民主的圣经根源

在古希腊,尤其是在古雅典中寻找现代民主的根源已是习以为常。当然,雅典的直接民主与现代的代议制民主之间的差别是要考虑的。同样,对于雅典男性自由公民———且不论奴隶、外乡人和女人———民主参与国家事物的限制也是要关注的。然而,除了这些差别,雅典民主显然体现了公民普遍参与城邦(polis)治理,至少从厄菲阿尔特公元前462年实行改革后到马其顿取得统治地位的大部分时期内是如此。这样,在希腊古代与现代之间就确立了一个基本的关联。尽管承认古希腊民主与其虽然是改头换面的重生显现之间的历史和哲学关联,但我们的论点是,现代民主现象…     

THE PRIMORDIAL ROOTS OF BEING

Abstract. Suffering, alongside the feeling of sanctity of life, pervades human experience, generating primal anxiety, which humans learn to shore up with social solidarity and with the practice of communication in religious rituals. The roots of social belonging spring from the primordial sentiments toward ethnicity, race, language, religion, customs and traditions, and region. Self–identity, mediated by mental formations derived from social relations, is composed of thinking and values. Daily experience reveals that cultural differences produce blind spots in thinking and barriers in values—-governing areas of activity, social relations, the world, and identity of being—-that impedes cross—-cultural understanding.     

BRAIN ROOTS OF THE WILL-TO-POWER

Abstract. The human brain has evolved to its great size while retaining the anatomical and chemical features of three basic formations that reflect an ancestral relationship to reptiles, early mammals, and late mammals. Such considerations must be taken into account in the origin and expression of individual and collective violence, which operationally depend on power and the orchestrated use of power. Aristotle and Friedrich Nietzsche have respectively provided paradigms of a "great-souled man" and a "superman"— both basically ruthless. In neurobehavioral investigations of the triune brain, one finds the basis for the hierarchical development of ruthless power, merciful power, and transcendental power.     

幼儿元认知知识发展的特点

以北京市某幼儿园5个班98名幼儿为被试,利用分类和拼图任务对其元认知知识进行了测试.结果发现:3～5岁幼儿在元认知知识的某些方面表现出了一定的发展变化过程,对主体性的元认知知识、任务难度的元认知知识和策略的元认知知识的认识表现出了显著的年龄差异,特别是内部策略的运用随着年龄的增长越来越多,而对外部策略的运用越来越少.     

THE PUZZLE OF FALLIBLE KNOWLEDGE

Abstract: Although the fallible/infallible distinction in the theory of knowledge has traditionally been upheld by most epistemologists, almost all contemporary theories of knowledge claim to be fallibilist. Fallibilists have, however, been forced to accommodate knowledge of necessary truths. This has proved to be a daunting task, not least because there is as yet no consensus on how the fallible/infallible divide is to be understood. In this article, after examining and rejecting a number of representative accounts of the notion of fallible knowledge, I argue that the main problems with these accounts actually stem from the very coherence of that notion. I then claim that the distinction is best understood in terms of the externalist/internalist conceptions of knowledge. Finally, I seek to garner some independent support for the proposal by highlighting some of its consequences, including its surprising bearing on certain recent and seemingly distant controversies involving issues in epistemology and philosophy of mind.     

ANTISTRUCTURE AND THE ROOTS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

The cognitive and evolutionary sciences of religion offer a standard model of religious representations, but no equivalent paradigm for investigating religiously interpreted altered states of consciousness (religious ASCs). Here, I describe a neo-Durkheimian framework for studying religious ASCs that centralizes social predictive cognition. Within a processual model of ritual, ritual behaviors toggle between reinforcing normative social structures and downplaying them. Specifically, antistructural ritual shifts cognitive focus away from conventional affordances, collective intentionality, and social prediction, and toward physical affordances and behavioral motivations that make few references to others’ intentional states. Using synchrony and dance as paradigmatic examples of antistructural ritual that stimulate religious ASCs, I assemble literature from anthropology, cognitive neuroscience, and philosophy of language to offer fruitful empirical predictions and opportunities for testing based on this framework. Among the empirical predictions is that antistructural ritual may provide for cultural change in religions when religions are construed as complex adaptive systems.     

THE BIBLICAL ROOTS OF LOCKE'S THEORY OF PERSONAL IDENTITY

Locke's consciousness‐based theory of personal identity resulted not only from his agnosticism on substance, but also from his biblical theology. This theory was intended to complement and sustain Locke's moral and theological commitments to a system of otherworldly rewards and sanctions as revealed in Scripture. Moreover, he inferred mortalist ideas from the Bible, rejecting the resurrection of the same body and maintaining that the soul dies at physical death and will be resurrected by divine miracle. Accordingly, personal identity is neither in the soul, nor in the body, nor in a union of soul and body. To Locke, personal identity is in consciousness, which, extending “backwards to any past Action or Thought,” enables the self, both in this life and upon resurrection for the Last Judgment, to recognize that “it is the same self now it was then; and ‘tis by the same self with this present one that now reflects on it, that that Action was done” (Essay II.xxvii.9).     

THE ESCHATOLOGICAL CHARACTER OF OUR KNOWLEDGE OF GOD

In this essay, I show how Thomas Aquinas circumscribes epistemological questions concerning both the possibility and character of our knowledge of God within a larger eschatological framework that acknowledges the beatific vision as the ultimate good that we desire as well as the ultimate end for which we were created. Thus, knowledge of God is possible and actual on Aquinas's view because it is eternally rather than merely temporally indexed—that is, properly attributable to the blessed in heaven and only derivatively attributable to persons of faith. I further argue that interpreting Aquinas's account of faith in the light of his account of the beatific vision allows us to carve out polemical space for the theologically realist claim that there can be and in fact is objectivity in our knowledge of God, whether that knowledge comes through faith (in this life) or the beatific vision (in the next life).