Philosophy and the Search for Truth

Philosophy, as it is understood and practiced in the West, is and has been generally considered to be the search for truth. But even if philosophy is the search for truth, it does not automatically follow that those who are identified as ‘philosophers’ are themselves actually engaged in that search. And indeed, in this paper I argue that many philosophers have in fact not been genuinely engaged in the search for truth (in other words, many philosophers have not been doing philosophy) and as such much of what passes for philosophy is in fact not really philosophy at all.     

God's Mission and the Christian Assembly: The Search for an Alternative Practice of Worship

Abstract : The search for something alternative characterizes the practice of worship in many contemporary Christian assemblies. Although “alternative” is often set in opposition to “traditional,” it is better understood in response to “conventional” worship. Five such alternative movements are described here: liturgical movement, contemporary worship movement, liberation perspectives, Pentecostalism, and postmodern approaches. The alternative impulse in all of these perspectives has to do with a fuller realization of the Christian assembly in relation to God's mission.     

阿赖耶识的真妄及其在修行中的应用

本文对印度佛教经论及中国汉藏佛学诸宗关于第八阿赖耶识性质的说法作了梳理,说明地论师、摄论师、天台宗、慈恩宗、真言宗及藏传宁玛派、觉朗派等,对阿赖耶识的性质,凡有妄、真、真妄和合三种看法,各有其经典依据,其中以真妄和合说较为合理,并对阿赖耶识在修行、开悟中的应用进行了论述,认为见到阿赖耶识与否并不能作为见道、开悟的标准.     

On Valuing Truth in Practice: Rome's Postmodern Challenge

Abstract:  This essay probes whether there can be any real and fruitful dialogue between Roman Catholic self-understanding in relation to truth and postmodern questioning of the value of all such truth-talk, at least as traditionally conceived. After an introductory section situating the essay in context, the exploration moves through four phases. First, there are some initial reflections on the place of truth in Catholic self-understanding and the significant shaping force this exerts on Catholic structure and practice. Second, attention shifts to asking after the motivating factors behind Rorty's trenchant disavowal of 'objectivity' in favour of 'solidarity', or localized agreement, as the only viable basis for interpreting and acting within the world. Having noted the challenges the Rorty's concerns pose to Catholic self-understanding, attention turns in the third part to review the counter-case that can be made for the lasting significance of a revised aspiration for truth as the articulation of reality. The final section further probes the challenge that this position in turn holds for the concern that Catholicism give appealing, inspiring, convincing, and, in this sense, authoritative witness to the task of discerning together the truth in love.     

Double Gestures: Feminist Critiques and the Search for a Useable Practice

This essay is a critical review of two recent collections, Feminism and Foucauk: Reflections on Resistance, edited by Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby and Feminism as Critique: On the Politics of Gender, edited by Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell. While the collections differ in their manner of addressing the critical sources that have inspired them—the former relying upon a single theorist, the latter attempting to move through some of the philosophical history that constitutes our present theoretical terrain—both attempt to think through and thus revisudize some of the categories of difference which we have inherited. Though the best essays from these collections are celebrated for demonstrating how “feminism as critique” can work to move us toward a clearer and more inclusive feminist theory, questions are raised about what the inattention to race in these volumes suggests about our own role in the construction of power and knowledge, and the erasures that help to secure them both.     

The Role of Social Contacts in the Successful Job Search

This study examined the impact of social contacts (“It's who you know, not what you know”) on job getting. Workers were interviewed to discover the source of information about their most recent job. Results show that social contacts were the most frequently used resources during the job-getting process and that these personal contacts were used more often in some occupational environments than in others.     

On the Explanatory Role of Correspondence Truth

An intuitive argument for scientific realism suggests that our successes in predicting and intervening would be inexplicable if the theories that generate them were not approximately true. This argument faces many objections, some of which are briefly addressed in this paper, and one of which is treated in more detail. The focal criticism alleges that appeals to success cannot deliver conclusions that parts of science are true in the sense of truth-as-correspondence that realists prefer. The paper responds to that criticism, in versions proposed by Michael Williams, Michael Levin, and, especially, Paul Horwich, by arguing that critics typically stop at a shallow level of psychological explanation. If we probe more deeply we discover a genuine explanatory role for correspondence truth.     

Proverb Comprehension: The Primacy of Literal Meaning

According to the multistage model of figurative language understanding, literal meanings must be developed before figurative meanings. Although the model implies that figurative understanding should take longer than literal understanding, Kemper (1981) reported that figuratively biased proverbs were processed more quickly than literalized proverbs. By contrast, in the present study the results from six experiments yielded the opposite conclusion. These results support the multistage model and the conceptual base theory of proverb comprehension (Honeck, 1997; Honeck & Temple, 1994; Honeck, Voegtle, Dorfmueller, & Hoffman, 1980) which incorporates it. Discrepancies between studies that have examined the multistage model may crucially depend on methodological factors such as type of experimental design, materials, and, as apparent in the present case, the task and dependent measure used.     

Alethic Pluralism and the Role of Reference in the Metaphysics of Truth

In this paper, I outline and defend a novel approach to alethic pluralism, the thesis that truth has more than one metaphysical nature: where truth is, in part, explained by reference, it is (relevantly) relational in character and can be regarded as consisting in correspondence; but where instead truth does not depend upon reference it is not (relevantly) relational and involves only coherence. In the process, I articulate a clear sense in which truth may or may not depend upon reference: this involves distinguishing semantic denotation from pragmatic speaker reference and claiming that there may or may not exist a metasemantic connection between these two notions. Finally, I argue that reference is not in general inscrutable—that this metasemantic connection does exist in the case of our ordinary discourse about present macroscopic concrete objects—but that it is in pure mathematics, where reference cannot be secured, and which therefore plays no role in accounting for truth. In this manner, alethic pluralism is upheld.