Creatio Ex Nihilo: A FieldOriented Approach

Abstract :  Process‐oriented thinkers complain that the classical understanding of the God‐world relationship is inherently dualistic. Instead they propose a model of the God‐world relationship based on the soul‐body analogy. Yet this seems to compromise the freedom of God vis‐à‐vis creation and the notion of God as Trinity. The author suggests a new approach to the God‐world relationship based on a modified understanding of "societies" within the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead: namely, "societies" as structured fields of activity for their constituent actual occasions. The three divine persons of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity in this way first co‐constitute an unbounded field of activity or "space" for their own dynamic interrelation within the divine being. Then within this "space" by their conjoint free decision the persons of the Trinity gradually bring into existence the entire world of creation understood as a hierarchically ordered set of subfields corresponding to individual entities (inanimate and animate) and the "systems"(environments, communities) into which they are aggregated. Since fields can be thus interlayered and yet remain basically independent of one another in their ongoing existence and activity, God is not thereby identified with the world nor the world collapsed into God. But the divine persons and all their creatures still share in different ways one and the same communitarian life.     

From bastion to enactment: The ‘non‐dream’ in the theatre of analysis1

In this paper, the author's objective is to discuss models that express what occurs in the analytical situation. He demonstrates how early models relating to painting and sculpture, to history and archaeology, develop into other models that refer to the relationship between two people. He studies in depth the Barangers analytical eld with its obstructive bastions as a background to understanding what is currently valued as intersubjectivity in psychoanalysis. The container contained model and the phenomenon of recruitment are also discussed. The author uses clinical material to demonstrate how these models are linked to enactment, and a study of this concept provides evidence of the importance of the visual image, the dream and non‐dream, the affective pictogram, as privileged aspects for the understanding and evolution of thought in the analytical process. Its importance leads to a proposal of a model that uses the theatre as a metaphor for the analytical process. In this model, analyst and patient both participate as characters in the scenes, and simultaneously as their co–authors. The analyst should also be responsible for the direction of scenes, as well as acting as critic. His task is to prevent obstructive conspiracies (the non‐dream) and new meanings for the scenes, thus allowing the development of new scenes and plots, and the enlarging of the mental universe.     

教学控制策略对小学儿童多媒体情境下英语学习效果的影响

该研究以103名二年级小学生为被试,运用教育实验方法探讨了在多媒体情境下,不同认知风格、英语水平的儿童在不同教学控制策略下的英语学习效果。结果发现:(1)英语水平较低的学生,无论其认知风格是场独立性还是场依存性,都是在教师控制策略下的学习效果好于教师指导下的学生控制策略;(2)英语水平较高且认知风格为场依存性的学生,在教师指导的学生控制策略下的学习效果显著好于在教师控制策略下的学习效果,而认知风格为场独立性的学生在两种策略下的学习效果没有显著差异。     

Intelligence analysts’ strategies for solving analytic tasks

Analytic performance may be assessed by the nature of the process applied to intelligence tasks and analysts are expected to use a “critical” or deliberative mindset. However, there is little research on how analysts do their work. We report the findings of a quantitative survey of 113 intelligence analysts who were asked to report how often they would apply strategies involving more or less critical thinking when performing representative tasks along the analytic workflow. Analysts reported using “deliberative” strategies significantly more often than “intuitive” ones when capturing customer requirements, processing data, and communicating conclusions. Years of experience working in the intelligence community, skill level, analytic thinking training, and time spent working collaboratively (opposed to individually) were largely unrelated to reported strategy use. We discuss the implications of these findings for both improving intelligence analysis and developing an evidence-based approach to policy and practice in this domain.     

A one-step method for modelling longitudinal data with differential equations

Differential equation models are frequently used to describe non-linear trajectories of longitudinal data. This study proposes a new approach to estimate the parameters in differential equation models. Instead of estimating derivatives from the observed data first and then fitting a differential equation to the derivatives, our new approach directly fits the analytic solution of a differential equation to the observed data, and therefore simplifies the procedure and avoids bias from derivative estimations. A simulation study indicates that the analytic solutions of differential equations (ASDE) approach obtains unbiased estimates of parameters and their standard errors. Compared with other approaches that estimate derivatives first, ASDE has smaller standard error, larger statistical power and accurate Type I error. Although ASDE obtains biased estimation when the system has sudden phase change, the bias is not serious and a solution is also provided to solve the phase problem. The ASDE method is illustrated and applied to a two-week study on consumers’ shopping behaviour after a sale promotion, and to a set of public data tracking participants’ grammatical facial expression in sign language. R codes for ASDE, recommendations for sample size and starting values are provided. Limitations and several possible expansions of ASDE are also discussed.     

Permanent Contributions in Philosophy

Has any school or movement in all of Western philosophy made a permanent contribution, permanent in the sense that it will last as long as philosophy does? More narrowly, has there ever been put forward a thesis that has achieved lasting consensus? After carefully defining “philosophical thesis” and “consensus,” so as to forestall uninteresting answers, this paper argues that the ancient Greeks made one or two such contributions, and the Analytic philosophers (ca. 1890–1960) made a few, but there have been no others. Moreover (a) the Analytic contributions were more empirical than philosophical, and (b) they were almost entirely negative. So, the basic short answer to our question is “no.” The paper concludes by asking in what way(s) there has been progress in philosophy.     

The Anatomy of a Philosophical Hoax

This article reflects upon the state of the philosophical profession vis‐à‐vis a close reading of the hoax perpetrated against the International Journal of Badiou Studies in 2016. This hoax is not a subversive act of disciplinary criticism (as the hoaxers contend). Rather, it is a poorly disguised attempt to enforce a partisan and myopic conception of philosophy and to delegitimize an entire subfield of philosophical production—namely, continental philosophy. The hoax is symptomatic of a deeper problem that plagues the profession today: the willingness exhibited by many philosophers to police the boundaries of the discipline by engaging in what we call “acts of force.” The prevalence of acts of force demonstrates that professional philosophy is shaped not only by the giving and taking of reasons but also by shopworn disciplinary tribalisms (for example, continental versus analytic) and asymmetrical power relations involving agents with unequal amounts of social, professional, and philosophical capital.     

Reception and willingness to share pseudo‐profound bullshit and their relation to other epistemically suspect beliefs and cognitive ability in Slovakia and Romania

Propensity to judge randomly generated, syntactically correct (i.e., bullshit) statements as profound is associated with a variety of conceptually relevant variables (e.g., intuitive cognitive style and supernatural beliefs). Besides generalizing these findings to a different cultural setting, we examined the relationships to sharing the bullshit on social media. Rating nonsense as profound was associated with a lower cognitive ability; a stronger belief in the paranormal, alternative medicine, and conspiracies; and ontological confusion. The more profound a statement was rated to be, the more likely it was to be shared, and propensity for sharing bullshit was predicted by ontological confusion and religious beliefs. Bullshit receptivity and sharing may be closely related to several dimensions of epistemically suspect beliefs; people with these propensities are relatively open to vague statements resembling New Age spirituality.