Ordered to the Good: Final Causality and Analogical Predication in Thomas Aquinas

Thomas Aquinas's treatments of analogical predication of the divine names have generated perennial and polarizing debates. This article expands the framework for analysis by examining the divine names through the lens of final causality and the convertibility of being and good, stressing agathological participation as crucial for understanding the metaphysical foundation for analogical predication of the divine names. This approach specifies how analogical predication of the divine names functions as an intermediary end subordinate to the ultimate end of the beatific vision and how the ultimate end of the beatific vision causes the intermediate end of analogical predication.     

A Survey of Telephone Answering Services in Suicide Prevention and Crisis Intervention Agencies*

ABSTRACT: The telephone service established by directors of suicide prevention and crisis intervention services is generally given little careful consideration. Many agencies take their telephone systems for granted, assuming that almost any system will function adequately if an operator is available and a crisis worker is on call. There are a number of important issues at stake that should be carefully considered before a program is established that uses any system other than full-time coverage by the trained crisis worker at a permanent location. In order to investigate just what really happens under the various systems in use, a series of 76 calls was placed to 19 different emergency crisis services in the southeastern United States. Times were recorded to show how much time elapsed, through what various systems, to get an actual crisis worker on the line. There were marked differences across the eight different systems identified. The results clearly indicate that crisis services are in danger of unknowingly providing inferior and dangerously low quality service unless they maintain maximum control over their own telephone answering system 24 hours a day.     

Spatial learning set acquisition in rats

Development of a learning set reflects the ability to abstract from a given problem the rules and procedures that can be generalized to novel stimuli. This ability has been demonstrated readily in rats only with tasks employing olfactory stimuli, suggesting a modality-specific capability. In the present experiment, rats were tested on a series of three go/no-go spatial discrimination tasks in order to evaluate their ability to develop a learning set in a modality other than olfaction. Each discrimination task was presented in a different room providing unique extra-maze cues. All rats reached the criterion performance of 18 correct responses in 20 consecutive trials on all three discriminations and showed a learning set. Some rats performed the third discrimination perfectly after only a single error. These results indicate that the ability to develop a learning set is not specific to the olfactory modality but reflects a more general cognitive capacity.