Emergent Monism and the Classical Doctrine of the Soul

Traditional Christian belief in the existence of human life after death within a transformed material universe should be capable of rational justification if one chooses carefully the philosophical scheme underlying those claims. One should not have to appeal simply to the power of a loving God to justify one's beliefs. A revision of Whitehead's metaphysical scheme is proposed that allows one to render these classical Christian beliefs at least plausible to a broad range of contemporary thinkers as a consequence of a cosmology based on the principle of universal intersubjectivity and the need for a common ground between opposing subjectivities.     

Normalized pulse volume and blood volume as separate indices of finger arterial and venous vascular tone: Examination under propofol

Abstract: This study examined the newly proposed indices for estimating finger vascular tone, which can be obtained from near infrared transmittance photoplethysmographic recordings; normalized pulse volume (NPV) and blood volume (BV). They were recorded for seven male and two female students under continuous infusion of and recovery from propofol. Concomitant hemodynamic measurements were made with a non-invasive impedance cardiograph and a continuous blood pressure monitor. Normalized pulse volume showed no apparent dose-dependency and was negatively correlated with total peripheral resistance. In contrast, BV increased dose-dependently with propofol concentration and was negatively correlated with cardiac preload index (PLI) and with stroke volume (SV) at higher concentrations. The supplementary structural equation modeling procedure effectively illustrated causal relationships between BV, PLI and SV. In conclusion, the present data suggest that NPV and BV independently reflect arterial and venous tone in the finger tip, respectively. Although the underlying mechanisms remain unclear, BV is more sensitive to vascular dilation under propofol anesthesia.     

Decay functions and criminal spatial processes: geographical offender profiling of volume crime

Although it is now well established across diverse samples that the frequency of offending ‘decays’ as distance from the home/base increases, it remains unclear what form of decay function best characterises this relationship. Different forms of decay function reflect different patterns and rates of decrease in the likelihood of offending as distance from the home/base increases. These different patterns imply rather different underlying psychological processes. Therefore, considerations of the particular function characterising distance decay elucidate explanations of offender spatial behaviour. To bring to light the possible psychological and behavioural processes inherent in offending distance decay, the present study examined the fit of logarithmic, negative exponential, and quadratic decay functions to the distribution of the distances travelled to offend by a sample of 70 prolific burglars from the UK. It is argued that these functions are consistent with the operation of perceptual processes of magnitude estimation, friction or effort effects, and the influences of cost‐benefit assessments, respectively. The results indicate that offending distance decay patterns most closely fit the logarithmic function, consistent with Stevens' perceptual processes of distortion in magnitude estimation, whilst not ruling out additional processes relating to the increased effort required in travelling greater distances to offend. Because most geographical profiling systems are built upon the distance decay function, the impact of utilising the different forms of function on the accuracy of geographic profiles was also assessed utilising ‘search cost’ calculations. The results showed little impact of applying different decay functions. Thus, whilst the decay function does have important theoretical implications for understanding offender spatial behaviour, it is noted that the particular variant used does not significantly impact on the effectiveness of geographical profiling systems as they currently exist. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Finding the g-factor in brain structure using the method of correlated vectors

It is unclear whether brain mechanisms underlying human intelligence are distributed throughout the brain or mainly concentrated in the frontal lobes. Data are inconsistent possibly due, at least in part, to the different ways the construct of intelligence is measured. Here we apply the method of correlated vectors to determine how the general factor of intelligence (g) is related to regional gray matter and white matter volumes. This is a re-analysis of an earlier study showing regional gray matter and white matter volume is correlated to Full Scale IQ (FSIQ). However, it is well-known that FSIQ taps several cognitive abilities and skills in addition to g. The results now show that the g factor accounts for several but not all FSIQ/gray matter correlations distributed throughout the brain and these areas may differ for young and older adults.     

Naming,race, and white supremacy in the teaching of religion and Islam: Incorporating intersectional interventions

The need to confront issues of race and white supremacy in our teaching of religion is critically important, but through the pedagogical convention of naming, we take the first step in inviting our students to understand the hows and whys of it. I will explore the ways that Charles Long's theory of signification and counter‐signification can be pedagogically deployed to incorporate intersectional interventions in the teaching of religion in America, specifically in the case of an Islam in America course.     

Supervisors as SMEs: The Relationship Between Supervisor Job Experience and Ratings of Subordinate Skill Importance

This study investigated the relationship between supervisor job experience and ratings of the importance of eight skill components for performing subordinates' jobs. When examining these correlations, statistical control was utilized to ensure that supervisor and subordinate characteristics confounded with supervisor job experience were not affecting hypothesized relationships. As predicted, there were statistically significant positive correlations between supervisor job experience and ratings on 6 of the 8 components. Also as predicted, controlling for the characteristics confounded with supervisor job experience made a substantial difference in results; 13 of the 16 correlations using statistical control significantly differed from correlations that did not. This illustrates that future research on SME characteristics should consider controlling variables confounded with the focal characteristic(s) under study in order to more thoroughly understand characteristic–rating relationships. Implications of these findings for research and practice are discussed and suggestions for future research are offered.     

'Stream of consciousness' and 'ownership of thought' in indigenous people in central Australia

Fifteen Central Australian Aboriginal adults (8 patients, 7 colleagues) were presented with a culturally modified version of Flavell's 'stream of consciousness' experiment (pictures of persons with empty or 'busy' thought-bubbles, and an invitation to assign a picture to the mental state of a second experimenter seen reading or sitting quietly). Only 4 people assigned the empty thought bubble to the quiet experimenter. This result was at least as good as that of a sample of Stanford College students tested by Flavell. The experiment provoked detailed comments from the informants about subjectivity, suggesting great subtlety of phenomenological awareness in Central Australian Aboriginal people, and attributing a kind of subjectivity to non-human entities, including inanimate elements. We learnt that the Western Deserts dialect term watiya was reserved for the subjectivity attributed to trees and rocks. The ownership of all thought was attributed to the tjukurpa (the Aboriginal dreaming). These Aboriginal cultural attributions were compared and contrasted with reflections developed by Jung and the post-Jungian David Holt on the nature of subjectivity, and religious notions of the redemption of matter.     

Plotinus’ concept of matter in Giordano Bruno’s De la causa,principio et uno*

The aim of this paper is to focus on the reception of Plotinus’ concept of matter in the Renaissance philosopher Giordano Bruno and his early Italian dialogue De la causa, principio et uno (1584). I argue that Bruno’s concept of materia in De la causa, principio et uno reflects Plotinus’ theory of intelligible matter in Ennead ii 4 [12] 2–5 as well as Plotinus’ positive view of the perceptible world in Enneads ii 9 [33] and iv 8 [6]. It is suggested that Bruno interprets Plotinus as an ancient philosopher who supported the unity and homogeneity of matter. Giordano Bruno’s reception of Plotinus in De la Causa, principio et uno could enlighten contemporary discussions in Neoplatonic studies concerning the question of matter in the Enneads.     

Is Philosophy All About the Meaning of Life?

This article defends a conception of philosophy popular outside the discipline but unpopular within it: that philosophy is unified by a concern with the meaning of life. First, it argues against exceptionalist theses according to which philosophy is unique among academic disciplines in not being united by a distinctive subject matter. It then presents a positive account, showing that the issue of the meaning of life is uniquely able to reveal unity between the practical and theoretical concerns of philosophy, while meeting a range of desiderata for a typical specification of subject matter. After showing how recent analytic work on “the meaning of life” has conflated the traditional question with issues of social meaningfulness, it offers an explanation of why the traditional question has become marginalised in philosophy. The reasons are not good, however, so it concludes that philosophy should embrace its popular image.     

Non-mereological pluralistic supersubstantivalism: an alternative perspective on the matter/spacetime relationship

In both the historical and contemporary literature on the metaphysics of space (and, more recently, spacetime), a core dispute is that between relationism and substantivalism. One version of the latter is supersubstantivalism, according to which space (or, again, spacetime) is the only kind of substance, such that what we think of as individual material objects (electrons, quarks, etc.) are actually just parts of spacetime which instantiate certain properties. If those parts are ontologically dependent on spacetime as a whole, then we arrive at an ontology with only a single genuinely independent substance, namely the entire spacetime manifold. This is monist supersubstantivalism. A view on which the parts of spacetime are ontologically prior to the whole has been called pluralistic supersubstantivalism. As currently formulated, supersubstantivalism (in either its monist or pluralistic forms) carries significant advantages and encounters major difficulties. I argue that some of the latter motivate an alternative formulation, non-mereological pluralistic supersubstantivalism, according to which spacetime is a real substance, but what we think of as material objects are also real substances, irreducible to and numerically distinct from that larger spacetime manifold and any of its parts. Yet, the underlying nature of those material objects is ultimately the same type as that of spacetime: at bottom, a particle is just a smaller quantity of spacetime embedded in or contained by or co-located with the larger whole that we would normally think of as ‘spacetime,’ capable both of genuine movement within/across the larger spacetime manifold and (at least in principle) independent existence from it.