The Epistemology of the Book of Revelation

Recent developments in Christian philosophy, in particular epistemology, need to be enriched by a study of epistemology in the Bible. This article uncovers the epistemological assumptions of the Book of Revelation (specifically related to spiritual experience, revelation, and eschatological vindication) and points out how they may advance the development of a contemporary Christian epistemology.     

Factors associated with a positive attitude towards change among employees during the early phase of a downsizing process

Most research on organizational changes in working life, including downsizing, focuses on the negative attitudes and negative consequences of the change. The aim of this study was to evaluate if the employee's previous learning experience and characteristics of the working environment were associated with positive attitudes towards organizational change. The 467 employees (73.5% males) working in a global oil company in the early phases of a downsizing process were asked to answer a questionnaire with demographic variables, perception of the working environment, and attitude to change (93% response rate). Corporate social responsibility (CSR), involvement and participation, team leadership and team effectiveness were important factors related to positive attitudes towards organizational change. Non-leaders and older employees were positive to change. We conclude that employees' perceptions of their psychosocial working environment, in particular the CSR, were highly related to their attitude to organizational change.     

Employability during unemployment: Adaptability, career identity and human and social capital

Recently, Fugate et al. [Fugate, M., Kinicki, A. J., & Ashforth, B. E. (2004). Employability: A psycho-social construct, its dimensions, and applications. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 65(1), 14] defined employability as a psycho-social construct comprised of three dimensions: (i) adaptability; (ii) career identity; and (iii) human and social capital. The aim of the current paper was to empirically test Fugate et al.’s model in a sample of 416 unemployed Australians (n = 126 for longitudinal sample). Specifically, this research explored employability in relation to three aspects of unemployment: (1) self-esteem during unemployment; (2) job search during unemployment; and (3) re-employment (at a 6-month follow-up). Overall, the results of this longitudinal study provide broad support for the psycho-social construct of employability and demonstrate its applicability to the unemployment context.     

Anti-Luck Epistemologies and Necessary Truths

That believing truly as a matter of luck does not generally constitute knowing has become epistemic commonplace. Accounts of knowledge incorporating this anti-luck idea frequently rely on one or another of a safety or sensitivity condition. Sensitivity-based accounts of knowledge have a well-known problem with necessary truths, to wit, that any believed necessary truth trivially counts as knowledge on such accounts. In this paper, we argue that safety-based accounts similarly trivialize knowledge of necessary truths and that two ways of responding to this problem for safety, issuing from work by Williamson and Pritchard, are of dubious success.     

The Black Foe: Being Towards Death1

The ontology of death is universal, hence archetypal. Nowhere do we witness any organic creature escape its talons. Analytical psychology has had an intimate relationship to death for the simple fact that it contemplates the soul, the numinous, and an afterlife. From Hegel to Heidegger, Freud and Jung, death was an existential force that sustained and transformed life, the positive significance of the negative. Rather than merely a destructive phenomenon, death informs Being, the power of nothingness that dialectically drives life. In this paper, I will introduce the notion of what I call the omega principle, the psychological orientation and trajectory of our being towards death, which we may say is a universal preoccupation and recapitulation of the collective unconscious that subsumes our personal relation to death, an eternal return of the objective psyche constellated as esse in anima.     

Psychosocial Genetic Counseling in the Post-Nondirective Era: A Point of View

For three decades nondirectiveness has served as the central ethos for genetic counseling. It has evolved from narrow definitions defining what should not be done to broad definitions that promote active counseling skills in support of client autonomy and informed decision making. As broad definitions have been formulated, the term nondirective has become largely irrelevant to their content; it persists primarily as a historic relic. It has thus become an impediment to creative theory and clinical practice. I propose that nondirectiveness be replaced as the central ethos, while relevant components (providing balanced information, not imposing the counselor's values) are retained as elements of practice and ethics. This raises the question of what principle(s) should be adopted as a new guiding ethos. To promote a discussion of that issue I propose that the central ethos of genetic counseling should be to bring the psychosocial component into every aspect of the work.     

Children's interpretation of generic noun phrases

Generic utterances (e.g., "Cows say 'moo'") have 2 distinctive semantic properties: (a) Generics are generally true, unlike indefinites (e.g., "Bears live in caves" is generic; "I saw some bears in the cave" is indefinite), and (b) generics need not be true of all category members, unlike universal quantifiers (e.g., all, every, each). This article examined whether preschool children and adults appreciate both these features, using a comprehension task (Study 1) and an elicited production task (Study 2). In both tasks, 4-year-old children--like adults--treated generics as distinct from both indefinites ("some") and universal quantifiers ("all"). In contrast, 3-year-olds did not differentiate among generics, "all," and "some." By 4 years of age, generics emerge as a distinct semantic device.