“Who Can Proclaim the Mighty Acts of the Lord?”

The Holy and Great Council of the Orthodox Church that met in Crete in 2016 reaffirmed that mission and evangelism is a duty for Orthodox faithful, especially in Europe, which is often seen as a terrain for evangelization by movements coming from the global South. This requires caution, planning, accountability, and especially deep faith, against the background of complacency observed among members of the Orthodox Church that creates a noticeable missionary vacuum. The article underlines the necessity to begin with honest self-criticism by pastors and teachers, clergy and laypeople and to follow this with serious pastoral planning in relation to the modern social and cultural environment and the needs of the people.     

Social mirrors. Tove Jansson’s Invisible Child and the importance of being seen

This article examines the experience of being seen and analyzes its central role in the formation of a coherent sense of self. Tove Jansson’s short story from 1962, ‘The Invisible Child’, serves as the red thread of the article, and the story is analyzed in the light of Donald Winnicott’s work on social mirroring. The analysis is enriched by the psychoanalytic insights of Veikko Tähkä and Heinz Kohut, and complemented by Axel Honneth’s philosophical elaborations as well as by recent developmental findings as presented by Vasudevi Reddy. The article is divided into an introduction and three sections. After summarizing Jansson’s story in the introduction, the first section elaborates and examines different senses of social invisibility. The second section assesses developmental factors that promote social invisibility and highlights the importance of being seen. The third and final section interprets Jansson’s story as an analogy to an intensive therapeutic process, while pinpointing those elements that facilitate the restructuring of a disturbed sense of self. As a whole, the article thus discusses an issue that is often simply taken for granted in discussions of empathy and interpersonal experience: social visibility.     

The Validity of the “Mother” and “Father” Cards of the Rorschach

This article presents analyses on psychometric properties of a recent revision of the Substance Abuse Subtle Screening Inventory (SASSI-3). Participants were 772 individuals from a range of clinical settings who were independently diagnosed according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (3rd ed., rev. [DSM-III-R]; American Psychiatric Association [APA], 1987) or DSM-IV (APA, 1994) criteria regarding the presence or absence of a substance-dependence disorder. A development sample (n = 391) was used to formulate SASSI-3 decision rules that yielded 95% agreement with clinical diagnoses of substance dependence. Correspondence with the criterion variable was shown to be 97% in a cross-validation sample (n = 381) from the same clinical settings. Convergent relations were demonstrated with a variety of other indexes of substance misuse, including clinical assessments of substance abuse history, alcohol and drug-related arrests, self-reported use of illicit drugs, and other instruments designed to screen for substance misuse. Further, logistic regression analyses indicated no significant differences in the overall accuracy of the SASSI-3 as a function of respondents' demographic characteristics or clinical ratings of respondents' level of adjustment and functioning (Global Assessment of Functioning ratings; APA, 1987, 1994).     

Hussearle's Representationalism and the “hypothesis of the Background”

John Searle's hypothesis of the Background seems to conflict with his initial representationalism according to which each Intentional state contains a particular content that determines its conditions of satisfaction. In Section I of this essay I expose Searle's initial theory of Intentionality and relate it to Edmund Husserl's earlier phenomenology. In Section II I make it clear that Searle's introduction of the notion of Network, though indispensable, does not, by itself, force us to modify that initial theory. However, a comparison of this notion to the notion of horizon from Husserl's later phenomenology and an interpretation of Husserl's conception of the determinable X as providing a solution to the problem of perceptual misidentification lead me to conclude that in his discussion of 'twin examples' Searle had better modified his initial theory. Finally, I critically examine Searle's claim that anyone who tries seriously to follow out the threads in the Network will eventually reach a bedrock of non-Intentional capacities. In Section III I show in detail, partly in a rather Husserlian vein, that Searle's four official arguments for the Background thesis, though containing some very valuable contributions to a theory of linguistic skills, are not convincing at all if they are to be understood as going beyond the scope of (Hus)Searle's 'content-cum-Network' picture of Intentionality. The upshot of these considerations is that the Background thesis should be read as a thesis concerning the causal neurophysiological preconditions of human Intentionality rather than concerning the logical properties of Intentional states in general. Recently Searle himself has come to the same result, but he does not say for which reasons. The present essay makes it clear why Searle just had to arrive at this important result.     

Passion, Pain, and Purpose: One Man’s Response to the Passion of the Lord

The purpose of this article is to review and comment on the book The Passion of the Lord: African American Reflections. Edited by James A. Noel and Matthew V. Johnson, and published by Facets (an imprint of Fortress Press: Minneapolis), the book explores the unique perspective of African American thought in relation to the story of the Passion of Christ, and the cultural aesthetics which allow Christ’s suffering on the cross to become a powerful agent of spiritual strength, hope, love, and faith. This article records one African American man’s deep personal engagement of, and resonance to, the material as he validates, affirms the important insights of the seven theologians presented. Through personal observation and experience, poetry and relevant cultural idioms, the author honors work which, ultimately, contributes to a vitally important self-understanding of who African Americans are now, where they are now, and how they have come to be the people they are now in America.

Brainwashing and the persecution of “cults”

While the presence of authoritarian cults in our midst raises a number of social control and law and order issues, current controversies over cults contain substantial elements of mystification. Brainwashing is an inherently subjective metaphor that is used as a rationale for persecuting unpopular movements and defining religious converts as nonautonomous zombies who can be coerced for therapeutic purposes. While coercive persuasion models do have some heuristic value for the analysis of indoctrination in some authoritarian groups, assumptions regarding the alleged destruction of the free will of converts and the status of authoritarian religiosity as a medical pathology are not warranted.     

“The end of history ” and the fate of the philosophy of history

The “end of history” by Fukuyama is mainly based on Hegel’s treatise of the end of history and Kojeve’s corresponding interpretation. But Hegel’s “end of history” is a purely philosophical question, i.e., an ontological premise that must be fulfilled to complete “absolute knowledge.” When Kojeve further demonstrates its “universal and homogeneous state,” Fukuyama extends it into a political view: The victory of the Western system of freedom and democracy marks the end of the development of human history and Marxist theory and practice. This is a misunderstanding of Hegel. Marx analyzes, scientifically, the historical limitation of Western capitalism and maintains, by way of a kind of revolutionary teleology, the expectation of and belief in human liberation, which is the highest historical goal. His philosophy of history is hence characterized by theoretical elements from both historical scientificalness and historical teleology.     

Comparing the meanings of “if” and “all”

In this study, we compared the everyday meanings of conditionals (“if p then q”) and universally quantified statements (“all p are q”) when applied to sets of elements. The interpretation of conditionals was predicted to be directly related to the conditional probability, such that P(“if p then q”) = P(q|p). Quantified statements were assumed to have two interpretations. According to an instance-focused interpretation, quantified statements are equivalent to conditionals, such that P(“all p are q”) = P(q|p). According to a set-focused interpretation, “all p are q” is true if and only if every instance in set p is an instance of q, so that the statement would be accepted when P(q|p) = 1 and rejected when this probability was below 1. We predicted an instance-focused interpretation of “all” when the relation between p and q expressed a general law for an infinite set of elements. A set-focused interpretation of “all” was predicted when the relation between p and q expressed a coincidence among the elements of a finite set. Participants were given short context stories providing information about the frequency of co-occurrence of cases of p, q, not-p, and not-q in a population. They were then asked to estimate the probability that a statement (conditional or quantified) would be true for a random sample taken from that population. The probability estimates for conditionals were in accordance with an instance-focused interpretation, whereas the estimates for quantified statements showed features of a set-focused interpretation. The type of the relation between p and q had no effect on this outcome.     

The “concept of time” and the “being of the clock”: Bergson, Einstein, Heidegger, and the interrogation of the temporality of modernism

The topic to be addressed in this paper, that is, the distinction between the “concept” of time and the being of the clock, divides into two parts: first, in the debate between Albert Einstein and Henri Bergson, one discovers the ground for the diverging concepts of time characterized by physics in its opposing itself to philosophy. Bergson’s durée or “duration” in opposition to Einstein’s ‘physicist’s time’ as ‘public time,’ one can argue, sets the terms for Martin Heidegger’s extending, his ontological analysis of Da-sein, as human being-in-the-world. Second, in this the ‘concept of time’ gives way to the analysis of the ‘being of the clock.’ What is this being of the clock that makes evident the fundamental temporality of Da-sein? This question is rehearsed in Division Two of Being and Time. My claim is that the fundamental insight into the nature of time revealed by the encounter between Bergson and Einstein is that time extemporizes itself. Temporality “is” not a being but a process that temporalizes itself, precisely because it “is not.”     

Developmental study of the comprehension and production of the pronoun “it”

Forty-two English-speaking children aged 3,3 to 7,0 were asked to act out instructions of the type There is clay on the table, give it to me, where the pronoun it occurs in object position and refers to a collective noun, or to a count noun, or to a noun (chocolate) which can be either. They were also asked to describe actions performed by the experimenter and to repeat the experimenter's instructions. A hierarchical pattern of behavior emerged and unexpected errors were noted. The results do not appear to be interpretable from the purely linguistic point of view; it is argued that analogous observations have been made in problem-solving tasks and that therefore cognitive development in general must play an important part.     

Note on the “Semantic” and the “Absolute” concept of truth

Philosophical Studies -     

Note on the “semantic” and the “absolute” concept of truth

Philosophical Studies -     

Enactivism and the “problem” of perceptual presence

One of the classic debates in cognitive science is between nativism and empiricism about the development of psychological capacities. In principle, the debate is empirical. However, in practice nativist hypotheses have also been challenged for relying on an ill-defined, or even unscientific, notion of innateness as that which is “not learned”. Here this minimal conception of innateness is defended on four fronts. First, it is argued that the minimal conception is crucial to understanding the nativism-empiricism debate, when properly construed; Second, various objections to the minimal conception—that it risks overgeneralization, lacks an account of learning, frustrates genuine explanations of psychological development, and fails to unify different notions of innateness across the sciences—are rebutted. Third, it is argued that the minimal conception avoids the shortcomings of primitivism, the prominent view that innate capacities are those that are not acquired via a psychological process in development. And fourth, the minimal conception undermines some attempts to identify innateness with a natural kind. So in short, we have little reason to reject, and good reason to accept, the minimal conception of innateness in cognitive science.

     

Semantic minimalism and the “miracle of communication”

According to semantic minimalism, context-invariant minimal semantic propositions play an essential role in linguistic communication. This claim is key to minimalists’ argument against semantic contextualism: if there were no such minimal semantic propositions, and semantic content varied widely with shifts in context, then it would be “miraculous” if communication were ever to occur. This paper offers a critical examination of the minimalist account of communication, focusing on a series of examples where communication occurs without a minimal semantic proposition shared between speaker and hearer. The only way for minimalists to respond to these examples is by restricting the scope of their account to intra-lingual communication. It can then be shown (1) that the minimalist’s notion of a language shrinks to a point, such that practically no instances of communication will fall under that account, and (2) that the retreat to intra-lingual communication is in any case self-defeating, since the only way for minimalists to account for the individuation of languages is by resort to precisely the kinds of contextual considerations they abjured in the first place. In short, if, as minimalists allege, contextualism founders because it renders communication contingent on speaker and hearer sharing a context, it can now be seen that minimalism faces a parallel problem because it renders communication contingent on speaker and hearer sharing a language. I end by arguing that the possibility of communication cannot, as minimalists assume, be grounded in shared semantic conventions; rather, successful communication must precede the establishment of any particular set of semantic conventions.