马克思的本体论思想及其当代意义

马克思的本体论思想日益引起学界的关注。本文认为,必须从马克思的哲学革命变革的宗旨和使命出发,把本体论问题放到“解释世界”和“改变世界”的框架内,才能给马克思的本体论思想以及正确的诠释和定位,马克思终点了传统的思辨形而上学本体论,但却继承和光大了人类的形而上情结和追求,并以人和人的实践活动底蕴,深刻地回答了世界本真存在的追问,关爱生命,提高人的素质,促进人的全面发展,这就是马克思本体论思想的当代价值所在。     

Should Religious Naturalists Promote a Naturalistic Religion?

Religious naturalism refers here to a view of reality, and it will be contrasted with versions of supernaturalism and of atheistic naturalism. Naturalistic religion refers to certain varieties of religion, especially some inspired by the universality of science and the need for a global ethics. In this essay I explicate why a religious naturalist need not advocate a naturalistic religion. Rather, a religious naturalist can build upon the heritage of religious traditions and be open to, but at the same time be agnostic about, the idea of a nonnatural ground of reality . The religious naturalism I defend has been criticized from various directions: one reviewer in this journal considered it too much indebted to the traditions, and hence "reactionary" and supernaturalistic; another considered it too minimalist in its religion ("virtually nonexistent") as a consequence of the preference for a too sober version of naturalism. My distinction between religious naturalism and naturalistic religion may answer some of these objections.     

Can Semantics Guide Ontology?

Since the linguistic turn, many have taken semantics to guide ontology. Here, I argue that semantics can, at best, serve as a partial guide to ontological commitment. If semantics were to be our guide, semantic data and semantic treatments would need to be taken seriously. Through an examination of plurals and their treatments, I argue that there can be multiple, equally semantically adequate, treatments of a natural language theory. Further, such treatments can attribute different ontological commitments to a theory. Given this, I argue that semantics can fail to deliver determinate ontological commitments and determinate answers to ontological questions, more generally.     

Nina Coltart and the border of Bethlehem

Nina Coltart's freedom in addressing delicate areas such as spirituality and Buddhism within a psychoanalytic framework has opened borders between different psychoanalytic communities. This paper sets out to identify a deep‐rooted philosophical tension that runs through several aspects of Coltart's work starting from her ‘Slouching towards Bethlehem … or, thinking the unthinkable in psychoanalysis’. In exploring this central topic in depth psychology, of the distinction between thinkable and unthinkable contents, the author argues that it is not a fundamental distinction in Coltart's work but is rather a particular example of a more fundamental structural dichotomy which pervades her approach and which manifests in several different guises. It is the breadth and sincerity of Coltart's writings which make this a useful exercise, not only for understanding the structure of her work but also in illuminating some structural tensions which permeate depth‐psychological pursuits in general.     

Folk-linguistic fictions and the explananda of the language sciences

For the past two millennia, the explananda of language theory have been inherited from the Western linguistic tradition. The legacy is what might be called “the Western linguistic imaginary”: An indeterminate but deeply mesmerizing inventory of entities, properties, and powers of language commonly attributed to language and language-users and which therefore seem to stand in need of explanation. In recent years, naturalistic research programs in the cognitive sciences have provided illuminating explanations of basic (“lower-order”) cognitive phenomena. The challenge today for the science of language is whether, in transforming itself along the lines of epistemological naturalism, it can provide similarly illuminating explanations of any of its traditional explananda. In addressing this challenge, greater attention needs to be given to the source of such explananda in the everyday, culturally-diverse practices of folk metalinguistics.     

Towards More Rigorous Personality Trait–Outcome Research

Much of personality research attempts to identify causal links between personality traits and various types of outcomes. I argue that causal interpretations require traits to be seen as existentially and holistically real and the associations to be independent of specific ways of operationalizing the traits. Among other things, this means that, to the extents that causality is to be ascribed to such holistic traits, items and facets of those traits should be similarly associated with specific outcomes, except for variability in the degrees to which they reflect the traits (i.e. factor loadings). I argue that, before drawing causal inferences about personality trait–outcome associations, the presence of this condition should be routinely tested by, for example, systematically comparing the outcome associations of individual items or facets, or sampling different indicators for measuring the same purported traits. Existing evidence suggests that observed associations between personality traits and outcomes at least sometimes depend on which particular items or facets have been included in trait operationalizations, calling trait‐level causal interpretations into question. However, this has rarely been considered in the literature. I argue that when outcome associations are specific to facets, they should not be generalized to traits. Furthermore, when the associations are specific to particular items, they should not even be generalized to facets. Copyright © 2016 European Association of Personality Psychology     

Oneself in practitioner research,with Vygotsky and Bakhtin

Practitioner action and reflection are understood as central to practitioner research in this paper. While Vygotskian-based premise highlights instructional practices and intervention as central to practitioner understanding, Bakhtin-based dialogical premise draws on relational constructs and attend to practitioner being, answerability and authorship. Vygotskian and Bakhtinian units of analysis used are viewed as means with which to conceive practitioner action/reflection and build a community of practitioners. Taken together, practitioner knowing is found inextricable with practitioner ontology, making practitioner research of ongoing instructional practices more human in line with Dewey.     

THREE COMPARATIVE MAPS OF THE HUMAN

Abstract. This article is a response to the 1994 Star Island conference on the "Decade of the Brain" from a Jewish perspective. After a brief introduction about the logical function of models and maps, I compare and contrast three models of the human: Ezekiel's vision of the chariot in the Hebrew Scriptures, Franz Rosenzweig's geometry of the human face in Der Stern der Erlosung (the Star of Redemption), and a standard anatomical picture of the human brain. Whereas Rosenzweigs face is seen to be compatible with Ezekiel's chariot, both are seen to be radically distinct from the implicit conception of what a human being is in modern medical science. I conclude with a suggestion that the differences are to be understood in terms of their different intended functions and express my hope for some new kind of model that will incorporate the functional advantages of both.     

On the Logical Positivists' Theory of Truth: The Fundamental Problem and a New Perspective

The present article purports to show that the protocol sentence debate, pursued by some leading members of the Vienna Circle in the mid-1930s, was essentially a controversy over the explanation and the real significance of the concept of truth. It is further shown that the fundamental issue underlying the discussions about the concept of truth was the relationship between form and content, as well as between logic/language and the world. R. Carnap was the philosopher who most explicitly and systematically attempted to come to grips with this problem. It is shown that the form-content distinction pervades the three most important phases of Carnap's philosophical development: the structuralist (in Der logische Aufbau der Welt), the syntactical and the semantical. His final semantical stance is essentially determined by the concept of linguistic frameworks. The article purports to demonstrate that this concept cannot be dispensed with in philosophy, but that Carnap failed to work out its ontological implications. Finally, the concept of an internal ontology is briefly delineated. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Toward a New Understanding of Nature, Reality, and the Sacred: A Syllabus

Adjustments in the understanding of the relation of religion and science since the Enlightenment require new considerations in epistemology and metaphysics. Constructionist theories of knowledge and process theories of metaphysics better provide the new paradigms needed both to preserve and to limit the significance of each field of human understanding. In a course taught at Moravian College, this perspective is applied to the concepts of nature, reality, and the sacred, with a view to showing how we might develop one such paradigm. Key resources for this task are to be found in the work of artist René Magritte; theologians Langdon Gilkey, Arthur Peacocke, and John Haught; philosophers and historians of science Alfred North Whitehead, Timothy Ferris, Ernan Mc Mullin, and Ian Barbour; philosopher of religion Paul Ricoeur; and historians of religion Rudolph Otto and Mircea Eliade. Such a new paradigm calls for an ecologically sensitive religious awareness which is both sacramental and holistic.