Maker of Heaven and Earth

The first article of the Nicene creed forms Christian teaching about creation in two ways. It exhibits a particular order of Christian confession and instruction, and it recommends to the church the importance of properly distinguishing three relations: the relation between God the Father and God the Son; the relation between God and the world; and the relation between heaven and earth. This dogmatic commentary on the creed attends to the first two relations and introduces the third.     

Mikhail Lifshits and the fate of Hegelianism in the 20th century

In his essay “Das literarische Erbe Hegels” (“The fate of Hegel’s literary legacy”, 1931) Lifshits addressed the fate of Hegelianism in the first third of the 20th century. He observed a struggle surrounding Hegel’s heritage between Marxism on the one hand, and Neo-Hegelianism or ?the Hegel renaissance“ on the other hand and came to the conclusion that the only legitimate Hegel heir is—Marxism. According to Lifshits, Neo-Hegelianism exploits the “Hegelian state” to justify the modern power state by illegitimately shifting the meaning of the Hegelian concept of the state. Thanks to Kojève’s philosophy, a diffuse yet profound Neo-Hegelian influence continues to have an impact on modern thinking, which gives cause in this essay to examine Lifshits’ verdict on the illegitimacy of the Neo-Hegelian Hegel heritage by confronting his argumentation with Kojève’s Neo-Hegelian concept. So, this essay will update Lifshits’ perspective on the fate of Hegelianism and broaden it beyond the horizon that was available to Lifshits.     

Maker Cultures and the Prospects for Technological Action

Supported by easier and cheaper access to tools and expanding communities, maker cultures are pointing towards the ideas of (almost) everyone designing, creating, producing and distributing renewed, new and improved products, machines, things or artefacts. A careful analysis of the assumptions and challenges of maker cultures emphasizes the relevance of what may be called technological action, that is, active and critical interventions regarding the purposes and applications of technologies within ordinary lives, thus countering the deterministic trends of current directions of technology. In such transformative potential, we will explore a set of elements what is and could be technological action through snapshots of maker cultures based on the empirical research conducted in three particular contexts: the Fab Lab Network, Maker Media core outputs and initiatives such as Maker Faires, and the Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA). Elements such as control and empowerment through material engagement, openness and sharing, and social, cultural, political and ethical values of the common good in topics such as diversity, sustainability and transparency, are critically analysed.     

算命者--倒霉鬼的制造者

这些年来算命风甚盛,据我的观察算命的大抵有三类人。 一是文化水平低的。此类人有官员、企业家、教师。虽是管人的人,可是科技知识太差了,连有神没神都分不清,都信着命由天定,上有神明。于是要升官的、     

The Sceptic,The Outsider,and Other Minds

Topoi - The usual way with scepticism is to formulate a problem in connection with the external world and then apply this to other minds. Drawing on work by Stanley Cavell and Richard Moran, I...     

The Concept, and Conceptions, of Justice

ABSTRACT Occasioned by but not pretending to constitute a critique of Julian Le Grand's 'Equity as an Economic Objective', published in the first issue of the Journal of Applied Philosophy , this paper argues that the concept of justice must be distinguished from conceptions thereof. Once this is done it emerges that many of what are both offered and accepted as conceptions of justice really are not. By proceeding next both to enquire what are the incentives to such misrepresentations and to reveal some of their unrecognized costs, this is shown to be by no means a merely trifling and purely verbal matter. In particular, by misrepresenting the imposition of their peculiar and characteristic ideal of equality of outcome as the enforcement of the mandate of justice, Procrusteans unwittingly imply that they are themselves involved in appallingly shabby and discreditable practices.     

The negations of conjunctions,conditionals, and disjunctions

How do reasoners understand and formulate denials of compound assertions, such as conjunctions and disjunctions? A theory based on mental models postulates that individuals enumerate models of the various possibilities consistent with the assertions. It therefore predicts a novel interaction: in affirmations, conjunctions, A and B, which refer to one possibility, should be easier to understand than disjunctions, A or B, which refer to more than one possibility; in denials, conjunctions, not(A and B), which refer to more than one possibility, should be harder to understand than disjunctions, not(A or B), which do not. Conditionals are ambiguous and they should be of intermediate difficulty. Experiment 1 corroborated this trend with a task in which the participants selected which possibilities were consistent with assertions, such as: Bob denied that he wore a yellow shirt and he wore blue pants on Tuesday. Experiment 2 likewise showed that participants' own formulations of verbal denials yielded the same trend in which denials of conjunctions were harder than denials of conditionals, which in turn were harder than denials of disjunctions.     

The Truth, Goodness, and Beauty of Darwinism

As a young proponent of "creation science," I rejected Darwinian biology as false, bad, and ugly. Now I defend Darwinism as true, good, and beautiful. Moreover, I now see Darwinism as compatible with the natural piety that arises as one moves from nature to nature's God.     

The roles of encoding,retrieval, and awareness

In the experiment reported here, we examined the processes by which expected (probable) changes are detected more frequently than are unexpected (improbable) changes (the change probability effect; Beck, Angelone, & Levin, 2004). The change probability effect may be caused by a bias toward probable changes during encoding of the prechange aspect, during retrieval of the prechange aspect, or during activation of an explicit response to the change. Participants performed a change detection task for probable and improbable changes while their eye movements were tracked. Change detection performance was superior for probable changes, but long-term memory performance was equivalent for both probable and improbable changes. Therefore, although both probable and improbable prechange aspects were encoded, probable prechange aspects were more likely to be retrieved during change detection. Implicit change detection was also greater for probable changes than for improbable changes, suggesting that the change probability effect is the result of a bias during the retrieval and comparison stage of change detection. The stimuli used in the change detection task may be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive.     

The Hope,Promise, and Possibility of Psychotherapy

In this paper, five values—diversity, science, education, practice, and spirit—(a) are examined within the professional context of psychotherapy, (b) are presented as forming the foundation of much if not all that is psychotherapy, and (c) are considered as binding values that join us as a community of practicing, theorizing, and researching psychotherapists. Some of the positives of each value are reviewed. Diversity has heightened our sensitivity to and respect for individual and cultural differences. Science has kept us focused on empirically challenging and empirically informing our practice. Education has maintained emphasis on providing solid training/supervision in psychotherapy and transmitting its culture. Practice has provided us with opportunities to increasingly implement and expand on our role as helpers and healers. Spirit has been the guiding light—the heart and soul—that supports, infuses and informs all of our therapeutic endeavors and gives them meaning. What follows is a celebration of sorts—(a) capturing some of what we have done and are doing right in psychotherapy, (b) reflecting some of the weight of those “right” efforts, and (c) conveying some of the inherent hope, promise, and possibility that forever guide us in our work.     

The logic, intentionality, and phenomenology of emotion

My concern in this paper is with the intentionality of emotions. Desires and cognitions are the traditional paradigm cases of intentional attitudes, and one very direct approach to the question of the intentionality of emotions is to treat it as sui generis—as on a par with the intentionality of desires and cognitions but in no way reducible to it. A more common approach seeks to reduce the intentionality of emotions to the intentionality of familiar intentional attitudes like desires and cognitions. In this paper, I argue for the sui generis approach.