i am proud to honor the legacy of Frank M. Oppenheim. This legacy is broad and deep. First, Oppenheim has played a major role in remedying the neglect of the life and work of Josiah Royce. He has done so with probing articles on central concepts in Royce’s philosophy and with a series of longer studies that delineated unexpected developments in Royce’s thought and life, demonstrating how Royce, throughout his career, refined and rethought his central philosophical ideas and (...) created entirely unique and new directions of philosophical reflection. With superb interpretive and mediating skills, Oppenheim has provided the scholarly world with a finely nuanced picture of the context of Royce’s thought in terms of his... (shrink)

Frank Mathias Oppenheim was born in Coldwater, Ohio, on May 18, 1925, and studied at Xavier, Loyola, and Saint Louis Universities. He joined the Chicago Province of the Jesuit Order in 1942 and was ordained on June 15, 1955. He is the author of four books on Josiah Royce’s philosophy: Royce’s Journey Down Under, Royce’s Mature Philosophy of Religion, Royce’s Mature Ethics, and Reverence for the Relations of Life: Re-Imagining Pragmatism via Josiah Royce’s Interactions with Peirce, James, and Dewey, (...) in addition to scores of journal articles devoted to Royce. Oppenheim is also the editor of Josiah Royce’s Late Writings: A Collection of Unpublished and Scattered Works, and was... (shrink)

Fr. Frank Oppenheim’s body of work dedicated to the philosophy of Josiah Royce exhibits a degree of objectivity and admiration not evidenced in philosophical circles since Ralph Barton Perry’s magisterial The Thought and Character of William James.1 Royce once derisively referred to his own system Σ as akin to a Boston attic—a “junk heap” in which everything is there, but best of luck in getting anything out! It is helpful to consider the entire body of Oppenheim’s Royce-work as (...) the combination of a “Boston attic” and the most ideal image of the “kitchen sink”—the contents not only all there, but neatly separated, perfectly arranged, and brilliantly displayed. The purpose of this essay is to situate Oppenheim’s... (shrink)

Over the course of a fifty-year scholarly career, Frank M. Oppenheim, SJ, has devotedly studied and encouraged others to study the American philosopher Josiah Royce. Early in my own study of Royce, I read and learned a great deal from Oppenheim’s book Reverence for the Relations of Life. I met Oppenheim at a 2007 conference at Harvard on Royce and William James, and he encouraged my continued study. Thus, I am honored to participate in this issue of (...) The Pluralist celebrating Oppenheim’s thought and his study of Royce.In spite of all the efforts of Oppenheim and other scholars, Royce remains too little known.1 It is tempting to ask why a contemporary scholar would devote painstaking and devoted attention... (shrink)

Formulations of Anselm’s ontological argument have been the subject of a number of recent studies. We examine these studies in light of Anselm’s text and (a) respond to criticisms that have surfaced in reaction to our earlier representations of the argument, (b) identify and defend a more refined representation of Anselm’s argument on the basis of new research, and (c) compare our representation of the argument, which analyzes that than which none greater can be conceived as a definite description, to (...) a representation that analyzes it as an arbitrary name. (shrink)

The authors investigated the ontological argument computationally. The premises and conclusion of the argument are represented in the syntax understood by the automated reasoning engine PROVER9. Using the logic of definite descriptions, the authors developed a valid representation of the argument that required three non-logical premises. PROVER9, however, discovered a simpler valid argument for God's existence from a single non-logical premise. Reducing the argument to one non-logical premise brings the investigation of the soundness of the argument into better focus. Also, (...) the simpler representation of the argument brings out clearly how the ontological argument constitutes an early example of a ?diagonal argument? and, moreover, one used to establish a positive conclusion rather than a paradox. (shrink)

The issue of violent extremism has given rise to new policy debates in Norway. A key limitation of these debates, often grounded in naïve assumptions about the peacebuilding effect of education, is the downplay of emotions and dissent in democratic engagement. This article analyses how selected educators in Norway describe encountering and engaging with extremist students for educational interventional purposes. Previous research suggests that educational efforts to counter violent extremism can be exclusionary from the perspective of target audiences. In contrast, (...) this study draws on agonistic pluralism to provide an alternative to understand educational approaches that may help students disengage from violent extremism. The findings show that the selected educators argue the importance of trust, support and tolerance when engaging with extremist students. For these professionals, education should not downplay radical or extreme emotions but rather place them at the centre of educational engagement. Furthermore, it is suggested that educators’ empathic engagement may open the path for young people to disengage from violent extremism. (shrink)

Background Infertility is an increasingly prevalent disease in society and is considered by the World Health Organization to be a public health problem. An important ethical issue arises from the clarification of reproductive rights in a fair and equal way. The objective of this study was to deepen and update the knowledge and discussion about the difficulty of accessing infertility treatments in Brazil. Methods A cross-sectional observational study was carried out through the application of an online questionnaire that collected the (...) socioeconomic characteristics of couples and identify how barriers to infertility care affect the most vulnerable populations. We included couples who sought medical assistance to achieve pregnancy at two clinics in the states of São Paulo and Minas Gerais. Results A total of 201 questionnaires were analyzed. Most couples self-declared as white and the average age of wives was 36 years and husbands 38 years. 65% (65%) of couples would proceed with the treatment in a different city to which they lived, 37% evaluated as having easy access to a medical specialist only after indication, and more than half of the participating have thought about giving up the treatment due to some difficulty in accessing it. 39% of participants sought more than one medical service to find better reception, 42% of couples sought more than one medical service to define where it would be better financially, and 67.2% referred to the high cost of treatments, that is, financial issues, as a great difficulty in accessing medical services and/or treatment. Although 72.6% of couples considered having a good quality of life, 54.2% admitted that infertility and the search for treatment generated anxiety/stress in the couple’s life. Conclusion There is a need for public education on reproductive health and for policymakers to raise awareness of the importance of the difficulty that many couples face in seeking treatment to become pregnant, especially in countries with less financial resources. Indeed, it is commonly accepted that there is a universal human right to access healthcare of appropriate quality as a matter of justice. Discussion of access to reproductive technologies should be considered taking into account the longstanding ethical debate regarding fertility, fecundity, and infertility, as well as reproductive care. (shrink)

Though Frege was interested primarily in reducing mathematics to logic, he succeeded in reducing an important part of logic to mathematics by defining relations in terms of functions. By contrast, Whitehead & Russell reduced an important part of mathematics to logic by defining functions in terms of relations (using the definite description operator). We argue that there is a reason to prefer Whitehead & Russell's reduction of functions to relations over Frege's reduction of relations to functions. There is an interesting (...) system having a logic that can be properly characterized in relational but not in functional type theory. This shows that relational type theory is more general than functional type theory. The simplification offered by Church in his functional type theory is an over-simplification: one can't assimilate predication to functional application.<br>. (shrink)

The authors investigated the ontological argument computationally. The premises and conclusion of the argument are represented in the syntax understood by the automated reasoning engine PROVER9. Using the logic of definite descriptions, the authors developed a valid representation of the argument that required three non-logical premises. PROVER9, however, discovered a simpler valid argument for God's existence from a single non-logical premise. Reducing the argument to one non-logical premise brings the investigation of the soundness of the argument into better focus. Also, (...) the simpler representation of the argument brings out clearly how the ontological argument constitutes an early example of a ‘diagonal argument’ and, moreover, one used to establish a positive conclusion rather than a paradox. (shrink)

Among the most auspicious findings of neuroscience in recent years is the mutability of brain connectivity. In allowing for an increased integration of the study of brain with the study of mind, it deepens our understanding of affect and cognition and of the perceptual and imaginative dimensions of the psyche. It is the primary objective of this article to investigate what the young discipline known as neuroaesthetics brings to our understanding of Beckett’s creativity and how it enriches our scholarship. Focusing (...) on Beckett’s preoccupation with memory, resituating this preoccupation within the arena of the Default Mode Network — in which reference to self is spontaneous and in some sense deeply related to the freely associative speech of the “talking cure” — leads to several conclusions: The most significant include the potentially therapeutic value Beckett derived from writing (change in the mind being a function of change in the brain) and to the justification for recontextualizing psychohistory (speculative at best) as psychobiology. (shrink)

La presente contribución indaga una dimensión de la intensa y compleja relación intelectual entre Henri de Lubac y Michel de Certeau, graficada en el paso del Corpus Mysticum a La fábula mística. En particular nos detenemos en una arista del proyecto intelectual de Lubac que busca desempolvar las potencialidades de la simbólica medieval para contrarrestar las nefastas derivas de la racionalidad moderna. Dicho proyecto se inspira en una ontología sacramental y en la centralidad de la allegoria in factis, heredada del (...) pensamiento de los Padres de la Iglesia. La reflexión que realiza Certeau en La fábula mística muestra ser no solo la continuación del Corpus Mysticum de Lubac, sino que de manera tangencial evidencia los límites del proyecto de su maestro, a través de su atención lúcida a la ruptura nominalista. Certeau muestra así que la emergencia de la mística moderna de los siglos xvi-xvii nace como respuesta al desaplazamiento de la allegoria in factis a la allegoria in verbis, que estaría a la raíz de la desontologización del lenguaje y del cisma entre la experiencia espiritual y la teología. (shrink)

In this issue of Cognition, Thompson and her colleagues challenge the results from a paper we published several years ago. That paper demonstrated that metacognitive difficulty or disfluency can trigger more analytical thinking as measured by accuracy on several reasoning tasks. In their experiments, Thompson et al. find evidence that people process information more deeply—but not necessarily more accurately—when they experience disfluency. These results are consistent with our original theorizing, but the authors misinterpret it as counter-evidence because they suggest that (...) accuracy is a measure of deeper processing rather than a contingent outcome of such processing. We further suggest that Thompson et al. err when they discriminate between “perceptual fluency” and “answer fluency,” the former of which is an element of the latter. Thompson et al. advance research by adding reaction time as a measure of deeper cognitive processing, but we caution against misinterpreting the meaning of accuracy. (shrink)

This collection of original essays on political and legal theory concentrates on themes dealt with in the work of Felix Oppenheim, including fundamental political and legal concepts and their implications for the scope of morality in politics and international relations. Among the issues addressed are the relationship between empirical and normative definitions of "freedom", "power", and "interests", whether governments are free to act against the national interest, and whether they can ever be morally obliged to do so.

I have been asked to consider two questions: How Christian ‘oughts’ are related to Christian ‘is-es’, and, What does Christianity take flourishing to be? The background to these questions is that Christian ethics have traditionally been taken, both by supporters and opponents, as au ethic of creature-hood, sometimes quite crudely conceived. It is a sketch, but by no means a caricature, of a great deal of standard Christian thinking, to depict it as answering the two questions as follows: God is (...) your Creator: therefore you ought to obey him. The end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him for ever. (shrink)

To explain the phenomena in the world of our experience, to answer the question “why?” rather than only the question “what?”, is one of the foremost objectives of all rational inquiry; and especially, scientific research in its various branches strives to go beyond a mere description of its subject matter by providing an explanation of the phenomena it investigates. While there is rather general agreement about this chief objective of science, there exists considerable difference of opinion as to the function (...) and the essential characteristics of scientific explanation. In the present essay, an attempt will be made to shed some light on these issues by means of an elementary survey of the basic pattern of scientific explanation and a subsequent more rigorous analysis of the concept of law and of the logical structure of explanatory arguments. (shrink)

Human beings have to ask how faith is possible, in this mixed world of trouble and joy. A safe universe with no scope for adversity would be a mechanical toy, not a creation. A glorious universe will be a place where troubles have eventually been overcome. Christians believe in one God, who is three Persons. God the heavenly Father took the risk of making a real world, full of living people capable of happiness. Jesus Christ, God the Son, came as (...) a human being to take responsibility for creation. He suffered and died; and he rose from death to vindicate the whole enterprise and show that creation can and will be made good. People are not left to work out their own faith but are invited to belong to the church, in order to keep in touch with God the Spirit. They are to behave as God's children, not by rule-bound conformity but by grateful response to the glory of God the Holy Trinity. (shrink)

What are the characteristics to be included in a fruitful definition of democracy? More important still, which of the features commonly considered democratic had better be excluded from the dinning characteristics?

We wish to give a precise formulation of the intuitive concept: The degree to which the known facts support a given hypothesis.

Resolution is the most widely studied approach to propositional theorem proving. In developing efficient resolution-based algorithms, dozens of variants and refinements of resolution have been studied from both the empirical and analytic sides. The most prominent of these refinements are: DP (ordered). DLL (tree), semantic, negative, linear and regular resolution. In this paper, we characterize and study these six refinements of resolution. We give a nearly complete characterization of the relative complexities of all six refinements. While many of the important (...) separations and simulations were already known, many new ones are presented in this paper: in particular, we give the first separation of semantic resolution from general resolution. As a special case, we obtain the first exponential separation of negative resolution from general resolution. We also attempt to present a unifying framework for studying all of these refinements. (shrink)

This book presents an entirely new answer to the question: “What is fair?” In their radical approach to ethics, Frohlich and Oppenheimer argue that much of the empirical methodology of the natural sciences should be applied to the ethical questions of fairness and justice.

The authors evaluate the soundness of the ontological argument they developed in their 1991 paper. They focus on Anselm’s first premise, which asserts that there is a conceivable thing than which nothing greater can be conceived. After casting doubt on the argument Anselm uses in support of this premise, the authors show that there is a formal reading on which it is true. Such a reading can be used in a sound reconstruction of the argument. After this reconstruction is developed (...) in precise detail, the authors show that the conclusion, a reading of the claim “God exists”, does not quite achieve the end Anselm desired. (shrink)