The Life and Works of a Bottom-Up Thinker

A brief account is given of the author's life as a physicist and then a priest. The twin foundations of the author's theological endeavors have been a respect for traditional Christian thinking, though not exempting it from revision where this is needed, and a style of argument termed bottom-up thinking, which seeks to proceed from experience to understanding. The diversity of the world faith traditions is perceived as a major source of perplexity. A revised and modest natural theology and the issue of divine action have been at the top of a science and theology agenda. A defense is sketched in realist terms of the metaphysical strategy of using an ontological interpretation of the unpredictabilities of chaos theory to support a notion of top-down causality through active information. The success of Christian theology as a resource of total explanation depends on a credible account of eschatological hope. Reference is made to practical experience of ethics in the public square.     

“先行组织者”教学策略在中学历史教学中的实验研究

“先行组织者”教学策略是奥苏伯尔提出的一种较为完善的教学理论。该研究运用自然实验的方法对该理论在中学历史教学中的实际效果进行了研究。结果表明:该策略能提高学生的学习与保持效果,而且它对学习的帮助主要是通过提高学生的理解能力而实现的。     

What Game Is Being Played? The Need for Clarity about the Relationships Between Scientific and Theological Understanding

This paper investigates the relationship between theology and the natural sciences by considering four realist and five nonrealist interpretations of theological understanding. These are that theology expresses biblical affirmations, the faith of the community, revelatory declarations, or a prioriconclusions, and that it is reducible to expressions of feelings, attitudes, naturalism, liberating praxis, or moral convictions. Because these views are unsatisfactory, the author calls for an imaginative form of natural theology that shows how faith's understanding of the purpose, value, and meaning of reality fits how the world is actually found to be.     

戴震义理之学中的人性结构模式

戴震的人性学说是其义理之学的重要组成部分,是建构在其坚实的“血气心知”基础之上的。戴震论“性“,已不单纯局限于“性”之自身,而是具有超越“性”自身的人类学或伦理学的含义。本文将从人性的生成阶段、人性的自然结构和社会结构等方面对戴震的人性结构模式学说做一番梳理。     

最心安处是吾乡：本体安全感威胁对家乡品牌偏好的影响

全球化进程的加快和贸易战的发生让人们处于一种本体不安全的状态中, 即人们的本体安全感受到了威胁。本文研究了消费者本体安全感威胁对家乡品牌偏好的影响。三项研究的结果表明, 相比本体安全感没有受到威胁的个体, 本体安全感受到威胁的个体对家乡品牌的偏好度更高, 其中家乡依恋起到了中介作用。具体而言, 本体安全感受到威胁的个体更倾向于依恋可以提供常规生活和构建个人身份的家乡, 以此寻求本体安全感恢复, 从而增加了对家乡品牌的偏好。实验结果还发现, 自然栖息地情境展露在本体安全感威胁对家乡品牌偏好的作用中起到调节作用。具体而言, 当展露于自然栖息地情境时, 本体安全感受到威胁的个体能够通过对自然栖息地这一更广泛的地点依恋来对抗本体安全感威胁, 不再需要寻求家乡依恋来缓解本体安全感威胁, 从而使其在对家乡品牌和非家乡品牌的偏好上不再呈现出差异。本研究的发现丰富了现有本体安全感和品牌偏好的相关研究, 为品牌提供了一种新的本土营销策略, 具有丰富的理论贡献和管理启示。     

Bonding and bridging social capital and their associations with self‐evaluated community resilience: A comparative study of East Asia

The purpose of this study is to test key social capital indicators in a disaster context by considering the bonding and bridging types of social capital. Using the East Asian Social Survey, this study chooses three behavioural/cognitive elements of social capital—social trust, voluntary association membership, and personal networks—and divides them into bonding and bridging social capital, in‐group and out‐group trust, homogeneous and heterogeneous membership, and strong and weak ties to test their effects on self‐evaluated community resilience to natural hazards. The results showed that social trust and personal networks had strong positive effects, but the effect of voluntary association membership was positive in societies with high rates of membership (Japan and South Korea) and negative in a society with a low rate of membership (Taiwan). Furthermore, while bonding social capital generally showed a stronger effect than bridging social capital in East Asia, a society with more frequent and intense disasters (Japan) showed a strong effect of heterogenous membership on self‐evaluated community resilience. This study connects two aspects of social capital studies—the elements and the types of social capital—and the findings imply that the relationship between social capital and community resilience may have some mediator variables.     

Spontaneous number discrimination of multi-format auditory stimuli in cotton-top tamarins (Saguinus oedipus)

Studies using operant training have demonstrated that laboratory animals can discriminate the number of objects or events based on either auditory or visual stimuli, as well as the integration of both auditory and visual modalities. To date, studies of spontaneous number discrimination in untrained animals have been restricted to the visual modality, leaving open the question of whether such capacities generalize to other modalities such as audition. To explore the capacity to spontaneously discriminate number based on auditory stimuli, and to assess the abstractness of the representation underlying this capacity, a habituation-discrimination procedure involving speech and pure tones was used with a colony of cotton-top tamarins. In the habituation phase, we presented subjects with either two- or three-speech syllable sequences that varied with respect to overall duration, inter-syllable duration, and pitch. In the test phase, we presented subjects with a counterbalanced order of either two- or three-tone sequences that also varied with respect to overall duration, inter-syllable duration, and pitch. The proportion of looking responses to test stimuli differing in number was significantly greater than to test stimuli consisting of the same number. Combined with earlier work, these results show that at least one non-human primate species can spontaneously discriminate number in both the visual and auditory domain, indicating that this capacity is not tied to a particular modality, and within a modality, can accommodate differences in format.     

Thinking about the Needy, Justice, and International Organizations

This article has three main parts, Section 2 considers the nature and extent to which individuals who are well-off have a moral obligation to aid the worlds needy. Drawing on a pluralistic approach to morality, which includes consequentialist, virtue-based, and deontological elements, it is contended that most who are well-off should do much more than they do to aid the needy, and that they are open to serious moral criticism if they simply ignore the needy. Part one also focuses on the United States, and illustrates both how incredibly wealthy the U.S. is and some of the spending habits of its citizens; however, its considerations apply to the well-off generally. Section 3 considers whether justice provides reasons for helping the needy. Noting that justice in an extremely complex notion, it discusses numerous considerations relevant to justices scope and implications, including an extended Rawlsian conception of justice, an absolute conception, a comparative conception, the distinction between natural and social justice, and various elements of common-sense morality. Section 2 also distinguishes between agent-relative justice-based reasons, which are relevant to whether we act justly, and agent-neutral justice-based reasons, which are relevant to whether we have reasons of justicefor acting. Correspondingly, it argues that even if one can ignore the needy without acting unjustly, as philosophers like Robert Nozick and Jan Narveson contend, there may be powerful reasons of justicefor addressing their plight. Section 4 briefly address the responsibilities of international organizations like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and World Trade Organization (WTO). Drawing on Section 2, it is suggested that in addition to standard reasons to act justlytowards needy members of the worlds community, there will be reasons of justicefor such organizations to aid the needy in both present, and future, generations. The article concludes by contending that the well-off in countries like the U.S. have reason to view international organizations like the World Bank, IMF, and WTO as their agents, and to seek to insure that they alleviate misfortunes amongst the worlds needy.