Transparent emotions? A critical analysis of Moran's transparency claim

I critically analyze Richard Moran's account of knowing one's own emotions, which depends on the Transparency Claim (TC) for self-knowledge. Applied to knowing one's own beliefs, TC states that when one is asked “Do you believe P?”, one can answer by referencing reasons for believing P. TC works for belief because one is justified in believing that one believes P if one can give reasons for why P is true. Emotions, however, are also conceptually related to concerns; they involve a response to something one cares about. As a consequence, acquiring self-knowledge of one's emotions requires knowledge of other mental attitudes, which falls outside the scope of TC. Hence, TC cannot be applied to emotions.     

You and me

Are there distinctively second-personal thoughts? I clarify the question and present considerations in favour of a view on which some second-personal thoughts are distinctive. Specifically, I suggest that some second-personal thoughts are distinctive in also being first-personal thoughts. Thus, second-personal thinking provides a way of sharing another person's first-personal thoughts.     

How Revolutionary is the Holy Spirit?

Most theologians agree that the early church neglected the Holy Spirit in formulations of the Trinity, and in recent years, many books have been written to redress this deficiency. Pentecostal theologians are especially invested in recovering a fuller doctrine of the Holy Spirit. These two monographs, one by an established scholar (Steve Studebaker) and the other by a relative newcomer (Andrew Gabriel), are among the best on this topic. Both are unafraid to be critical of Pentecostal theology and both are valuable for their specificity. Gabriel revises the divine attributes of classical theism while Studebaker goes even further by arguing that the Holy Spirit constitutes the Trinity. Neither author is sympathetic to Social Trinitarianism, and Studebaker in particular is critical of Richard of Saint Victor, who is often credited as an early progenitor of the social model. This first complete translation of Richard's treatise on the Trinity, by Ruben Angelici, reveals a radical view of the Holy Spirit and thus needs to be taken seriously by all future discussions of this topic. Richard not only gives the Holy Spirit its own personal identity but also ties the Spirit to God's power of listening, just as the Son is God's Word.     

Hospice Care and a Theology for Patients at the End of Life

In Richard Kearney's text Anatheism, he claims that one can respond to the call of the stranger in two ways, with hospitality or with hostility. However, because the stranger possibly bears the presence of the divine, he urges one to risk responding to the stranger's call with hospitality rather than hostility, opening oneself up to encountering the sacred in the form of the stranger. In the present analysis, I claim that hospitality toward the stranger is modeled in the hospice philosophy of care for dying patients. I note the distinctions between the biomedical model of health care and the biopsychosoical model of care, and draw on Kearney's framework and Dorothee Soelle's text Suffering to suggest that, with regard to how to interpret pain, the act of hosting can be an option more viable than that of demonstrating hospitality.     

THE SEMANTIC STRUCTURE OF EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY AS AN ARGUMENT AGAINST INTELLIGENT DESIGN

Abstract. This paper examines the impact of two formalizations of evolutionary biology on the antiselectionist critiques of the Intelligent Design (ID) movement. It looks first at attempts to apply the syntactic framework of the physical sciences to biology in the twentieth century, and to their effect upon the ID movement. It then examines the more heuristic account of biological‐theory structure, namely, the semantic model. Finally, it concludes by advocating the semantic conception and emphasizing the problems that the semantic model creates for ID's negative and positive theses.     

AFFIRMATIONS AFTER GOD: FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE AND RICHARD DAWKINS ON ATHEISM

Abstract. In this essay, I compare the atheism of Friedrich Nietzsche with that of Richard Dawkins. My purpose is to describe certain differences in their respective atheisms with the intent of showing that Nietzsche's atheism contains a richer and fuller affirmation of human life. In Dawkins’s presentation of the value of life without God, there is a naïve optimism that purports that human beings, educated in science and purged of religion, will find lives of easy peace and comfortable wonder. Part of my argument is that this optimism regarding the power of objective science is subject to Nietzsche's criticism of Socrates and what he calls the “theoretical man.” As such, it fails in terms of providing a true affirmation of life in the godless world.     

Diagnostic models for procedural bugs in basic mathematical skills

A new diagnostic modeling system for automatically synthesizing a deep-structure model of a student's misconceptions or bugs in his basic mathematical skills provides a mechanism for explaining why a student is making a mistake as opposed to simply identifying the mistake. This report is divided into four sections: The first provides examples of the problems that must be handled by a diagnostic model. It then introduces procedural networks as a general framework for representing the knowledge underlying a skill. The challenge in designing this representation is to find one that facilitates the discovery of misconceptions or bugs existing in a particular student's encoding of this knowledge. The second section discusses some of the pedagogical issues that have emerged from the use of diagnostic models within an instructional system. This discussion is framed in the context of a computer-based tutoring/gaming system developed to teach students and student teachers how to diagnose bugs strategically as well as how to provide a better understanding of the underlying structure of arithmetic skills. The third section describes our uses of an executable network as a tool for automatically diagnosing student behavior, for automatically generating “diagnostic” tests, and for judging the diagnostic quality of a given exam. Included in this section is a discussion of the success of this system in diagnosing 1300 school students from a data base of 20.000 test items. The last section discusses future research directions.     

Pardoning Puritanism: Community, Character, and Forgiveness in the Work of Richard Baxter

The English Puritan Richard Baxter (1615–1691) developed an account of forgiveness that resonates with twentieth-century virtue ethics. He understood forgiveness as one component of a larger disposition of character developed in community as human beings recognize themselves as sinful creatures engaged in complex relationships of dependency and responsibility, with both God and one another. In the midst of these relationships, persons experience divine and human forgiveness and discover opportunities to practice forgiveness in return. Baxter thus negotiated a distinctive relationship between Christian hope for reconciliation and more stereotypical Puritan emphases on punishment, civil order, and justice. At the same time that recent moral reflection allows us to raise questions about some features of Baxter's argument (such as his treatment of anger), his work provides important resources for correlating dispositions with concrete obligations, establishing a place for forgiveness in the public realm, and counterbalancing the modern emphasis on individual rights.     

A Loss of Judgment: The Dismissal of the Judicial Conscience in Recent Christian Ethics

Christian ethicists have neglected conscience, understood as an individual's moral self‐awareness before a locus of accountability and judgment, over the last few decades. The aim of this essay is to suggest how this neglect came about. I draw on the work of Paul Lehmann and Oliver O'Donovan to illustrate how ethicists in the twentieth century became suspicious of conscience because of its association with the alleged ahistorical individualism of Immanuel Kant's work. I argue that a social‐historicist conception of conscience, such as H. Richard Niebuhr offered, attempts to save conscience from this suspicion. Ironically, however, Stanley Hauerwas's development of Niebuhr's historicist, communitarian approach to conscience, appears to have led to a dismissal of conscience. I conclude with a brief comment about what this dismissal has cost contemporary Christian ethics, namely the Christian tradition's basic commitment to the singularity of an individual's accountability before God.