Philosophy of Education in a Poor Historical Moment: A Personal Account

Under the post-metaphysical sky “old” humanistic-oriented education is possible solely at the cost of its transformation into its negative, into a power that is determined to diminish human potentials for self-exaltation. Nothing less than total metamorphosis is needed to rescue the core of humanistic genesis: the quest for edifying Life and resistance to the call for “home-returning” into the total harmony that is promised to us within nothingness.     

The Will to Truth,the Death Drive and the Will to Power

This paper claims that Freud’s idea of the death drive is analogous to the will to truth in traditional philosophy and can be better understood as a truth drive. The argument is based upon Nietzsche’s interpretation of the will to truth as a concealed will to death. This interpretation emphasizes the opposition between truth and life; truth is a concept of constancy while life is a concept of change. Freud’s recognition of the conservative nature of the drives brings him to the paradoxical conclusion of the existence of a death drive. It is paradoxical, for Freud, since it considers death as a fundamental principle of life and as its aim. The paper suggests that by replacing the concept of death by the concept of truth and using Nietzsche’s idea of “the will to power” this paradox can be resolved without losing Freud’s insight of the dialectic nature of psychological life.

     

Salient Volunteering Behavior Increases Monetary Risk‐taking

Research finds that engaging in prosocial behavior has many positive psychological outcomes (e.g., enhanced well‐being, optimism, perceived control, and a boost in self‐concept), and research on monetary risk‐taking reveals these psychological outcomes are associated with increased risk‐taking. Merging these findings, we propose that when people's volunteering behavior is made salient in their minds, they take more monetary risks. Making research participants’ volunteering behavior salient by having them recall an act of prior volunteering (studies 1 and 3), choosing whether to volunteer (study 2), or choosing one of two volunteering activities (study 4), four experiments (and a fifth reported in the Appendix S2) reveal increased risk‐taking across several monetary‐risk outcomes (incentive‐compatible gambles, allocation of a windfall gain, and a behavioral risk‐taking measure involving escalating risk). Lastly, when the decision maker attributes a decision to volunteer to an external source, the effect of salient volunteering on monetary risk‐taking attenuates.     

Action-based and vision-based selection of input: Two sources of control

In the first part of this paper we review evidence suggesting that there exists a mechanism that selects input on the basis of its similarity to the required action. This response-based input selection differs from the more established space- and object-based input selection in that it is not constrained by the structure of the input. Our evidence suggests that the two-choice Stroop effect is caused by this response-based selection mechanism. By contrast, it is known that the flanker effect is determined by the space- and object- based selection mechanisms. We explore whether the conflict resolution of the Stroop and flanker tasks is different as well by embedding these two tasks in a PRP (Psychological Refractory Period) paradigm. We show that the Stroop and the PRP effects are additive whereas the flanker and the PRP effects are underadditive, suggesting that the processes in charge of the conflict resolution in the Stroop and the flanker tasks are indeed different. We discuss possible reasons for this difference, and discuss possible ways in which the response-based mechanism can be implemented in information processing models.     

Win-shift and win-stay learning in the short-beaked echidna (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Tachyglossus aculeatus</Emphasis>)

Numerous previous investigators have explained species differences in spatial memory performance in terms of differences in foraging ecology. In three experiments we attempted to extend these findings by examining the extent to which the spatial memory performance of echidnas (or "spiny anteaters") can be understood in terms of the spatio-temporal distribution of their prey (ants and termites). This is a species and a foraging situation that have not been examined in this way before. Echidnas were better able to learn to avoid a previously rewarding location (to "win-shift") than to learn to return to a previously rewarding location (to "win-stay"), at short retention intervals, but were unable to learn either of these strategies at retention intervals of 90 min. The short retention interval results support the ecological hypothesis, but the long retention interval results do not. Electronic Publication     

The Factor Structure of the Beavers Interactional Scales

Confirmatory factor analysis and regression analyses of the Beavers Interactional Scales did not appear to support the model offered by its developers, namely, several specified family attributes contributing respectively to two global factors of Family Competence and Family Style. Moreover, regression analysis indicated that only three of 12 items predicted raters' assessments of Global Family Health, and one of seven items predicted Global Family Style. Individuals interested in the family dynamic centripetal/centrifugal might best think of that as a unitary entity and rate it accordingly.     

Plantinga’s Reformed Epistemology: What’s the Question?

Alvin Plantingas Warranted Christian Belief is without questionone of the central texts of the Reformed epistemology movement. Critiques of Plantingas defence have been both multiple and varied. As varied as these responses are, however, it is my contention that many of them amount to the same thing. It is the purpose of this paper to offer an overview of the main lines of attack that have been directed as Plantingas project, and thereafter to show how many, if not most, of these objections can be understood as versions or aspects of the same criticism, what I call the Inadequacy Thesis.