The Frontloading Argument

Maybe the most important argument in David Chalmers’s monumental book Constructing the World is the one he calls the ‘Frontloading Argument’, which is used in Chapter 4 to argue for the book’s central thesis, A Priori Scrutability. And, at first blush, the Frontloading Argument looks very strong. I argue here, however, that it is incapable of securing the conclusion it is meant to establish.     

Replies to Deng,Lee, and Skow

This paper is a contribution to a book symposium on my book Experiencing Time. I reply to comments on the book by Natalja Deng, Geoffrey Lee and Bradford Skow. Although several chapters of the book are discussed, the main focus of my reply is on Chapters 2 and 6. In Chapter 2 I argue that the putative mind-independent passage of time could not be experienced, and from this I develop an argument against the A-theory of time. In Chapter 6 I offer one part of an explanation of why we are disposed to think that time passes, relating to the supposedly ‘dynamic’ quality of experienced change. Deng, Lee, and Skow’s comments help me to clarify several issues, add some new thoughts, and make a new distinction that was needed, and I acknowledge, as I did in the book, that certain arguments in Chapter 6 are not conclusive; but I otherwise concede very little regarding the main claims and arguments defended in the book.     

Amplifying and Attenuating Inequity in Collaborative Learning: Toward an Analytical Framework

Abstract

Research on collaborative learning has focused on its potential to foster successful problem solving. Less attention, though, has been given to issues of equity. In this article, we investigate how inequity can become amplified and attenuated within collaborative learning through small interactional moves that accumulate to produce broader patterns of equity or inequity. Our theoretical perspective utilizes Boaler’s notion of relational equity and introduces what we term participatory equity. Research was conducted in a computer science course co-taught by the authors and taken by upper-elementary students. Data sources include audio recordings of students’ collaborative interactions, ethnographic field notes, student work, and student surveys. This article focuses on a single student, Jason, and his dyadic interactions, and builds upon our previous analyses of his interactions with four higher-performing partners. Findings reveal how the interplay between classroom structures and student enactments shaped two types of inequity during collaborative learning. We conclude by discussing implications for theorizing and analyzing equity and inequity, as well as pedagogical considerations for structuring collaborative learning to attenuate inequity.     

Introduction: symposium on Brooke Ackerly’s Just Responsibility: A Human Rights Theory of Global Justice

ABSTRACT

This symposium brings together normative and empirical scholars in dialogue on Brooke Ackerly’s innovative and compelling recent monograph, Just Responsibility. Contributors discuss the book’s distinctive grounded normative theory methodology, its arguments for how individuals can take appropriate responsibility for global structural injustices, and its potential for practical impact.     

Review article

A Young Muslim's Guide to the Modern World. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, 1993. Cambridge, The Islamic Texts Society. 270 pp., ISBN 0–946621–51–9

Seyyed Hossein Nasr's new book is intended both for the young Muslim born in the West and for overseas Muslim students who are studying here. It demands the serious attention not only of these groups but of all who inhabit our ‘global village’. In order to gather a range of views four postgraduate students from CSIC were invited to review the book from their particular perspectives. Two of the students were Muslim and two Christian. In both cases, one student was born in the West and the other was an overseas student. What follows are their analyses of the book.     

Stoic Warriors and Stoic Torturers: The Moral Psychology of Military Torture

Abstract

Nancy Sherman’s book Stoic Warriors provides an interesting reflection on how a modified version of the ancient teachings of stoicism may be applicable to the concerns and needs of the modern military. In the course of her book, she explains different aspects of the Stoic teachings, such as the importance of outward comportment and control of the emotions, and discusses how they might be relevant to the modern military. In this paper I will focus on her discussion of Abu Ghraib and other atrocities such as the My Lai massacre in the Vietnam War. I argue that her analysis of the contributing factors that lead to those abuses demonstrates a lack of understanding of how systematic atrocities come to occur and how military torturers are trained. In this paper I show that systematic torture arises not only out of unrestrained rage and hatred, but through a training process that builds on many of the features of basic military training and, ironically, incorporates many of the techniques of self-control and detachment that are characteristic of stoicism.     

Resistance in treatment as a means of avoiding inner conflict

It is not commonly known that, in his eighties, Michael Fordham sought the help of Donald Meltzer in what Dr Meltzer described as ‘more a weekly supervision of dreams than an analysis’. Dr Fordham is said to have commented that it was ‘a weekly supervision of my inner world - and you can't get closer to psychoanalysis than that’ He was greatly helped by these ‘supervisions’ and at the end of their work together, Meltzer suggested that Fordham wrote his memoirs. This resulted in The Making of an Analyst: Michael Fordham, published in 1993.

This fascinating account of Fordham's life and work contains much of interest about his personal development. He talks with candour about his confusions and passions in what is at times a surprisingly revealing manner. In particular Fordham talks openly about his closest relationships and how they affected him. The book was published, as he wanted it to be, after careful discussion with James Astor and Karl Figlio.

We are pleased to be able to publish the following contribution from Dr Meltzer about the book which he prompted. It is a mixture of personal responses on reading the book and memories of the man.     

On Recanati’s Mental Files

Abstract

In his book Mental Files (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), Francois Recanati develops a theory of mind and language based on the idea that Fregean senses should be identified with ‘mental files’, mental representations whose primary function is to store information about objects. I discuss three aspects of Recanati’s book. The first concerns his use of acquaintance relations in individuating mental files, and what this means for ‘file dynamics’. The second concerns his comments on a theory that I have elsewhere advocated, the ‘sequenced worlds’ or ‘multi-centered worlds’ theory. The third concerns how the mental file approach handles non-doxastic attitudes like imagining.     

The amplification of reason,or the recuperation of imagination: Peter Weir's Dead Poets Society

Abstract

The principal aim of this article is to focus on the problem of the applicability of Rawls’s ideas to the growing interest in developing what might now well be called a “global bioethics”. The specific focus is the question whether Rawls’s later work helps us to develop principles of distributive justice for such an alleged global bioethics, drawing on and critically evaluating Alan Buchanan’s critical discussion of Rawls’s The Law of Peoples. The main tenets of Rawls’s theory of justice, particularly as it concerns health care as one of our “primary needs”, are discussed, drawing on the work of Norman Daniels. Secondly, an argument for the necessity of a global approach to biomedical ethics in view of the need for a more equitable provision of health care between developed and developing worlds is developed. Thirdly, the main tenets of Rawls’s The Law of Peoples, the book in which Rawls extrapolated the implications of his theory of justice to the sphere of just international law, are discussed. Allen Buchanan’s criticisms of this Rawlsian enterprise are critically reviewed. On the basis of this discussion, two additional Principles of Global Distributive Justice (PGDJ) are formulated. The first principle is: “Justice in international relations requires that the burden of catastrophic events be distributed equitably between affected and unaffected peoples”. The implications of this principle are discussed, and complemented with an extended definition of the concept of “catastrophe”. Drawing on each component of that definition, the author then illustrates how the HIV/AIDS pandemic is the best current example of an international catastrophe, and how that calls for the implementation of the formulated principle. Then follows the formulation of the second principle for distributive justice for the law of peoples. This principle is: “Justice requires that efforts at an equitable distribution of burdens at the level of international relations be met with policies from the beneficiaries that, as far as possible, sustain the benefits attained from these efforts”. The author ends by showing how this principle is being neglected by the denialism of, for example, the South African policy-makers’ lack of a responsible response to the HIV/AIDS pandemic over the past decade, and by making suggestions how this denial and neglect might be rectified in the area of the provision of antiretroviral drugs to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV.     

Reply to critics

ABSTRACT

In this reply to critics, I reply to Stephanie Leary’s, Kris McDaniel’s, Tristram McPherson’s and David Plunkett’s articles on my book Choosing Normative Concepts. One central theme in the replies concerns what is the best strategy for the so-called ardent realist when it comes to responding to the challenge I present in the book. Another central theme concerns the criticisms of my characterizations of what normative concepts and normative properties are.     

Mental Files,Blown Up by Indexed Files

Abstract

Our paper discusses Recanati’s application of the mental files apparatus to reports of beliefs and other attitudes. While mental files appear early on in Recanati’s work on belief-reports, his latest book introduces the concept of indexed files (a.k.a. vicarious files) and puts it to work to explain how we can report other people’s attitudes and to account for opacity phenomena. Our goal is twofold: we show that the approach in Recanati’s Mental Files (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) departs significantly from his earlier proposals as well as from the very spirit of truth-conditional pragmatics; and we argue that the indexed files approach, qua an attempt to provide a semantics for belief-reports, is untenable.     

Beyond the Four Loves

Abstract

By looking at C.S. Lewis's book The Four Loves through the critical lens of the work of Julia Kristeva, this paper considers how love can be defined and delimited through language and discourse, and how such limitations may be broken down. It examines how Lewis constructs a framework around which various loves are valorized, and how this leads to sexuality and physicality being pushed to the margins—leaving the ‘higher’ loves, such as friendship, safe and manageable. Kristeva's work is used to highlight the way in which Lewis treats the physical and the sexual as ‘abject’, and to explore some of the broader implications that this has in respect of language, culture and gender. Her understanding of love, with its roots in the psychoanalytic tradition, challenges Lewis by insisting on the connection between love, language and the body—and therefore suggests ways in which discourses about love, such as those offered by Lewis, can be disrupted and challenged, enabling us to move beyond The Four Loves towards a multiplicity of loves.     

Henry More as reader of Marcus Aurelius

ABSTRACT

I examine Henry More’s engagement with Stoicism in general, and Marcus Aurelius in particular, in his Enchiridion Ethicum. More quotes from Marcus’ Meditations throughout the Enchiridion, leading one commentator to note that More ‘mined the Meditations’ when writing his book. Yet More’s general attitude towards Stoicism is more often than not critical, especially when it comes to the passions. I shall argue that while More was clearly an avid reader of the Meditations, he read Marcus not as a Stoic but as a ‘non-denominational’ ancient moralist who confirms a range of doctrines that More finds elsewhere in ancient philosophy. In this sense More continues the Neoplatonic practice of downplaying doctrinal differences between ancient philosophers in order to construct a single ancient philosophical tradition. This is quite different from the approach of his contemporary and fellow Cambridge Platonist, Ralph Cudworth, who was keen to highlight doctrinal differences between ancient philosophers.     

Materialism and ‘the soft substance of the brain’: Diderot and plasticity

ABSTRACT

Materialism is the view that everything that is real is material or is the product of material processes. It tends to take either a ‘cosmological’ form, as a claim about the ultimate nature of the world, or a more specific ‘psychological’ form, detailing how mental processes are brain processes. I focus on the second, psychological or cerebral form of materialism. In the mid-to-late eighteenth century, the French materialist philosopher Denis Diderot was one of the first to notice that any self-respecting materialist had to address the question of the status and functional role of the brain, and its relation to our mental life. After this the topic grew stale, with knee-jerk reiterations of ‘psychophysical identity’ in the nineteenth-century, and equally rigid assertions of anti-materialism. In 1960s philosophy of mind, brain–mind materialism reemerged as ‘identity theory’, focusing on the identity between mental processes and cerebral processes. In contrast, Diderot’s cerebral materialism allows for a more culturally sedimented sense of the brain, which he described in his late Elements of Physiology as a ‘book – except it is a book which reads itself’. Diderot thus provides a lesson for materialism as it reflects on the status of the brain, science and culture.     

The socialization of emotion by parents: Following Saarni’s legacy

Abstract

In 1985, Carolyn Saarni and Michael Lewis published the landmark book, The Socialization of Emotions. In launching the focused study of emotion socialization, then guiding the field with her insights and observations for more than 3 decades, Saarni fostered the current vibrancy of the study of parents’ emotion socialization. In this paper, I begin by summarizing Saarni’s perspective on emotion socialization by parents. I then illustrate how her work has influenced, and continues to inform, many aspects of emotion socialization research by myself and others, as well as our understanding of the intricate and nuanced exchanges between children, parents and culture that serve to foster the emotional development of children. Emotion socialization is at once ubiquitous and subtly complex, and our deepening insights into its many forms and faces are themselves a tribute to Saarni’s ongoing legacy to the field.     

Redating Narrative Theology: A Challenge to The Conventional Chronology

This essay considers the work of G.K. Chesterton, and in particular The Everlasting Man, in relation to narrative theology. It discusses the apparent contradiction between Aidan Nichols’ judgement that this book develops a ‘Christocentric theology of history’ and Chesterton’s own assertion that its approach is ‘historical rather than theological’. It argues that Chesterton employs both natural and narrative theology in The Everlasting Man, and these two forms of theology frame a reading of the book which resolves the seeming contradiction between Nichols’ and Chesterton’s views, while also challenging the conventional chronology used in discussions of narrative theology.     

Lost confidence and potential: a mixed methods study of underachieving college students’ sources of self-efficacy

This study investigated the sources of self-efficacy of college students enrolled in a learning frameworks course, whom we identified as underachievers. Through weekly journal entries, the group of underachievers ( \(n=13\) ) cited the factors that made them feel confident or not confident. Students’ responses to open-ended prompts were coded according to Bandura’s (Self-efficacy: the exercise of control, W.H. Freeman, New York, 1997) four hypothesized sources of self-efficacy and an additional emergent theme of self-regulated learning. After, through student responses on a self-report survey, we compared the group of underachievers to a group of achievers ( \(n=36\) ) on their self-efficacy and its sources. Both quantitative and qualitative results underscored the importance of mastery experiences for underachievers. The underachievers had significantly less mastery experiences and verbal persuasions despite having similar levels of self-efficacy. Implications for how to cultivate mastery and to provide efficacy-supportive feedback as well as psychological mechanisms regarding high potential underachievers are discussed.     

Quitting smoking: The importance of non-smoker identity in predicting smoking behaviour and responses to a smoking ban

Objective: We examined how ‘smoker’ and ‘non-smoker’ self- and group-identities and socio-economic status (SES) may predict smoking behaviour and responses to antismoking measures (i.e. the Dutch smoking ban in hospitality venues). We validated a measure of responses to the smoking ban.

Design: Longitudinal online survey study with one-year follow-up (N = 623 at T1 in 2011; N = 188 at T2 in 2012) among daily smokers.

Main outcome measures: Intention to quit, quit attempts and ‘rejecting’, ‘victimizing’, ‘socially conscious smoking’ and ‘active quitting’ responses to the smoking ban.

Results: Non-smoker identities are more important than smoker identities in predicting intention to quit, quit attempts and responses to the smoking ban, even when controlling for other important predictors such as nicotine dependence. Smokers with stronger non-smoker identities had stronger intentions to quit, were more likely to attempt to quit between measurements, and showed less negative and more positive responses to the smoking ban. The association between non-smoker self-identity and intention to quit was stronger among smokers with lower than higher SES.

Conclusion: Antismoking measures might be more effective if they would focus also on the identity of smokers, and help smokers to increase identification with non-smoking and non-smokers.