Life, death, and the hiddenness of God

Many philosophers have contended that (traditional) theism or supernaturalism suffers from what can properly be called the Problem of Divine Hiddenness (the PDH). [See Howard-Snyder and Moser 2002]. Moreover, it is the contention of many proponents of the PDH that this “problem,” if, indeed, not just a component of the “problem of evil,” bears a striking similarity to the latter. Specifically, at the heart of this ostensible difficulty for theism is that Divine “Hiddenness,” like pain and suffering—or at least pain and suffering in the amount that the world contains—is precisely the opposite of what one would expect if there existed a (maximally great) supernatural Person. Accordingly, it is maintained by proponents of the PDH that supernaturalism is disconfirmed by the relevant “problem.” The aim of this essay is to establish that there is more than ample metaphysical warrant (of a sort overlooked thus far) for maintaining that the “hiddenness” of God is exactly what should be expected if theism is true. Thus, the conclusion we hope to secure is that the PDH has considerably less to recommend it than its proponents have thought, and, accordingly, that it fails to constitute an effective threat to supernaturalism.     

Specifying the Neuropsychology of Affective Disorders: Clinical,Demographic and Neurobiological Factors

Neuropsychological research in patients with affective disorders shows heterogeneous results with regard to the severity and profile of cognitive impairments. In this paper we hypothesize that the investigation of clinical (subtypes, comorbidity, traumatization, personality, severity, diurnal swings, course, duration, age of onset, biased processing, rumination, motivation, experience of failure, sleep, suicidal tendencies, computer attitudes), demographic (age, education, gender) and neurobiological factors (structural and functional brain changes, glucocorticoids, medication, ECT) that are related to cognitive performance has specified the understanding of severity and profile of neuropsychological impairments. We reviewed the literature pertaining to clinical, demographic and neurobiological factors following Pubmed and PsychInfo databases using different combinations of general key-terms including “Affective Disorder,” “Depression,” “Mania,” “Neuropsychological,” “Neurobiological,” “Moderator,” and “Review” as well as more specific demographic, clinical and neurobiological search terms. Findings from the literature show that the consideration of these factors has improved knowledge about the severity of neuropsychological impairments in patients with affective disorders whereas the neuropsychological profile is still poorly understood. Despite limited understanding, however, the existent results provide promising suggestions for the development of treatment programs.     

Rhetoric, technical writing, and ethics

Many outside science and engineering, especially social scientists and “rhetoricians”, claim that rhetoric, “the art of persuasion”, is an important part of technical communication. This claim is either trivial or false. If “persuasion” simply means “effective communication”, then, of course, rhetoric is an important part of technical communication. But, if “persuasion” has anything like its traditional meaning (a specific art of winning conviction), rhetoric is not an important part of technical communication; indeed, its use in technical communication would be unethical. [By] an advocate is meant one whose business it is to smooth over real difficulties, and to persuade where he cannot convince. —Thomas Henry Huxley, Man’s Place in Nature ^{1 (p. 238)} As a profession, engineers frown on persuasiveness and find it suspect. —Dorothy A. Winsor, Writing Like an Engineer ^{2 (p. 12), A} Michael Davis’s research interests are in the areas of engineering ethics and the social contract. Recent published books include Thinking Like an Engineer, 1998, Oxford, and Ethics and the University, 1999, Routledge.     

Iona College Community Centered Family Health History Project: Lessons Learned from Student Focus Groups

The Community Centered Family Health History project was initiated to create accessible family health history tools produced by and for the community. The project goal was to promote increased community engagement in health education by encouraging conversations among family members that would translate knowledge of family health history into healthy lifestyle choices. As one of seven community partners, Iona College participated in customizing and beta-testing the Does It Run in the Family? toolkit. Twenty-nine college students were engaged to recruit three relatives related by blood to provide feedback on the utility of the toolkit. The toolkit consists of two booklets—“A Guide to Family Health History” and “A Guide to Understanding Genetics and Health”—explaining the importance of knowing and talking about health within the family as well as basics about how conditions are passed down through generations. Twenty-two of the twenty-nine students participated in focus groups to discuss their reactions to participation in the project. Students in the focus group reported that the study participants—students and their family members—found the toolkit to be user friendly and the experience a valuable one that prompted many to take positive steps toward good health.     

First-Personal Authority and the Normativity of Rationality

In “Vindicating the Normativity of Rationality,” Nicholas Southwood proposes that rational requirements are best understood as demands of one’s “first-personal standpoint.” Southwood argues that this view can “explain the normativity or reason-giving force” of rationality by showing that they “are the kinds of thing that are, by their very nature, normative.” We argue that the proposal fails on three counts: First, we explain why demands of one’s first-personal standpoint cannot be both reason-giving and resemble requirements of rationality. Second, the proposal runs headlong into the now familiar “bootstrapping” objection that helped illuminate the need to vindicate the normativity of rationality in the first place. Lastly, even if Southwood is right—the demands of rationality just are the demands or our first-personal standpoints—the explanation as to why our standpoints generate reasons will entail that we sometimes have no reason at all to be rational.     

The Purpose and Neurobiology of Theory of Mind Functions

Theory of Mind (ToM) refers to a cognitive process which allows an individual to “place him/herself” in the other person’s “mind,” so as to comprehend the latter’s cognitive and emotional status, so as to predict his/her behavior and emotional response to a particular situation. ToM is necessary for everyday interaction among individuals and accounts for such human traits as empathy, compassion, and deceit. It is also particularly important in the relationship between a healer and his or her client, as well as in the God–human relationship. Recent research in the area of neurosciences has identified a specific brain “system” responsible for ToM, as well as described how these functions may be affected in certain neuropsychiatric conditions. In this article, we discuss the definition and neurobiological substrate of ToM. In addition, we discuss the cognitive steps important to achieve an “accurate” theory of mind, its relevance to “self-knowledge,” and its limitations. We also review some of the data concerning abnormalities and “distortion” of ToM in neuropsychiatric disorders and aberrant human behavior.     

A New Framework for Comparative Study of Philosophy

The aim of this essay is to outline a conceptual framework for a type of philosophy (or approach to philosophy) to be herein called “non-sentential philosophy.” Although I will primarily concern myself with the conceptual coherence of the framework in this essay, illustrations will be provided to show that the notion has rich implications for comparative studies. In particular, I believe this theoretical framework will be of interest to those looking for a way to capture the differences between certain non-Western philosophical traditions—such as Chinese philosophy—and Western philosophy, a tradition in which the sentential approach is dominant.     

Reducing mind to molecular pathways: explicating the reductionism implicit in current cellular and molecular neuroscience

As opposed to the dismissive attitude toward reductionism that is popular in current philosophy of mind, a “ruthless reductionism” is alive and thriving in “molecular and cellular cognition”—a field of research within cellular and molecular neuroscience, the current mainstream of the discipline. Basic experimental practices and emerging results from this field imply that two common assertions by philosophers and cognitive scientists are false: (1) that we do not know much about how the brain works, and (2) that lower-level neuroscience cannot explain cognition and complex behavior directly. These experimental practices involve intervening directly with molecular components of sub-cellular and gene expression pathways in neurons and then measuring specific behaviors. These behaviors are tracked using tests that are widely accepted by experimental psychologists to study the psychological phenomenon at issue (e.g., memory, attention, and perception). Here I illustrate these practices and their importance for explanation and reduction in current mainstream neuroscience by describing recent work on social recognition memory in mammals.     

The role of mental rotations in primate-inspired robot navigation

Scripts store the temporal order of component events of everyday activities as well as the temporal position of the events within the activity (early or late). When confronted with an activity, predictions are generated about how the component events will unfold. Thereby, an error-detection mechanism continuously monitors whether they unfold as anticipated or not in order to reveal errors in the unfolding activity. We investigated whether the temporal position “early” or “late” influenced the detection of errors using the pupillary response as an index of cognitive resource consumption. An event triplet consisting of three events was presented in a chronological or non-chronological temporal order. Crucially, the triplet focused either on the beginning (temporal position “early”) or the end (temporal position “late”) of an activity. We assumed that these position codes would be used to facilitate error detection when a non-chronological event was presented. Results showed that errors in the temporal order were detected more successfully in early than in late triplets. Results further suggest that strong predictions are formed about how an activity begins. Violations of this prediction must be overcome by zooming into the representation and allocating attention to the temporal position that consumes cognitive resources. Only after zooming in has taken place successfully may the position codes be used to anticipate temporal violations in unfolding event sequences.     

Around the nation’s mystic core: interactions between political concepts and the literary imagination in the works of Stanisław Brzozowski

The essay examines Stanisław Brzozowski’s ideas on mutual interactions between the sphere of culture and the realm of the political. It shows how Brzozowski made use of literary texts in order to elucidate social and political processes. In doing so, he insisted on a specific form of knowledge accessible through texts of literature and literary criticism, which are not limited by the mere “logic of notions.” Following Vico and Sorel Brzozowski detected an “irrational core” at the bases of human collectivities such as above all modern nations, and it is through literature that this core can be revealed. Brzozowski’s understanding of political ideas and concepts is informed—to a decisive degree—by the literary imagination. This can be shown by a semantic and rhetorical analysis of some of his later writings.     

What is an emotional feeling? Lessons about affective origins from cross-species neuroscience

Cross-species affective neuroscience aspires to provide an evidence-based foundation for understanding the primary-process emotional networks that concurrently control instinctual emotional actions and affective feelings—direct emotional circuit mediated ‘rewards’ and ‘punishments’. In humans and other mammals, the ancestral subcortical regions of the brain are central to such affective BrainMind functions (a monistic term, here used synonymously with MindBrain, depending on stylistic needs). Although these circuits cannot be ‘identical’ across species (that would be incompatible with evolutionary principles) they are sufficiently similar, anatomically, neurochemically and functionally, to allow animal brain research to illuminate (yield testable predictions) about homologous human mind functions. Primal emotional feelings (affects) are inbuilt value functions of the brain that energize and inform the rest of the mental apparatus about basic survival values, thereby promoting secondary-process learning/memory functions and tertiary-process cognitive thinking-ruminative functions, yielding bottom-up evolutionary controls that ultimately allow top-down regulatory controls. As we envision how such “nested” hierarchies—two-way paths of causality—reflecting both bottom-up and top-down functions—we will need disciplined distinctions between cognitions and emotions at the primary-process level, while also accepting total interpenetrance of cognitions and affects at the tertiary-process level of MindBrain organization. This allows full and synergistic integration of basic and dimensional approaches to emotions. Here the primal emotional networks, so critically important for understanding ‘human-nature’ and psychiatric disorders, are discussed didactically in ways that can minimize dilemmas that non-evolutionary, non-hierarchical perspectives are subject to in modern emotion research.     

Representationalism and Husserlian Phenomenology

According to contemporary representationalism, phenomenal qualia—of specifically sensory experiences—supervene on representational content. Most arguments for representationalism share a common, phenomenological premise: the so-called “transparency thesis.” According to the transparency thesis, it is difficult—if not impossible—to distinguish the quality or character of experiencing an object from the perceived properties of that object. In this paper, I show that Husserl would react negatively to the transparency thesis; and, consequently, that Husserl would be opposed to at least two versions of contemporary representationalism. First, I show that Husserl would be opposed to strong representationalism, since he believes the cognitive content of a perceptual episode can vary despite constancy of sensory qualia. Second, I then show that Husserl would be opposed to weak representationalism, since he believes that sensory qualia—specifically, the sort that he calls “kinesthetic sensations”—can vary despite constancy in representational content.     

Introducing the Concepts of “Positions,” “Space,” and “Worlds”: Seeing Human Being and Becoming—and Religion—in New Ways

Theories of psychological development, however diverse, often express common underlying ontological-epistemological commitments shaped by the legacies of Descartes, Newton, and Kant. Three related psychoanalytic concepts—“positions,” “space,” and “worlds”—individually and collectively sketch the contours of a different way of construing human being and becoming—a way that departs from these legacies. Implications for the study of religion of this “different way” are examined.     

Tysons corner, Virginia

Beginning around the time of the Sputnik crisis of 1957, a number of specialized, defense-related firms moved to the Washington, D.C. area. Their primary function was vague: they often defined their work as “systems integration”—but that was not well-defined. Journalists, not understanding the nature of this activity, called the firms “Beltway Bandits,” a misnomer since nearly all were located not around the Washington Beltway but rather close by one another in an area known as Tysons Corner, Virginia. Though little understood and by 1997 all but gone as independent companies, these firms laid the foundation for one of the most vibrant and economically successful regions of the country: Tysons Corner. Tysons is now an anchor for Internet activity and probably has more high-technology software activity than anyplace, save Silicon Valley, in the United States. It is also home to one of the most successful retail centers in the northeastern United States. Tysons is a classic “Edge City” in the words of urban geographer Joel Garreau: tremendous commercial vitality yet none of the qualities one associates with a “community.” Tysons Corner has no post office or ZIP code of its own, no political boundary, no subway or railroad station, no library, public school, park, or town square. Yet is is an easily-recognized “place.” This study looks at the area, its origins, and its present status, with a view toward some general comments about the place for such “Edge Cities” in the country’s future.     

Hypermedia, cognition, and artificial intelligence

Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversation in it, “and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversation?” Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Lewis Carroll Hari Seldon and his band of psychologists planted a colony—the Foundation—to incubate art, science, and technology, and form the nucleus of the Second Empire. The Foundation Trilogy. Isaac Asimov     

Realization,explanation and the mind-body relation

The Morris water maze has been put forward in the philosophy of neuroscience as an example of an experimental arrangement that may be used to delineate the cognitive faculty of spatial memory (e.g., Craver and Darden, Theory and method in the neurosciences, University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, 2001; Craver, Explaining the brain: Mechanisms and the mosaic unity of neuroscience, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007). However, in the experimental and review literature on the water maze throughout the history of its use, we encounter numerous responses to the question of “what” phenomenon it circumscribes ranging from cognitive functions (e.g., “spatial learning”, “spatial navigation”), to representational changes (e.g., “cognitive map formation”) to terms that appear to refer exclusively to observable changes in behavior (e.g., “water maze performance”). To date philosophical analyses of the water maze have not been directed at sorting out what phenomenon the device delineates nor the sources of the different answers to the question of what. I undertake both of these tasks in this paper. I begin with an analysis of Morris’s first published research study using the water maze and demonstrate that he emerged from it with an experimental learning paradigm that at best circumscribed a discrete set of observable changes in behavior. However, it delineated neither a discrete set of representational changes nor a discrete cognitive function. I cite this in combination with a reductionist-oriented research agenda in cellular and molecular neurobiology dating back to the 1980s as two sources of the lack of consistency across the history of the experimental and review literature as to what is under study in the water maze.     

Patterns of covert speech behavior and phonetic coding

In previous research a discriminative relationship has been established between patterns of covert speech behavior and the phonemic system when processing continuous linguistic material. The goal of the present research was to be more analytic and pinpoint covert neuromuscular speech patterns when one processes specific instances of phonemes. Electromyographic (EMG) recording indicated that the lips are significantly active when visually processing the letter “P” (an instance of bilabial material), but not when processing the letter “T” or a nonlinguistic control (C) stimulus. Similarly, the tongue is significantly active when processing the letter “T” (an instance of lingual-alveolar material), but not when processing the letters “P” or “C.” It is concluded that the speech musculature covertly responds systematically as a function of class of phoneme being processed. These results accord with our model that semantic processing (“understanding”) occurs when the speech (and other) musculature interacts with linguistic regions of the brain. In the interactions phonetic coding is generated and transmitted through neuromuscular circuits that have cybernetic characteristics.