Welcoming the Stranger

Abstract. Thinking about teaching as an act of intellectual hospitality has the potential to shape productively how teachers conceive of their own roles in the classroom, their interactions with students, and their execution of crucial tasks. It also offers a path to helpful reflection about a persistent issue that arises particularly for the many faculty members who teach in small departments of religion and are therefore called upon to address a wide range of topics in their teaching. In addition, adopting an ethos of hospitality in the classroom provides a salutary counterpoint to the pervasive and often corrosive academic practices of critique, refutation, and dispute.     

Interactionism and Physicality

Substance-dualist interactionism faces two sorts of challenge. One is empirical, involving the alleged incompatibility between interactionism and the supposed closure of the physical world. Although widely considered successful, this challenge gives no reason for preferring materialism to dualism. The other sort of challenge holds that interactionism is conceptually impossible. The historically influential version of the conceptual challenge is now discredited, but recent discussions by Chomsky and by Crane and Mellor suggest a new version. In brief, the argument is that anything that interacts causally with physical things would have to be sanctioned by physics,and anything sanctioned by physics is ipso facto (as a matter of conceptual necessity) physical. I focus on the second premise. I show that plausible arguments for it are in fact fallacious and that counterexamples undermine it. Thus the argument fails: substance-dualist interactionism cannot be ruled out on conceptual grounds alone.     

Convergence among measures of interpersonal attraction

The purpose of this research was to determine whether Rubin's (1970) Liking and Love scales, the Interpersonal Jealousy scale of Mathes and Severa (1981), and a measure of sexual attraction, the Sexual Attraction scale, measure the same or independent dimensions of interpersonal attraction when applied to same- and opposite-sex friends rather than dating partner. It was found that the Liking and Love scales appeared to measure the same dimension of interpersonal attraction. However, this dimension was independent of the dimension measured by the Interpersonal Jealousy scale and the dimension measured by the Sexual Attraction scale. The latter two dimensions were also independent of each other.