Escaping Heaven

In response to the problem of Hell, Buckareff and Plug (Relig Stud 41:39–54, 2005; Relig Stud 45:63–72, 2009) have recently proposed and defended an ‘escapist’ conception of Hell. In short, they propose that the problem of Hell does not arise because God places an open-door policy on Hell. In this paper, I expose a fundamental problem with this conception of Hell—namely, that if there’s an open door policy on Hell, then there should be one on Heaven too. I argue that a coherent conception of Heaven cannot have such a policy. Hence, escapism is not an adequate response to the problem of Hell.     

Hilbert's Inferno: Time Travel for the Damned

Combining time travel with certain kinds of supertask, this paper proposes a novel model for Hell. Temporally‐closed spacetimes allow otherwise impossible opportunities for material kinds of damnation and reveal surprising limitations on metaphysical objections to Hell. Prima facie, eternal damnation requires either infinite amounts of time or time for the damned to speed‐up arbitrarily. However, spatiotemporally finite ‘time travel’ universes can host unending personal torment for infinitely many physical beings, while keeping fixed finite limits on rates of temporal passage. Such ‘Hilbert's Inferno’ spacetimes suggest neither materialism nor the finitude of time and space need forbid Hell. A material Hell can be spatiotemporally finite yet eternal for its inhabitants. Hilbert's Inferno also sheds light on Hell's location and accessibility, and shows that some spacetimes are intrinsically better suited to punishment than reward.     

Continued relevance of Dante Alighieri’s Comedy that transformed the soul and the culture

Abstract

The following essay is a modified version of an invited presentation given in Florence, Italy in May 2017. It builds on and extends some of the previous psychoanalytic and multidisciplinary studies of Dante’s Divine Comedy as a “psychoanalysis of the Middle Ages” that greatly contributed to the incipient changes of the cultural episteme. The paper will explore and elaborate the continued relevance of Dantian proto-psychoanalytic insight into the complex role of regression, destruction, transgression, and conflict in generating growth, expansion, and creativity, and the ways in which ethics and erotics intertwine in a complex path towards unity, within the context of his multivocal presubjective, intrasubjective, and intersubjective inquiry leading to psychic reorganization. The liminal nature of Dante’s poetry, extending the symbolic and representational range in a way unprecedented in the vernacular literature of his time, vivifying and representing what is traditionally thought of as beyond representation, will also be considered in terms of its relevance to the contemporary psychoanalytic discourse.     

Mandel'štam and Dante: TheDivine Comedy in Mandel'štam's poetry of the 1930s

Osip Mandel'?tam (1891–1938?) belongs among the greatest Russian poets of the twentieth century. During the thirties, when he led a tragic existence and felt a premonition of his inevitable violent death, Mandel'?tam saw in Dante not only the greatest poet, but also his own superior teacher, and his poems of that period contain a tormented meditation on the masterpiece of Dante's genius — theDivine Comedy. Epic poetry of Dante, Homer, Virgil and others was possible because the inner world of each poet was essentially at one with the ethos of the society in which he lived. Mandel'?tam's inner world was Judaeo-Christian, European, and rooted in classical and neo-Platonic philosophy, but his outer world, consisting of a new Marxist or pseudo-Marxist system, was totally at odds with it. Thus Mandel'?tam could not embody the epic impulse of the society he opposed. He was left with the tormented lyric impulse. The fundamental conflict between Mandel'?tam as a lyric poet and the society in which he had to live and work accounts for the fact that his vision of Stalinist society in a number of respects remarkably corresponds to Dante's vision of a perverted divine order in theInferno.     

Dante’s Divine Comedy and modern depth therapy

The author discusses a connection between the modern analysand’s experience of depth therapy and the Christian pilgrim’s experience of confession, penitence and transformation as described by Dante in his Divine Comedy. She looks at structure and order in the context of psychotherapy. Taking Adriana Mazzarella’s ‘In Search of Beatrice’ as a guide, she examines a Jungian interpretation of the poem as an analogy of therapeutic initiation. She explores the idea of cultural complexes via the study of the medieval world view as one distinct from our own. She demonstrates the way in which study of the Comedy unexpectedly helped her survive an experience of long-term psychotherapeutic work.     

The fairness of Hell

The Christian conception of Hell as everlasting punishment for past sins is confronted with two charges of unfairness. The first is the inequity of an eternal punishment. The never‐ending punishment seems disproportionate to the finite sin (Kershnar, Lewis, Adams). A second and related problem is that the boundary between sins that send one for all eternity to Hell and those sins that are slightly less bad that are compatible with an eternity in Heaven is arbitrary and thus it is unfair that sinners so alike are treated differently (Sider). Hell, as traditionally conceived, is then claimed to be incompatible with God's traditional attributes such as his commitment to justice, omniscience and omnipotence. The unfairness can be avoided by appealing to God's foreknowledge and a debt/atonement theory of punishment. My view is analogous to refusing to parole the unrepentant. If a wrongdoer is eternally defiant, then he can never be released from Hell for his debt won't ever be paid if he isn't reformed and reconciled with the wronged. So it doesn't matter that his initial sin was a finite wrong not deserving of infinite punishment nor a sin no worse than that of the penitent in Heaven.     

‘Most of Us Guys are Raring to Go Anytime, Anyplace, Anywhere’: Male and Female Sexuality in Cleo and Cosmo

Women’s magazines are a popular site for analysis of socio-cultural messages about gender, sex, and sexuality. We analyzed six consecutive issues of Cosmopolitan and Cleo to identify the ways in which they construct and represent male and female sexuality. Overall, male sexuality was prioritised, ‘real’ heterosex was depicted as penetrative, and orgasm was given precedence. Two main accounts of male and female sexuality were identified. Men’s need for (great) sex positioned men as easily aroused and sexually satisfied, but women as needing to develop ‘great’ sexual skills to keep their men from ‘straying.’ Accounts of pleasure, performance, and the male ego represented men as concerned about women’s pleasure, about their own sexual performance and as sensitive about suggested sexual ‘inadequacies.’ We discuss the implications of these constructions for women’s gendered (sexual) subjectivity, sexual practices, and identities.     

Intrapersonal variability in interpersonal perception in romantic relationships: Biases and accuracy

We examined whether intrapersonal variability in the perception of partner’s behavior, perception spin, was related to partner’s intrapersonal variability in behavior, behavioral spin, and was associated with biases in the perception of negative affect. Ninety-three cohabiting couples reported their perceptions of partner’s affect and partner’s communal and agentic behavior in interactions with each other for 20 days. Perception spin was calculated as the within-person standard deviation of perception scores across interactions. Spin in the perception of the partner was associated with the partner’s behavioral spin. Participants with higher perception spin overestimated their partner’s negative affect and more strongly assumed that their partner’s affect was similar to their own negative affect. Thus, perception spin is an individual difference variable that reflects in part the extent of variability in the partner’s behavior, but higher spin also indicates distortions in perceptions of others.     

Female copulatory orgasm and male partner’s attractiveness to his partner and other women

Women’s copulatory orgasm may function to retain sperm from men with “good genes”, one indicator of which is attractiveness, and one benefit of which is pathogen resistance. Women who perceive their partner to be more (vs. less) attractive are more likely to report orgasm at last copulation. Another benefit of male attractiveness to women is that he may sire offspring that will gain the heritable share of this advantage (i.e., “sexy sons”). Research has not addressed the “Sexy Sons” Hypothesis (e.g., as indicated by women’s perception of other women’s assessments of their partner’s attractiveness) in regards to female copulatory orgasm. We secured self-reports from 439 women in a committed, heterosexual relationship and investigated the relationships between women’s orgasm at last copulation and (1) women’s assessments of their partner’s attractiveness and (2) women’s perceptions of other women’s assessments of their partner’s attractiveness. The results indicate that women mated to more (vs. less) attractive men are more likely to report orgasm at last copulation, and this relationship is mediated by women’s perceptions of other women’s assessments of their partner’s attractiveness. We discuss the mediated relationship, note limitations of the research, and suggest future research directions.     

Dante's ‘Two Suns’: Reflections on the psychological sources of the Divine Comedy

The power of Dante's Divine Comedy is unmistakable, but surprising in view of its theological structure and assumptions that are no longer current among most modern readers. This paper suggests that its power derives from the deep psychological truthfulness with which Dante deals with the painful personal crisis that underlies the poem and is his starting point. It attempts to clarify what may have constituted that crisis, and why the structure of the Comedy, and in particular its use of two guides, Virgil and Beatrice, who might be thought a somewhat incompatible pairing, point significantly to the nature of the solution Dante arrived at. In particular it suggests that the puzzling fictions to do with Statius in the Purgatorio are a clue to Dante's own difficulties in bridging the classical and Christian traditions, and that his highly original solution to these difficulties, by no means conforming to conventional Christian orthodoxy in the 13th/14th century, was needed with special urgency in a time of pervasive civil conflict.     

A Peculiarity in Pearl’s Logic of Interventionist Counterfactuals

We examine a formal semantics for counterfactual conditionals due to Judea Pearl, which formalizes the interventionist interpretation of counterfactuals central to the interventionist accounts of causation and explanation. We show that a characteristic principle validated by Pearl’s semantics, known as the principle of reversibility, states a kind of irreversibility: counterfactual dependence (in David Lewis’s sense) between two distinct events is irreversible. Moreover, we show that Pearl’s semantics rules out only mutual counterfactual dependence, not cyclic dependence in general. This, we argue, suggests that Pearl’s logic is either too weak or too strong.     

Notes on Mally’s deontic logic and the collapse of {\varvec{Seinsollen}} and {\varvec{Sein}}

This paper analyzes Mally’s system of deontic logic, introduced in his The Basic Laws of Ought: Elements of the Logic of Willing (1926). We discuss Mally’s text against the background of some contributions in the literature which show that Mally’s axiomatic system for deontic logic is flawed, in so far as it derives, for an arbitrary A, the theorem “A ought to be the case if and only if A is the case”, which represents a collapse of obligation. We then try to sort out and understand which axioms are responsible for the collapse and consider two ways of amending Mally’s system: (i) by changing its original underlying logical basis, that is classical logic, and (ii) by modifying Mally’s axioms.     

His and Her Perspectives: Gender Ideology, Work-to-Family Conflict, and Marital Satisfaction

This study examines the relationships between gender ideology, work-to-family conflict, and marital satisfaction. We hypothesize that gender ideology will moderate relationships between both the respondent’s work-to-family conflict and their spouse’s work-to-family conflict in predicting marital satisfaction, and that spouses’ gender ideologies will interact in predicting marital satisfaction. The hypotheses are addressed using data from a random sample of U.S. dual-earner couples (N?=?156) in a western state. The findings indicate that the more egalitarian women’s gender ideologies, the stronger the negative relationship between women’s marital satisfaction and women’s work-to-family conflict. The results also indicate that the dependence of men’s marital satisfaction on wives’ gender ideologies varies according to men’s own gender ideologies. Implications of the study are discussed.     

T. V. Moore’s (1939)Cognitive Psychology

Thomas Verner Moore published a book calledCognitive Psychology in 1939, almost 30 years before Neisser’s (1967) more familiar and far more influential work. Although it covers most of the standard topics found in current cognitive psychology textbooks, and even anticipated several current trends, Moore’s text is not cited by any of the major histories of the “cognitive revolution” or any current cognitive textbook. We provide a brief sketch of Moore’s academic life and summarize several of his papers that are still cited. After describing the psychologies prevalent in 1939, we compare Moore’s text with two contemporary works, Woodworth (1938) and McGeoch (1942). We conclude by comparing the older text with Neisser’s and by offering several reasons why the book is virtually unknown.     

Cohen’s Conservatism and Human Enhancement

In an intriguing essay, G. A. Cohen has defended a conservative bias in favour of existing value. In this paper, we consider whether Cohen’s conservatism raises a new challenge to the use of human enhancement technologies. We develop some of Cohen’s suggestive remarks into a new line of argument against human enhancement that, we believe, is in several ways superior to existing objections. However, we shall argue that on closer inspection, Cohen’s conservatism fails to offer grounds for a strong sweeping objection to enhancement, and may even offer positive support for forms of enhancement that preserve valuable features of human beings. Nevertheless, we concede that Cohen’s arguments may suggest some plausible and important constraints on the modality of legitimate and desirable enhancements.     

Non-Inferential Aspects of Ad Hominem and Ad Baculum

The aim of the paper is to explore the interrelation between persuasion tactics and properties of speech acts. We investigate two types of arguments ad: ad hominem and ad baculum. We show that with both of these tactics, the structures that play a key role are not inferential, but rather ethotic, i.e., related to the speaker’s character and trust. We use the concepts of illocutionary force and constitutive conditions related to the character or status of the speaker in order to explain the dynamics of these two techniques. In keeping with the research focus of the Polish School of Argumentation, we examine how the pragmatic and rhetorical aspects of the force of ad hominem and ad baculum arguments exploit trust in the speaker’s status to influence the audience’s cognition.     

Satan,Saint Peter and Saint Petersburg

We examine a distinctive kind of problem for decision theory, involving what we call discontinuity at infinity. Roughly, it arises when an infinite sequence of choices, each apparently sanctioned by plausible principles, converges to a ‘limit choice’ whose utility is much lower than the limit approached by the utilities of the choices in the sequence. We give examples of this phenomenon, focusing on Arntzenius et al.’s Satan’s apple, and give a general characterization of it. In these examples, repeated dominance reasoning (a paradigm of rationality) apparently gives rise to a situation closely analogous to having intransitive preferences (a paradigm of irrationality). Indeed, the agents in these examples are vulnerable to a money pump set-up despite having preferences that exhibit no obvious defect of rationality. We explore several putative solutions to such problems, particularly those that appeal to binding and to deliberative dynamics. We consider the prospects for these solutions, concluding that if they fail, the examples show that money pump arguments are invalid.     

Narrative and Rhetorical Approaches to Problems of Education. Jerome Bruner and Kenneth Burke Revisited

Over the last few decades there has been a strong narrative turn within the humanities and social sciences in general and educational studies in particular. Especially Jerome Bruner’s theory of narrative as a specific ‘mode of knowing’ was very important for this growing body of work. To understand how the narrative mode works Bruner proposes to study narratives ‘at their far reach’—as an art form—and on several occasions he refers to the dramatistic pentad as an important method for ‘unpacking’ narratives. The pentad proposed by Bruner to study narratives was developed by the American philosopher and rhetorician Kenneth Burke and is embedded in his general linguistic theory of dramatism. From an educational perspective Bruner’s reference to the work of Burke has not been elaborated upon thus far. In this paper we aim to take Bruner’s suggestion at hand and explore how his educational theory of narrative as a mode of knowing can indeed be enriched by Kenneth Burke’s theory and method of dramatism. We claim that specifically the rhetorical framework that is developed by dramatism offers an important perspective about perspectives for education in a context that is increasingly confronted with a plurality of interpretive frameworks.