatible with holding theological beliefs. [End Page 225]Joshua T. MauldinCenter of Theological InquiryCopyright © 2017 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Secular Government, Religious People by Ira C. Lupu and Robert W. TuttleJoshua T. MauldinSecular Government, Religious People Ira C. Lupu and Robert W. Tuttle grand rapids, mi: eerdmans, 2014. 279 pp. $25.00.In Secular Government, Religious People, Ira C. Lupu and Robert W. Tuttle provide a structuralist account of the Establishment Clause and suggest that their conception of the secular character of government resonates with the dominant strand of (...) First Amendment jurisprudence. On their view, the religion clauses are not only about the religious rights of persons; the Establishment Clause is primarily about the character of government itself. That character is secular, meaning that the government is “constitutionally disabled” from settling “ecclesiastical questions.” These include not only obviously theological questions about the nature of God or true religion but also seemingly more mundane matters such as “Who is fit to be a minister?” or “Which faction of a fractured religious congregation is closer to the beliefs of the congregation’s charter members?”The problem with judicial attempts to engage such questions became increasingly evident in the development of legal doctrine throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and one of the primary values of this book is its clear account of this history. One example is the “iconic” Supreme Court decision in the 1971 case of Lemon v. Kurtzman, which included an important rule against “excessive entanglement” between the state and religious groups, based on the Establishment Clause. For Lupu and Tuttle, this ruling is paradigmatic of their structuralist argument for nonestablishment. If the Establishment Clause requires that government be secular, then the government may not claim divine authority or establish a covenant with God or engage in acts of worship. The government may, nevertheless, acknowledge the religious character of its people; the religious freedom of the people is protected by the secular character of government in that a sphere of society is reserved for religious practice and thereby protected from governmental intrusion. While religious persons might actually prefer that government “interfere” in the religious sphere for various reasons, and might even view the government’s failure to do so as an assault on religious freedom, it is precisely the noninterference of government in religious matters that protects religious freedom.The book involves both a descriptive analysis of the development of American law and a normative argument for a particular legal philosophy. Tuttle and Lupu argue that it is best when government is secular, and they suggest that this is a basic assumption of mainstream American law, both in its origins and later [End Page 213] trajectory. Some will question the sharp distinction drawn between “government” and “people.” In a democratic society, is there a clear line between the people and the government as representative of the people’s will? Furthermore, one wonders whether the kind of American “civil religion” that Robert Bellah famously analyzed in the 1960s, and against which Tuttle and Lupu inveigh, is simply here to stay. American presidents continue to invoke God in public speeches, and many citizens believe that the United States itself is in a covenant with God. Tuttle and Lupu worry that any appeal to such a covenant leads to the “totalitarian” identification of political and divine authority. But the covenant with God could just as easily lead to a critique of political authority as to a reinforcement of it. As Abraham Lincoln declared in a legendary piece of American political theology, “The Almighty has his own purposes.” For Tuttle and Lupu, this kind of civil religion is both unconstitutional and bad public policy. But one wonders whether we could ever really eradicate it, and even if we could, whether it would be wise to do so.Joshua T. MauldinCenter of Theological InquiryCopyright © 2016 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Most cognitive psychology experiments evaluate models of human cognition using a relatively small, well-controlled set of stimuli. This approach stands in contrast to current work in neuroscience, perception, and computer vision, which have begun to focus on using large databases of natural images. We argue that natural images provide a powerful tool for characterizing the statistical environment in which people operate, for better evaluating psychological theories, and for bringing the insights of cognitive science closer to real applications. We discuss how (...) some of the challenges of using natural images as stimuli in experiments can be addressed through increased sample sizes, using representations from computer vision, and developing new experimental methods. Finally, we illustrate these points by summarizing recent work using large image databases to explore questions about human cognition in four different domains: modeling subjective randomness, defining a quantitative measure of representativeness, identifying prior knowledge used in word learning, and determining the structure of natural categories. (shrink)

Women constitute the majority of both the leadership and the membership of local toxic waste activist organizations; yet, gender and the fight against toxic hazards are rarely analyzed together in studies on gender or on environmental issues. This absence of rigorous analysis of gender issues in toxic waste activism is particularly noticeable since many scholars already make note that women predominate in this movement. This article is an attempt to understand how women activists transcend private pain, fear, and disempowerment and (...) become powerful forces for change by organizing against toxic waste in their communities. This article systematically looks at these connections by examining data from survey research and case studies. The authors are particularly interested in the transformation of self of these women, with an emphasis on “ways of knowing.” They also examine the potential of existing social movement theories to explain women's activism against toxic waste. (shrink)

We consider four mechanisms by which apparent discontinuities in the distribution of antisociality could arise: (1) executive genes or hormonal systems, (2) multiplicative interactions of predisposing factors, (3) environmental tracking into a limited number of social roles, and (4) cross-generational gene—environment interactions. A more explicit consideration of complex self-organizing dynamic systems may help us understand the maintenance of antisocial subpopulations.

It is often argued that cosmopolitanism faces unique motivational constraints, asking more of individuals than they are able to give. This ‘motivational problem’ is held to pose a significant challenge to cosmopolitanism, as it appears unable to transform its moral demands into motivated political action. This article develops a novel response to the motivational problem facing cosmopolitanism, arguing that self-interest, alongside appeals to sentiment, can play a vital and neglected, transitional role in moving towards an expanded cosmopolitical condition. The article (...) explicates the ‘motivational problem’, analyses the relationship between self-interest and sentimental cosmopolitanism in addressing it, and develops a series of claims that self-interest can be one important component in what we label as ‘transitional cosmopolitanism’. In doing so, we argue that self-interested motivations can be compatible with sentiment-based approaches, rendering them more plausible. In addition, two expected critiques of self-interested ‘transitional cosmopolitanism’ are tackled: (A) That it cannot address feasibility constraints, and (B) That self-interested motivations cannot meet what an ‘authentic’ cosmopolitanism entails. We refute and challenge these critiques and outline three conditions in which self-interest can advance a transitional form of cosmopolitanism, while also being compatible with cosmopolitanism writ large. (shrink)

Intuitively, vagueness involves some sort of indeterminacy: if Plato is a borderline case of baldness, then there is no fact of the matter about whether or not he’s bald—he’s neither bald nor not bald. The leading formal treatments of such indeterminacy—three valued logic, supervaluationism, etc.—either fail to validate the classical theorems, or require that various classically valid inference rules be restricted. Here we show how a fully classical, yet indeterminist account of vagueness can be given within natural semantics, an alternative (...) semantics for classical proof theory. The key features of the account are: there is a single notion of truth—definite truth—and a single notion of validity; sentences can be true, false, or undetermined; all classical theorems and all classical inference rule are valid; the sorites argument is unsound; ‘definitely’ is treated as a meta-language predicate; higher-order vagueness is handled via semantic ascent. (shrink)

Drawing on the influence of primacy and recency effects in processing information about corporate social responsibility, the authors examine how internal and external factors impact the consumer-firm relationship in the presence of contradictory CSR information. Evaluating these factors provides a more comprehensive understanding of how consumers react to unethical and socially irresponsible actions. Contrary to recent research that suggests a reactive CSR communication strategy to be best due to recency effects, the present findings show that past customer experiences with the (...) firm facilitate a ‘primacy effect’. Thus, when corporate social irresponsibility occurs, a customer’s prior experiences mitigate negative consequences. Conversely, a firm’s positive CSR reputation may provide goodwill, although it does not guarantee that consumers will process CSR information differently. Therefore, firms cannot build a strong CSR reputation and expect to be immune from the consequences of CSI. Given these new findings of how consumers process contradictory CSR information, firms should implement a strategic and deliberate communication plan that delivers different messages to different stakeholders. Specifically, these findings suggest that firms benefit most from a proactive communication strategy with their current customers and a reactive communication strategy with the general public. (shrink)

To examine the underlying processes of an innovative mind-body practice, Mindful Body Awareness, this exploratory study involved four case studies analyzed phenomenologically using the dialogal method. Mindful Body Awareness combines manual and verbal processing, and is focused on facilitation of client body awareness. Four individuals were recruited to receive weekly 1.25 hour sessions over four weeks. The Helpfulness Aspects of Therapy form was administered immediately after each session to access participants’ perceptions of the therapy experience. In addition, the Scale of (...) Body Connection was used to examine pre- and post-body awareness and bodily dissociation. Analysis involved phenomenology and descriptive statistics. The overall perceived helpfulness of the intervention was evident in the four themes that emerged from the analysis. These themes were gaining interoceptive awareness, personal agency, therapist trust and conceptual framing, and transformation. The participants’ responses were also used to investigate the therapy process across time. A pattern of increased interoceptive depth was apparent, as was a concomitant progression in embodied sense of self. Improvements in body awareness and bodily dissociation were evident for two of the four participants. These findings help to identify primary components of Mindful Body Awareness and suggest the role of these components in the embodiment process. (shrink)

Documenting capacity assessments and identifying substitute decisionmakers in healthcare facilities is ethically required for optimal patient care. Lack of such documentation has the potential to generate confusion and contention among patients, their family members, and members of the healthcare team. An overview of our research at the Ottawa Hospital and issues that influence the consistency of documentation in the Canadian context are presented here, as well as ideas for the mitigation of these issues and ways to encourage better documentation.

Joshua Matthan Brown contrasts the concept of God assumed by most analytic philosophers, what he refers to as theistic personalism, with that of the apophatic conception of God endorsed by Eastern Christian thinkers. He maintains that the most powerful and economical response to contemporary arguments for atheism is to reject theistic personalism and adopt apophatic theism. Apophatic theists believe there is a lot we cannot say about God, taking the divine nature to be completely ineffable. Brown develops (...) a coherent account of divine ineffability and provides reasons for adopting this oft misunderstood view. Importantly, he draws upon apophatic theology, and its commitment to divine ineffability, to proffer an undercutting defeater for virtually every contemporary argument for the nonexistence of God. Along the way he anticipates and responds to several significant objections. (shrink)

The doctrine of the resurrection says that God will resurrect the body that lived and died on earth—that the post-mortem body will be numerically identical to the pre-mortem body. After exegetically supporting this claim, and defending it from a recent objection, we ask: supposing that the doctrine of the resurrection is true, what are the implications for the mind-body relation? Why would God resurrect the body that lived and died on earth? We compare three accounts of the mind-body relation that (...) have been applied to the doctrine of the resurrection: substance dualism, constitutionalism, and animalism. We argue that animalism offers a superior explanation for the necessity of the resurrection: since human persons just are their bodies, life after death requires resurrection of one’s body. We conclude that those endorsing the doctrine of the resurrection should be animalists. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Acts of Enjoyment: Rhetoric, Žižek, and the Return of the SubjectJames J. Brown Jr. and Joshua GunnActs of Enjoyment: Rhetoric, Žižek, and the Return of the Subject by Thomas Rickert. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007. Pp. x + 252. $24.95, hardcover.Thomas Rickert had a falling-out with his brother, and this distresses him so much that his disrupted relation is described as “traumatic.” Rickert reports that (...) while listening to a portable CD player during a run on an unexpectedly warm winter day, a song by the now defunct jazz/rock band Morphine reminded him of a happy time at a pool hall with his brother (24). Mediated—or better, medicated—by music, the homological happiness of running in the sun and a positive past memory also resurfaced a painful relational rupture, the reason of which Rickert omits to underscore that mysterious, “little detail or object” of the Real that marks his singular finitude as a writing subject (216 n. 11). We’ll want to come back to this curiously deliberate omission, but for the present we note Rickert is not simply an undead author but a human being with relations and feelings. He is not just a gifted scholar or a bundle of reflections, but a nexus of body and movement and words and affect. If there is anything that Rickert’s study can be said to work through with brilliance, humor, and grace, it is the reality of complex personhood.Rickert’s brotherly confession comes in Chapter 1 as a way to introduce a psychoanalytic understanding of subjectivity, and more specifically, to help illustrate how trauma works itself out as an afterwardness or “belatedness” ( Nachträglichkeit ): traumatic events from the past are not reckoned with or worked-through until some coincidence or reminder, such as a similar [End Page 183] sensory experience, reintroduces the event in doubled re-presentation (18–27). This implies the “subject” (a paradigm person) is a kind of timedelay, a self-conscious temporal moving that becomes this way through re-presentation. The rhetorical subject is analogously a retrojected reckoning with events past (not all traumatic) that Rickert identifies as a scene of writing, a locus that has important implications for rhetorical studies in general and writing pedagogy in particular. Rickert’s logic is as follows: if we agree that the subject is a belated one in the psychoanalytic sense, then how we teach rhetoric needs to change. Rickert opens the book with the observation that his students are producing excellent cultural critiques but that such critiques do not lead the students to change their actions (1–7), perhaps evidence enough that something is not quite right in a classroom grounded by “cultural studies pedagogy” and ideology critique—or at the very least, proof that something has changed. The opening gambit is simply that a “postpedagogy” premised on an understanding of rhetorical subjectivity as belatedness is better than a status quo rooted in the rational subject of the Enlightenment.Mostly through a Žižek-filtered, Lacanian lens, Acts of Enjoyment then undertakes a retake of the rhetorical field, frequently scanning from the traumatic ontology of the rhetorical subject to that domain of knowledge that we hold dear, the subject of rhetoric. In Chapter 2, the (primal) scene thus shifts from the slo-mo subject to rhetorical studies, initially through a reassessment of Kinneavy’s “communications triangle,” but ultimately in response to the shock treatment of poststructuralism. The initial theoretical traumas introduced by Victor Vitanza, Diane Davis, Sharon Crowley, and others discussed in Chapter 1 are threaded into an account of “poststructural” redress in Chapter 2: as is true of all forms of trauma, the initial poststructural jolt delivered to the concept of subjectivity was deadened; poststructural theory was eventually used to “shore up rather than challenge Kinneavy’s triangle” (37). To truly work-through our traumatized subject in both senses, we need a second trauma: Lacanian psychoanalysis. Presumably, “poststructuralist thought” is to be opposed because it has no account of the subject (21–24); “Lacan,” after all, “is not a poststructuralist” (48). The remainder of the chapter is then used to deploy Lacan’s conceptual lexicon.Just as... (shrink)

It is claimed by the future like ours anti-abortion argument that since killing adult humans is wrong because it deprives them of a future of value and the fetus has a future of value, killing fetuses is wrong in the same way that killing adult human beings is wrong. In The morality of abortion and the deprivation of futures (this journal, April 2000) I argued that the persuasive power of this argument rests upon an equivocation on the term “future of (...) value”. If the expression means “a potential future of value” then the moral claim is implausible because people do not in general have rights to what they need to fulfill their potential; if the expression means “self-represented future of value” then the argument fails because the fetus does not represent its future. Under no interpretation is the argument sound. In Deprivations, futures and the wrongness of killing (this journal, December 2001) Donald Marquis, author of the future like ours argument, responds at length to this objection. In the present essay the focus of the debate shifts to the proper interpretation of the right not to be killed. Donald Marquis argues that this liberty right entails the welfare right to the means necessary to sustain life; I argue that the right not to be killed does not entail unlimited welfare rights. On Marquis's view, the right not to be killed confers upon the fetus the right to whatever it takes to sustain life; on the view I defend, the right not to be killed does not confer upon the fetus or anyone else the right to another person's body. On Marquis's view, abortion is almost never permissible; on my view abortion is almost always permissible. (shrink)

Evolutionary models of behavior often encounter resistance due to an apparent focus on themes of sex, selfishness, and gender differences. The target article might seem ripe for such criticism. However, life history theory suggests that these themes, and their counterparts, including cooperation, generosity, and gender similarities, represent two sides of the same coin – all are consequences of reproductive trade-offs made throughout development.

This paper introduces a framework for thinking about ontological questions—in particular, the Special Composition Question—and shows how the framework might help support something like an account of restricted composition. The framework takes the form of an account of natural objects, in analogy with David Lewis’s account of natural properties. Objects, like properties, come in various metaphysical grades, from the fundamental, fully objective, perfectly natural objects to the nomologically otiose, maximally gerrymandered, perfectly non-natural objects. The perfectly natural objects, I argue, are (...) the mereological simples, and (roughly) a collection composes an object of degree-n naturalness if and only if its members are arranged F-wise, for some property F that appears in the degree-n natural laws. Arbitrary composites turn out to be perfectly non-natural objects and are metaphysical bystanders. Ordinary composite objects fall in between. Some—e.g., atoms—are very (though not perfectly) natural; others—e.g., tables—are highly non-natural. (shrink)

Contemporary scholars of Chinese philosophy often presuppose that early China possessed a naturalistic worldview, devoid of any non-natural concepts, such as transcendence. Challenging this presupposition head-on, Joshua R. Brown and Alexus McLeod argue that non-naturalism and transcendence have a robust and significant place in early Chinese thought. -/- This book reveals that non-naturalist positions can be found in early Chinese texts, in topics including conceptions of the divine, cosmogony, and apophatic philosophy. Moreover, by closely examining a range of (...) early Chinese texts, and providing comparative readings of a number of Western texts and thinkers, the book offers a way of reading early Chinese Philosophy as consistent with the religious philosophy of the East and West, including the Abrahamic and the Brahmanistic religions. -/- Co-written by a philosopher and theologian, this book draws out unique insights into early Chinese thought, highlighting in particular new ways to consider a range of Chinese concepts, including tian, dao, li, and you/wu. (shrink)

Are properties perfectly natural (or not) relative to worlds, or are they perfectly natural (or not) tout court? That is, could there be a property P that is instanti-ated at worlds w1 and w2, and is perfectly natural at w1 but not at w2? Here, we offer an original argument for the non-world-relativity of perfect naturalness. Along the way, we reply to a prima facie compelling argument for the contin-gency of perfect naturalness, based upon the connection between natural prop-erties and (...) laws of nature. (shrink)