Is it Possible and Desirable for Theologians to Recover from Kant?

Kant marks a watershed in the history of theology, after which the anxious questions, “Can we speak of God? How can we?” have continually haunted modern theologians, insisting on being addressed before any others. Feeling compelled not to say about God what they want to say without first establishing that they are justified or entitled in saying those things, theologians have experienced both frustration and anxiety. However, the widespread assumption that one must experience the Kantian agony in order to be a modern theologian is challenged. Wolterstorff contends that one can move beyond Kant by rejecting the mental representationalist picture required by the latter’s account of intuitions and concepts. Conceiving of our intuitions as ’inputs’ which are then mentally represented according to concepts, is not only unnecessary but misleading. Theologians are better off rejecting the assumption that awareness always represents input and adopting instead the view that perceptual awareness, for example, is not so much an input but an action – the actualization of one of our human powers. Such an alternate pathway (opened up by Thomas Reid) would allow modern theologians to appropriate Kant without being appropriated by Kant.     

Cognitive models of stereotype change: (1). Generalization and subtyping in young people's views of the police

We report investigations of change in, and cognitive representation of young people's stereotypes of the police, in response to a police-schools liaison programme. This programme provides a real-life application of the ‘conversion’ model of stereotype change (in which stereotypes change radically in response to salient instances of disconfirming information). Study 1 revealed that school police officers were rated significantly more positively than the police in general, but that this view did not generalize to perceptions of the police in general. Stereotypes of the police became less positive over one year, although females were more positive than males, and school police officers were not judged typical of the category. Study 2 revealed that subjects categorized their school police officer separately from the police in general, and perceived him to share features with ‘caring and welfare’ professions, rather than other police officers and authority figures. Both studies converge on the limitations of the conversion model and tend to support the subtyping model (in which extremely disconfirming individuals are isolated from other group members).     

Measuring the stop point of rapid smoking

A method and an apparatus are described for measuring the point at which subjects elect to stop smoking when cigarette smoke is delivered more rapidly than in typical smoking. The device allows either the subject or the experimenter to control the volume of smoke and the interval between puffs. The device delivers reliable quantities of particulate matter from cigarette smoke. Subjects retested a week apart exhibited consistent stopping points.     

Socrates and the Unity of the Virtues

In the Protagoras, Socrates argues that each of the virtue-terms refers to “one thing” (εν: 333b4). But in the Laches (190c8–d5, 199e6–7), Socrates claims that courage is a proper part of virtue as a whole, and at Euthyphro 11e7–12e2, Socrates says that piety is a proper part of justice. But A cannot be both identical to B and also a proper part of B – piety cannot be both identical to justice and also a proper part of justice. In this paper we argue that coherent sense can be made of Socrates' apparently conflicting claims. The key to understanding Socrates' position, we will argue, is the central role of wisdom among the virtues. It is through the relationship of each virtue to wisdom that each may be said to be the same as all of the others, on the one hand, and also that some virtues may be regarded as proper parts of some other virtues, or as proper parts of virtue in general, on the other.     

Household family structure and children's aggressive behavior: A longitudinal study of urban elementary school children

The relationship between contemporary household family structures at fourth-grade and sixth-grade parent- and teacher-rated aggression was examined in an epidemiologically defined population of urban school children. The relationship between family structure and aggression varied by child gender and by parent and teacher ratings in the home and school, respectively. After taking into account family income, urban area, and fourth-grade aggressive behavior, boys in both mother—father and mother—male partner families were significantly less likely than boys in mother-alone families to be rated as aggressive by teachers. No significant relations between family structure and teacher- or parent-rated aggression were found for girls.This work was supported by the following National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) grants: Epidemiologic Prevention Center for Early Risk Behavior P50 MH38725; Periodic Outcome of Two Preventive Trials RO1 MH42968; and a Postdoctoral Training Program 2T32MH18834-06A1. The authors would like to thank the Baltimore Public City School System and the children and parents who participated. The views expressed here are those of the authors; no official endorsement by NIMH is intended or should be inferred.Address all correspondence and reprint requests to Dr. Ialongo, Department of Mental Hygiene, School of Hygiene and Public Health, Johns Hopkins University, 624 North Broadway, Baltimore, Maryland 21205.     

Scientism, deconstruction, and nihilism

I show how scientism leads to deconstruction and both, in turn, lead to nihilism. Nihilism constitutes a denial both of the existence of fallacious moral reasoning and the existence of a moral dimension to fallacious reasoning. I argue against all of these positions by maintaining that (1) there is a pre-theoretical framework of norms within which technical thinking function, (2) the pre-theoretical framework cannot itself be technically conceptualized, and (3) the explication of this framework permits us to identify both fallacies of moral reasoning and the immorality of fallacious reasoning.     

Role of the institutional animal care and use committee in monitoring research

During the 1980s, federal regulations transferred significant portions of the responsibility for monitoring the care and use of research animals from animal care programs to Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees (IACUCs). After a brief review of the history of the regulation of the use of animals in research preceding and during the 4 decades following World War II, this article raises 4 problems associated with the role IACUCs currently play in monitoring the use of animals in research: (a) lack of expertise, (b) diverted resources, (c) conflict of interest, and (d) restrictions of academic freedom. It is concluded that the care and treatment of animals used in research would be served better and organized more rationally if the day-to-day responsibilities for approving projects and caring for animals were separated more clearly from broader, oversight functions, with the former being assigned to animal care programs and the latter to IACUCs.