A Third Principle of Justice

In this paper I argue that in order to secure the commitment of believers in reasonable comprehensive doctrines to political liberalism a third principle of justice needs to be adopted in the Original Position. Rawls acknowledges that neutral legislation by the liberal state may negatively affect some reasonable comprehensive doctrines, and I offer a third principle of justice to help alleviate this problem. This principle, which I believe is in keeping with the United States constitutional history especially where church-state relations are concerned, maintains that a constitutional regime should, insofar as possible, avoid adopting rules with harmful effects upon those comprehensive doctrines which satisfy the conditions of reasonable pluralism.     

BIOLOGY AND THE THEOLOGY OF THE HUMAN

We will consider two Christian responses to the enormous advances in recent years in the connected sciences of genetics, evolutionary biology, and biochemistry, a dualist one by Pope John Paul II and an “emergentist” one by Arthur Peacocke. These two could hardly be more different. It would be impossible within the scope of a brief comment to do justice to these differences. What I hope to do instead is more modest: to draw attention to troublesome ambiguities in some of the key concepts on which discussions of human uniqueness depend, to recall very briefly some of the difficulties philosophers have encountered in their attempts to define the relation of the human powers of mind to the material capacities of body, and finally to ask what the theological significance of all this is.     

GUILT AND THE SCIENCE OF EMOTION: HOW DOES PRAYER FIT?

This article engages sources regarding evolutionary development of guilt (Richard Joyce's The Evolution of Morality, Jesse Prinz's Gut Reactions, and others) and how they can be used to dialogue with material on the alleviation of guilt in the Christian tradition using examples in the work of Anselm of Canterbury and John Chrysostom. This raises a few key questions. If guilt is an evolutionary trait created to build reputation and relationship, how does this mesh with some theological approaches to solutions for guilt? To be more precise, guilt possibly evolved to create a motivation for beneficial communal actions, and necessitates belief in the authority of the rules that one breaks to induce it. That said, does religion play a role in awareness of one's guilt, while also providing a solution to that guilt? The possibilities are explored in this article as they relate to issues of repentance, atonement, and prayer.     

John Dewey,The Other Face of the Brazilian New School

This paper intents to analyze the influence of John Dewey’s ideas in the movement that defended the educationl renovation in Brazil (named New School) at the end of the 1920s and in the 1930s. For this, it explains two trends of that movement: the first is described by the metaphor of industrial or mechanical efficiency, whose emphasis was in the power derived from the disciplinary idea of progress, which was embedded in the process of rationalization of the social relations submitted by a factory model; the second, developed by influence of Dewey, is characterized by a project of democratization of society and school that prevented the individual massification and the adoption of the rationalizing model inspired by the factory without any criticism. When Dewey was put in the center of the debate on political, pedagogical and social goals of the Brazilian New School, he was called to introduce a series of concepts that helped to find the balance between the respect for individuality and the observation of the social needs. This paper has some of the conclusions of a major research project, “Philosophy and Science in the New Educational Discourse (Brazil: l930–1960),” sponsored by CNPq.     

Listening to God: Using Meta–Terminology to DescribeRevelation in a Comparative Theistic Context1

Abstract : Starting from the assertion that comparative theology is inherently dialogical in nature, this paper examines the use of non‐confessional meta‐terminology and its application in interfaith dialogue. In so doing, it examines potential meta‐terms for describing revelation as related in the Bhagavad‐Gita, the Qur’an, and the Gospel of John, and concludes that non‐confessional terms aid in the dismissal of normative viewpoints, leading to greater appreciation of commonality and meaning in the truth claims of other faiths and dialogue partners.     

Attentional deficit in learning-disabled children: evidence from visual half-field asymmetries

The structural theory of cerebral lateralization has been typically used to explain hemispheric asymmetries. However, the attentional model of brain functioning may help resolve some of the inconsistent findings with groups of learning-disabled children. To test this hypothesis, a visual half-field paradigm for word recognition was employed in a group of 26 learning-disabled and 26 normal children matched for sex, chronological age, and handedness. Three experimental conditions (unilateral, cued unilateral, and bilateral) and two word error types (visually and acoustically confusable words) were analyzed. The results indicated that normals produced the expected RVHF superiority under all experimental conditions, but the learning-disabled produced the expected RVHF superiority only under the cued unilateral condition. Learning-disabled children also made significantly more visually and acoustically confusable errors than normals and unlike normal children increased the number of acoustic errors in the RVF under bilateral stimulation. These results provide evidence that learning-disabled children may process information inefficiently and have brain activation patterns that are more susceptible to attentional effects.     

Speaking to Pictures

A review of Peter Steele’s Plenty, a book in which each poem is faced by a colour plate of the painting or object which sparked it off. Hollander’s ecphrasis and Krieger’s ekphrasis are held in – possibly unresolvable – dialectic by Steele’s poems. The only resolution which one can find is one of wit rather than of philosophy.

BEFORE THE ORIGINAL POSITION: The Neo-Orthodox Theology of the Young John Rawls

This paper examines a remarkable document that has escaped critical attention within the vast literature on John Rawls, religion, and liberalism: Rawls's undergraduate thesis, “A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith: An Interpretation Based on the Concept of Community” (1942). The thesis shows the extent to which a once regnant version of Protestant theology has retreated into seminaries and divinity schools where it now also meets resistance. Ironically, the young Rawls rejected social contract liberalism for reasons that anticipate many of the claims later made against him by secular and religious critics. The thesis and Rawls's late unpublished remarks on religion and World War II offer a new dimension to his intellectual biography. They show the significance of his humanist response to the moral impossibility of political theology. Moreover, they also reveal a kind of Rawlsian piety marginalized by contemporary debates over religion and liberalism.     

William King’s Influence on Locke’s Second Edition Change of Mind about Human Action and Freedom

ABSTRACT

Locke’s influential discussion of agency in the chapter ‘Of Power’ in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding underwent important changes between the first and second edition. He reconsidered many of his central claims about the mind’s deliberation about actions. Locke’s position in the two editions is not only different but, as he himself points out, sometimes incompatible. This has suggested to some commentators that his change of mind was at least partly due to an external influence. Locke himself gestures towards this conclusion in the new ‘Epistle’ in the second edition Essay. One view is that William Molyneux was a notable influence, while another position is that Ralph Cudworth’s work on free will, either directly or indirectly through the influence of his daughter Damaris Masham, was an important influence. The position I develop in this paper is that the strongest candidate for an important external influence on Locke’s second edition revision is Molyneux’s close associate and friend, Irish philosopher and Archbishop of Dublin, William King. I argue that King’s criticism is a plausible influence on Locke’s reconceptualization of will and desire. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, King’s criticism appears to have been instrumental in Locke’s new emphasis on the agent’s capacity to determine what to value.