从"玄之又玄"到"重玄"的演变

从"玄之又玄"到"重玄"经历了一个演变过程."玄之又玄"本意是"幽远而又幽远",指道的不可知性与终极性."重玄"的最初含义是"重天",佛道两教学者用它来指宗教的终极境界.隋唐时期"重玄"与"双遣"连用,指"遣有、遣无、遣其遣"的三重否定思想方法."重玄"与"双遣"的结合标志着从"玄之又玄"向"重玄"的转变最终完成.     

Mystery Appeal: Effects of Uncertainty and Resolution on the Enjoyment of Mystery

To investigate determinants of mystery enjoyment, a short story was manipulated to produce different levels of uncertainty regarding two suspects' criminal involvement (low vs. high uncertainty) and to create different resolution types (denouement, confirmation, and surprise). Participants' (N = 84) reactions and enjoyment were ascertained via questionnaires after reading the mystery development and after the mystery resolution. Moreover, personality assessments were administered. Results show that enjoyment of the mystery reception was greater when participants were highly uncertain regarding the culprit and experienced high levels of curiosity. As hypothesized, resolution enjoyment depended on type of resolution and self-esteem. A resolution that confirmed respondents' suspicion was disliked by persons with high self-esteem, whereas respondents with low self-esteem disliked a surprising resolution. Enjoyment of a general denouement, when participants had not held specific expectations, was not affected by self-esteem; high self-esteem participants in the "surprise" condition and low self-esteem participants in the "confirmation" condition experienced comparable enjoyment.     

Perplexity and Mystery

In this paper I comment on Gareth B. Matthews's "The Socratic Augustine" and Peter King's "Augustine on the Impossibility of Teaching." Matthews's paper adduces several instances of Augustine's apparent willingness to accept Socratic perplexity in some philosophical matters. Matthews suggests that these cases are compatible with Augustine's dogmatism because Augustine presupposes that the phenomena in question, although perplexing, are actual. I suggest instead that Augustine can be viewed as taking a neutral stance toward many of his examples, because they arise in areas of philosophical inquiry where it is not important to the tenets of his faith that he hold the right opinion. King defends the Augustinian thesis that teaching, construed as the causal transmission of knowledge from teacher to learner, is, if not impossible, at least mysterious. I suggest that much of the alleged mystery may rest on a confusion between epistemological dependency and metaphysical dependency.     

Mystery of the anti-McCollough effect

The McCollough Effect (ME) is a complex perceptual aftereffect that remains of interest half a century after its discovery. It is argued that a recently reported variant, dubbed the anti-McCollough effect, is not the reverse of the ME, with aftereffect colors in the same direction as the inducing stimuli. A red-horizontal stimulus leads to a reddish aftereffect not because of red-horizontal parings, but despite them. The anti-ME is a weak standard-direction ME produced by complementary afterimage colors (afterimage green with horizontal), rather than by environmental colors, first shown decades ago. It is not a new type of contingent aftereffect. The red-horizontal pair does not interfere with the afterimage green-horizontal pair it produces because a single color-orientation pairing provides more ambiguous input than does the standard two orientation-color pairings (red-horizontal, green-vertical) of the ME. It is also argued that not even one orientation-contingent color aftereffect is convincingly shown in the "anti"-ME, let alone, as has previously been suggested, two simultaneous orientation-contingent color aftereffects in opposite directions at different levels of the visual system, in which the higher-level effect suppresses the downstream effect from reaching consciousness. The "anti"-ME can be explained by existing theories of contingent aftereffects, including perceptual-learning theory.