In this paper we argue that reflection on the patterns of practical concern that agents like us exhibit strongly suggests that the same person relation comes in continuous degrees rather than being an all or nothing matter. We call this the SP-degree thesis. Though the SP-degree thesis is consistent with a range of views about personal-identity, we argue that combining desire-first approaches to personal-identity with the SP-degree thesis better explains our patterns of practical concern, and hence gives us reason to (...) endorse such an approach. We then argue that the combination of the SP-degree thesis and the desire-first approach are best modelled by a stage-theoretic view of persistence according to which temporal counterpart relations are non-symmetric relations that come in continuous degrees. Ultimately, we think that the overall appeal of this package of views provides reason to accept the package: reasons that outstrip the reasons we have to endorse any particular member of the package. (shrink)

Borrowing from evolutionary biology, existentialism, developmental psychology, and social learning theory, an integrated model of human behavior is applied to several forms of self-destructive behavior, to include anorexia nervosa, suicide, substance abuse, and pathological gambling. It is argued that self-destructive behavior is a function of how the individual psychologically construes survival and copes with perceptions of isolation and separation from the environment. The paradox of self-destructive behavior in organisms motivated by self-preservation is resolved by taking note of the fact that (...) self-destruction stems from peopleís efforts to survive psychologically and resolve the subjectóobject duality, even when this places their physical well-being in jeopardy. (shrink)

Given the possibilities of synthetic biology, weapons of mass destruction and global climate change, humans may achieve the capacity globally to alter life. This crisis calls for an ethics that furnishes effective motives to take global action necessary for survival. We propose a research program for understanding why ethical principles change across time and culture. We also propose provisional motives and methods for reaching global consensus on engineering field ethics. Current interdisciplinary research in ethics, psychology, neuroscience and evolutionary theory grounds (...) these proposals. Experimental ethics, the application of scientific principles to ethical studies, provides a model for developing policies to advance solutions. A growing literature proposes evolutionary explanations for moral development. Connecting these approaches necessitates an experimental or scientific ethics that deliberately examines theories of morality for reliability. To illustrate how such an approach works, we cover three areas. The first section analyzes cross-cultural ethical systems in light of evolutionary theory. While such research is in its early stages, its assumptions entail consequences for engineering education. The second section discusses Howard University and University of Puerto Rico/Mayagüez (UPRM) courses that bring ethicists together with scientists and engineers to unite ethical theory and practice. We include a syllabus for engineering and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) ethics courses and a checklist model for translating educational theory and practice into community action. The model is based on aviation, medicine and engineering practice. The third and concluding section illustrates Howard University and UPRM efforts to translate engineering educational theory into community action. Multidisciplinary teams of engineering students and instructors take their expertise from the classroom to global communities to examine further the ethicality of prospective technologies and the decision-making processes that lead to them. (shrink)

[First paragraphs] Reductionists about personal identity contend that there is nothing more to our survival than a series of causally related experiences and/or bodily continuities. Our belief in a separately existing self or subject of experiences is held to be unjustified, and we are recommended to reduce the conception of our own identity over time by jettisoning this belief. The particular form of reductionism that places the true view of our identity in a series of causally related experiences is usually (...) known as psychological reductionism or the psychological continuity approach. The version that gives prominence to the continuity of the body or human being, at least as it has been developed in recent years, is known as animalism or the biological approach. I shall concentrate on psychological reductionism because, of these two views, it seems to me the more intuitively appealing. But I shall also consider the animalist alternative, arguing that my main line of attack against psychological reductionism can be adapted against it. Both positions are mistaken in supposing that we have insufficient reason for believing in a separately existing subject of experiences. This conclusion is defended in the first section. In the second, I maintain that certain additional grounds that have been offered for accepting a reductionist position fail to do so. And, in the third, I examine a general objection to the conception of a subject of experiences that has been defended in the first two sections. (shrink)

Surviving Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality is the first book of philosophy that explores race, ethnicity, and nationality together and attempts to present a systematic and unified theory about them with particular emphasis on the metaphysical and epistemological issues that these phenomena raise.

Johnston presents an argument for a form of immortality that divests the notion of any supernatural elements. The book is packed with illuminating philosophical reflection on the question of what we are, and what it is for us to persist over time.

In this paper, I discuss an argument for the existence of God known as “The Argument from the Survival of the Jews.” This argument has the form of an Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE). It proceeds from the phenomenon of Jewish survival to the existence of God as the best explanation for this phenomenon. I will argue that, even if we grant that Jewish survival is a remarkable occurrence that demands an explanation, and even if we gloss over the (...) difficulties in defining the terms “Jewish” and “survive,” the argument ultimately fails as an argument for the existence of God. It fails because it postulates divine supervision in order to explain Jewish endurance, but it doesn’t provide any clues as to what might be the underlying mechanism at work. (shrink)

This chapter examines sexual assault from the point of view of a survivor, indicating that its consequences extend beyond the emotional or physical. Philosophical issues are raised by this experience, such as its effects on personal identity, notions of “harm“Notions of "harm", the role of denial, victim blaming, as well as its political implications for gender equality. Given the significance of these concerns and the extent of sexual assaults, it is imperative the harms of violence against women be taken more (...) seriously by philosophers. (shrink)

Here I advance two related evolutionary propositions. (1) Natural selection is most often considered to require competition between reproducing “individuals”, sometimes quite broadly conceived, as in cases of clonal, species or multispecies-community selection. But differential survival of non-competing and non-reproducing individuals will also result in increasing frequencies of survival-promoting “adaptations” among survivors, and thus is also a kind of natural selection. (2) Darwinists have challenged the view that the Earth’s biosphere is an evolved global homeostatic system. Since there is only (...) one biosphere, reproductive competition cannot have been involved in selection for such survival-promoting adaptations, they claim. But natural selection through survival could reconcile Gaia with evolutionary theory. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 61.2 (2000) 223-240 [Access article in PDF] The "Survival of the Fittest" and the Origins of Social Darwinism Gregory Claeys * In late September 1838 a young man, aged 29, a former medical student and amateur naturalist, who had spent several years in the South Pacific studying plant and animal life, but who remained puzzled as to why "favourable variants" of each species (...) survived while "unfavourable variants" were destroyed, sat perusing a book, as he later recalled, "for amusement." 1 The work which provoked Charles Darwin was T. R. Malthus's Essay on Population (1798), which he later claimed first suggested to him the idea that "on the whole the best fitted live." This idea Darwin would popularize through the notion of the "struggle for existence," a phrase which he famously claimed to use as a "metaphor" but which meant simply "the doctrine of Malthus applied with manifold force to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms." 2 That application resulted in the publication [End Page 223] of the Origin of Species in 1859, an occasion hailed as "the greatest event of Queen Victoria's reign," 3 even "by far the most important... in the history of the modern West." 4 It is well known, too, that Darwin's appreciation of Malthus was not unique even among naturalists. The year before the Origin of Species appeared another young man, Alfred Russel Wallace, aged 25, encountered the very same book. "There suddenly," he later recalled, flashed upon him "the idea of the survival of the fittest." 5 We know Wallace today, thus, as the codiscoverer of theory of natural selection, who presented a paper jointly with Darwin at the Linnean Society on that momentous evening of 1 July 1858 to mark their brilliant achievement. 6This curious coincidence has often been noted, but its ramifications require further assessment. This article examines some crucial nineteenth-century sources of the idea of the "survival of the fittest," which came to underpin many of the social and political doctrines later associated with the theory of natural selection, and also what were regarded as some of the limits of this idea. 7 It contends that there was in fact far more than mere coincidence in the obviously provocative role played by Malthus's Essay for both Darwin and Wallace. 8 It argues, [End Page 224] therefore, against the presumption of tacit causality--logically implicit in the concept of "Social Darwinism" 9 --that much of the social and political theory which nominally invoked Darwin was fundamentally derived from, as opposed to being reinforced by, the principles of natural selection. It challenges the view that the logic of discovery in the natural sciences, in other words, induced parallel or derivative concepts in the social sciences and that the "survival of the fittest" emerged first as a natural, and then mutated into a social concept. Instead it suggests that what was specific about much of Social Darwinism resulted from several shifts in thought in mid-Victorian Britain to which Darwin himself also responded and which therefore also vitally influenced his own development.No doubt, of course, this assertion of causation contains some truth. Darwin was extraordinarily widely read and extraordinarily influential. We are all aware of the great theological debates associated with his name in late Victorian Britain, of the counter-attack against Darwin begun by Bishop Wilberforce in June 1860, and of the tenacious war of attrition conducted by "Darwin's bulldog," T. H. Huxley, who coined the term "agnostic" in 1869 to define the lack of scientific evidence for the existence of God. 10 Much has been written of the moral panic and growing loss of religious faith, paralleling the course of Darwin's own "reluctant agnosticism," which followed the conclusion that human beings had been levelled to the status of animals and deprived of a special Providential creation as well as any divine purpose in the perpetuation of their species. In history a tremendous impetus was given to the search for certain laws of social development. In social... (shrink)

Turner Nevitt’s elucidates and critically engages with what he describes as the “deeper and more problematic disagreements between survivalists and corruptionists about how to understand some of the most basic principles of Aquinas’s metaphysics,” his goal being to “advance some more systematic reasons for thinking that corruptionists are right and survivalists are wrong—both about how to understand the basic principles of Aquinas’s metaphysics, and about how to apply them to the question about the status of human beings or persons between (...) death and resurrection.” In responding to Nevitt’s argument on behalf of survivalism, I have two goals: first, to defend a particular survivalist interpretation and application of Aquinas’s basic metaphysical principles, and second to argue that, even if Aquinas himself was a corruptionist, he (and we) ought to be survivalists. (shrink)

Leslie Kean’s Surviving Death is a wonderfully readable, carefully constructed summary of the evidence for the existence of what is colloquially called an “afterlife.” That is, she considers evidence for the hypothesis that individual human minds and personalities possess an existence going beyond their attachment to any particular body – so that, for instance, an individual with a certain name and certain traits may sometimes continue to perceive and act, even when the body typically associated with that individual is dead (...) and gone. Most of the book comprises moderately detailed descriptions of specific cases, involving specific people, which indicate the existence of some sort of “afterlife” for individual human minds, or potentially give some information regarding the nature of this afterlife. Kean considers a gamut of phenomena such as past-life memories, near-death experiences, mediumistic trances, poltergeists, and so forth. However, she also makes a significant effort to draw general conclusions, lessons and hypotheses from the totality of these cases, while maintaining respect for the confusing and in many ways still mysterious nature of the phenomena under discussion. Each of the topics considered in the book has been reviewed and analyzed in more depth elsewhere. What Kean does, however, is provide a clear, evocative and rational survey of the many types of evidence that are directly relevant to the possibility and nature of an afterlife for individual human minds. (shrink)

Although the doctrine of "survival of the fittest" is central to the Modern paradigm, it is not, as most Modernists would claim, the unvarnished truth. Indeed if we begin to think of the marketplace as a model of dynamic complexity then the logic of cooperation is inescapable. The point is that if business leaders refuse to accept that cooperation is a defining principle, not merely an abstract altruistic ideal but an essential strategy for the sustainable, long-term success of the businesses (...) they are building, then they will continue to undermine their own best interests in the name of competitive dominance. (shrink)

According to the neo-Aristotelian moral tradition, every living thing has an ultimate end: To flourish as a member of its species. This view of the ultimate end shapes inquiry into what is the ultimate end of human living things. In this paper, I develop an alternative view of the ultimate end of a living thing: The ultimate end is only to survive, not as a member of a species, but as a living thing. There are four steps to my development. (...) First, I criticize the prevailing species-based view of the ultimate end. Second, I argue that other-regarding behavior is not normative for living things; only survival is. Third, I elucidate a new and what I take to be correcting understanding of survival. Fourth, I programmatically develop the idea that inquiry into human well-being and into morality (for human beings) should be understood as aspects of inquiry into human survival. (shrink)

Human memory likely evolved to serve adaptive functions, that is, to help maximise our chances of survival and reproduction. One demonstration of such adaptiveness is the increased retention of inf...

You can survive after death in various kinds of artifacts. You can survive in diaries, photographs, sound recordings, and movies. But these artifacts record only superficial features of yourself. We are already close to the construction of programs that partially and approximately replicate entire human lives (by storing their memories and duplicating their personalities). A digital ghost is an artificially intelligent program that knows all about your life. It is an animated auto-biography. It replicates your patterns of belief and desire. (...) You can survive after death in a digital ghost. We discuss a series of digital ghosts over the next 50 years. As time goes by and technology advances, they are progressively more perfect replicas of the lives of their original authors. (shrink)

The 2015 Nepal earthquake and subsequent avalanche at Mount Everest Base Camp is the deadliest mountaineering disaster to date. This study is novel in exploring the lived experiences of survivors and the role of mental toughness in their psychological responses to the disaster. Design: Phenomenological study. Method: Ten mountaineers, who were on expeditions during the earthquake, participated in phenomenological interviews. Data were analysed inductively and thematically, while strategies to enhance trustworthiness were also employed. Results: Seven dimensions emerged from the data, (...) which captured climbers' psychological responses to the disaster, ranging from the moments the earthquake hit to reflections on the disaster after returning home. Contrasting emotional responses were described, and suggested to depend on experience and mental toughness. Negative emotional and behavioural responses were reported in the aftermath. Some climbers reported post-traumatic stress, but also a strong desire to return to Mount Everest and continue mountaineering. Conclusions: These findings provide detailed insights into the lived experiences of climbers who survived the 2015 Nepal earthquake and Base Camp avalanche. Findings also shed light on the role of mental toughness in coping with and responding to a major natural disaster. (shrink)

Do I have a special reason to care about my future, as opposed to yours? We reject the common belief that I do. Putting our thesis paradoxically, we say that nothing matters in survival: nothing in our continued existence justifies any special self-concern. Such an "extreme" view is standardly tied to ideas about the metaphysics of persons, but not by us. After rejecting various arguments against our thesis, we conclude that simplicity decides in its favor. Throughout the essay we honor (...) Jim Rachels, whose final days exemplified his own unselfish morality as well as the “neutralist” ideal we espouse. As an appendix, we include the last original work to be published by James Rachels, in which he criticizes Sidgwick’s most famous defense of egoism. (shrink)

In Darwinism's Struggle for Survival Jean Gayon offers a philosophical interpretation of the history of theoretical Darwinism. He begins by examining the different forms taken by the hypothesis of natural selection in the nineteenth century and the major difficulties which it encountered, particularly with regard to its compatibility with the theory of heredity. He then shows how these difficulties were overcome during the seventy years which followed the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, and he concludes by analysing the major (...) features of the genetic theory of natural selection, as it developed from 1920 to 1960. This rich and wide-ranging study will appeal to philosophers and historians of science and to evolutionary biologists. (shrink)

Thinking of the evils of homophobia and what is needed to survive them requires acknowledging a new category of evil besides the evils of individual deeds, social practices and social structures. That further category is evil social environments. Building on the work of Jeremy Waldron on the harm in hate speech, this chapter extends that account to certain hate crimes that, like the written word, send a lingering social message. The cases of four women survivors of homophobia are then examined (...) in relation to such harm. Two who wrote memoirs had been targeted for murder, one in an evil environment, the other in a more positively responsive environment. The remaining two survival stories are less dramatic. But they are important in how they illustrate ordinary challenges faced successfully by lesbians and gay men in emotionally toxic environments, and how, in this sense, those not directly threatened with murder might still be justly regarded as survivors. The chapter concludes with reflections on the meanings of survival and some of the costs of surviving an evil homophobic environment. (shrink)

Does anyone ever survive his or her bodily death ? Could anyone? No speculative questions are older than these, or have been answered more frequently or more variously. None have been laid to rest more often, or — in our times — with more claimed decisiveness. Jay Rosenberg, for instance, no doubt speaks for many contemporary philosophers when he claims, in his recent book, to have ‘ demonstrated ’ that ‘ we cannot [even] make coherent sense of the supposed possibility (...) that a person's history might continue beyond that person's [bodily] death’. (shrink)

Longer terms offer room for more complex responses: strategizing, learning from mistakes, choices of how or whether to try to survive, to hide, resist, flee, or comply with oppressive demands. This chapter explores the specific conceptual issues regarding the meaning of survival. "Surviving" refers both to an activity and to what remains. Picking up on the ambiguity of "surviving", there are two ways to understand true survival. Preservation survival requires one to come through with mental and physical health in basically (...) decent shape. Combining the two models of survival, it is tempting to see some less than true survivors as analogues of Aristotle's friendships of utility and pleasure. In long‐term atrocities, "survivor" often designates those who live through to the end and then function at a decent level. With illness or accident, survival can mean simply being alive at the end. "Survivor" is judgment‐laden in that it discriminates among those who live through an atrocity. (shrink)

As the technological phenomenon known as the worldwide web permeates civilization, it creates some cultures and destroys others. In this pioneering book, philosopher Thomas Langan explores "virtual reality"Can inherently contradictory phrase"and the effects of technology on our very being. In our present-day high- technology environment, making simple, everyday decisions is difficult because the virtual world we've created doesn't necessarily operate according to the old "common sense." To retain our intellectual fitness, we must, Langan argues, consider these essential questions: If virtual (...) reality is, in fact, reality, what is this life that we are caught up in? What is _being_ within the context of virtual reality? How can we establish a system for distinguishing truth from fiction? Although technology minimizes distances between people and makes the information they seek more accessible, it simultaneously blurs the line dividing fact from falsehood and real from virtual. An individual's intellectual survival is threatened as technological advancement challenges our collective understanding of what reality is. Because much of the information that is presented as fact simply works to fulfill a specific agenda, we cannot accept as truth everything that appears on the internet or in the media. To survive, we must learn to manage our lives and resources despite the flood of information we are bombarded with daily. Addressing the general educated reader, _Surviving the Age of Virtual Reality_ expertly interweaves the worlds of technology and philosophy, pushing the analysis of this technological and human phenomenon to new depths. (shrink)

Chris Tweedt has offered a solution to the “common sense problem of evil,” on which that there is gratuitous evil is justified non-inferentially as a trivial inference from non-inferentially justified premises by invoking versions of CORNEA. Tweedt claims his solution applies not only to the versions of the common sense problem of evil offered by Paul Draper and Trent Dougherty, but also to that offered by me in this journal in 1992. Here I argue that Tweedt fails to defeat this (...) version of the problem. So even if Tweedt’s response to Draper and Dougherty is successful, a version of the common sense problem of evil survives. (shrink)

Human bodies have a totally different mode of existence from those collections of mental properties (intelligence, will power, consciousness, etc.) that we call minds. They belong to the ontological category of physical substances or entities, whereas mental properties belong to the ontological category of properties or attributes, and as such can exist only so long as their physical bearers exist. Mental properties “emerge” (in a sense that makes emergence ubiquitous throughout the natural world) when the constituent parts of a biological (...) organism—especially its brain—are configured in certain sorts of ways. A view of reality that is both conceptually coherent and scientifically comprehensive makes the very idea of surviving one’s bodily death literally absurd. -/- 1. The Cheshire Cat Fallacy: “A Grin Without a Cat” -- 2. Two Main Arguments for Substance Dualism - 2.1 An Appeal to the Logic of Identity and Difference - 2.2 An Appeal to the Noncogitative Nature of Matter -- 3. A Host of Problems for Substance Dualism - 3.1 The Inexplicability of Mind-Brain Dependence - 3.2 The Inexplicability of Mental Causation - 3.3 The Violation of Scientific Laws - 3.4 Minds as Miracle-Workers - 3.5 Problems about Our Embryological and Developmental Histories - 3.6 Problems about our Evolutionary Histories - 3.7 Which Stage of the Soul or Mind Survives? - 3.8 Where are our Disembodied Souls Supposed to Survive? -- 4. The Argument from Leibniz’s Law Presupposes a Category Misallocation - 4.1 The Fallacy of Reification - 4.2 Resisting the Reifying Lure of Language - 4.3 Dualistic Consequences of Reifying Mentalistic Terms - 4.4 Allocation to Ontological Categories - 4.5 Locke’s Partial Solution to the Category Misallocation - 4.6 Ryle on Category Mistakes and “the Ghost in the Machine” - 4.7 Ryle’s Important Insight: To Have a Mind is to have a Set of Mental Properties - 4.8 Interim Summary -- 5. The Emergence of “Minds” from Incogitative Matter - 5.1 Locke’s A Priori Argument - 5.2 Locke’s Argument Refuted by Counterexamples - 5.3 The Concept of Emergence Defined - 5.4 Rival Concepts of Emergence - 5.5 The Ubiquitousness of Emergent Properties - 5.6 The Metaphysics of Emergent Materialism - 5.6.1 Substance Monism - 5.6.2 The Doctrine of Property Dualism is Misconceived - 5.6.3 Emergent Properties of Different Kinds - 5.6.4 The “Hierarchy” of Sciences - 5.6.5 The Broad Spectrum of “Mental” Properties -- 6. The Metaphysical Impossibility of Survival - 6.1 Mind-Brain Dependence - 6.2 The Issue of Mental Causation - 6.2.1 The Bogeyman of Epiphenomenalism - 6.3 The Violation of Scientific Laws - 6.4 Minds as Miracle-Workers - 6.5 Our Embryological and Developmental Histories - 6.6 Our Evolutionary Histories -- 7. Conclusion. (shrink)

In his essay ‘The Deconstruction of Christianity’, Jean-Luc Nancy identifies Christianity with the heart of the West, thus following René Girard's claim that Christianity is the religion that exposes the workings of scapegoating and mimetic violence that drive most religions and cultures. However, in On Touching, Derrida distances himself from Nancy's project, and I argue that this is precisely because he is aware that a straightforward embrace of the deconstruction of Christianity is a ruse, as it will end up in (...) a Christian victory that ultimately overcomes deconstruction. The problem, however, is that a simple opposition to Christianity is also insufficient because it gets caught in a similar trap where Christianity ultimately wins (religion will always triumph, as Lacan says). The workings of this ‘trap’ will be explored through a reading of Derrida's essay ‘What is a Relevant Translation?’ and particularly his discussion of Shylock's situation in Merchant of Venice, where Derrida recognizes the ruse of Christianity in its ability to trump Shylock's literal translation of the law, but still he ‘insist[s] on the Christian dimension’. Why? To answer this question this paper turns to another: how do we survive Christianity? (shrink)

The fate of war captives has been extensively explored, as, indeed, has the way that fate affects both the conduct and course of hostilities. Nevertheless, little research has been conducted on the link that connects the two, namely the act of surrender, and this is especially true of classical Greece. This article seeks to remedy this situation by answering three interlinked questions, namely: how men attempted to surrender on the battlefields of classical Greece; in what tactical conditions they did so; (...) and finally, what prospects they had of surviving the process. (shrink)

We discuss how academically-based interdisciplinary teams can address the extreme challenges of the world’s poorest by increasing access to the basic necessities of life. The essay’s first part illustrates the evolving commitment of research universities to develop ethical solutions for populations whose survival is at risk and whose quality of life is deeply impaired. The second part proposes a rationale for university responsibility to solve the problems of impoverished populations at a geographical remove. It also presents a framework for integrating (...) science, engineering and ethics in the efforts of multidisciplinary teams dedicated to this task. The essay’s third part illustrates the efforts of Howard University researchers to join forces with African university colleagues in fleshing out a model for sustainable and ethical global development. (shrink)

. The survival of truth after Derrida. Cultural Values: Vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 127-134.

Evidence from biology and psychology suggests that our moral views depend on our evolutionary history. For example, if we humans would have evolved to live like hive bees, we would probably think very differently about moral questions such as whether we have a duty to care for our children. The findings from biology and psychology threaten to ‘debunk’ the justification of judgements about objective moral truths. Objective moral truths are always the same and they do not vary with our contingent (...) evolutionary history, whereas our moral judgements do. It has been argued that we, therefore, cannot tell right from wrong. In my thesis, I investigate the epistemology behind the evolutionary debunking of morality. Evolutionary explanations of morality, I argue, do not imply that our moral judgements are false. This leaves the possibility that evolution undercuts our (alleged) evidence for our moral judgements. Our evolutionarily influenced moral judgements might turn out to be unreliable guides to the moral truth, just like sight is a lousy guide to the external world in bad lighting conditions. However, I show that as long as we have reason to initially trust our moral beliefs, evolution does not provide us with reason to give up our moral beliefs. If evolution undercuts our moral beliefs, evolutionary considerations must show that true moral judgements do not qualify as knowledge because moral judgements are not cognitive achievements but comparable to lucky guesses. The thesis thus answers how empirical investigations of morality might have justificatory implications and the findings are relevant for deciding whether new factual information can alter how we think about right and wrong. (shrink)

Surviving School Stress provides the reader with fundamental components of different types of stress, stressors, and strategies for interventions. In Part I, Dr. Lebrun breaks down the individual components of each type of stress and provides readers with a clear understanding of the key concepts and essential questions needed to be able to effectively intervene with children and adolescents within a school or home setting. Part II of the book provides a framework for educators to use to guide small and (...) large group lessons in a school setting. Each lesson can be individually presented. The small group lessons are meant to guide students in a very focused direction. The general classroom lessons can be adapted depending on the needs of the group within that particular classroom. This resource is suitable for all special education teachers, general classroom teachers at the K-12 levels, behavior consultants, and school mental health counselors. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Surviving American Culture:On Chuck PalahniukEduardo MendietaIn an age in which American culture has become the United States' number one export, along with its weapons, low intensity conflict, carcinogenic cigarettes, its "freedom," and pornography, it is delightful and even a sign of hope that there are writers who have taken on the delicate and perilous task of offering a prognosis of what ails this culture. In the following essay I (...) argue that Chuck Palahniuk's works ought to be read as a mortician's report on American culture. Chuck Palahniuk broke into the literary world by way of the movie version of his first novel: Fight Club (1995). He has gone on to write six other novels: Survivor (1999), Invisible Monsters (2000), Choke (2001), Lullaby (2002), and Diary (2003). He also has published an interesting travel book, Fugitives and Refugees; A Walk in Portland, Oregon (2003), but since this is not properly fiction, I will not discuss it in this essay.1Clearly, Palahniuk has already produced a corpus worthy of careful consideration and analysis. Yet, as a west coast writer, far from the literary circles and brokers of the east coast, indeed far away from the clubs of self-promotion and self-monitoring that censure and hold in tight grip the monopoly of criticism that highlights "worthy literature," Palahniuk has not attracted a lot of critical attention. It is only with his most recent work Choke that he has began to be widely reviewed and commented on. In the following I provide a thematic reconstruction of each one of the six published novels, in chronological sequence. I will argue that Palahniuk is not trying to write the "great American novel," although he is profiling himself as a quintessential "American" writer in the midst of post–Cold War megalomania and celebrated Pax Americana. He has taken on a culture that has become so gargantuan, [End Page 394] fragmented, and differentiated but at the same time so rich, so self-reflexive, so historicized and also so mimicked that one novel cannot tell its story in one narrative with one dramatic thread. Many novels, many short cuts, many vignettes, are necessary: one polyphonic, asynchronous, temporally bi-directional, hyper-textual, and cyber-encyclopedic novel made up of individual novels, where each novel is the Bildungsroman of an American hero but told in reverse. These heroes, I will argue, are testimonies to the resilient power of individuals to resist even the most invasive and persistent onslaughts by culture on the physic life of freedom and individuality. I will also argue that he is neither a commercial nor academic writer; that is, he is not the kind of writer who writes either in order to maintain a living or secure tenure. He is a writer with a mission, a vision, and a very distinctive style. The stories that Palahniuk tells are stories that begin at the end, and end at the beginning: they are turned around Bildungsromans. They are, in other words, about unmaking, uncoupling, and disentangling our selves from the normal self into which we have been socialized. These stories are, thus, about the discovery of moral resources that lay dormant in the very simplicity of human solidarity and trust in our will to survive morally untainted, or at least redeemable. I will conclude by arguing that Palahniuk's novels are about surviving American Culture, and about how deviance is the health of the individual in a sick society.One could characterize Fight Club as the intelligent man's response to Robert Bly's Iron John (1990),2 or the fictionalized version of the Michael Kimmel's Manhood in America: A Cultural History (1996).3 Alternatively, one could argue that Fight Club is the fin-de-sieclé response to Barbara Ehrenreich's prognosis in her The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (1983) of 1970s and 1980s narcissistic and hedonistic masculinity.4 Chuck Palahniuk's first novel is a biting and poignant look at men in American culture after the end of affluence and the simultaneous "feminization" of masculinity. It is at the same time about the struggle for a viable sense of masculinity in an age in... (shrink)

(Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1996: 17-36) I If I am to survive until some later date, what must happen, and what must not happen, over the intervening period? I am talking here about survival in the strict sense. Take an earlier and a later person, if they are one and the same, what is it about them that makes this so? In addressing this question the preferred tool has long been the exploitation of imaginary or science fiction cases. We (...) are asked to reflect on scenarios in which an ordinary person is subjected to some unusual treatment which effectively removes one or more of the elements that usually accompanies personal persistence. If we think the subject survives the treatment, the conclusion is drawn that the elements removed are not necessary to personal identity as we conceive it. The hope is that the repeated use of this method, with a variety of scenarios, will finally produce a convergence of intuitive responses as to what is necessary and sufficient for survival. Unfortunately, this method has failed to produce the goods. The literature is brimming with cunningly constructed scenarios yet consensus as to what personal persistence involves seems as elusive as ever. So it is hardly surprising that the method has come in for some criticism recently. There is a feeling that much time has been wasted on devising fantastic stories about which many people have no firm or reliable intuitions. Hence the demand for a different approach. As for the direction the new approach should take, a general trend can be detected: a focusing on human beings, biological entities of a particular kind, with species-specific identity conditions - a move away from science fiction, towards science. I shall be arguing here that this response is premature. Although it would be a mistake to expect too much from the standard method, it delivers at least one significant result: that of the several strands that make up a human life, we believe that one particular strand is of overriding importance in regard to our continued existence. (shrink)

Chris Tweedt has offered a solution to the “common sense problem of evil,” on which that there is gratuitous evil is justified non-inferentially as a trivial inference from non-inferentially justified premises by invoking versions of CORNEA. Tweedt claims his solution applies not only to the versions of the common sense problem of evil offered by Paul Draper and Trent Dougherty, but also to that offered by me in this journal in 1992. Here I argue that Tweedt fails to defeat this (...) version of the problem. So even if Tweedt’s response to Draper and Dougherty is successful, a version of the common sense problem of evil survives. (shrink)

Theoretically, this study is framed within the semiotic tradition of communication theory, which theorizes communication as the intersubjective mediation by signs. Methodologically, this study is guided by Peirce’s semiotic ideas, especially his writing about the commens and commind, or the sign and the object, and the power of a community as the final interpretant performing the process of sensemaking. Results showed how the survivors of a natural calamity symbolically interacted with such calamity, and how this led to a reformation of (...) the way they view themselves and the world. The survivors’ symbolic images captured in narratives, in sketches and drawings, and in poetry helped them to reframe their sense of self and their worldview by believing in common sense and intuition, and by valuing the power of courage, initiative, preparedness, hope, and resilience. An unfortunate irony emerged in their symbolic interaction with the disaster such that their sinning and self-inflicted blame made them think they were worthy of punishment. Nonetheless, this unfortunate irony will change if the survivors continue to reflect on their civic roles, interrogate their environmental and political contexts, and expand their awareness and social consciousness. As these unfold, the survivors will be able to accomplish empowerment, emancipation, and an independent mind. (shrink)

Marya Schechtman's narrative self-constitution view relies on an account of reality as self-evident that eclipses the interpretive labor required to fix the content of intelligibility. As a result, her view illegitimately limits what counts as identity-conferring narrative and problematically excludes many with psychiatric disabilities from the category of full personhood. Plantikow cautions personal identity theorists against this move and offers an alternative approach to engaging in and conceptualizing narrative construction.

Claudia Card did not live long enough to complete her work on surviving evils. Yet she left us an invaluable body of work on this topic. This essay surveys Card's views about the nature of evils and the ethical quandaries of surviving them. It then develops an account of survival agency that is based on Card's insights and in keeping with the agentic capacities exercised by Yezidi women and girls who have escaped from ISIS's obscene program of trafficking in women (...) and sexual violence. Card holds that true survival requires not only staying alive and as healthy as possible but also preserving your good moral character. The essay maintains that while exercising agency to elude evil and protect yourself often depends on your own skills and personality traits, exercising agency to restore or develop your moral character often depends on social support. (shrink)

In this quite modestly ambitious essay, I'll generally just assume that, for the most part, our "scientifically informed" commonsense view of the world is true. Just as it is with such unthinking things as planets, plates and, I suppose, plants, too, so it also is with all earthly thinking beings, from people to pigs and pigeons; each occupies a region of space, however large or small, in which all are spatially related to each other. Or, at least, so it is (...) with the bodies of these beings. And, even as each of these ordinary entities extends through some space, so, also, each endures through some time. In line with that, each ordinary entity is at least very largely, and is perhaps entirely, an enduring physical entity (which allows that many might have certain properties that aren't purely physical properties.) Further, each ordinary enduring entity is a physically complex entity: Not only is each composed of parts, but many of these parts, whether or not absolutely all of them, are themselves enduring physical entities, and many of them also are such physically complex continuing entities. When an ordinary entity undergoes a significant change, then, at least generally, this change will involve changes concerning that entity's constituting physical parts, whether it be a rearrangement of (some of) these parts, or a loss of parts, or a gain of parts, or whatever. Often, the entity will still exist even after the change occurs. As we may well suppose, this happens when, from two strokes of an ax, an ordinary log loses just a chip of wood. As we may then say, such a change conforms with the log's "persistence conditions." Somewhat less often, such an ordinary entity undergoes a change that means an end to it: When a bomb's explosion makes our log become just so many widely scattered motes of dust, the log will no longer exist. Such a momentous change doesn't conform with the log's persistence conditions. (shrink)

Suppose that it was possible to teletransport. The teletransporter would destroy your old brain and body and construct an identical brain and body at a new location. Would you survive teletransportation? Many people think that teletransportation would kill you. On their view, the person that emerges from the teletransporter would be a replica of you, but it wouldn't be you. In contrast, I argue that there's no relevant difference between teletransportation and ordinary survival. So, if you survive ordinary life, then (...) you survive teletransportation. Yet my argument may also show that we have little prudential reason to care about our survival in general. (shrink)