On June 12, 2016, the world witnessed one of the deadliest single shooter massacres in U.S. history. Fifty persons were killed and fifty-three were critically injured. Of those fifty, twenty-three were Puerto Rican; 90% of those killed were Latinx. Their faces spanned the racial kaleidoscope of the African, Latinx, and Indigenous diaspora. Most of them were working class and extremely young (Ochoa 2016). However, these particularities went largely omitted from the coverage of the event that swept the nation under the (...) label of an LGBTQ hate crime. The ubiquity of death of color in the U.S. cannot be overstated. Indeed, many pulses have been lost outside of Pulse nightclub. To many, June 12 may seem like a day among many, lost to the memorials of death no one really wants to remember. In this paper I explore June 12 as we turn the page on its sixth year of remembrance. I make the case for a reading of June 12 as more than an LGBTQ hate crime, but rather as emblematic of a battleground of a sacred space (Latin night at the gay bar) for queer bodies of color. The project establishes a more complex framework for understanding what took place on June 12 that can appreciate the ethno-racial, spiritual, and queer dimensions that foregrounded the event. I maintain that the method of analysis necessitates a different model of theorizing, one that can crystalize the sexuality of terrorism, the whiteness of homonationalism, and thereby the importance of creating sacred space for Latinx queer subjects, many of whom, in the context of June 12, form part of the Puerto Rican diaspora. (shrink)

Heraclitus accepts as a principle that any particular insight into things is necessarily partial and perspectival. Edward Halper has discussed how, for this reason, it is in principle impossible for a particular thinker to attain the perspective of the Logos by which the whole can be made intelligible. So, metaphysics itself tells us that metaphysics is impossible. According to Halper, Heraclitus was wrong to take the Logos as applying to itself, as the Logos should properly be understood as applying only (...) to what is not a product of human agency. I argue that Halper’s move cannot serve as a corrective patch to Heraclitus’ metaphysical thought, since it posits a distinction between the human and the rest of reality which Heraclitus could never accept. Although not a radical monist who denies the reality of all multiplicity, a fundamental principle of his thought is that all distinctions and oppositions are grounded in a more fundamental unity. I instead approach the Heraclitean paradox by appealing to the strategy, familiar from a number of ancient Greek philosophers, of making a distinction between different levels of knowledge inherent within the same knower. (shrink)

Three key elements of Aristotle’s theory of demonstration have Pythagorean antecedents. Demonstration is a revelatory discourse that is 1) inferential, 2) explicitly based on premises that are not themselves demonstrated on the basis of more basic premises, and 3) explanatory, insofar as the premises express those basic facts that are explanatory of the conclusion. The Pythagorean Table of Opposites constitutes a kind of protologic making possible a kind of deduction, which Aristotle would have regarded as a “demonstration,” that reveals the (...) reasons behind Pythagorean commands and prohibitions. Philolaus recognizes ultimate explanatory principles. Both he and Archytas recognize the asymmetry of principles and what is explained on their basis. (shrink)

Editors' Note: Your dilemmas as a negotiator fall into two basic sets, “what’s possible?” and “what's right?” The first is treated by many chapters in this book. Here, from his philosopher's background, Gibson writes about the influence of morality on negotiations, and how we can think more clearly about what's the right thing to do. This chapter should be read in conjunction with Carrie-Meadow’s chapter on The Morality of Compromise.

Behavioral and physiological synchronization have important implications for work teams with regard to workload management, coordinated behavior and overall functioning. This study extended previous work on the nonlinear statistical structure of GSR series in dyads to larger teams and included subjective ratings of workload and contributions to problem solving. Eleven teams of 3 or 4 people played a series of six emergency response (ER) games against a single opponent. Seven of the groups worked under a time pressure instruction at the (...) beginning of the first game. The other four groups were not given that instruction until the beginning of the fourth game. The optimal lag length for the teams, which appeared to be phase-locked, was substantially shorter than that obtained previously for loosely-coupled dyads. There was a complex nonlinear effect from the time pressure manipulation on the autocorrelation over time that reflected workload and fatigue dynamics that were operating. The R2 values for linear and nonlinear statistical models differed by less than.01. The average amount of influence from one ER team member to another was 4.5-4.7% of the variance in GSR readings. ER team members were classified as drivers and empaths, based on the autocorrelations and transfer influences to and from other players in the GSR time series. Empaths were rated by their peers as making more types of positive contributions to the problem solving discussions than others, and drivers received the lowest ratings. Larger Lyapunov exponents that were calculated from the GSR time series were positively correlated with individuals’ ratings of subjective workload and were negatively correlated with leadership indicators. Several directions for further research are outlined. (shrink)

Philosophers, scientists, and artists alike are prone to explore important questions concerning ecology as it relates to the impact of human actions for the future of nature and human civilizations. The main focus in this essay is to consider ecological implications of art understood as a form of leisure. Art is of course more than leisure for the artists and other arts professionals, but its personal and societal roles also serve as leisure activities. Both the production of art and its (...) consumption have important ecological implications. Select philosophical (Hegel) and scientific (Escobar) concerning art and nature provide a context for exploring art’s role in ecology. Complementing the philosophical and scientific understanding of ecological concerns are the efforts of artists and arts institutions to address ecological concerns both in their creative works and in assessing ecological implications of their respective practices. Ecology concerns environmental relationships taking place among the elements of nature (weather, land and water for example) that relate to evolutionary change and the effects on life in the built environments that comprise human civilizations. [i] Leisure, as I shall understand it here functions as a creative force in the life of human persons. [i]Robert A. Stebbins, “Leisure, Happiness, and Positive Lifestyle” and John Haworth, “Leisure, Life, Enjoyment,” in editors, Sam Elkingtonand Sean J. Gammon, Contemporary Perspectives in Leisure (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), 28-64. (shrink)

This essay attempts to spell out what might be left of Husserlian phenomenology when one leaves behind Husserl's own grounding ambitions. Husserl construes transcendental phenomenology as first philosophy. In a pragmatist vein of leaving it behind in the interest of something other, I discuss what would happen if one were to 'pragmatize' phenomenology. After first laying out Husserl's vision, in a second part I reconstruct the motives that led to it in reaction to a 'Cartesian anxiety' of not securing an (...) indubitable ground of knowledge. After that, the article spells out some pragmatic reflections on what phenomenology would be, without the need to secure foundations of knowledge. Such a liberation would in effect enable phenomenology to more fully make true on the ideals of the Enlightenment (which Rorty, too, underwrites) of emancipating oneself of one of the last vestiges of a dogmatic slumber. (shrink)

I consider the identity-theory of the Würzburg System as part of Schelling's five-year project to provide a metaphysical foundation for Naturphilosophie that is free of Kantian/Fichtean subjectivism and obeys the key constraint formulated by the German appropriation of Spinoza's: there can be no "egress from the absolute," i.e., no deduction of the limitations of finitude such as the Wissenschaftslehre provided. The demands of epistemic security (the identity of that which knows and what is known) and ontological simplicity (the impossibility of (...) ontological commitment both to an absolute and to individuals) are met by reworking the theory of the absolute's 'cognition' so that God's self-affirmation and self-contemplation are identified with the philosopher's intellectual intuition. In this way, Schelling integrates contents that Spinoza left separate in the first three books of the Ethics and establishes an ontology of power; this grounds a more dynamic version of Naturphilosophie, where Potenzen themselves become ontological actors. (shrink)

In his seminal 1935 study of the internal senses in medieval2 thought, Harry Austryn Wolfson presented a detailed account of the development of the "classification and terminology" of the Greek, Arabic, Hebrew and Latin traditions on sensory powers which he called, "post-sensationary faculties,"~ that is, powers which are posterior to the five external senses. In explaining the complex development of teachings on the internal senses from Aristotle's texts, Wolfson recounted the Aristotelian understanding of Galen who specifically locates the OHXVOTl'ttKOV or (...) cogitative faculty in the middle ventricle of the brain and John of Damascus whose equally Aristotelian account follows the Stagirite in attributing judgments of goodand bad as well as combination and separation of ideas to the omvoTl'ttKTJ 'lfUXTt or the cogitative soul and to ouxvma or cogitation.4 One of the many fruits of Wolfson's discussion was an explanation of the development of the Avicennian doctrine of estimation as arising"out of a desire to supplement a deficiency which seemed to exist in Aristotle's account of the actual motion of pursuit and avoidance which is observed in both man and animal. "5 With wahm used to describe instinctive behavior consequent upon non-rational animal imagination analogous to human reasoning or deliberation, Wolfson wrote, the Arabic fikr now was tobe associated with imagination and no longer was to be seen as simply the power of combining and separating ideas. "In the case of ouivotcx combined with imagination, it is the combination and separation of images, i.e., the construction out of images of things existent, new composite images of things nonexistent, or the breaking up of images of things existent into images of things nonexistent."6 From this moment on, and not without some foundation in Aristotle's own texts as indicated, fikr/ cogitatio and their related derivative terms are used to characterize human rational powers which are essentially activities involving the bodyand bodily instruments insofar as imagination is necessarily bodily. (shrink)

This essay explores the philosophical productions of women from the Spanish speaking Caribbean. Here the Caribbean is understood as a multiplicitous and polyphonic space that exists amidst modernities engendered by colonization. I present the intellectual contributions of Luisa Capetillo, Ofelia Rodríguez Acosta, Petronila Angélica Gómez, Ochy Curiel, Yuderkys Espinosa Miñoso, and Yomaira Figueroa as fertile philosophical starting points from which to frame a feminist tradition of the Spanish-speaking Caribbean that appreciates the multiple and often conflicting body of ideas that emerge (...) from within a sea of islands. (shrink)

I defend the view that charity in interpretation is both an epistemic and a moral virtue. In the first part, I examine Donald Davidson’s version of his principle of charity and question his ascription of beliefs by raising a phenomenological objection: beliefs themselves, before being ascribed, need to be interpreted when interpreters and the subjects they try to understand do not share the same cultural and historical background. In the second section, I examine the notion of epistemic virtue as discussed (...) in virtue epistemology and question whether an epistemic virtue can be completely separated from a moral virtue. In the third section, I show how Gregory the Great, Father of the Church and Pope in the 6th century, understands the virtue of charity in interpretation not as a motivation but as an attraction to the good so that the interpreter is not only a technician producing an interpretation but a moral agent acting in a community. (shrink)

Al-Farabi, Avicenna and Averroes, widely known classical rationalists in the Arabic/Islamic philosophical tradition and strongly infl uential sources for Latin philosophy in the High Middle Ages, all thought themselves to be following Aristotle’s lead regarding the intellectual abstraction of intelligibles in the formation of necessary and unchanging scientific knowledge. For Aristotle it is clear that sensation is a potentiality for apprehending or coming to be individual sensed objects found in the world exterior to the human soul. This takes place by (...) way of a separation of the forms of sensibles from matter and a reception of them as an actualization of the senses of the soul. 1 In an analogous fashion, intellectual knowing is a potentiality for apprehending or coming to be in act non-individuated intellectual forms that are somehow in individuated particular sensible things. Although Aristotle says that “the objects of thought are in the sensible forms”, the analogy with sensation breaks down when it comes to the objects intellectually known. The reason for this is that the nonindividuated or universal forms of human knowledge are not in the sensibles in act as they must be in the intellect. 2 Again following Aristotle De Anima 3.4 and 3.5, these thinkers hold for a part of intellect that is passive or receptive of all things and another part that is active in making all things, this latter described as a disposition like light, this as well describing the active agent as acting like light. This second part, which the Arabic tradition called the Agent Intellect, sometimes describing it also as Active Intellect, al-‘aql al-fa‘il, was understood per Aristotelem to be an eternal cause of the intellectual forms in the human intellect. It was accepted that, without a grounding in separate eternal intellect, there may well be generalization or abstraction – in some sense of the 57term? but scientific knowledge understood as true, necessary and unchanging will not be achieved. 3 Of course, in Posterior Analytics 2.19 Aristotle writes of sensory experience and provides the image of a retreat gradually coming to a halt, saying, “The soul is so constituted that it is capable of the same sort of process”. This process somehow establishes the universal in the soul even though perception is of the particular. He describes this as taking place by induction, writing, “Clearly then it must be by induction that we acquire knowledge of the primary principles, because this is also the way in which general concepts are conveyed to us by sense-perception.” These are “first things” or primary principles or premises required by demonstration. And the Arabic tradition understood Aristotle to hold for the necessity of demonstration in the formation of scientific knowledge, something that stringently requires not only proper syllogistic form but also first premises that are known to be true, not just supposed or simply generalized on the basis of experience. 4 For the Arabic tradition, Aristotle?s doctrine of intellectual understanding required the involvement of that separate Agent Intellect to provide a solid foundation for human scientific knowledge by way of intellectual abstraction. (shrink)

Synchronization of autonomic arousal levels within dyads and larger teams has been associated with several types of social-behavioral outcome. One previous study reported greater physiological influence of leaders on followers than of followers on leaders; influence was measured pairwise within triadic problem solving groups. The present study explored synchronized autonomic arousal with leadership outcomes in two experiments with group sizes of three to eight members. Drivers, who had the greatest physiological impact on other team members were consistently less like the (...) leader of the group. Empaths, who were the most receptive to autonomic signals from others, were not consistently associated with leadership roles, although they did show sensitivity to team dynamics in their ratings of cognitive and social sources of workload. The tentative conclusion, subject to future research, is that successful leadership requires a balance between the driver and empath orientations. (shrink)

To further the understanding of how to build or reduce synchrony in a work team, we examined two principles for defining the optimal condition to produce or limit synchrony: the empath-driver ratio, and the balance between autocorrelated autonomic arousal and the degree of influence that transfers from each group member to other group members. In study 1, we employed a series of computational simulations designed to manipulate the four variables. The results indicated that there is a four-way balance between driver (...) strength, empath strength, autocorrelational and transfer effects among team members. The relationship between the synchronization coefficient and the empath-driver ratio was moderated by whether the group adopted a network structure for group problem solving or command-and-control. In study 2 we analyzed autonomic arousal in four teams of five participants playing a first-person shooter computer game. The correlation between the synchronization coefficient and the empath-driver ratio was 0.280 based on 64 pairs of observations. The relationship was moderated by both the network structure and the statistical model that one adopted to analyze dyadic relationships within the group. The implications of these relationships for a growing theory of team synchrony are discussed. (shrink)

Synchronization is a special case of self-organization in which one can observe close mimicry in behavior of the system components. Synchrony in body movements, autonomic arousal, and EEG activity among human individuals has attracted considerable attention for their possible roles in social interaction. This article is specifically concerned with autonomic synchrony and finding the best model for the dyadic relationships, with regard to both theoretical and empirical accuracy, that could be extrapolated to synchrony levels for groups and teams of three (...) or more people. The four models that are compared in this study have different theoretical origins: the two-variable linear regression function, a three-parameter nonlinear regression function, the logistic map function stated in polynomial form, and the logistic map function stated as an exponential regression structure. The data for this study were electrodermal responses collected from a team of four people engaged in an emergency response simulation that produced 12 dyadic time series. Results shows strong levels of fit between the data and all four models, although there were significant differences among them. Further research directions point toward finding conditions that favor one model over another and exploring other possible nonlinear structures. (shrink)

In response to “Trump and the Trumpists” (Vol. 3, No. 1).

The article looks into the private interpretations of the private revelations given by the Blessed Virgin Mary to the shepherd children in Fatima, Portugal during World War I at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. It mentions that these interpretations have been subjected to the changes by Catholics who changed the Magisterium of the Church. It also notes the Russian country's consecration and conversion to the Catholic Church demonstrating obedience, confession, and Holy Communion.

In this article, I focus on three issues in Francisco Suárez’s account of the separated soul: the status of the separated soul as a person, the separated soul’s knowledge of itself, and the question of the soul’s nature both as form of the body and as existing outside the body. I place his discussion in dialogue with St. Thomas Aquinas and Cajetan (Thomas de Vio) and show the ways he departs from those two thinkers. Finally, I show that his account (...) of these problems makes for a philosophically probable account of the resurrection of the body. (shrink)

The Fichte-Schelling Correspondence interweaves intriguing personal stories and philosophical combat. One of the sadder personal stories involves Schelling getting wind of Fichte’s remark to Friedrich Schlegel that he did not understand transcendental method. The letters document several clumsy attempts by Fichte to minimize the criticism only to have it surface again in a letter Fichte wrote to a former student, Jean Baptiste Schad, who showed the letter to Schelling. In it, Fichte claimed that Schelling understood Wissenschaftslehre no better than Friedrich (...) Nicolai, whom Fichte had publicly excoriated for critiquing as “I-philosophy” a superficial assemblage of random quotes from mixed sources. (shrink)

In this article, Carter tells the weaving tale of the globalization of art and the interplay between eastern and western contemporary art. Carter sketches out the history of contemporary art in China with a keen eye towards the interplay between Chinese artists and the various western influences over time, such as the 16th century Jesuit artists, Impressionism, Cubism, Fauvism, and Dada to name a few. This history is marked by a ubiquitous tension as Chinese artists incorporated western innovations into their (...) work, while also maintaining the poetic and literary foundation of Chinese art. Coupling that with the influence of the Cultural Revolution and Soviet realism on the Chinese are world, Carter discusses the tenuous boundaries upon which Chinese art has been and continues to be produced. After considering this history, Carter goes on to analyze the effect Chinese art has on the western art world--both how it shapes the western art world and how this globalization, in turn, shapes Chinese art. In navigating this boundary, Carter explains how Chinese artists find mediate appealing to a global audience while maintaining their Chinese roots. Carter concludes this essay by considering the economic success of Chinese art in the west and drawing attention to the negotiations still taking place today between local culture/global culture, tradition/innovation and authenticity/market appeal. (shrink)

Many who speak glowingly about the possibilities for human relations in cyberspace, or virtual communities, laud them precisely because such communities are to a great extent free of the real spatial-temporal restrictions rooted in the limitations of our bodies. In this paper I investigate the importance of the body in establishing and maintaining human relations by considering the thought of the twentieth century French philosopher Gabriel Marcel. Because Marcel emphasized the central importance of the body in one's personal self-identity as (...) well as in initiating and maintaining intersubjective bonds in human communities, he is able to offer some interesting reflections on the character of virtual communities. I suggest that a number of the features of cyberspace and its communities that make it attractive to many are precisely the characteristics that Marcel would consider detrimental to establishing intimate lasting human communities. I conclude by indicating why I think that Marcel would be concerned that certain trends in our high tech culture may well lead many to prefer ``living'' in virtual, rather than real communities. (shrink)

This paper examines how within De Caelo Aristotle argues that the heavens rotate to the right, because this is best. I isolate and evaluate its presuppositions and show how it comprises both a dialectical argument to cosmological principles and a partial demonstrative explanation on the basis of such principles. Second, I consider the expressions of epistemological hesitation that Aristotle offers in regard to this (and similar) arguments, and draw conclusions concerning the status of cosmology as an Aristotelian science. In order (...) to "save the phenomena," to allow the endoxon that the heavens are alive and divine to stand, Aristotle needs to make the point that the world and its doings, including all of our human doings, depend on an actuality that is in some sense better than the occasional, incomplete activities in which we engage. (shrink)