Giving the Ontological Argument Its Due

In this paper, I shall present and defend an ontological argument for the existence of God. The argument has two premises: (1) possibly, God exists, and (2) necessary existence is a perfection. I then defend, at length, arguments for both of these premises. Finally, I shall address common objections to ontological arguments, such as the Kantian slogan (‘existence is not a real predicate’), and Gaunilo-style parodies, and argue that they do not succeed. I conclude that there is at least one extant ontological argument that is plausibly sound.     

Blind Intuitions: Modernism's Critique of Idealism

Adorno contends that something of what we think of knowing and rational agency operate in ways that obscure and deform unique, singular presentations by relegating them to survival-driven interests and needs; hence, in accordance with the presumptions of transcendental idealism, we have come to mistake what are, in effect, historically contingent, species-subjective ways of viewing the world for an objective understanding of the world. And further, this interested understanding of the world is deforming in a more radical way than just obscuring what is there for the sake of interested needs and purposes; these instrumental ways of knowing and acting, are broadly self-interested, in the interest of survival, without effective concern for the well-being and worth of others; by becoming generalized and exclusive, hegemonic, by driving out modes of encountering things and persons that support their differences and independence, their needs and interests, these instrumental practices are the deepest cause of the ills of our time. As heightened forms of rational self-interest, self-interest being the drive of reason, transcendental interests suppress the interests of others. Adorno argues that modernist artistic practices perform a critique of the set of assumptions governing idealism by demonstrating how there is a suppressed rational form of human comportment directed towards the making and comprehension of unique sensuous particulars. Art, according to Adorno's ‘Aesthetic Theory’, is a broken off and isolated fragment of human knowing; in its hibernates the rational forms of acting and knowing that have been suppressed in the coming to be of Enlightened modernity.     

Discussion of “Melancholic Psychosis”

Derek Hook’s paper (this issue) represents an important discussion of the Lacanian perspective on melancholia and its close and often forgotten clinical link to psychosis. Hook’s paper provides a critical insight into how melancholia is understood as a surrender to the jouissance of the Other. The reviewer only disagrees with Hook’s idea that there is no object loss in melancholia because the melancholic knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in the absent object. This unknown loss leaves him exposed to an erotogenic masochism proper and a self-annihilating kind of jouissance.     

Different Realities: What Is Reality and What Difference Does It Make?

Consciousness does not exist apart from psyche; it reflects it. Different realities are not interchangeable with other manifestations of psychic reality. “Borderland consciousness” is the term I have conceived for people who, in one way or another, have a living dynamic connection to and relationship with nature. Given this understanding, the oral traditional and Native American cultures manifest a reciprocity psyche, and are today the closest manifestation of the psychic reality in Genesis, pre-expulsion from Eden. Navajo language contains no words for religion, guilt, human, inanimate, psyche, or ego. The Western psyche manifests a dominion psyche; that is, a binary consciousness borne as a result of the expulsion in Genesis, and wedded to logic as an uncompromising characteristic of sanity and health. This kind of consciousness too often crushes the spirit dimension, which is transrational. An awareness of borderland consciousness is entering into the Western cultural collective. This is the telos of the Garden of Eden expulsion, and itself represents the dominion psyche and the reciprocity psyche in dialogue. This dialogue offers a critical counterbalance to the rogue behavior of the overspecialized Western ego of the dominion psyche. This article urges Jungians to develop new methods of connecting with borderland consciousness since the dominion psyche and its technology alone cannot save our species in the face of the threat of a global climate change disaster.     

The consequences of suggesting false childhood food events

We combined data across eight published experiments (N = 1369) to examine the formation and consequences of false autobiographical beliefs and memories. Our path models revealed that the formation of false autobiographical belief fully mediated the pathway between suggesting to people that they had experienced a positive or negative food-related event in the past and current preference for that food. Suggestion indirectly affected intention to eat the food via change in autobiographical belief. The development of belief with and without memory produced similar changes in food preferences and behavior intention, indicating that belief in the event drives changes in suggestion-related attitudes. Finally, positive suggestions (e.g., “you loved asparagus the first time you tried it”) yielded stronger effects than negative suggestions (e.g., “you got sick eating egg salad”). These findings show that false autobiographical suggestions lead to the development of autobiographical beliefs, which in turn, have consequences for one's attitudes and behaviors.     

The own‐age face recognition bias is task dependent

The own‐age bias (OAB) in face recognition (more accurate recognition of own‐age than other‐age faces) is robust among young adults but not older adults. We investigated the OAB under two different task conditions. In Experiment 1 young and older adults (who reported more recent experience with own than other‐age faces) completed a match‐to‐sample task with young and older adult faces; only young adults showed an OAB. In Experiment 2 young and older adults completed an identity detection task in which we manipulated the identity strength of target and distracter identities by morphing each face with an average face in 20% steps. Accuracy increased with identity strength and facial age influenced older adults' (but not younger adults') strategy, but there was no evidence of an OAB. Collectively, these results suggest that the OAB depends on task demands and may be absent when searching for one identity.     

Incremental validity of mindfulness-based attention in relation to the concurrent prediction of anxiety and depressive symptomatology and perceptions of health

This investigation evaluated the role of mindfulness-based attention in concurrently predicting anxiety and depressive symptomatology and perceived health functioning in a community sample of 170 young adults (95 females; mean age (Mage) = 22.2 years, SD = 7.6). Partially consistent with prediction, results indicated that, relative to negative and positive affectivity and emotional expression and processing associated with approach-oriented coping, mindfulness-based attention incrementally predicted anhedonic depressive, but not anxious arousal, symptoms. Additionally, consistent with prediction, mindfulness-based attention demonstrated incremental validity in relation to perceived health, and the degree of impairment of health in terms of physical and mental functioning. Results are discussed in relation to the construct development of mindfulness-based attention, and specifically, the role(s) of this factor in emotional and physical health processes.