Plantinga’s Reformed Epistemology: What’s the Question?

Alvin Plantingas Warranted Christian Belief is without questionone of the central texts of the Reformed epistemology movement. Critiques of Plantingas defence have been both multiple and varied. As varied as these responses are, however, it is my contention that many of them amount to the same thing. It is the purpose of this paper to offer an overview of the main lines of attack that have been directed as Plantingas project, and thereafter to show how many, if not most, of these objections can be understood as versions or aspects of the same criticism, what I call the Inadequacy Thesis.     

Logotherapy-Enhanced REBT: An Integration of Discovery and Reason

Viktor Frankls Logotherapy and Albert Elliss Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) are at seemingly opposite ends of the psychotherapeutic spectrum. However, a close review of the assumptions and philosophy of each school of therapy reveals that these two systems are compatible. We propose that a Logotherapy-enhanced REBT can increase human achievement and happiness by balancing the individual discovery of meaning with the pursuit of reason. This integrated and enhanced therapy will help human beings participate in positive life experiences and take greater responsibility for change. Fruitful and beneficial aspects of a Logotherapy enhanced-REBT are explored with respect to cognitions, emotions, and the reduction of rumination. Conclusions are drawn, limitations are discussed, and future recommendations are outlined.     

Daily depression and cognitions about stress: evidence for a traitlike depressogenic cognitive style and the prediction of depressive symptoms in a prospective daily diary study

The authors examined the stability and dynamic structure of negative cognitions made to naturalistic stressors and the prediction of depressive symptoms in a daily diary study. Young adults reported on dispositional depression vulnerabilities at baseline, including a depressogenic cognitive style, dysfunctional attitudes, rumination, neuroticism, and initial depression, and then completed short diaries recording the inferences they made to the most negative event of the day along with their experience of depressive symptoms every day for 35 consecutive days. Daily cognitions about stressors exhibited moderate stability across time. A traitlike model, rather than a contextual one, explained this pattern of stability best. Hierarchical linear modeling analyses showed that individuals' dispositional depressogenic cognitive style, neuroticism, and their daily negative cognitions about stressors predicted fluctuations in daily depressive symptoms. Dispositional neuroticism and negative cognitive style interacted with daily negative cognitions in different ways to predict daily depressive symptoms.     

Gender differences in social support: a question of skill or responsiveness?

Spouses often report that wives provide better social support than husbands. Yet studies observing spouses' supportive interactions challenge this perception, finding no differences between husbands' and wives' supportive behaviors. This article offers reconciliation by suggesting that husbands and wives may differ, not in their skill at providing support, but in their responsiveness to their partners' changing needs over time. Observational and diary data from couples confirmed that, whereas husbands and wives did not differ on average in the support they provided each other, they did differ in the timing of that support. Wives tended to provide better support on days that their husbands experienced greater stress. However, when wives experienced greater stress, their husbands displayed both support and negativity.     

Concordant Spiritual Orientations as a Factor in Physician--Patient Spiritual Discussions: A Qualitative Study

Objectives: To understand the impact of physicians and patients religious/spiritual orientation on discussions of spiritual issues. Methods: We performed semi-structured interviews of 10 Missouri family physicians and 10 patients of these physicians, selecting subjects nonrandomly to represent a range of demographic factors, practice types, and chronic or terminal illness. We coded and evaluated transcribed interviews for themes. Results: Respondents expressed that similar belief systems facilitate patient–physician spiritual interactions and bring confidence to their relationships. Those holding dissimilar faiths noted limited ability to address spiritual questions directly. They cited significant barriers to spiritual interaction but considered that ecumenism, use of patient-centered care, and negotiation skills lessen these barriers. Conclusions: Our respondents view spirituality similarly to other aspects of the physician–patient relationship involving differing viewpoints. Where discordance exists, cross-cultural, patient-centered, diplomatic approaches facilitate spiritual discussions.     

Action,Control and Sensations of Acting

Sensations of acting and control have been neglected in theory of action. I argue that they form the core of action and are integral and indispensible parts of our actions, participating as they do in feedback loops consisting of our intentions in acting, the bodily movements required for acting and the sensations of acting. These feedback loops underlie all activities in which we engage when we act and generate our control over our movements.The events required for action according to the causal theory, or Searle’s theory, do not add up to agency. I find the agent at work, her engagement in her action, in her sensation of acting.It is often thought that bodily movements are either mere events or actions. I suggest that there is a third possibility: that they are activities which are not actions. Activities, whether they are actions or not, differ from mere events in that they are controlled from within the brain. They are actions only if this control forms agent control, that is, control in which the conscious mind, the agents’ intentions in acting and her sensations of acting, participates.Internally wayward actions are characterized by the fact that the person involved does not have a sensation of action and therefore does not control her movements. In the absence of such a sensation she does not act.     

From <Emphasis Type="Italic">Pintele Yid to Racenjude</Emphasis>: Chaim Zhitlovsky and racial conceptions of Jewishness

The Russian Jewish intellectual, Chaim Zhitlovsky (1865–1943), a leading architect of secular Jewish culture and thought, was a central figure in the progressive Jewish intelligentsia of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In an essay written in 1927, Yidn un Yiddishkayt (Jews and Jewishness), he sought to define the secular essence of what he calls Yiddishkayt. This essay is not the first in Zhitlovskys long publicistic career in which he searches for new, secular definitions of Jewish identity and culture. But this essay differs, since it is marked by Zhitlovskys use of contemporary social scientific notions of race and racial traits to conceptualize what he believes constitutes Jewishness in a non-religious context, along with his adoption of the mystical Jewish concept of the pintele yid, the theory of an innate Jewishness embodied by a Jewish spark. Zhitlovskys desire to craft a truly secular theory of Jewish identity led him ironically to accept models of Jewish identity at odds with his stated larger vision. In turning to contemporary racial theory, as well as long nurtured mystical models of Yiddishkayt, Zhitlovsky reveals the wide range of ideological discourses that led him to innovative and controversial notions of modern Jewish identity.     

Senator Bill Frist and the Medical Jeremiad

This essay analyzes Senator Bill Frist's 2001 address to the American Society of Thoracic Surgeons. The author argues that the address represents an attempt to reframe physicians' political identity to authorize more active participation by them. Frist authorizes and demands such participation through the construction of a medical jeremiad. He argues that American physicians must have greater involvement to preserve the health of the body politic and to reassert physician control over the biomedical system. Although Frist's arguments are built on an apparently democratic form of address, his jeremiad illustrates aristocratic possibilities in medico-political rhetoric.     

Evaluative conditioning in social psychology: Facts and speculations

The aim of the present paper is to examine the contribution of evaluative conditioning (EC) to attitude formation theory in social psychology. This aim is pursued on two fronts. First, evaluative conditioning is analysed for its relevance to social psychological research. We show that conditioned attitudes can be acquired through simple co-occurrences of a neutral and a valenced stimulus. Moreover, we argue that conditioned attitudes are not confined to direct contact with a valenced stimulus, but can be formed and dynamically reformed indirectly, through association chains. Second, social research is examined in an effort to identify evaluative learning mechanisms. We suggest that several important phenomena in social psychology (e.g., ingroup favouritism, prejudice, name letter effect) are at least partly due to simple mechanisms of evaluative learning. The implications for attitude formation theory and for applied settings are discussed.     

Care of the Self and Patient Participation in Genetic Discourse: A Foucauldian Reading of the Surgeon General's “My Family Health Portrait” Program

Critics of genetic discourse are concerned that deterministic and discriminatory views of genetics are increasingly becoming adopted. These views argue that current genetic discourse becomes a source of power whereby powerful institutions harm people with so-called “bad” genes. This essay argues that current analyses of the power of genetics discourse are grounded in an improper reading that disempowers patients. Deploying Michel Foucault's concept “care of the self,” this essay claims that genetics discourse is better understood as a way that patients take on power through rhetoric rather than a force that has power over patients. Through a close reading of the “My Family Health Portrait” program, this paper argues that patients experience a process of “subjection” wherein they become agents of and objects of genetics discourse both. This alternative mode of analyzing the power of genetics discourse has implications for our collective understanding of the operations of the care of the self and the uses of genetic information that we propose.