Ibn ʿArabī (1165–1240) and Rūmī (1207–1273) on the Question of Evil: Discontinuities in Sufi Metaphysics

This article compares and contrasts Ibn ?Arabī’s and Rūmī’s accounts of evil. Ibn ?Arabī explains the existence of evil as a consequence of both metaphysical necessity and God’s volitional act. Evil is the inevitable ‘shadow’ of existence implied by the Infinity of God, and God’s mercy existentiates the possibilities ‘hidden’ in the Infinite, allowing this metaphysical necessity to emerge. In contrast to Ibn ?Arabī’s necessitarian-cum-volitional theodicy, Rūmī presents an almost exclusively volitional theodicy. He traces the roots of evil to the Divine Will. To preserve God’s moral perfection, he frequently points to the positive compensating functions of the existence of evil in the world. Ibn ?Arabī’s theodicy enables him to accentuate the necessity of evil in order to save the act of will, and hence God’s perfection, from being directly related to the emergence of evil. Rūmī’s volitional theodicy, however, relates the Divine Will directly to evil, and subsequently attempts to preserve the purity of the Divine intention by accentuating all the positive compensations.     

水平空间与情绪效价联结效应的产生机制

采用词汇效价判断任务,考察水平空间与情绪效价联合效应的产生机制。实验1在被试双手正常放置条件下考察了词汇效价与水平空间联结效应的存在;实验2则要求被试双手交叉放置,以考察当反应手和反应键的空间信息冲突时水平空间与情感效价的关联现象;实验3则进一步考排除反应手的参与,以考察口头报告的反应方式是否对两者的联结效应产生影响。结果表明,不同反应方式下均存在空间情感效价的联结,且此联结更多是反应选择极性编码的结果。     

A Way to Interpret Łukasiewicz Logic and Basic Logic

Fuzzy logics are in most cases based on an ad-hoc decision about the interpretation of the conjunction. If they are useful or not can typically be found out only by testing them with example data. Why we should use a specific fuzzy logic can in general not be made plausible. Since the difficulties arise from the use of additional, unmotivated structure with which the set of truth values is endowed, the only way to base fuzzy logics on firm ground is the development of alternative semantics to all of whose components we can associate a meaning. In this paper, we present one possible approach to justify ex post Łukasiewicz Logic as well as Basic Logic. The notion of ambiguity is central. Our framework consists of a Boolean or a Heyting algebra, respectively, endowed with an equivalence relation expressing ambiguity. The quotient set bears naturally the structure of an MV- or a BL-algebra, respectively, and thus can be used to interpret propositions of the mentioned logics.     

Chimpanzee (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Pan troglodytes</Emphasis>) and orangutan (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Pongo abelii</Emphasis>) forethought: self-control and pre-experience in the face of future tool use

Planning for future needs has traditionally been considered to be restricted to human cognition. Although recent studies on great ape and corvid cognition challenge this belief, the phylogenesis of human planning remains largely unknown. The complex skill for future planning has not yet been satisfactorily established in any other extant primate species than our own. In humans, planning for future needs rely heavily on two overarching capacities, both of which lie at the heart of our cognition: self-control, often defined as the suppression of immediate drives in favor of delayed rewards, and mental time travel, which could be described as a detached mental experience of a past or future event. Future planning is linked to additional high complexity cognition such as metacognition and a consciousness usually not attributed to animals. In a series of four experiments based on tool use, we demonstrate that chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and orangutans (Pongo abelii) override immediate drives in favor of future needs, and they do not merely rely on associative learning or semantic prospection when confronted with a planning task. These results suggest that great apes engage in planning for the future by out competing current drives and mentally pre-experiencing an upcoming event. This suggests that the advanced mental capacities utilized in human future planning are shared by phylogenetically more ancient species than previously believed.     

Variability and moral phenomenology

Many moral philosophers in the Western tradition have used phenomenological claims as starting points for philosophical inquiry; aspects of moral phenomenology have often been taken to be anchors to which any adequate account of morality must remain attached. This paper raises doubts about whether moral phenomena are universal and robust enough to serve the purposes to which moral philosophers have traditionally tried to put them. Persons’ experiences of morality may vary in a way that greatly limits the extent to which moral phenomenology can constitute a reason to favor one moral theory over another. Phenomenology may not be able to serve as a pre-theoretic starting point or anchor in the consideration of rival moral theories because moral phenomenology may itself be theory-laden. These doubts are illustrated through an examination of how moral phenomenology is used in the thought of Ralph Cudworth, Samuel Clarke, Joseph Butler, Francis Hutcheson, and Søren Kierkegaard.     

Die Behandlung von Borderline-Persönlichkeitsstörungen

Zusammenfassung Bereits 1681 beklagte sich ein englischer Arzt in einem Brief über Patienten, die ohne jedes Ma? jene lieben, die sie alsbald ohne jeden Grund hassen würden. Weiterhin seien pl?tzliche Ausbrüche von Wut, Schmerz, Angst oder ?hnlichen Emotionen zu beobachten. Mit dieser frühen Beschreibung typischer Borderline-Symptome wird die Darstellung der Entwicklung der Theorie der Borderline-St?rung von den Anf?ngen bis heute eingeleitet. Vor diesem Hintergrund werden der Stand der Diagnostik und die derzeit wichtigen Behandlungskonzepte umrissen, und zwar die psychodynamischen, verhaltenstherapeutischen und klientenzentrierten Ans?tze. Es wird dargelegt, welche Antworten es auf die Frage gibt, was das angemessene therapeutische Setting ist, insbesondere mit Blick auf station?re Behandlungskonzepte. Die vorliegenden empirischen Studien best?tigen die Wirksamkeit von Psychotherapie bei Borderline-St?rungen. Die geringe Zahl der Studien belegt aber auch die Schwierigkeit der empirischen Forschung in diesem Bereich. Der abschlie?ende Ausblick in die Zukunft der Psychotherapie der Borderline-Pers?nlichkeitsst?rungen prognostiziert eine weitere Zunahme von Pers?nlichkeitsst?rungen im Spektrum psychiatrischer Erkrankungen und eine zunehmende Differenzierung des Behandlungsangebots bzw. Spezialisierung der Behandler.      

Protophysik und Spezielle Relativitätstheorie

Protophysics and Special Theory of Relativity. First, a proposal for a constructive foundation of the Special Theory of Relativity by M. Buth is criticized and confronted with an alternative proposal by the author. The main idea is to solve the problem of transforming coordinates between inertial systems in terms of the General Theory of Measurement. Regarding transformations of co-ordinates as transformations of thecorresponding “functions of measurement” these functions have to meet two demands. 1. To identify measured values which are related to different inertial systems and measuring procedures as the same magnitude, the ratio scale of length and duration has to be defined with respect to the whole class of inertial systems. 2. Using the concept of a certain physical magnitude, propositions about measuring devices are made which are invariant with respect to measuring procedures. As aconsequence every transformation between functions of measurement has to be an equivalence relation. The first demand leads to linearity, the second one reduces the set of permissible transformations between inertial systems to the alternative of Galilei- and Lorentz-transformation. The (im)possibility of putting an absolute simultaneity into practice decides between these transformations. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Intentional behaviour in dog-human communication: an experimental analysis of “showing” behaviour in the dog

Despite earlier scepticism there is now evidence for simple forms of intentional and functionally referential communication in many animal species. Here we investigate whether dogs engage in functional referential communication with their owners. “Showing” is defined as a communicative action consisting of both a directional component related to an external target and an attention-getting component that directs the attention of the perceiver to the informer or sender. In our experimental situation dogs witness the hiding of a piece of food (or a favourite toy) which they cannot get access to. We asked whether dogs would engage in “showing” in the presence of their owner. To control for the motivational effects of both the owner and the food on the dogs’ behaviour, control observations were also staged where only the food (or the toy) or the owner was present. Dogs’ gazing frequency at both the food (toy) and the owner was greater when only one of these was present. In other words, dogs looked more frequently at their owner when the food (toy) was present, and they looked more at the location of the food (toy) when the owner was present. When both the food (toy) and the owner were present a new behaviour, “gaze alternation”, emerged which was defined as changing the direction of the gaze from the location of the food (toy) to looking at the owner (or vice versa) within 2 s. Vocalisations that occurred in this phase were always associated with gazing at the owner or the location of the food. This behaviour, which was specific to this situation, has also been described in chimpanzees, a gorilla and humans, and has often been interpreted as a form of functionally referential communication. Based on our observations we argue that dogs might be able to engage in functionally referential communication with their owner, and their behaviour could be described as a form of “showing”. The contribution of domestication and individual learning to the well-developed communicative skills in dogs is discussed and will be the subject of further studies. Received: 3 April 2000 / Accepted after revision: 2 September 2000     

Aspects of spatial cognition in capuchins (Cebus apella): frames of reference and scale of space

Frames of reference (i.e. sets of loci defining spatial locations) determine animals’ performances in object search tasks. Reference frames are used at different scales. Although much behavioural research has been conducted on search strategies in many animal species, relatively little has been done on nonhuman primates. The two experiments reported here focused on the relative strength and the level of functioning of different reference frames at the small-scale level in four capuchins (Cebus apella). Two identical boxes and a landmark were placed on a round platform that could be rotated. A reward was hidden in subject’s view under one box, and then a sash-screen was lowered to hide the rotation of the platform; the sash-screen was then lifted and the subject allowed to search for the reward. In experiment 1 the rewarded box was always the closer to the landmark, in experiment 2 it could be either the box closer to or the box farther from the landmark. Capuchins were successful after invisible rotations in experiment 1, but they failed after invisible rotations in experiment 2. Two possible explanations are proposed: (1) capuchins relied heavily on the left-right body-axis as a frame, and they could only substitute it with a simple association between the rewarded position and the landmark; or (2) capuchins failed because they chose external cues in the room, therefore on a inappropriate scale. The latter explanation allows two further inferences: (a) the capuchins’ choice was indirectly related to their body-axes; and (b) the capuchins revealed a cognitive asymmetry between small-scale and large-scale spaces, thus differing from humans. Received: 10 October 1999 / Accepted after revision: 4 May 2000     

Domestic hens have declarative representations

It is generally considered that information can be stored either as a procedural or as a declarative representation. A devaluation technique was used to determine whether hens have declarative representations. Individual hens (Gallus gallus domesticus) were fed in an enclosure with two containers, each with a new food type. One of the food types was devalued by pre-feeding with that food, after which the hens were tested with empty food containers. The pre-feeding should only affect the choice of the hens if they have learned where a particular food type was (declarative representation) rather than “go left when coming into the enclosure” (procedural representation). A significant proportion of the hens went to the location previously occupied by the non-devalued food (seven out of eight). This supports the hypothesis that domestic hens can form declarative representations. Received: 6 March 1999 / Accepted after revision: 1 November 2000