For over fifty years, Rudolf J. Siebert (b.1927) has developed his Critical Theory of Religion and Society out of the Critical Theory of the Institute for Social Research, commonly known as the "Frankfurt School." Born from the World War II ruins of his hometown in Frankfurt, Germany, Siebert's Hegelian thought has developed in conversation with Christian theology, German Idealism, comparative religion, political-economy, sociology, psychology, and history. Also known as Dialectical Religiology, Siebert's literary corpus is saturated with the dialectics of (...) Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), especially Hegel's philosophy of right, history, religion, as well as Hegel's theodicy, which lays at the core of the enlightener's work. This volume has collected Siebert's most important works on Hegel and the Hegelian influence on his Critical Theory of Religion and Society, some of which have never been published before. The articles contained in this volume represent over five decades worth of Siebert's engagements with Hegel, and his application of his dialectical critique to a variety of subjects, including secularization, theology, rebellion and revolution, civil society and the family, war and peace, the future of the West, and many other important subjects. As philosophers frequently return to Hegel, especially within the troubling conditions of modernity, this collection of Siebert's articles will serve as a foundational source for the study of Hegelian thought and its relevance to the contemporary moment well into the 21st century and beyond. (shrink)

The Manifesto develops further the Critical Theory of Religion intrinsic to the Critical Theory of Society of the Frankfurt School into a new paradigm of the Psychology, Sociology, Philosophy and Theology of Religion.

We report on the development and initial validation of the Moralization of Everyday Life Scale, designed to measure variations in people's assignment of moral weight to commonplace behaviors. In Study 1, participants reported their judgments for a large number of potential moral infractions in everyday life; principal components analysis revealed 6 main dimensions of these judgments. In Study 2, scores on the 30-item MELS showed high reliability and distinctness from the Big 5 personality traits. In Study 3, scores on the (...) MELS were strongly correlated with scores on an early scale of moral judgments, suggesting convergent validity. (shrink)

In our essay we trace the evolution of the critical theory of religion, or comparative dialectical religiology, out of the critical theory of society of the Institute for Social Research or the Frankfurt School. For us, the history of religions reflects the history of humanity’s intellectual and spiritual evolution. As we developed our critical theory of religion, we have tried to supersede concretely the great accomplishments of three generations of critical theorists, particularly in the field of religion. One main theme (...) of our critical theory of religion is the dialectic of two modes of existence: having and being; egoism and altruism. As we determinately negated the critical theory of society into our comparative dialectical religiology, we also penetrated deeper into its roots in the works of Kant and Hegel, Marx and Freud, Judaism and Christianity, particularly into the mystical theology of the great dialectician Meister Eckhart and of his many modern followers. We conclude our essay with the vision of the City of Being. (shrink)

Joint attention (JA) is hypothesized to have a close relationship with developing theory of mind (ToM) capabilities. We tested the co-occurrence of ToM and JA in social interactions between adults with no reported history of psychiatric illness or neurodevelopmental disorders. Participants engaged in an experimental task that encouraged nonverbal communication, including JA, and also ToM activity. We adapted an in-lab variant of experience sampling methods (Bryant, Coffey, Povinelli, & Pruett, 2013) to measure ToM during JA based on participants’ subjective reports (...) of their thoughts while performing the task. This experiment successfully elicited instances of JA in 17/20 dyads. We compared participants’ thought contents during episodes of JA and non-JA. Our results suggest that, in adults, JA and ToM may occur independently. (shrink)

Whatever its ultimate philosophical merits, it is often thought that the growing block theory presents an intuitive picture of reality that accords well with our pre-reflective or folk view of time, and of the past, present, and future. This is partly motivated by the idea that we find it intuitive that, in some sense, the future is open and the past closed, and that the growing block theory is particularly well suited to accommodate this being so. In this paper, we (...) empirically investigate three claims. First, that people's intuitive or pre-reflective sense that the future is open is at least partly captured by there being truth-gaps for future contingents: what we call alethic openness. Second, that people, perhaps tacitly, believe that the fact that the future is alethically open is a reason to endorse the growing block theory; and third, that part of what explains why people tend to naively represent our world as a growing block is that they represent the future as alethically open. We found evidence in support of the first two claims. We consider the implications of these findings for several debates in the philosophy of time. (shrink)

We are Ancestors or The Age of Responsibility by Rudolf Jordan CAPE TIMES LIMITED CAPE TOWN 1941 PREFACE THIS treatise outlines the Philosophy of Responsibility...

In a friendly interdisciplinary debate, we interrogate from several vantage points the question of “personhood” in light of contemporary and near-future forms of social AI. David J. Gunkel approaches the matter from a philosophical and legal standpoint, while Jordan Wales offers reflections theological and psychological. Attending to metaphysical, moral, social, and legal understandings of personhood, we ask about the position of apparently personal artificial intelligences in our society and individual lives. Re-examining the “person” and questioning prominent construals of that (...) category, we hope to open new views upon urgent and much-discussed questions that, quite soon, may confront us in our daily lives. (shrink)

Much philosophical attention has been devoted to “The Land Ethic,” especially by Anglo-American philosophers, but little has been paid to A Sand County Almanac as a whole. Read through the lens of continental philosophy, A Sand County Almanac promulgates an evolutionary-ecological world view and effects a personal self- and a species-specific Self-transformation in its audience. It’s author, Aldo Leopold, realizes these aims through descriptive reflection that has something in common with phenomenology-although Leopold was by no stretch of the imagination a (...) phenomenologist. Consideration of human-animal intersubjectivity, thematized in A Sand County Almanac, brings to light the moral problem of hunting and killing animal subjects. Leopold does not confront that problem, but it is confronted and resolved by Jose Ortega y Gassett, Henry Beston, and Paul Shepard in terms of an appropriate human relationship with wild-animal Others. Comparison with the genuinely Other-based Leopold-Ortega-Beston-Shepard wild-animal ethic shows the purportedly Other-based humanand possibly animal ethic of Emmanuel Levinas actually to be Same-based after all. (shrink)

This work details the theological sources and moral significance of the life and work of the Scottish moral philosopher Adam Smith (1723-1790). The panel of contributors deepen our understanding of Adam Smith in his religious and theological context and the significance of this understanding for contemporary moral, economic, and political challenges to modern social life. The chapters cover a broad range of disciplinary and historical concerns, from Smith's view of providence and his famous "invisible hand" to the role of self-interest (...) and benevolence in Smith's social and economic thought. A better appreciation for the moral and theological dimensions of Smith's thought provides not only a better understanding of Smith's own context and significance in the Scottish Enlightenment, but also promises to assist in meeting the perennial challenges of properly connecting economic realities to moral responsibility. The book is of interest to advanced students and scholars of the history of economic thought, historical and moral theology, intellectual history, political science and philosophy. (shrink)

This study suggests a new approach to EEG data classification by exploring the idea of using evolutionary computation to both select useful discriminative EEG features and optimise the topology of Artificial Neural Networks. An evolutionary algorithm is applied to select the most informative features from an initial set of 2550 EEG statistical features. Optimisation of a Multilayer Perceptron is performed with an evolutionary approach before classification to estimate the best hyperparameters of the network. Deep learning and tuning with Long Short-Term (...) Memory are also explored, and Adaptive Boosting of the two types of models is tested for each problem. Three experiments are provided for comparison using different classifiers: one for attention state classification, one for emotional sentiment classification, and a third experiment in which the goal is to guess the number a subject is thinking of. The obtained results show that an Adaptive Boosted LSTM can achieve an accuracy of 84.44%, 97.06%, and 9.94% on the attentional, emotional, and number datasets, respectively. An evolutionary-optimised MLP achieves results close to the Adaptive Boosted LSTM for the two first experiments and significantly higher for the number-guessing experiment with an Adaptive Boosted DEvo MLP reaching 31.35%, while being significantly quicker to train and classify. In particular, the accuracy of the nonboosted DEvo MLP was of 79.81%, 96.11%, and 27.07% in the same benchmarks. Two datasets for the experiments were gathered using a Muse EEG headband with four electrodes corresponding to TP9, AF7, AF8, and TP10 locations of the international EEG placement standard. The EEG MindBigData digits dataset was gathered from the TP9, FP1, FP2, and TP10 locations. (shrink)

The present paper describes a joint action paradigm in which individuals or pairs utilized two computer keys to keep a dot stimulus moving inside a larger rectangle. Members of a pair could neither see nor hear each other. This paradigm allowed us to combine the discrete-trial type dependent variables commonly utilized by representational theorists, with the continuous, temporal dependence variables utilized by dynamical theorists. Analysis revealed that individuals kept the dot in the rectangle longer than dyads and did so by (...) moving it back and forth within the rectangle. Dyads, however, pressed their individual buttons as quickly as possible in order to keep the dot near the middle of the rectangle. These findings indicate that joint action constitutes a multi-scale phenomena that is best investigated via multiple, complementary methodologies versus single-measure, competing theories. (shrink)

Attention to economic inequality has increased in the wake of the global financial crisis, and along with this increased attention has come the need for reconsideration of the dynamics of moral reflection on inequality. Inequality is often viewed as a negative in terms of economic and social costs. But there are also moral challenges that arise from inequality. The Christian tradition emphasizes the diversity, and therefore the inequality, of the created order, and as such inequality is not simply a result (...) of sin. After the fall into sin, there are new dynamics which consist of sinful kinds of inequality as well as sinful attitudes towards the gifts and endowments of others. This “grief” at the good of others has been classically understood as the vice of envy. This article argues for the ongoing relevance of envy as a particularly important moral category for evaluation of economic inequality. (shrink)

There are two kinds of time-bias: near-bias and future-bias. While philosophers typically hold that near-bias is rationally impermissible, many hold that future-bias is rationally permissible. Call this normative hybridism. According to arbitrariness objections, certain patterns of preference are rationally impermissible because they are arbitrary. While arbitrariness objections have been levelled against both near-bias and future-bias, the kind of arbitrariness in question has been different. In this paper we investigate whether there are forms of arbitrariness that are common to both kinds (...) of preferences, and hence whether there are versions of the arbitrariness objection that are objections both to near-bias and future-bias. If there are, then this might go some way towards undermining normative hybridism and to defending a thorough-going time-neutralism. (shrink)

Critical engagement -- Lutheran World Federation (LWF) -- World Communion of Reformed Churches (WCRC) -- World Council of Churches (WCC) -- Conclusion, avenues for reform.

This comprehensive anthology offers influential works of philosophy written in the last 125 years in Northern and Central Europe and in the United States'durable contributions that have shaped the contemporary philosophical landscape in English-speaking countries. Substantial yet readable selections represent leading American pragmatists, the early Cambridge analysts, members of the Vienna Circle, the so-called "ordinary language" philosophers, along with recent analytic and post-analytic philosophers.

In considering the challenges medical educators face in addressing the needs of today's health-care system, it is instructive to review the challenges Abraham Flexner (1910) was called upon to address at the turn of the last century. As Flexner surveyed the state of U.S. medical schools 100 years ago, he found a legacy system of medical education that was failing to prepare 20th-century physicians to meet the evolving needs and expectations of patients. That legacy system was based largely on an (...) outmoded apprenticeship model of education, was failing to incorporate the rapidly developing natural sciences, and to make matters worse, was devoid of external scrutiny and uniform standards by which medical schools .. (shrink)

Upholding public trust in clinical research necessitates that human subjects be protected from avoidable harm and that the design, interpretation and reporting of research results be shielded from avoidable bias. On both counts, managing financial conflicts of interest is critically important, especially in the modern era when the opportunities for investigators to benefit personally from the commercialization of their intellectual property are overtly encouraged and rapidly expanding. Efforts are underway in the United States to provide more useful guidance to universities (...) and medical schools for purposes of strengthening the oversight and management of financial conflicts of interest in clinical research. (shrink)