Speaking of Possibilities: The Theistic Actualism of Anselm's Divine Locutio

In his Monologion, Anselm represents God's knowledge of his creative possibilities, not in the intellectualist and Platonic terms of Augustine's divine ideas, but in the linguistic, poetic, and semi‐Stoic terms of a divine “utterance” or “expression” (locutio). Through his shift in theological metaphor, Anselm makes a subtle yet significant departure from the prevailing, “possibilist” model of divine possibility in western theology—according to which God's possibilities are known prior to and independently of any act or intention to create—towards a radically alternate, analogical and “actualist” appreciation of God as the sovereign speaker and inventor of his own possibilities.     

A defense of modal appearances

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion - I argue that beliefs about what appears possible are justified in much the same way as beliefs about what appears actual. I do so by chisholming,...     

Doctoral Dissertations on Suicide From U.S. and Canadian Institutions of Higher Learning, 1990–1995

Doctoral dissertations on suicide from 1990 to 1995 appearing in Volumes 51–55 and the 1995 issues of Volume 56 of Dissertation Abstracts International are listed. A total of 214 dissertations from 119 North American institutions of higher learning (110 in the United States and 9 in Canada) are compiled and organized by the year in which the dissertation was completed. An average of 40 dissertations were completed annually for the years 1990–1994. The institutions granting the most doctorates are indicated. More than half of the doctoral projects involve topics of youth suicide, with only small numbers of dissertations on any other specific topic.     

Maturation of EEG power spectra in early adolescence: a longitudinal study

This study investigated the fine-grained development of the EEG power spectra in early adolescence, and the extent to which it is reflected in changes in peak frequency. It also sought to determine whether sex differences in the EEG power spectra reflect differential patterns of maturation. A group of 56 adolescents were tested at age 10 years and then at two further time-points approximately 18 months apart. The EEG was recorded during both eyes-closed and eyes-open conditions and Fourier transformed to provide estimates of absolute and relative spectral power at 0.5 Hz intervals from 0.5 to 40 Hz. The peak alpha frequency for each individual at each time-point was also determined for relative spectral power. Partial Least Squares (PLS) analysis was used to determine the combination of electrodes and frequencies that showed developmental change, or differed between the sexes. As a function of age, absolute delta and theta frequencies power decreased, and relative alpha2 and beta frequencies increased, replicating the standard findings of a decrease in lower, and increase in higher, frequencies with age. A small but significant increase in peak alpha frequency with age was detected. Moreover PLS analysis performed with individual alpha frequencies aligned to 10 Hz suggested that the age-related increase seen in alpha2 relative power was driven by changes in the peak frequency. Although males demonstrated higher alpha power than females, there were no sex differences in peak frequency, suggesting that there may be more to sex differences in EEG power than simply different rates of maturation between the two sexes.     

Implicit influence of affective postures on the perception of others: you can't show me how I feel

This study examined how one's own posture influences the perception of another's posture in a task with implicit affective information. In 2 experiments, participants assumed or viewed a body posture and then compared that posture with a viewed posture. They were not told that postures varied in affective valence: positive, negative, neutral-abstract, or neutral-meaningful. Posture affect influenced both accuracy and response time measures of posture discrimination. Participants were slower and less accurate for targets that matched an assumed posture, but only for affective postures. This pattern did not hold for matching affectively neutral postures (meaningful or not), nonmatching postures, or for purely visual comparisons. These results are consistent with both cognitive embodiment theories postulating that personal body posture influences the perception of other's postures and emotional embodiment theories postulating sensorimotor and emotional simulation processes that create correspondences between one's own and another's emotional postures. Nonetheless, these findings differ from studies finding facilitation for explicit emotional judgments of affective congruence. People use different information depending on task requirements. The assumption of an affective posture may activate simulations of personal emotional experiences that may, in turn, serve to differentiate personal posture perception from ostensibly the same posture in another person.     

Book reviews

Truth at all Costs. Review of The Kairos Document, Challenge to the Church, published in UK by Catholic Institute for International Relations and the British Council of Churches

The Bengali Muslims of Bradford. Stephen William Barton Community Religions Project Monograph Series, University of Leeds, 1986 243 pp.

Investigating American Occultism. The Occult in America: New Historical Perspectives. edited by Howard Kerr and Charles L Crow. University of Illinois Press, £13.60

Gurdjieff: an annotated bibliography J. Walter Driscoll & the Gurdjieff Foundation of California Garland Publishing. New York, 1985. pp. xxv + 363, $50