With a Sword Pointing to the East,West, South,and North

In his In Defense of War, Nigel Biggar argues for an account of war based in Christian love. In the process, he opposes Christian pacifists, the British Left, liberal accounts of just‐war, and accounts of just‐war based on self‐defense. Although framed in terms of love, his account pivots around punishment, which is further explicated by a thorough review of the recent war in Iraq, the invasion of which he deems justified. This review compares Biggar's monograph to prior iterations of a love‐based approach to just war by Paul Ramsey and Oliver O'Donovan. Biggar's contributions regarding love, punishment, and policy analysis are recognized, as well as his attempt to carry on the tradition of the ‘mournful warrior’. As a model for the kind of scrutiny that Christian ethicists should bring to bear on serious social issues, Biggar's monograph is excellent. However, the political stance and – largely implicit and unstated – political theology operating behind this book are, in the end, disconcerting.     

“FILL AND SUBDUE”? IMAGING GOD IN NEW SOCIAL AND ECOLOGICAL CONTEXTS

While the social and ecological landscape of the twenty‐first century is worlds away from the historical‐cultural context in which the biblical myth‐symbols of the image of God and the knowledge of good and evil first emerged, Philip Hefner's understanding that Homo sapiens image God as created co‐creators presents a plausible starting point for constructing a second naïveté interpretation of biblical anthropology and a fruitful concept for envisioning and enacting our human future.     

MILL'S ARGUMENT FOR OTHER MINDS

Montesquieu's Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1733/1734) is a methodological exercise in causal explanation on the meso-level applied to the subject of the military rise and fall of Rome. Rome is described as a system with contingent initial conditions that have a strong path-determining effect. Contingent and plastic initial configurations become highly determining in their subsequent operation, thanks to self-reinforcing feedback loops. Montesquieu's method seems influenced by the ruthless commitment to efficient causality and the reductionism of seventeenth-century mechanicist philosophy; but in contrast to these predecessors, he is more interested in dynamic processes than in unchangeable substances, and his use of efficient causality in the context of a system approach implies a form of holism that is lacking in his predecessors. The formal and conceptual analysis in this article is in many ways complementary with Paul Rahe's recent predominantly political analysis of the Considérations. At the same time, this article points to a problem in the works on the Enlightenment by Jonathan Israel: his account stresses a one-dimensional continuum consisting of Radical, Moderate and Counter-Enlightenment. This invites Israel to place the combined religious, political and philosophical views of each thinker on one of these three points. His scheme runs into trouble when a thinker with moderate religious and political views produces radical philosophical concepts. Montesquieu's Considérations is a case in point.     

The Divine Truth of Mathematics and the Origins of Linear Algebra

In a work ahead of its time the German mathematician Hermann Grassmann (1809–1877) published in 1844 one of the landmark works in mathematics, his Ausdehnungslehre or Calculus of Extension. It contained the main theorems that make up what is today called linear algebra. The significance of the book was not recognized at first and it took even longer before any connection was publicly made between this work and Grassmann's training for the ministry. This was in spite of the strong influence on his thinking in general that he described coming from his teacher at Berlin, the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher.     

Parental Choices and the Prospect of Regret: An Alternative Account

Is the question ‘will you regret it if you do (not do) this?’ helpful when people face difficult life decisions, such as terminating a pregnancy if a disability is detected or deciding to become a parent? Despite the commonness of the question in daily life, several philosophers have argued lately against its usefulness. We reconstruct four arguments from recent literature on regret, transformative experience and the use of imagination in deliberation. After analysis of these arguments we conclude that the prospect of regret remains a useful deliberative heuristic, provided four conditions are fulfilled. If the prospect of (the absence of) regret is arrived at via reflection on one’s values, in a non-coercive context, when well-informed about factual circumstances, and in a process of self-commitment, the question of what one will regret is a helpful device to get in touch with one’s deepest concerns that give reasons to act in a particular way.     

The League

About painting, cybernetics, and shared purpose, this article is partly a story, in part a memoir, an adventure in cybernetics, happening 30 years ago, in snow, in the small Swiss city of St. Gallen. A conference of the American Society for Cybernetics meets there. It is 1987. The author, a painter, searching for a new understanding of painting, encounters a convergence of the art of painting and the art of cybernetics through principles of second-order cybernetics in Pask, von Foerster and Maturana, dissolved in Kathleen Forsythe’s poetry. The form, as well as the content of this article, reflects cybernetics.     

'Dancing cannot start too soon': Spiritual education in the thought of Jean Paul Friedrich Richter

Johann Paul Friedrich Richter (1763-1825) adopted the pen-name 'Jean Paul' in honour of Jean Jaques Rousseau. His Levana or the doctrine of education (Levana oder Erziehlehre) was once a standard text and required reading in teacher education. Outside Germany the name of Jean Paul is now little known and the seminal educational text for which he was famous is rarely read. This neglect of Jean Paul is undeserved. What Jean Paul owed to Rousseau is apparent, but his work is rich in insight of his own. Three principles undergird Jean Paul's understanding of spiritual education (geistige Erziehung). Jean Paul insisted that spiritual education is essentially counter-cultural, that it is promoted by play and that it is grounded in love. Such education can never be at home in a curriculum which, however lofty are its stated objectives, is ultimately politically controlled. Jean Paul's insistence that play is constitutive of education needs to be heeded in an educational culture in which the playful is always at risk of displacement by what the government of the day deems to be of greater consequence. The heart of Jean Paul's understanding of education can be expressed succinctly, 'We love to teach and we teach to love'.     

The development of orientation categories between 2 and 4 months of age

Recent research has indicated that infants are capable of responding to stimuli in a manner indicating that they categorize them. Infant perception of orientation was examined within a framework of categorization. In one experiment, it was shown that 4-month-old infants generalized habituation from one range of oblique grating stimuli to another, consistent with the interpretation that any two oblique stimuli were perceived as more similar than a vertical and an oblique. Four-month-old infants' generalization was not due to a simple inability to discriminate between obliques (Experiment 2) so the results of Experiment 1 reflect in large part true categorization behavior and not categorical perception. Results for 2- and 3-month old infants suggest that "vertical" serves as a reference stimulus in infant orientation perception such that gross distinctions between vertical and nonvertical precede the development of the "oblique" category. The category boundary between oblique and vertical did not successfully predict better between-than within-category discrimination in 4-month-old infants (Experiment 3) under the conditions of these experiments.     

Stutterers' voice initiation times during conditions of novel stimulation

The present experiment examined stutterers' voice initiation times (VITs) during conditions of novel stimulation. The experimenters were interested in determining how VITs varied as a function of pacing and masking. Stutterers were examined in control, pacing, and masking conditions. The results indicated that: (1) stutterers significantly improved their VITs in the pacing condition as compared with the control condition (p = 0.005), (2) stutterers had significantly faster VITs in the pacing condition as compared with the masking condition (p = 0.005), and (3) stutterers improved VITs in the masking condition as compared with the control condition (p = 0.075). These results are discussed in terms of the facilatory nature of novel stimulation in modifying speech-system functioning.     

The mean fundamental frequency in stutterers and nonstutterers during reading and spontaneous speech

Corresponding to the higher tension of muscles involved in speech production, a higher mean fundamental frequency should be expected in stutterers as compared to nonstutterers. It could be shown by the change scores of the mean fundamental frequency from reading to free conversation that stutterers tend to have a higher fundamental frequency during spontaneous speech.