Are black circles attentive fields? A reply to Bross, Blair, and Longtin.

It is argued that the experiment carried out by Bross et al is not a valid test of assimilation theory because they confuse a graphic representation of a constant with the construct itself and assume that changing the former will alter the latter.     

‘Very Truly,I Tell You,Before Abraham was,I am’: A Theological Treatise on the Concept of Time in John’s Gospel

This essay analyses temporal peculiarity in John’s Gospel, identified as eschatological and narratological in nature. Part one employs historical‐critical and literary‐critical exegesis to explain the interrelation and function of these peculiarities, while part two derives a temporal metaphysic from the exegesis to explain the concept of time in the Gospel. This exposition is used to make sense of the Gospel’s claim that the one who possesses eternal life will never die. The essay concludes that the Gospel’s future and realised eschatology act as reflections of one another, and argues that the future eschatological scheme functions as a distension of the realised scheme.     

Two Kinds of Logical Impossibility

In this paper, we argue that a distinction ought to be drawn between two ways in which a given world might be logically impossible. First, a world w might be impossible because the laws that hold at w are different from those that hold at some other world (say the actual world). Second, a world w might be impossible because the laws of logic that hold in some world (say the actual world) are violated at w. We develop a novel way of modelling logical possibility that makes room for both kinds of logical impossibility. Doing so has interesting implications for the relationship between logical possibility and other kinds of possibility (for example, metaphysical possibility) and implications for the necessity or contingency of the laws of logic.     

Applicability of two violence risk assessment tools in a psychiatric prison hospital population

The risk of violent behavior is known to be higher for patients who suffer from a severe mental disorder. However, specific prediction tools for clinical work in prison psychiatry are lacking. In this single-center study, two violence risk assessment tools (Forensic Psychiatry and Violence Tool, “FoVOx,” and Mental Illness and Violence Tool, “OxMIV”) were applied to a prison hospital population with a primary psychotic or bipolar disorder and subsequently compared. The required information on all items of both tools was obtained retrospectively for a total of 339 patients by evaluation of available patient files. We obtained the median and inter-quartile range for both FoVOx and OxMIV, and their rank correlation coefficient along with 95% confidence intervals (CIs)—for the full cohort, as well as for cohort subgroups. The two risk assessment tools were strongly positively correlated (Spearman correlation = 0.83; 95% CI = 0.80–0.86). Such a high correlation was independent of nationality, country of origin, type of detention, schizophrenia-spectrum disorder, previous violent crime and alcohol use disorder, where correlations were above 0.8. A lower correlation was seen with patients who were 30 years old or more, married, with affective disorder and with self-harm behavior, and also in patients without aggressive behavior and without drug use disorder. Both risk assessment tools are applicable as an adjunct to clinical decision making in prison psychiatry.