Ritual Education and Moral Development: A Comparison of Xunzi and Vygotsky

Xunzi’s 荀子 advocacy for moral education is well-documented; precisely how his program bolsters moral development, and why a program touting study of ritual could be effective, remain subjects of debate. I argue that these matters can be clarified by appealing to the theory of learning and development offered by Lev Vygotsky. Vygotsky posited that development depends primarily on social interactions mediated by sociocultural tools that modify learners’ cognitive architecture, enabling increasingly sophisticated thought. Vygotsky’s theory is remarkably similar to Xunzi’s account of how studying and practicing ritual restructures learners’ moral psychology. Specifically, both Vygotsky and Xunzi offer nonnativist accounts of psychosocial development that emphasize the centrality of sociocultural tools for learning. This comparison yields a more nuanced and empirically supported interpretation of Xunzi’s account of moral education, as well as an account that has applications in contemporary work in moral education and development.     

荀子心"合"物论发微

关于荀子认识论的研究,学者通常都从主观和客观分别对待出发,认为荀子力图使主观"符合"客观,以期求得全面荀正确的认识.本文作者认为,这种看法可以说符合常识的理解,但却没有切近苟子的本意.子的认识论是心物一体的认识论,心不是"主观",物也不是"客观",他更没有提出"符合"论,也不以"客观"为认识的标准.荀子的认识论是心"合"物论,也就是心物相合不二之论.     

A New CBT Model of Panic Attack Treatment in Comorbid Heart Diseases (PATCHD): How to Calm an Anxious Heart and Mind

Treating anxiety comorbid with heart disease is challenging due to (a) diagnostic overlap between anxiety and heart disease, (b) the high risk associated with ignoring chest pain symptoms and delaying seeking medical attention, (c) that cognitive-behavioral therapy based on catastrophic misinterpretation of bodily symptoms requires adaption to incorporate the element of risk, and (d) that certain interoceptive symptom induction experiments may be harmful and are therefore fraught with liability. We describe Panic Attack Treatment in Comorbid Heart Diseases (PATCHD) that is based on enhancing coping skills, performing safe interoceptive exposures and supervised exercise, and countering avoidance to reduce panic attack frequency. Pre- and posttreatment data from 18 patients shows a significant reduction in cardiovascular hospital admissions and length of stay, panic attacks, general anxiety, and depression (all p < .05). Because of the complex nature of panic disorder comorbid with heart disease, health professionals should familiarize themselves with several necessary CBT adaptions.     

Education for the Heart and Mind: Feminist Pedagogy and the Religion and Science Curriculum

Feminist educators and theorists are stretching the boundaries of what it means to do religion and science. They are also expanding the theoretical and practical frameworks through which we might present curricula in thosefields. In this paper, I reflect on the implications of feminist pedagogies for the interdisciplinary field of religion and science. I begin with a brief discussion of feminist approaches to education and the nature of the feminist classroom as a setting for action. Next, I present some theoretical and practical issues to consider when developing a feminist praxis and an antisexist curriculum. This leads into a discussion of the role of language and critical reflection in the religion and science classroom, the risks associated with reflective discourse, and considerations in the use of 'feminist' teaching tools such as small group work, journals, and portfolio assessment. Iconclude with a reflection on how feminist pedagogy promotes an epistemology that speaks to the hearts and minds of participants in the dialogue of religion and science.     

A Case of Mind/Brain Identity: One Small Bridge for the Explanatory Gap

Based on the technique ofpressure blinding of the eye, two types of after-image (AI) were identified. A physicalist or mind/brain identity explanation was established for a negative a AI produced by moderately intense stimuli. These AI's were shown to be located in the neurons of the retina. An illusory AI of double a grating's spatial frequency was also produced in the same structure and was both prevented from being established and abolished after establishment by pressure blinding, thus showing that the location was not more central. The illusory AI was predicted from the knownnon-linearity in the retina and this is the first case of a clear cut type-type identity of a sensation and a neural process. Some implications for the concepts of the explanatory gap between neurology and consciousness and multiple neural realizations of conscious states and topic neutrality are discussed.     

Exploring the Mind of Testosterone: A Beeper Study

Twelve low and 15 high testosterone subjects, representing the extremes in testosterone from a pool of 125 men and 128 women, kept diary records of their day-to-day thoughts and activities. Electronic pagers prompted subjects approximately 20 times over a four-day period to write down their locations, activity, thoughts, and feelings. Human coders and computer text analysis programs indicated a restless energy in the diaries of high testosterone subjects. High testosterone subjects experienced more arousal and tension than those low in testosterone. They spent more time thinking, especially about concrete problems in the immediate present. They wanted to get things done and felt frustrated when they could not. They mentioned friends more than family or lovers. Five terms characterized high testosterone subjects: restless, thinking, about action, right now, likely with friends.     

A Wild West of the Mind

§258 of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations is often seen as the core of his private language argument. While its role is certainly overinflated and it is a mistake to think that there is anything that could be called the private language argument, §258 is an important part of the private language sections of the Philosophical Investigations. As with so much of Wittgenstein's work, there are widely diverse interpretations of why exactly the private diarist's attempted ostensive definition fails. I argue for a version of the no-stage-setting interpretation of the failure of private ostension. On this interpretation, the reason why the diarist cannot establish a meaning for ‘S’ is that she lacks the conceptual-linguistic stage-setting needed to disambiguate the concentration of her attention (the private analogue of an ostensive definition). Thus, the problem with any subsequent use of ‘S’ is not that there is no criterion of correctness for remembering the meaning of ‘S’ correctly, or for re-identifying S correctly in the future. Rather, it is because of the initial failure to define ‘S’ that there is nothing that could count as a criterion of correctness for the future use of ‘S’; there is nothing to remember or re-identify. My argument for the no-stage-setting interpretation consists in showing how well it fits into the rest of the Philosophical Investigations and in defending it against objections from Robert J. Fogelin, Anthony Kenny, and most recently John V. Canfield. Kenny's and Canfield's objections are found to suffer from problems regarding memory scepticism.