Spinoza’s Christology A Brief Summary

Abstract

This article summarizes a number of Spinoza texts relating to his Christology and soteriology based on his Christology. The texts show that Spinoza’s Christology underpins his formulation of human nature or the constitution of the essence of the human mind. Considering Spinoza’s texts concerning God or Nature, “Christ according to the spirit”, the spirit or mind of Christ, and human salvation or blessedness; this article illustrates that given the texts, the study of Spinoza’s Christian religion is skewed and ought to be more balanced. The author’s reading of Spinoza and its application to his work presented in this article provides a coherent and tenable understanding of Spinoza’s efforts “to commend and establish the authentic purpose of the Christian Religion”.     

Learning strategy differentially impacts memory connections in children and adults

Even once children can accurately remember their experiences, they nevertheless struggle to use those memories in flexible new ways—as in when drawing inferences. However, it remains an open question as to whether the developmental differences observed during both memory formation and inference itself represent a fundamental limitation on children's learning mechanisms, or rather their deployment of suboptimal strategy. Here, 7–9-year-old children (N = 154) and young adults (N = 130) first formed strong memories for initial (AB) associations and then engaged in one of three learning strategies as they viewed overlapping (BC) pairs. We found that being told to integrate—combine ABC during learning—both significantly improved children's ability to explicitly relate the indirectly associated A and C items during inference and protected the underlying pair memories from forgetting. However, this finding contrasted with implicit evidence for memory-to-memory connections: Adults and children both formed A-C links prior to any knowledge of an inference test—yet for children, such links were most apparent when they were told to simply encode BC, not integrate. Moreover, the accessibility of such implicit links differed between children and adults, with adults using them to make explicit inferences but children only doing so for well-established direct AB pairs. These results suggest that while a lack of integration strategy may explain a large share of the developmental differences in explicit inference, children and adults nevertheless differ in both the circumstances under which they connect interrelated memories and their ability to later leverage those links to inform flexible behaviours.

Research Highlights

• Children and adults view AB and BC pairs related through a shared item, B. This provides an opportunity for learners to connect A–C in memory.
• Being encouraged to integrate ABC during learning boosted performance on an explicit test of A–C connections (children and adults) and protected from forgetting (children).
• Children and adults differed in when implicit A–C connections were formed—occurring primarily when told to separately encode BC (children) versus integrate (adults), respectively.
• Adults used implicit A–C connections to facilitate explicit judgments, while children did not. Our results suggest developmental differences in the learning conditions promoting memory-to-memory connections.

     

Do Neurodegenerative Diseases Affect Creativity? Divergent Thinking in Frontotemporal Dementia and Parkinson’s Disease

Creativity is considered to be one of the most important characteristics that humans possess. It emerges from fundamental cognitive operations and the activation of specific brain regions. In several neurological disorders, such as frontotemporal dementia (FTD) and Parkinson’s disease (PD), creativity plays an important role in diagnosis and rehabilitation strategies. This study examined the link between creativity and pathology in a sample of neurological patients (idiopathic PD, n = 17; FTD, n = 11 with behavioural or semantic variants), and 15 healthy subjects (Mini Mental State Examination score ≥ 20; age range, 45 to 85 years) using the Divergent Thinking Test. The FTD group exhibited lower scores than the PD and control groups. Furthermore, PD patients performed significantly better on the single DTT factor, originality, than controls.

These results are discussed in relation to neurological mechanisms that may influence creative strategies in dementia. Finally, it has been proposed creativity therapy as a cognitive rehabilitation approach, which may help patients enhance and maintain cognitive functions, reduce the severity of emotional disorders, and promote social interactions.