The principles of autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice are well established ethical principles in health research. Of these principles, justice has received less attention by health researchers. The purpose of this article is to broaden the discussion of health research ethics, particularly the ethical principle of justice, to include societal considerations — who and what are studied and why? — and to critique current applications of ethical principles within this broader view. We will use a feminist intersectional approach in the (...) context of health disparities research to firmly establish inseparable links between health research ethics, social action, and social justice. The aim is to provide an ethical approach to health disparities research that simultaneously describes and seeks to eliminate health disparities. (shrink)

Roger North's The Musicall Grammarian 1728, first published in 1990, is a treatise on musical eloquence in all its branches. Of its five parts, I and II, on the orthoepy, orthography and syntax of music, constitute a grammar; III and IV, on the arts of invention and communication, form a rhetoric; and V, on etymology, consists of a history. Two substantial chapters of commentary introduce the text, which is edited here for the first time in its entirety: Jamie Kassler (...) places his treatise within the broader context not only of North's musical and non-musical writings but also their relation to the intellectual ferment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and Mary Chan describes physical and textual aspects of the treatise as evidence for North's processes of thinking about musical thinking. (shrink)

Book Reviewed in this article: Israel's Prophetic Tradition: Essays in honour of Peter R. Ackroyd. Edited by Richard Coggins, Anthony Phillips and Michael Knibb, Pp.xxi, 272. Cambridge University Press, 1982, £21.00. Essays on John. By C.K. Barrett. Pp.viii, 167, London, SPCK, 1982, £10.50. The Letter to the Colossians. By Eduard Schweizer, translated by Andrew Chester. Pp.319, London, SPCK, 1982, £12.50. Foundational Theology: Jesus and the Church. By Francis Schüssler Fiorenza. Pp.xix, 326, New York Crossroad, 1984, $22.50. The Darkness of God: (...) Theology after Hiroshima. By Jim Garrison. Pp.x, 238, London, SCM Press, 1982, £5.95. Discerning the Mystery, An Essay on the Nature of neology. By Andrew Louth. Pp.xiv, 150, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1983, £12.50. The Tao and the Daimon: Segments of a Religious Inquiry. By Robert C. Neville. Pp.xv, 281, Albany, New York, State University of New York Press, 1982, $34.50 ), $11.95. Person and Myth: Maurice Leenhardt in the Melanesian World. By James Clifford. Pp.xi, 270, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1982, £21.50. Transcendence and the Sacred. Edited by A.M. Olson and L.S. Rouner. Pp.xv, 230, University of Notre Dame Press, 1981, £10.75. A History of Religious Ideas. Vol. 2: From Gautama Buddha to the Triumph of Christianity. By Mircea Eliade. Translated by William R. Trask. Pp.xi, 565, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1982, £17.50. Ordeal by Labyrinth: Conversations with Claude‐Henri Racquet. By Mircea Eliade. Translated by Derek Coltman. Pp.ix, 225, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1982, £12.55. Religious Philosophy of Prince‐Bishop Njegosh of Montenegro. By Zika Rad. Prvulovich. Pp.xviii, 273, Birmingham, The Author, 1984, £12.50, £10.50. The Home of Meaning: The Hermeneutics of the Subject of Paul Ricoeur. By John W. Van Dengel. Pp.xxi, 333, Washington, D.C., University Press of America, 1982, $24.50, $13.25. Life Forms and Meaning Stucture. By Alfred Schutz, translated, introduced and annotated by Helmut Wagner. Pp.vi, 217, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982, £11.95. The Shaping of Man: Philosophical Aspects of Sociobiology. By Roger Trigg. Pp.xx, 186. Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1982, £12.50, £5.95. Marx and Marxisms: Royal Institute of Philosophy Lecture Series, 14. Edited by G.H.R. Parkinson. Pp.vi, 268, Cambridge University Press, 1982, £9.95. Marx and Justice: The Radical Critique of Liberalism. By Allen E. Buchanan. Pp.xiv, 206, London, Methuen, 1982, £12.95. Israel Satanter: Text, Structure, Idea. By Hillel Goldberg. Pp.xvii, 358, New York, Ktav, 1981, $17.50. Freud on Femininity and Faith. By Judith Van Herik. Pp.xiii, 216, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1982, £17.50. Women, Reason and Nature. By Carol McMillan. Pp.x, 165, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1982, £12.50. Supererogation: Its Status in Ethical Theory. By David Heyd. Pp.vii, 191, Cambridge University Press, 1982, £14.00. The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy. Edited by Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny and Jan Finborg. Pp.xi, 1035, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1982, £40.00. St Thomas Aquinas. By Ralph McInerny. Pp.197, Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 1982, £4.50. Yves de Vallone: The Making of an Esprit‐Fort. By James O'Higgins, S.J. Pp.viii, 248, The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1982, $35.00. Religion and National Identity. Edited by Stuart Mews. Pp.xvi, 618, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1982, £19.50. Mortmain Legislation and the English Church, 1279–1500. By Sandra Raban. Pp.xii, 215,, Cambridge University Press, 1982, £25.00. John XXIII, Pope of the Council. By Peter Hebblethwaite. Pp.viii, 550, London, Geoffrey Chapman, 1984, £14.95.iCompiled by J.F. Púglisi and S.J. Voicu. Pp.260, Rome, Centro Pro Unione, 1984, $20.00. Ireland: A Bibliography of Material held at St Deiniol's Library. Compiled by Helen C. Price. Pp.iv, 136, Hawarden, St Deiniol's, 1984, £2.50. The Later Poems, 1972–1982. By R.S. Thomas. Pp.224, London, Macmillan, 1984, £4.95. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:EMOTION AND GOD: A REPLY TO MARCEL SAROT* DANIEL WESTBERG University of Virginia Charlottesville, Virginia M ARCEL SAROT has helpfully drawn attention to the question of St. Thomas's treatment of divine emotion; and in my view he rightly protests against the widely fashionable approach of rejecting the classical doctrine of impassibility in favor of a suffering and passible God. Nevertheless, I disagree sharply with his contentions (1) that emotion (...) is restricted to corporeal creatures,' and therefore (2) that emotion cannot be ascribed to God. What kind of moral agent would God be without emotion? Sarot is not helpful here, and in this respect the critics of impassibility have a legitimate point; for, if we eliminate emotion from God, then we have to treat the Scriptures as "embodying primitive anthropomorphic conceptions of God," so that God's love, wrath, mercy, justice, and even his "serious concern for the welfare of His people are meaningless."2 To dismiss the biblical picture of God as anthropomorphic, maintaining not only that "anger" and "joy" are symbolic, but that even the notions of care and concern are not applicable to the divine being, seems unfaithful to revelation. It also calls into question the nature of God's personality and agency.' *See Marcel Sarot, "God, Emotion, and Corporeality," The Thomist 58 (1994): 61-92. Much of this paper was prepared for a theological discussion group at the University of Virginia, before the appearance of Sarot's article. I am grateful for the points raised by Robert Wilken, Jamie Ferreira, Eugene Rogers, David Hart, and others in the discussion, and for the helpful comments of Jeff Greenman on this version. 1 Sarot, 82: "without corporeality, no emotion." 2 T. E. Pollard, "The Impassibility of God," Scottish Journal ofTheology 8 (1955): 360..1 R. E. Creel thinks that emotional impassibility is compatible with caring about and acting for the welfare of another person, but that such a being could not be "rejoiced by the good fortunes of its beloved and distressed by its misfortunes" (Divine Impassibility: An Essay in Philosophical Theology [Cambridge: Cambridge, University Press, 1986], 117). I do not think this is close enough to the biblical presentation. 109 110 DANIEL WESTBERG The burden of my response, and what I explain below, is this: Being a rational agent implies emotion of a kind. If we can speak of God having intellect and will, which St. Thomas does (STh I, qq. 14 & 19), so that God is an intelligent being with powers to act, then we should be able to speak (with similar qualifications) about emotion in God. In other words, agency by intellect and will implies emotion, which means that emotion should be ascribed to God, as the Bible does, but in a way that does not attribute passibility. The two basic mistakes I see in Sarot's account are these: (1) to rely on physicalist definitions of the nature of emotion; (2) to assume that the Latin passio is the same as the contemporary English term "emotion." Thus I agree that Aquinas understood the relevant meaning of passio to refer to a person undergoing some bodily change (a transmutatio corporalis), but deny that this extended in Aquinas's account over the entire range of even human emotion. Much of the recent work in the field of emotion, amongst both philosophers and psychologists, suggests that bodily sensation is only sometimes an aspect of emotion, and not essential in its definition. I shall attempt to show the parallels between the distinctions made by Aquinas and the framework of some of this contemporary research. I. EMOTION AND MORAL AGENCY The essence of emotion has to do with being a moral agent, not with bodily existence. Any moral being (including angels and other spirits, God and human beings) has emotion. This is the implication of any moral psychology (especially, though not necessarily, Aristotelian) that analyzes moral action as a result of choice combining reason and desire in reference to an end to be obtained. Beings that have intellect and will (or rational appetite) have emotion; that is, they are capable of being "moved" towards (or away from) an object by appetite. For human beings, the paradigm experience of emotion is... (shrink)

This paper surveys some ways of distinguishing Quasi-Realism in metaethics from Non-naturalist Realism, including ‘Explanationist’ methods of distinguishing, which characterize the Real by its explanatory role, and Inferentialist methods. Rather than seeking the One True Distinction, the paper adopts an irenic and pragmatist perspective, allowing that different ways of drawing the line are best for different purposes.

Among social epistemologists, having a certain proportion of reliably formed beliefs in a subject matter is widely regarded as a necessary condition for cognitive expertise. This condition is motivated by the idea that expert testimony puts subjects in a better position than non-expert testimony to obtain knowledge about a subject matter. I offer three arguments showing that veritism is an inadequate account of expert authority because the reliable access condition renders expertise incapable of performing its social role. I then develop (...) an alternative explanation of expert authority that I call the epistemic facility account, arguing that having a certain type of competence in a subject matter or domain of subject matters is sufficient for explaining expert authority while avoiding the problems with veritistic accounts. (shrink)

There has been a great deal of skepticism towards the value of the realism/anti-realism debate. More specifically, many have argued that plausible formulations of realism and anti-realism do not differ substantially in any way. In this paper, I argue against this trend by demonstrating how a hypothetical resolution of the debate, through deeper engagement with the historical record, has important implications for our criterion of theory pursuit and science policy. I do this by revisiting Arthur Fine’s ‘small handful’ argument for (...) realism and show how the debate centers on whether continuity should be an indicator for the future fruitfulness of a theory. I then demonstrate how these debates work in practice by considering the case of the Human Brain Project. I close by considering some potential practical considerations of formulating meta-inductions. By doing this, I contribute three insights to the current debate: 1) demonstrate how the realism/anti-realism debate is a substantive debate, 2) connect debates about realism/anti-realism to debates about theory choice and pursuit, and 3) show the practical significance of meta-inductions. (shrink)

A probiotic turn is underway in the management of human and environmental health. Modern approaches are being challenged by deliberate interventions that introduce formerly taboo life forms into bodies, homes, cities and the wider countryside. These are guided by concepts drawn from the life sciences, including immunity and resilience. This analysis critically evaluates this turn, drawing on examples of rewilding nature reserves and reworming the human microbiome. It identifies a common ontology of socio-ecological systems marked by anthropogenic absences and tipped (...) across thresholds into less desirable states. It examines the operation of an environmental mode of biopower associated with deliberate efforts to engineer ecologies through the introduction of keystone species. It offers a set of criteria for critically evaluating the degree to which these interventions transform or sustain prevalent forms of late modern biopolitics. The conclusion reflects on the potentials of probiotic environmentalities for hospitable government beyond the Anthropocene. (shrink)

This paper offers a defence of the distinction between agent-neutral and agent-relative reasons for action from scepticism aired by Toni Rønnow-Rasmussen. In response it is argued that the Nagelian notion of an agent-neutral reason is not incomprehensible, and that agent-neutral reasons can indeed be understood as obtaining states of affairs that count in favour of anyone and everyone performing the action they favour. Furthermore, I argue that a distinction drawn between agent-neutral and agent-relative reason-statements that express the salient features of (...) reason-constitutive states of affairs is neither reductive in the sense of reducing normative reasons to the propositional content of an agent’s mental state, nor trivial in the sense of locating the distinction merely in an agent’s description of the world. (shrink)

Bioinformatics – the so-called shotgun marriage between biology and computer science – is an interdiscipline. Despite interdisciplinarity being seen as a virtue, for having the capacity to solve complex problems and foster innovation, it has the potential to place projects and people in anomalous categories. For example, valorised ‘outputs’ in academia are often defined and rewarded by discipline. Bioinformatics, as an interdisciplinary bricolage, incorporates experts from various disciplinary cultures with their own distinct ways of working. Perceived problems of interdisciplinarity include (...) difficulties of making explicit knowledge that is practical, theoretical, or cognitive. But successful interdisciplinary research also depends on an understanding of disciplinary cultures and value systems, often only tacitly understood by members of the communities in question. In bioinformatics, the ‘parent’ disciplines have different value systems; for example, what is considered worthwhile research by computer scientists can be thought of as trivial by biologists, and vice versa. This paper concentrates on the problems of reward and recognition described by scientists working in academic bioinformatics in the United Kingdom. We highlight problems that are a consequence of its cross-cultural make-up, recognising that the mismatches in knowledge in this borderland take place not just at the level of the practical, theoretical, or epistemological, but also at the cultural level too. The trend in big, interdisciplinary science is towards multiple authors on a single paper; in bioinformatics this has created hybrid or fractional scientists who find they are being positioned not just in-between established disciplines but also in-between as middle authors or, worse still, left off papers altogether. (shrink)

In the following review essay I provide some background in order to place Margaret Archer's edited Volume 3 text, Generative Mechanisms, in context of the series from which it derives. In doing so I provide some sense of the significance of the series. Thereafter, I provide an overview of the key substantive claims of the essays, with some comment on how they may be linked together in terms of the theme of the series.

Female leaders continue to face bias in the workplace compared to male leaders. When employees are evaluated differently because of who they are rather than how they perform, an ethical dilemma arises for leaders and organizations. Thus, bridging role congruity and social identity leadership theories, we propose that gender biases in leadership evaluations can be overcome by manipulating diversity at the team level. Across two multiple-source, multiple-wave, and randomized field experiments, we test whether team gender composition restores gender equity in (...) leadership evaluations. In Study 1, we find that male leaders are rated as more prototypical in male-dominated groups, an advantage that is eliminated in gender-balanced groups. In Study 2, we replicate and extend this finding by showing that leader gender and team gender composition interact to predict trust in the leader via perceptions of leader prototypicality. The results show causal support for the social identity model of organizational leadership and a boundary condition of role congruity theory. Beyond moral arguments of fairness, our findings also show how, in the case of gender, team diversity can create a more level playing field for leaders. Finally, we outline the implications of our results for leaders, organizations, business ethics, and society. (shrink)

Arbitrary symbolism is a linguistic doctrine that predicts an orthogonal relationship between word forms and their corresponding meanings. Recent corpora analyses have demonstrated violations of arbitrary symbolism with respect to concreteness, a variable characterizing the sensorimotor salience of a word. In addition to qualitative semantic differences, abstract and concrete words are also marked by distinct morphophonological structures such as length and morphological complexity. Native English speakers show sensitivity to these markers in tasks such as auditory word recognition and naming. One (...) unanswered question is whether this violation of arbitrariness reflects an idiosyncratic property of the English lexicon or whether word concreteness is a marked phenomenon across other natural languages. We isolated concrete and abstract English nouns, and translated each into Russian, Arabic, Dutch, Mandarin, Hindi, Korean, Hebrew, and American Sign Language. We conducted offline acoustic analyses of abstract and concrete word length discrepancies across languages. In a separate experiment, native English speakers with no prior knowledge of these foreign languages judged concreteness of these nouns. Each naïve participant heard pre-recorded words presented in randomized blocks of three foreign languages following a brief listening exposure to a narrative sample from each respective language. Concrete and abstract words differed by length across five of eight languages, and prediction accuracy exceeded chance for four of eight languages. These results suggest that word concreteness is a marked phenomenon across several of the world's most widely spoken languages. We interpret these findings as supportive of an adaptive cognitive heuristic that allows listeners to exploit non-arbitrary mappings of word form to word meaning. (shrink)

By its very nature, much of teamwork is distributed across, and not stored within, interdependent people working toward a common goal. In this light, we advocate a systems perspective on teamwork that is based on general coordination principles that are not limited to cognitive, motor, and physiological levels of explanation within the individual. In this article, we present a framework for understanding and modeling teams as dynamical systems and review our empirical findings on teams as dynamical systems. We proceed by (...) (a) considering the question of why study teams as dynamical systems, (b) considering the meaning of dynamical systems concepts (attractors; perturbation; synchronization; fractals) in the context of teams, (c) describe empirical studies of team coordination dynamics at the perceptual-motor, cognitive-behavioral, and cognitive-neurophysiological levels of analysis, and (d) consider the theoretical and practical implications of this approach, including new kinds of explanations of human performance and real-time analysis and performance modeling. Throughout our discussion of the topics we consider how to describe teamwork using equations and/or modeling techniques that describe the dynamics. Finally, we consider what dynamical equations and models do and do not tell us about human performance in teams and suggest future research directions in this area. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe Centre for Social Ontology working group project has been exploring the concept of a Morphogenic Society since 2013. The project is now drawing to a close. One of the arising issues from the project has been whether such a society can be and is liable to be one of human flourishing. In this short paper, I explore one possible aspect of the concept of a Morphogenic Society.1 A Morphogenic Society may involve issues of ‘contingent necessity’. Contingent necessity may provide (...) one way to think about human flourishing, and this in turn may highlight the potential significance of the concept of a Morphogenic Society as a resource in positional argument for human flourishing. (shrink)

Rogers canvases the literature critical of recent experiments, adding new criticisms of her own. She argues these experiments should not undermine belief in human freedom and lists ethical and practical problems facing the attempt to study free will experimentally.

A popular critique of the kalām cosmological argument is that one argument for its second premise illicitly assumes a finite starting point for the series of past temporal events, thereby begging the question against opponents. Rejecting this assumption, opponents say, eliminates any objections to the possibility that the past is infinitely old and undermines the IFA’s ability to support premise 2. I contend that the plausibility of this objection depends on ambiguities in extant formulations of the IFA and that we (...) may resolve these ambiguities in a way that does not presuppose a finite staring point. I also argue that this disambiguation allows us to construct an argument demonstrating that the concept of an infinite past entails a contradiction. (shrink)

Rogers takes up each of the manual's topics in turn, providing explanation and commentary, and investigates the role of reasoning in the Ge-luk-pa system of ...

This paper defends moral testimony pessimism, the view that there is something morally or epistemically regrettable about relying on the moral testimony of others, against several arguments in Lillehammer. One central such argument is that reliance on testimony is inconsistent with the exercise of true practical wisdom. Lillehammer doubts whether such reliance is always objectionable, but it is important to note that moral testimony pessimism is best understood as a view about the pro tanto, rather than the overall, badness of (...) relying on testimony. One must also be clear about what counts as genuine moral testimony: there will be morally charged occasions when a virtuous person will properly rely on the views of others. It can also plausibly be argued that relying on moral testimony may constitute a lack of full autonomy. After discussing some remaining issues concerning the definition of moral testimony, a possible analogy between lying and relying on testimony, and the implications of untrustworthiness for the truth of moral testimony pessimism, the paper ends with a return to the case against relying on moral testimony, grounded on a conception of the role of knowledge and understanding in virtue. (shrink)

Wendy Rogers ist Professorin für klinische Ethik und Catriona Mackenzie ist Professorin für Philosophie. Beide lehren an der Macquarie University in Sydney, Australien. Susan Dodds ist Professorin für Philosophie an der La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australien. Alle drei befassen sich seit Jahren intensiv mit feministischer Theorie, angewandter und biomedizinischer Ethik sowie mit Moralphilosophie.

While many philosophers speak of ‘pluralism’ within philosophy of biology, there has been little said about what such pluralism amounts to or what its underlying assumptions are. This has provoked so me anxiety about whether pluralism is compatible with their commitment to naturalism (Cussins 1992). This paper surveys three prominent pluralist positions (Sandra Mitchell and Michael Dietrich’s (2006) ‘integrative pluralism’, and both Peter Godfrey-Smith’s (1993) and Beth Preston’s (1998) pluralist analyses of functional explanations in evolutionary biology) and demonstrates how all (...) three are committed to a form of pragmatism. This analysis both clarifies the justification and grounding of pluralism and allows these pluralisms to avoid the criticisms of Cussins. I close by making some more general points about pluralism and its relationship to history and integration. (shrink)

Epistemic Justification We often believe what we are told by our parents, friends, doctors, and news reporters. We often believe what we see, taste, and smell. We hold beliefs about the past, the present, and the future. Do we have a right to hold any of these beliefs? Are any supported by evidence? Should we … Continue reading Justification, Epistemic →.

As practiced, medicine bumps along with the rest of us, doing its level best to cope with the contingencies of this often heartbreaking world. Yet it's a commonplace that much of medicine's self‐image, and a good deal of its cultural heft, come from its connection with the natural sciences and, what's more, from a picture of science that has a touch of the transcendental, highlighting the unmatched rigor of its procedures, its exacting rationality, and the reliability of its results.In contrast, (...) the very idea of “queer” carries with it a little taste of the uncanny. What we're inclined to label queer resists understanding, not so much because it's too complicated, but because it tends to be too slippery to capture neatly in our conceptual nets—that queer ache in your side, for instance, or your partner's queer notion of doing laundry. The outmoded use of “queer,” as a way to refer disparagingly to gay people, carried similar uncanny connotations: the unnatural, the perverse.One might think, then, that the reclamation of “queer” as an umbrella term referring to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender spectrum has a pleasing depth to its irony—not only does it wrench the customary direction of evaluation conveyed by the word from condemnation to celebration, but it also hints that what you find comprehensible depends a good deal on who you are and where you're standing. What from the perspective of many heterosexual and cisgendered people may seem opaque, exotic, threatening—erotic love directed toward someone with the same kind of body you have, lives lived in ways that challenge the immutability of birth‐assigned gender—are to LGBT folk not uncanny at all, but as familiar as breathing.I like this conceit, but alas, it is too simple. It slights the variety of difficulties associated with making sense of queerness that can vex deeply thoughtful people of undoubted good will—as I found out some years ago when I first talked about my efforts to understand my own transgender identity with a ferociously intelligent, highly sophisticated friend. (shrink)

Robert Talisse’s recent attempt to justify liberal democracy in epistemic terms is in many ways a breath of fresh air. However, in the present paper we argue that his defense faces two inter-related problems. The first problem pertains to his defense of liberalism, and owes to the fact that a commitment to the folk-epistemological norms in terms of which he makes his case does not commit one to partaking in liberal institutions. Consequently, our (alleged) commitment to the relevant epistemic norms (...) does not justify liberal democracy. The second problem pertains to his defense of democracy. The problem is that, if Talisse provides what we take to be the most plausible response to the first problem, framed in terms of his acceptance of a form of epistemic perfectionism, he is able to maintain his commitment to liberal institutions, but at the price of leaving democracy behind in favor of what we will refer to as a liberal epistocracy. (shrink)

John Rogers explores the concepts of recognition, command and authority and tests their validity in several cases presented by Hobbes, ranging from parental authority to the omnipotence of God. The general thesis he defends is that, for Hobbes, autonomy always goes hand in hand with the possession of power. Even for the individuals in a civil society, there is no autonomy but in a condition of empowerment. But, at the same time, the strength of the laws of nature rests (...) in their rationality, and there can be no doubt that their compelling force comes from their being rational. The comparison with mathematical theorems furnishes an important element of understanding, since the laws of nature are conclusions concerning that which conduces to the conservation of oneself. Although there is an empirical element in the deduction of those practical theorems, this is no objection to the analogy being drawn, since this empirical element belongs to the learning process and not to the rationality of the law itself. In the light of this conception of natural law, Hobbes thus appears as a rationalist in morals and politics. (shrink)

Rogers suggests that human spirituality comprises the interplay of three foundational human dynamics: suffering, interconnecting, and valuing. The spiritual orientations that result from these clusters of dynamics are primarily integrating or disintegrating. The dominant spiritual orientation in this country has been disintegrating; and this orientation has characterized the attitude of the majority population toward African Americans since the beginning of slavery, fostering radical separation, displacing the suffering of the majority onto a minority, and defining the experience and perspectives of (...) the majority as normative without regard for the minority. Rogers explores the effects of this disintegrating spiritual orientation in terms of the dynamics of oppression using the ideas of 'being' and 'non-being'. The key to ameliorating oppression is to recognize the liberating capacity of suffering as potentially subversive within ever-enlarging contexts addicted to increasing material consumption and sensual gratification. ;Chapter 1 is a general introduction to the dissertation. ;Chapter 2 provides an overview of the primary methodology for research in 'formation theory' as developed by Adrian van Kaam. Using issues from the philosophy of science, the chapter also discusses the basis for divergence from the standard methodology based in the anomalous character of the researcher's 'formative event' and perspective relative to concerns that have been researched using formation theory. ;Chapter 3 considers a conceptualization of spirit as questing for meaningfulness, which provides the experiential ground for relating spirituality and liberation: Since oppression precipitates meaninglessness through disintegration, the reaffirmation of an integrative spirituality provides the ground for meaningfulness, which in turn grounds liberation, or transcendence. ;Chapter 4 presents the construct of human spirituality using the three foundational foci of spiritual formation: suffering, relating, and valuing. ;Chapter 5 concludes the dissertation using the two principle laws of thermodynamics to develop an analogous understanding for the necessity of suffering in maintaining an integrative and liberating spirituality. It also considers implications of the dissertation for liberation of oppressed peoples, the development of science and social policy, and formation theory. (shrink)

biological theories of emotion are often used to explain and predict human desires, particularly the desire to reproduce. I propose that these desires are largely socially constructed, but that the naturalization of desires and the normalization of biological theories sustain the pursuit of biological childbearing as a biological need. Foundational metaphysical and epistemological theories have lent both authority and urgency to the idea of a biological need to bear children, which has resulted in a diminished focus on alternative modes of (...) having children.I suggest that a form of biological determinism rests on what philosopher John Dewey calls a misplaced "quest for certainty." This search is a process whereby a... (shrink)

The government claims that the important decisions it is now making are guided by principles that simply cannot be guiding them. Their decisions must in fact be guided by other considerations. Yet they prefer to peddle nonsense than to reveal their actual thinking (assuming there is some). Why? Why do politicians, who are experts in rhetoric and seek to win public favour, relentlessly and publicly indulge in shoddy reasoning?

Wayfinding is defined as the ability to learn and remember a route through an environment. Previous researchers have shown that young children have difficulties remembering routes. However, very few researchers have considered how to improve young children's wayfinding abilities. Therefore, we investigated ways to help children increase their wayfinding skills. In two studies, a total of 72 5-year olds were shown a route in a six turn maze in a virtual environment and were then asked to retrace this route by (...) themselves. A unique landmark was positioned at each junction and each junction was made up of two paths: a correct path and an incorrect path. Two different strategies improved route learning performance. In Experiment 1, verbally labeling on-route junction landmarks during the first walk reduced the number of errors and the number of trials to reach a learning criterion when the children retraced the route. In Experiment 2, encouraging children to attend to on-route junction landmarks on the first walk reduced the number of errors when the route was retraced. This was the first study to show that very young children can be taught route learning skills. The implications of our results are discussed. (shrink)