Symbioses Can Transcend Particularisms: A Memoir of Friendship with Ralph Wendell Burhoe

Ralph Burho's paradigmatic scientific innovation is the extension of the concept of symbiosis to coadapted human genotypes and "culturetypes," centered on religion. Civilization also requires a coexistent secular arena, where religion's nearness may help prevent our natural synergistic instrumentalizations of each other from degrading to losses of respect for one another as responsible free agents. The mixed messages in the Bible's diverse stories help to preserve a richness of choices in memory as we navigate history. We science-and-religion theorists should expand our cademic base to include economics, politics, literature, and other areas, while emulating Ralph's wise and good-humored ways of drawing us together and affecting our lives.     

Setiya on reasons and causes

Setiya [2013. “Causality in Action”. Analysis Reviews, 73 (3): pp. 512–525] recently gave a novel argument in favor of a causal theory of acting for a reason. He presents three principles relating acting for a reason to psychological states of the agent and uses them to test theories of acting for a reason: theories cannot explain the necessary truth of the conditionals are to be rejected. Surveying a number of alternatives, he finds that only a causal-psychological theory passes this test, that, thus, it must be correct, and that there must be a solution to the problem of deviant causation. Setiya's challenge is forceful, but he does not establish his conclusion. The anticausalist can at this point reverse it: since deviant causation is intractable, some noncausal theory must be able to meet his challenge. This reversal has teeth: Setiya underestimates both the challenges that causal theories face and the resources available to the anticausalist to address his challenge.     

Eighteenth-century French materialism clockwise and anticlockwise

ABSTRACT

Because of their reliance on mechanistic metaphors and analogies referring to machines, the eighteenth-century materialists La Mettrie and Diderot have sometimes been described as ‘mechanistic materialists’. However, if one pays close attention to the ways in which mechanical analogies and metaphors were used in eighteenth-century French materialism, one sees that the recourse to these metaphors and comparisons in no way implies mechanism in the sense of physicalist reductionism. Instead, early instances of these comparisons appear in arguments pointing out that technological artefacts have functional properties which are not reducible to their physical properties. When La Mettrie compares man to a machine in his L'homme machine, he insists at the same time on the fact that, just like a machine, man is a cultural artefact. According to La Mettrie, man's very existence depends on language and culture, and it is precisely this dependence on culture which distinguishes him from other animals. However, La Mettrie's sceptical stance renders his position towards physicalistic reductionism ambiguous. Diderot, who by contrast was interested in the distinction between the living and non-living, distances himself from the ambiguous use of mechanistic metaphors and insists on the irreducibility of physiological and biological phenomena to the physical.     

The mirror and the hammer: the politics of resacralization

The paper consists of the opening chapter of Andrew Samuels’ book The Political Psyche, published in 1993, together with a retrospective introduction. In the chapter, the author discussed the possibilities and limitations of applying depth psychological thinking to social and political problematics. He situates the attempt to make such applications within a wider movement to refresh and reform Western political endeavours. He terms this wider project ‘resacralization’. The author cautions against psychological reductionism and a simplistic approach to market‐based capitalism, calling for a transformation of the latter to the degree possible. He links sociopolitical criticism and psychological writings on numinous experience, thereby connecting the worlds of politics and depth psychology without losing their separate and unique qualities.     

LAWS IN ECOLOGY: DIVERSE MODES OF EXPLANATION FOR A HOLISTIC SCIENCE

Ecology's reputation as a holistic science is partly due to widespread misconceptions of its nature as well as shortcomings in its methodology. This article argues that the pursuit of empirical laws of ecology can foster the emergence of a more unified and predictive science based on complementary modes of explanation. Numerical analyses of population dynamics have a distinguished pedigree, spatial analyses generate predictive laws of macroecology, and physical analyses are typically pursued by the ecosystem paradigm. The most characteristically ecological laws, however, are found in biotic analyses in the functional trait paradigm. Holistic credentials for ecology may thus be restored on two bases: its accommodating complementary modes of analysis and explanation, and its having some laws within the least reductionistic mode consistent with its subject matter. These claims, grounded in the aspectual theory of Herman Dooyeweerd, lead to some suggestions for enhancing the versatility and usefulness of ecology—and other sciences—by balancing different research paradigms under a holistic vision.     

THEOLOGY AND PHYSICS FORTY YEARS LATER

Abstract. Almost forty years later I look back on a 1966 article on theology and physics by Sanford Brown and my response published with it. I reflect on his hope that theological seminaries would give attention to the methods used in scientific inquiry. I compare our comments with subsequent thought on three issues: (1) the role of models in science and religion; (2) the relation of wholes to parts in physics and other sciences and the debate over reductionism and emergence; and (3) the implications of quantum physics for theology, including the possibility of divine action at the quantum level.     

In Defence of the Open Question Argument

The purpose of this paper is to defend G. E. Moore's open question argument, understood as an argument directed against analytic reductionism, the view that moral properties are analytically reducible to non-moral properties. In the first section I revise Moore's argument in order to make it as plausible and resistant against objections as possible. In the following two sections I develop the argument further and defend it against the most prominent objections raised against it. The conclusion of my line of reasoning is that the open question argument offers the best explanation of our responses to the questions put in the argument, namely that analytic reductionism is mistaken. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

THE COGNITIVE SCIENCE OF RELIGION: IMPLICATIONS FOR THEISM?

Abstract. Although the Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR), a current approach to the scientific study of religion, has exerted an influence in the study of religion for almost twenty years, the question of its compatibility or incompatibility with theism has not been the subject of serious discussion until recently. Some critics of religion have taken a lively interest in the CSR because they see it as useful in explaining why religious believers consistently make costly commitments to false beliefs. Conversely, some theists have argued for the compatibility of religious belief with basic CSR results. In this article, we contribute to the incipient discussion about the worldview relevance of the CSR by arguing that while a theistic reading of the field only represents one interpretative option at most, antitheistic claims about the incompatibility of the CSR with theism look like they may be harder to maintain than first appearances might suggest.     

"THEISTIC PSYCHOLOGY AND PSYCHOTHERAPY": A THEOLOGICAL AND SCIENTIFIC CRITIQUE

I take the APA publication A Spiritual Strategy for Counseling and Psychotherapy (Richards and Bergin 2005), along with a devoted issue of Journal of Psychology and Theology (Nelson and Slife 2006), as a paradigmatic example of a trend. Other instances include the uncritical use of "Eastern" philosophy in Humanistic and Transpersonal Psychology, almost normative appeal to the "Sacred" within the psychology of spirituality, talk of "God in the brain" within neurological research, the neologism entheogen referring to psychedelic drugs, and calls for new specializations such as neurotheology and theobiology. In response to the legitimate ethical requirements of respect and openness regarding clients' religious worldviews, the trend is to make God an essential component in psychological theory. The argument is that God is active in the universe and especially in human affairs to such an extent that any accurate account of strictly psychological matters, not just a comprehensive, interdisciplinary purview that could include a distinct theological dimension, must include God as an explanatory factor. Less nuanced than standard theological thought about divine intervention—including a range of opinions from supernaturalism, to occasionalism, to providential and deistic naturalism—this trend would blur the epistemological differences between religion and science by appeal to claimed knowledge sources such as inspiration and revelation and thus undermine the achievements of evidence-based science and establish particularistic religious beliefs as standard explanatory accounts. The concern to include a spiritual, in contrast to a religious or theist, dimension in psychological theory is welcome; but elaborated approaches, such as my own and those of Roberto Assagioli, Viktor Frankl, and Ken Wilber, open to varied theological applications, already exist.     

An Invitation to Behavior Analysts: Review of in Search of Memory: The Emergence of A New Science of Mind by Eric R. Kandel

This fascinating autobiography and multifaceted case history in neuroscience research is accessible to laymen and potentially instructive to working scientists. Kandel takes the reader through his thought processes as he describes experiments that led to some of the past decades'' major neuroscience discoveries (some highlights of which are summarized in the review''s Appendix), and eventually to his Nobel Prize. The review analyzes some of the terminological and conceptual issues that have often inhibited communication between behavior analysts and neuroscientists, with special attention to some of Bennett and Hacker''s admonitions viewed from the perspective of language evolution and linguistics. The review then discusses opportunities for behavior analysts to collaborate with neuroscientists by applying behavioral contingency analysis to help specify the independent variables of neuroscience experiments described by Kandel. Finally, it examines Kandel''s provocative heuristics for locating important research problems, and the lessons that can be gleaned from the book regarding the attributes of potentially great achievers.