The Book of Job and Male Melancholia: A Bizarre Story about Hating Mother God and the Maternal Jesus,Featuring Mel Gibson

This article tells, or advocates, a bizarre story about male revenge. By drawing from literature in the psychology of religion that deals with the Book of Job and by assuming the standpoint of “cultural hermeneutics” in biblical studies, the author playfully takes up an issue identified by Donald Capps: the issue of repressed rage in male melancholia. The author takes his cue from a recent doctoral dissertation from Princeton Theological Seminary. Jacobus Hamman (2000) applies a Winnicottian analysis to the Book of Job and argues that the Book of Job can be a useful pastoral resource today in a number of ways, including his proposal for believers to direct their aggression toward God. Implicit in Hamman’s Winnicottian analysis, but never explicitly stated, is the fact that God is Mother. The plot here is how the Book of Job might lead contemporary American men to hate Mother God and the maternal Jesus, thereby aiding them in externalizing their repressed and self-directed rage. Mel Gibson stars, if only briefly, in this childish story that presses the limits of Christian theology.     

Offspring Effects of Prenatal Alcohol Exposure from Birth to 25 Years: The Seattle Prospective Longitudinal Study

Before alcohol was generally known to cause birth defects, NIAAA in 1974 began funding a population-based Seattle study on alcohol use and pregnancy outcome. Women receiving prenatal care by mid-pregnancy were recruited (N = 1,529) and interviewed at home. Approximately 500 offspring exposed to a range of alcohol levels were examined on 11 occasions between day 1 and 25 years. Neuropsychological and neurobehavioral performance measures are correlated with prenatal alcohol dose, without substantial confounding by socio-demographic or rearing conditions, smoking, nutrition, or other drugs. Deficits in attention, arithmetic skill, spatial-visual memory, and IQ, as well as increased alcohol problems and psychiatric disorders are among offspring outcomes correlated at several ages with maternal drinking during and before pregnancy recognition. Findings are not confined to women who believed they had alcohol problems. Not all exposed offspring appear affected.     

Implicit Motives Modulate Attentional Orienting to Facial Expressions of Emotion

We conducted two studies (Ns=52 and 60) to test the notion that the incentive salience of facial expressions of emotion (FEE) is a joint function of perceivers’ implicit needs for power and affiliation and the FEE’s meaning as a dominance or affiliation signal. We used a variant of the dot-probe task (Mogg & Bradley, 1999a) to measure attentional orienting. Joy, anger, surprise, and neutral FEEs were presented for 12, 116, and 231 ms with backward masking. Implicit motives were assessed with a Picture Story Exercise. We found that power-motivated individuals orient their attention towards faces signaling low dominance, but away from faces that signal high dominance, and (b) that affiliation-motivated individuals show vigilance for faces signaling low affiliation (rejection) and, to a lesser extent, orient attention towards faces signaling high affiliation (acceptance).     

Explication Defended

How can formal methods be applied to philosophical problems that involve informal concepts of ordinary language? Carnap answered this question by describing a methodology that he called “explication." Strawson objected that explication changes the subject and does not address the original philosophical problem; this paper shows that Carnap’s response to that objection was inadequate and offers a better response. More recent criticisms of explication by Boniolo and Eagle are shown to rest on misunderstandings of the nature of explication. It is concluded that explication is an appropriate methodology for formal philosophy.     

Cracking the mirror: on Kierkegaard’s concerns about friendship

In this article, I offer a brief account of some of Kierkegaard’s key concerns about friendship: its “preferential” nature and its being a form of self-love. Kierkegaard’s endorsement of the ancient idea of the friend as “second self” involves a common but misguided assumption: that friendship depends largely upon likeness between friends. This focus obscures a vitally important element, highlighted by the so-called “drawing” view of friendship. Once this is emphasized, we can see a significant aspect - though by no means all - of Kierkegaard’s worry as misplaced. However, the “drawing” view also enables us to begin to see what a “Kierkegaardian” friendship might look like.     

The Elusive Nature of Executive Functions: A Review of our Current Understanding

Executive functions include abilities of goal formation, planning, carrying out goal-directed plans, and effective performance. This article aims at reviewing some of the current knowledge surrounding executive functioning and presenting the contrasting views regarding this concept. The neural substrates of the executive system are examined as well as the evolution of executive functioning, from development to decline. There is clear evidence of the vulnerability of executive functions to the effects of age over lifespan. The first executive function to emerge in children is the ability to inhibit overlearned behavior and the last to appear is verbal fluency. Inhibition of irrelevant information seems to decline earlier than set shifting and verbal fluency during senescence. The sequential progression and decline of these functions has been paralleled with the anatomical changes of the frontal lobe and its connections with other brain areas. Generalization of the results presented here are limited due to methodological differences across studies. Analysis of these differences is presented and suggestions for future research are offered.     

“Primary Relations” In a New Foundational Axiomatic Framework

The new system of axioms we propose is based on the foundational theory of De Giorgi et al. Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Preprints di Matematica 26: 1 (1996) slightly modified. In that paper (which is dedicated to a new axiomatic framework for mathematics, informatics and logic) the authors use two kinds of primitive notions: relations and qualities. Since their system is based on the distribution paradigm, they start from distinction. We propose to shift the perspective and to start from unity and then from within unity to pass to distinction; to this end we apply ideas of Lesniewski, Nijhoff International Philosophy Series 44 (1992). We introduce only one kind of entity as a primitive notion, namely relations, and treat qualities as articulations of relations. The new concept of “primary relation” permits the introduction of a dynamic, non-standard form of identity, which we hope will find application in various fields where self-referential structures are required.     

The role of beliefs in goal dynamics: prolegomena to a constructive theory of intentions

In this article we strive to provide a detailed and principled analysis of the role of beliefs in goal processing—that is, the cognitive transition that leads from a mere desire to a proper intention. The resulting model of belief-based goal processing has also relevant consequences for the analysis of intentions, and constitutes the necessary core of a constructive theory of intentions, i.e. a framework that not only analyzes what an intention is, but also explains how it becomes what it is. We discuss similarities and differences between our approach and other standard accounts of intention, in particular Bratman’s planning theory. The aim here is to question and refine the conceptual foundations of many theories of intentional action: as a consequence, although our analysis is not formal in itself, it is ultimately meant to have deep consequences for formal models of intentional agency.     

Ways in which coherence is confirmation conducive

Recent works in epistemology show that the claim that coherence is truth conducive – in the sense that, given suitable ceteris paribus conditions, more coherent sets of statements are always more probable – is dubious and possibly false. From this, it does not follows that coherence is a useless notion in epistemology and philosophy of science. Dietrich and Moretti (Philosophy of science 72(3): 403–424, 2005) have proposed a formal of account of how coherence is confirmation conducive—that is, of how the coherence of a set of statements facilitates the confirmation of such statements. This account is grounded in two confirmation transmission properties that are satisfied by some of the measures of coherence recently proposed in the literature. These properties explicate everyday and scientific uses of coherence. In his paper, I review the main findings of Dietrich and Moretti (2005) and define two evidence-gathering properties that are satisfied by the same measures of coherence and constitute further ways in which coherence is confirmation conducive. At least one of these properties vindicates important applications of the notion of coherence in everyday life and in science.     

Perceptual Bias in Speech Error Data Collection: Insights from Spanish Speech Errors

This paper studies the reliability and validity of naturalistic speech errors as a tool for language production research. Possible biases when collecting naturalistic speech errors are identified and specific predictions derived. These patterns are then contrasted with published reports from Germanic languages (English, German and Dutch) and one Romance language (Spanish). Unlike findings in the Germanic languages, Spanish speech errors show many patterns which run contrary to those expected from bias: (1) more phonological errors occur between words than within word; (2) word-initial consonants are less likely to participate in errors than word-medial consonants, (3) errors are equally likely in stressed and in unstressed syllables, (4) perseverations are more frequent than anticipations, and (5) there is no trace of a lexical bias. We present a new corpus of Spanish speech errors collected by many theoretically naïve observers (whereas the only corpus available so far was collected by two highly trained theoretically informed observers), give a general overview of it, and use it to replicate previous reports. In spite of the different susceptibility of these methods to bias, results were remarkably similar in both corpora and again contrary to predictions from bias. As a result, collecting speech errors “in the wild” seems to be free of bias to a reasonable extent even when using a multiple-collector method. The observed contrasting patterns between Spanish and Germanic languages arise as true cross-linguistic differences.