Keeping score: the consequential critique of religion

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion - This essay attempts to specify just what one would need to show in order to draw any substantive conclusion about religion’s consequential...     

Husserl's concept of the noema: A Daubertian critique

I am deeply indebted to Barry smith for his helpful criticism of earlier versions of this paper.     

The working mother: A critique of the research

This article provides a critique of the research on the working mother. Three major areas of research are reviewed: (1) the effects of maternal employment on preschoolers; (2) the working mother and school age children; and (3) working mothers, identity development, and life satisfaction. It was concluded that the research on maternal employment provided very few definitive answers regarding the effects of a mother's working on her family, children, and herself. Guidelines for conducting future research on maternal employment are presented.     

Liberal democracy: An African critique

Despite the end of the Cold War and the ascendancy of liberal democracy, celebrated by Francis Fukuyama as “the end of history”, a growing number of scholars and political activists point to liberal democracy’s inherent shortcomings. However, they have tended to dismiss it on the basis of one or two of its salient weaknesses. While this is a justifiable way to proceed, it denies the searching reader an opportunity to see the broad basis for the growing rejection of liberal democracy among African political theorists. Consequently, in this article, I argue that from an African perspective, the almost hegemonic status of liberal democracy can be challenged on at least five grounds, namely logical inconsistency, impracticability due to the largely communalistic outlook of many Africans, inconsistency between affirmation and action, violation of the right to ethnic identity, and the moral imperative to assert the right to cultural emancipation. I conclude by calling upon African and Africanist political theorists to utilise indigenous African political thought, coupled with emancipatory aspects of political thought from other parts of the world, to design practicable models of democracy for contemporary African states. I further conclude that in order to promote genuine inter-cultural dialogue on democratisation, people from Western cultures ought to acknowledge the equality of all cultures, and to recognise that systems of governance are part and parcel of those cultures.     

Interpreting the Butterfly Dream

This paper follows the tradition of treating Zhuangzi's Butterfly Dream episode as presenting a version of skepticism. However, unlike the prevalent interpretations within that tradition, it attempts to show that the skepticism conveyed in the episode is more radical than it has been conceived, such that the episode can be read as a skeptical response to Descartes’ refutation of skepticism based on the Cogito, ergo sum proof. The paper explains how the lack of commitment in Zhuangzi to the dubious assumption about ‘I’ that it necessarily refers to something existing to which Descartes seems to uncritically adhere allows Zhuangzi to doubt what for Descartes is absolutely indubitable: I exist.     

Concept empiricism: a methodological critique

Thanks to Barsalou's, Damasio's, Glenberg's, Prinz' and others' work, neo-empiricism is gaining a deserved recognition in the psychology and philosophy of concepts. I argue, however, that neo-empiricists have underestimated the difficulty of providing evidence against the amodal approach to concepts and higher cognition. I highlight three key problems: the difficulty of sorting out amodal predictions from neo-empiricist predictions, the difficulty of finding experimental tasks that are not best solved by imagery and the difficulty of generalizing findings concerning a given cognitive process in a given context to other cognitive processes or other contexts. Finally, solutions to these three problems are considered.     

Measurement of creativity: review and critique

Presently available criteria of creativity are reviewed and classified into ten categories: tests of divergent thinking, attitude and interest inventories, personality inventories, biographical inventories, teacher nominations, peer nominations, supervisor ratings, judgments of products, eminence and self-reported creative activities and achievements. These techniques for measuring creativity are then criticized in terms of their reliability, discriminant validity, dimensionality and convergent validity. It is concluded that an inventory of self-reported creative activities and accomplishments is the most defensible technique for selecting creative individuals.     

Interpreting the Satanic Legend

It is argued that recent hysteria about Satanic cults can best be understood as moral panic and urban legend. Data from a wide variety of sources, including the author's own personal experience, are brought forward in support of this thesis. It is then suggested that if we are not to remain at the mercy of the anxieties and distortions that produce this moral panic, we must interpret the legend. The interpretation that is offered is that this most recent outbreak of panic about satanism is specifically about a growing awareness of the ubiquity of intergenera-tional eros.Therapist in private practice in