In Search of the Trinity: A Dilemma for Parfit’s Conciliatory Project

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice - I outline a dilemma for Derek Parfit’s project to vindicate moral realism. In On What Matters, Parfit argues that the best versions of three of the main...     

Superassertibility and the Equivalence Schema: A Dilemma for Wright’s Antirealist

Crispin Wright champions the notion of superassertibility as providing a truth predicate that is congenial to antirealists in many debates in that it satisfies relevant platitudes concerning truth and does so in a very minimal way. He motivates such a claim by arguing that superassertibility can satisfy the equivalence schema: it is superassertible that P if and only if P. I argue that Wright’s attempted proof that superassertibility can satisfy this schema is unsuccessful, because it requires a premise that has not been properly motivated and is prima facie implausible. I further argue that, even if the dubious premise is accepted, the resulting proof is intuitionistically invalid. This is problematic, because a proponent of superassertibility as a truth predicate has independent reasons to affect a logical revision in the direction of intuitionism. The resulting dilemma suggests that superassertibility may not be an adequate truth candidate for any significant ranges of discourse. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992     

Revisiting Jung’s “A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity”: Some Implications for Psychoanalysis and Religion

This article explores one of C. G. Jung’s generally neglected essays, his psychological interpretation of the Trinity, and links up key theoretical notions with several more mainstream psychoanalytic concepts. It further uses the notions of oneness, otherness, thirdness, and the fourth to consider the recent points of convergence between psychoanalysis and religion.     

Kant’s Solution to the Euthyphro Dilemma

Are our actions morally good because we approve of them or are they good independently of our approval? Are we projecting moral values onto the world or do we detect values that are already there? For many these questions don’t state a real alternative but a secular variant of the Euthyphro dilemma: If our actions are good because we approve of them moral goodness appears to be arbitrary. If they are good independently of our approval, it is unclear how we come to know their moral quality and how moral knowledge can be motivating. None of these options seems attractive; the source of moral goodness unclear. Despite the growing literature on Kant’s moral epistemology and moral epistemology the question remains open what Kant’s answer to this apparent dilemma is. The Kantian view I attempt to lay out in this paper is supposed to dissolve the secular version of the Euthyphro dilemma. In responding to this dilemma we need to get clear about the source or the origin of our moral knowledge: Voluntary approval or mind-independent moral facts? Projectivism or detectivism? Construction or given? I believe that all these ways of articulating the problem turn out, on closer inspection, to be false alternatives.     

In Defense of Walter Benjamin’s Constellational Curriculum: A Response to the Critics

Studies in Philosophy and Education -     

Medusa’s Gaze Reflected: A Darwinian Dilemma for Anti-Realist Theories of Value

Street has argued that the meta-ethical realist is faced with a dilemma. Either evolutionary forces have had a distorting influenced on our ability to track moral properties or evolutionary forces influenced our beliefs in the direction of tracking moral properties. Street argues that if the realist accepts the first horn of the dilemma, the realist must accept implausible skepticism regarding moral beliefs. If the realist accepts the second horn of the dilemma, the realist owes an explanation of the fitness producing nature of moral beliefs. As Street establishes the dialectic, the anti-realist’s explanation is better. I will argue that Street’s first horn is question begging then I will grasp the second horn of the dilemma and argue that only the realist can explain the role of moral beliefs in our evolutionary history. My argument will take the form of a dilemma. For our evaluative judgments to be fitness conducive, they must be responsive to the right sort of external world properties. The non-reductive realist can provide such a set of properties. On the first horn of the dilemma, the anti-realist cannot. The realist, unlike the anti-realist, can explain why our evaluative judgments are fitness conducive. The realist has won the explanatory battle. On the second horn of the dilemma, the anti-realist can provide a set of non-normative external world properties that our evaluative attitudes are responsive to. In doing so, the anti-realist has provided the heretofore-missing component of the reductive realist’s project. Again, the realist has won.     

Mengzi’s Externalist Solution to the Role Dilemma

The role dilemma raises a problem for role ethic interpretations of Confucianism. The dilemma arises from the conflict between the demands and obligations of Humaneness and the demands and obligations of roles one occupies. Favoring the demands of Humaneness (i.e. externalism) undermines a role ethic because roles and role-obligations no longer ground the ethic. However, favoring social role-obligations (i.e. internalism) permits immoral and unjust role-obligations and allows for uncharitable readings of Confucianism.

This paper examines how Mengzi resolves the dilemma. I argue that Mengzi’s account of human nature privileges the demands of Humaneness; social roles are central but defeasible in light of Humaneness. I briefly discuss a prominent articulation of Confucian role ethics as well as the role dilemma. Then, after considering the technical resources within the Mengzi, I argue that Mengzi espouses an externalism about roles. Finally, I explore the relationship between Mengzi’s externalism and role ethics.     

In Search of the Absent Analyst: Commentary on Janine de Peyer’s “Uncanny Communication”

The subject of telepathic phenomena in psychoanalysis has been highly controversial ever since it was introduced into psychoanalysis by Freud in 1921. Following a theoretical-clinical introduction, my explanation for these profoundly mysterious phenomena combines contributory factors involving patient, archaic communication, and analyst, regarding massive primary traumatic absence that was imprinted in the patient’s nascent self and inchoate relating to others. The telepathic occurrence in treatment bursts forth as a search engine when the analyst is suddenly emotionally absent in order to seek and find the analyst and to halt the process of abandonment and collapse into the despair of the early traumatization. This is discussed here with regard to de Peyer’s clinical examples. Thus, the telepathic phenomena embody the enigmatic “impossible” extreme of patient–analyst deep-level interconnectedness and unconscious communication in the analytic process.     

Can Rawls’ Constructivism Avoid the Euthyphro Dilemma? In Reply to Shafer-Landau

In this essay, I consider two challenges implicit in Russ Shafer-Landau’s criticism of constructivists: the realism challenge and the relativism challenge, respectively. I do not try to offer a decisive set of objections to the challenges; instead I argue that some objective versions of constructivism, especially Rawls’s constructivism, are not susceptible to the criticisms.     

A Community’s Response to Suicide Through Public Art: Stakeholder Perspectives from the Finding the Light Within Project

Suicide is a preventable public health problem and a leading cause of death in the United States. Despite recognized need for community-based strategies for suicide prevention, most suicide prevention programs focus on individual-level change. This article presents seven first person accounts of Finding the Light Within, a community mobilization initiative to reduce the stigma associated with suicide through public arts participation that took place in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania from 2011 through 2012. The stigma associated with suicide is a major challenge to suicide prevention, erecting social barriers to effective prevention and treatment and enhancing risk factors for people struggling with suicidal ideation and recovery after losing a loved one to suicide. This project engaged a large and diverse audience and built a new community around suicide prevention through participatory public art, including community design and production of a large public mural about suicide, storytelling and art workshops, and a storytelling website. We present this project as a model for how arts participation can address suicide on multiple fronts—from raising awareness and reducing stigma, to promoting community recovery, to providing healing for people and communities in need.     

In Search of a More Reliable Truth: Mourning and Donald Capps’s Psychological Portrait of Jesus

This article is an abridged version of a chapter in my dissertation. In my dissertation, I examine the relationship between personal experience and public theory within certain strands of contemporary psychology of religion and pastoral theology. My guiding theory is Peter Homans’s “mourning religion” thesis. In this chapter, I examine the life and work of Donald Capps, who is the most prolific contemporary writer in the fields of psychology of religion and pastoral theology. I argue that Capps addressed various personal losses in a deeply personal way during his fifties, and I believe that the key moment for Capps in overcoming his melancholia occurred after his application of his melancholia theory to Jesus, because there Capps was able to integrate and to sustain in a satisfying way his various selves and, therefore, open himself up to mourn in a non-defensive way—the way of humor.     

Fetal behavioral responses to the touch of the mother’s abdomen: A Frame-by-frame analysis

The aim of the present study was to examine whether fetuses respond to the touching of the mother’s abdomen, and if they do, whether they differentiate based on familiarity and the source of the touch, utilizing 3D real-time (4D) sonography.Behavioral responses of 28 fetuses (20th to 33rd week of gestation; N = 15 in the 2nd and N = 13 in the 3rd trimester) were frame-by-frame coded using a coding system comprising 20 codes and were analyzed in four conditions, during the touch of the (1) mother, (2) the father, (3) the stranger and in a (4) no-touch, control condition.Fetuses showed differential responses to the touch, in particular in the duration of their reaching out to touch the uterus wall in the four conditions, and self-touch, dependent on the gestational age of the fetus. Fetuses in the 3rd trimester touched the uterus wall significantly longer than fetuses in the 2nd trimester did, when the mother touched compared to the control condition. At the same time, fetuses in the 3rd trimester also touched themselves less during the mother’s touch, compared when the stranger touched and also compared to the control condition.This differential response of the older fetuses might be due to the maturation of the central nervous system, and may indicate the emergence of a proprioceptive self-awareness by the 3rd trimester.     

The Son’s Fault: Martin Luther King,Jr.’s Search for and Recovery of Sonship

This article examines the role of sonship in the psychological and spiritual development of men. In using the methodology of psychobiography, I explore the life history of Martin Luther King, Jr. to analyze his search for and recovery of sonship. I propose that sonship helps men rebel against and, in the end, overcome the feelings of inadequacy that are experienced in their struggles to achieve manhood, particularly within the father–son dyad. The scholarship of pastoral theologian Donald Capps is instructive in this regard, in that he suggests that sons should be allowed to search for a male figure, a father-substitute, who can affirm, not disdain or reject, this state of sonship. In the end, what is often viewed as a negative act of regression—i.e., the recovery of and return to sonship—is recognized instead as a positive one that assists a man in his journey toward wholeness.     

Accounting for the ‘tragedy’ in the Prisoner's Dilemma

The Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) exhibits a ‘tragedy’ in this sense: if the players are fully informed and rational, they are condemned to a jointly dispreferred outcome. In this essay I address the following question: What feature of the PD's payoff structure is necessary and sufficient to produce the tragedy? In answering it I use the notion of a “trembling-hand equilibrium”. In the final section I discuss an implication of my argument, an implication which bears on the persistence of the problem posed by the PD.     

In whose interests? A response to Aaron Zimmerman’s Belief: A Pragmatic Picture

Philosophical Studies - I provide a brief précis of Aaron Zimmerman’s book, Belief: A Pragmatic Picture, then explore two possible problems for the view. The first concerns whether the...     

Internalism About Justification and the Skeptic’s Dilemma

I first argue that the skeptic needs an internalist conception of justification for her argument for skepticism. I then argue that the skeptic also needs to show that we do not have perceptual access to the world if her skepticism is to be a real threat to human knowledge of the world. This, I conclude, puts the skeptic in a dilemma, for internalist conceptions of justification presuppose that we have perceptual access to the world.