DEFINING “RELIGION” AS NATURAL: A CRITICAL INVITATION TO ROBERT McCAULEY

Previous critics have argued that Robert McCauley defines religion and science selectively and arbitrarily, cutting them to fit his model in Why Religion Is Natural and Science Is Not. McCauley has responded that final definitions are “overrated” and that artificial distinctions can serve an important role in naturalistic investigation. I agree with this position but argue that a genealogy of the category of religion is crucial to the methodology that McCauley describes. Since the inherent ambiguity of religion will undermine any essential claims about its cognitive naturalness, I invite McCauley to consider how his research might investigate scientific and religious cognition in new terms.     

隆乳术的演变与进步

隆乳术不仅可以重塑女性的形体美,而且可以增强女性的自信心,在当前具有广阔的市场。纵观隆乳术的发展演变史,从最初的注射隆乳术到自体组织隆乳术,再到当前的假体隆乳术和自体脂肪移植隆乳术,经历了“实践、认识、再实践、再认识”的多次反复。各种隆乳方式各具特色,其间既有成功的经验,又有失败的教训。针对隆乳术安全性的改进推动了隆乳术的不断向前发展。寻找一种安全有效的隆乳方式和理想的隆乳材料成为当前隆乳术发展的关键和整形外科医师关注的重点。     

The Politics of Teaching of Indigenous Traditions in Aotearoa/New Zealand

Reflecting on two study abroad trips to New Zealand in 2005 and 2007, I suggest in this essay that it is possible to mitigate the risk of (American or European) students recapitulating imperial attitudes through development of a rigorous curriculum focusing on the legacies of colonialism, institutional racism, and the somewhat dubious phenomenon of “post‐colonialism.” Readings, I argue, should be in continual play during cultural and social activities, operating in a dialectal move toward an “ethics of respect.” Such an ethics remains aporetic, or uncertain, insofar as no code of behavior can render us immune to the political and polemical effects of past and present forms of imperialism. However, a cultivated respect for distance and difference, including regarding questions of “authenticity,” can help to actualize the transformative promise of studying (indigenous) religion abroad. This essay is published alongside of six other essays, including a response from John Barbour, comprising a special section of the journal (see Teaching Theology and Religion 18:1, January 2015).     

Knowledge-How and Epistemic Value

A conspicuous oversight in recent debates about the vexed problem of the value of knowledge has been the value of knowledge-how. This would not be surprising if knowledge-how were, as Gilbert Ryle [1945, 1949 Ryle, Gilbert 1949. The Concept of Mind, London: Hutchinson's University Library.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]] famously thought, fundamentally different from knowledge-that. However, reductive intellectualists [e.g. Stanley and Williamson 2001 Ryle, Gilbert 1949. The Concept of Mind, London: Hutchinson's University Library.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]; Brogaard 2008, 2009 Brogaard, Berit 2009. What Mary Did Yesterday: Reflections on Knowledge-Wh, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 78/2: 439–67.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 2011 Brogaard, Berit 2011. Knowledge-How: A Unified Account, in Knowing How: Essays on Knowledge, Mind, and Action, ed. John Bengson and Marc A. Moffett, New York: Oxford University Press: 136–60. [Google Scholar]; Stanley 2011a Stanley, Jason 2011a. Knowing (How), Noûs 45/2: 207–38.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 2011b Stanley, Jason 2011b. Know How, Oxford: Oxford University Press.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]] maintain that knowledge-how just is a kind of knowledge-that. Accordingly, reductive intellectualists must predict that the value problems facing propositional knowledge will equally apply to knowledge-how. We show, however, that this is not the case. Accordingly, we highlight a value-driven argument for thinking (contra reductive intellectualism) that knowledge-how and knowledge-that come apart.     

Theoretical trajectories: Dreams and dreaming from Freud to Bion

This paper aims at comparing Freud's and Bion's conceptual models on dreams and dreaming. Beyond both authors’ shared disposition vis‐à‐vis problems posed by knowledge, a critical gap opens regarding their differing clinical practices. It is hypothesized that their ideas do not belong to irreconcilable paradigms, but that there are continuities besides discontinuities more frequently highlighted between Freudian statements on psychic functioning – described in his theory on dreams – and Bion's findings in his development of both the original theory and the connections between dreaming and thinking. Firstly, Freud's and Bion's epistemological sources are examined as well as their creative use and historical environment. Then certain general theoretical and clinical issues are considered concerning their theories on dreams, the evolution of their ideas and corresponding clinical contexts. In a third section, their confluences and dissimilarities are dealt with, including clinical vignettes belonging to the authors to illustrate their interpretative modes of working. This is meant to show both an implicit theoretical–clinical complementarity and the fact that, though their routes bifurcate about the function of dreams, there remain connecting paths. Lastly, the final remarks review certain issues that have frequently been controversial between these lines of thought.     

Can music bring people together? Effects of shared musical preference on intergroup bias in adolescence

Recent research has successfully applied social identity theory to demonstrate how individuals use music as a basis for intergroup differentiation. The current study investigated how music might also be used to encourage the development of positive intergroup attitudes. Participants (N = 97) were allocated to one of two experimentally created social groups and then led to believe that the groups had similar or different musical preferences. They then evaluated each group and reported their perceptions concerning how they expected their own group to be evaluated by the other group. Participants who believed the groups had similar musical preferences reported more positive intergroup attitudes relative to a control group; they also expected to be evaluated more positively by members of the other group. However, positive intergroup perceptions were also reported by those who believed the two groups had different musical preferences. The implications of these findings for theory and practice are discussed.     

OPEN-MINDEDNESS

Abstract: Open-mindedness is typically at the top of any list of the intellectual or "epistemic" virtues. Yet, providing an account that simultaneously explains why open-mindedness is an epistemically valuable trait to have and how such a trait is compatible with full-blooded belief turns out to be a challenge. Building on the work of William Hare and Jonathan Adler, I defend a view of open-mindedness that meets this challenge. On this view, open-mindedness is primarily an attitude toward oneself as a believer, rather than toward any particular belief. To be open-minded is to be aware of one's fallibility as a believer, and to acknowledge the possibility that anytime one believes something, one could be wrong. In order to see that such an attitude is epistemically valuable even to an already virtuous agent, some details of the skills and habits of the open-minded agent are elucidated.     

EPISTEMIC MALEVOLENCE

Abstract: Against the background of a great deal of structural symmetry between intellectual and moral virtue and vice, it is a surprising fact that what is arguably the central or paradigm moral vice—that is, moral malevolence or malevolence proper—has no obvious or well-known counterpart among the intellectual vices. The notion of "epistemic malevolence" makes no appearance on any standard list of intellectual vices; nor is it central to our ordinary ways of thinking about intellectual vice. In this essay, I argue that there is such a thing as epistemic malevolence and offer an account of its basic character and structure. Doing so requires a good deal of attention to malevolence simpliciter . In the final section of the essay, I offer an explanation of our relative unfamiliarity with this trait.     

The Most Agreeable of All Vices: Nietzsche as Virtue Epistemologist

It has been argued with some justice by commentators from Walter Kaufmann to Thomas Hurka that Nietzsche's positive ethical position is best understood as a variety of virtue theory – in particular, as a brand of perfectionism. For Nietzsche, value flows from character. Less attention has been paid, however, to the details of the virtues he identifies for himself and his type. This neglect, along with Nietzsche's frequent irony and non-standard usage, has obscured the fact that almost all the virtues he praises are intellectual rather than moral. The vices he most despises include dogmatism, intellectual partisanship, faith, boredom, the desire for certainty and pity. The virtues he most appreciates include curiosity, honesty, scepticism, creativity, the historical sense, intellectual courage and intellectual fastidiousness. These tables of values place Nietzsche squarely among so-called responsibilist virtue epistemologists, such as Lorraine Code and Linda Zagzebski, who emphasize that knowledge is infused with desire and affect. I argue that curiosity construed as the specification of the will to power in the domain of epistemology is the cardinal Nietzschean virtue, and that the others – especially intellectual courage and honesty – are presupposed by curiosity. Thus, Nietzsche turns out to accept his own peculiar brand of the thesis of the unity of virtue.     

Kierkegaard's Mirrors: Interest,Self, and Moral Vision

This paper advances the view that the history of philosophy is both a kind of history and a kind of philosophy. Through a discussion of some examples from epistemology, metaphysics, and the historiography of philosophy, it explores the benefit to philosophy of a deep and broad engagement with its history. It comes to the conclusion that doing history of philosophy is a way to think outside the box of the current philosophical orthodoxies. Somewhat paradoxically, far from imprisoning its students in outdated and crystallized views, the history of philosophy trains the mind to think differently and alternatively about the fundamental problems of philosophy. It keeps us alert to the fact that latest is not always best, and that a genuinely new perspective often means embracing and developing an old insight. The upshot is that the study of the history of philosophy has an innovative and subversive potential, and that philosophy has a great deal to gain from a long, broad, and deep conversation with its history.