The editors of the JRE collected short essays from scholars of religion in response to a recent incident at Hamline University that made national headlines. Last fall, Hamline University administrators refused to extend a contract to an adjunct professor of art history after a Muslim student accused her of Islamophobia for showing a 14th‐century image of Mohammad in an online class. The event provoked intense conversations about issues of academic freedom, religious diversity, the status of contingent faculty, and race. These (...) essays bring together scholarly and personal reflections about the incident at Hamline and what it means for the pedagogy of religious studies. (shrink)

The creative process has the potential to increase wellbeing and foster human flourishing (Dolan and Metcalfe, 2012 ; Forgeard and Eichner, 2014 ; O’Brien and Murray, 2015 ; Conner et al., 2018 ; Kaufman, 2018 ), yet has received little attention in the humanistic management literature. In this paper, we present three experiments showing that idea originators experience greater relationship conflict with counterparts who have committed perceived “idea theft”, i.e., proposed identical or related ideas. We test a model that identifies (...) a mechanism—self-threat—that mediates the relationship between idea theft and relationship conflict and identifies an intervention to ameliorate that self-threat via self-affirmation. Study 1 demonstrates the idea originator’s attribution of malign attributions to, and negative moral emotions toward, the counterpart. Study 2 demonstrates that idea originators ostracize both those who propose identical ideas and those who propose merely related ideas. In Study 3, evidence for self-threat as the mechanism underlying the negative relational consequences is provided via both a direct test of mediation as well as via moderation by self-affirmation. Our research contributes to the nascent idea theft literature and suggests a way to reduce its negative consequences. (shrink)

How might humanity experience ultimate reality as intimately related to us, as liberating us individually and corporately from disorder, and as empowering our personal self-integration? With this question in mind, this work reexamines the images and concepts of Christian doctrinal tradition which--under the rubric of the "doctrine of the atonement"--have historically promoted this experience. The extended constructive essay which concludes the book makes extensive and foundational--though not uncritical--use of Whiteheadian process-relational thought to provide new ontological grounding to Christian images and (...) concepts of atonement. (shrink)

This article uses the NetCorps Jordan project as a case study of the ways in which Information Technology transforms social and economic life at the grass roots. Particular attention is paid to the role of gender in shaping such processes. In the end, this essay explores the motivations, the hopes and the results of one Arab country’s IT4 D experiment using the narratives of the participants as a guide. It is clear from the analysis below that culture, context and gender (...) play a significant role in who gets to do what with IT. (shrink)

Critique de la possibilité d'individus non-substantiels récurrents que G. E. L. Owen repère dans l'«Organon» d'Aristote. Soulevant le problème ontologique de l'un et du multiple, des entités particulières et des entités universelles chez Aristote, l'A. montre qu'un individu unique en nombre ne peut se reproduire périodiquement et que le statut modal des individus récurrents contredit la définition du sujet présent dans les «Catégories» . Conformément aux conditions de la ressemblance établies par Aristote dans les «Topiques», l'A. conclut à l'impossibilité d'individus (...) substantiels ou non-substantiels universels. (shrink)

Vladimir Lefebvre's mathematical model of cognitive reflexion, together with applications; plus thirteen evaluations by relevant authorities. Lefebvre's chapter is an algebraic description of a special hypothetical -processor-, intrinsic to in humans, that models the self and others. The model's -predictions- of personality constructs, culture conflicts, musicological scales and quantum models are presented, together with experimental confirmations. Most of the critics (Jack Adams-Webber, William Batchelder, Konstantin Bogatyrew, Louis Kauffman, Victorina Lefebvre, L.B. Levitin, Ernest McClain, Anatol Rapoport, Richard Sacksteder, Frederick Turner, Harvey (...) Wheeler and Robert Zajonc) are favorable. Some offer different interpretations and propose modifications.". (shrink)

Here Ovid treats the demiurge's disposition of weightless aether over the other elements. This section of the cosmogony follows one that is devoted to the sphere of aer where the creator settles the turbulent winds and other threatening meteorological phenomena. Recently Denis Feeney has suggested that Ovid's demiurge ‘does not act in a very epic manner’ by placing weightless aether on top of the winds. He argues: ‘The oddness of the control is caught in a moment of comparison with Vergil's (...) universe: Vergil's Jupiter controls the winds by putting on top of them a mass of mountains, while Ovid's mundi fabricator places above them the aether, explicitly “liquid and lacking weight, containing nothing of earthly sediment” ’. Feeney's observation has much to recommend it. To begin with, Ovid's excursus on the cardinal winds evokes Vergil's set piece on the cave of Aeolus in Aeneid l. And the demiurge's subsequent placement of aether seems to echo the action of the Vergilian Jupiter. However, Feeney's conclusion that the demiurge's action is ‘redolent of anti-epic allegiances’ needs some adjustment.4 For his reading neglects an important verbal and structural allusion to the cosmogony of Lucretius . Accordingly, the conclusion to be drawn from lines 67–8 may be, not that Ovid momentarily reveals his Callimachean colours in an epic context, but that he plays Lucretius off against Vergil and so establishes his own position in the epic tradition of cosmological poetry. (shrink)

The “absorber theory” of Wheeler and Feynman is supposed to justify the use of retarded potentials in ordinary electromagnetic calculations despite a fundamentally time symmetric interaction. We restate the thesis of absorber theory as follows: here exist causal solutions of time symmetric electrodynamics. In our formulation, absorption need only take place in one direction of time (the future) rather than both, as seems to be required by Wheeler and Feynman. Even with complete absorption, however, the effects of advanced (...) interactions are not entirely eliminated and a residual field may introduce a degree of indeterminacy into particle trajectories obtained using retarded potentials alone. (shrink)

It is with sincere appreciation that I commend this edited collection to readers of the AJTP. The collection meets the task of promoting lively discussion that addresses the interface between theology and philosophy, especially as shaped by empiricist, naturalist, process, and pragmatist traditions. As the most recent volume in the series Toward Ecological Civilization, it delivers papers from the Tenth International Whitehead Conference and Ninth International Forum on Ecological Civilization, held in Claremont, California, June 2015, thereby delivering on a second (...) focus for the AJTP: the development of liberal religious thought in America.The authors gathered in this collection take seriously the earnest and... (shrink)

MICHAEL WHEELER Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005432 pages, ISBN: 0262232405 (hbk); $35.001.When I was teaching at MIT in the 1960s, students from the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory would come to...

There are a number of problematic features within the current treatment of time in physical theories, including the “timelessness” of the Universe as encapsulated by the Wheeler–DeWitt equation. This paper considers one particular investigation into resolving this issue; a conditional probability interpretation that was first proposed by Page and Wooters. Those authors addressed the apparent timelessness by subdividing a faux Universe into two entangled parts, “the clock” and “the remainder of the Universe”, and then synchronizing the effective dynamics of (...) the two subsystems by way of conditional probabilities. The current treatment focuses on the possibility of using a realistic clock system; namely, a coherent-state description of a damped harmonic oscillator. This clock proves to be consistent with the conditional probability interpretation; in particular, a standard evolution operator is identified with the position of the clock playing the role of time for the rest of the Universe. Restrictions on the damping factor are determined and, perhaps contrary to expectations, the optimal choice of clock is not necessarily one of minimal damping. (shrink)

The text is taken from Georg Luck's edition . I have also consulted P. Burman , S. G. Owen's editio maior , A. L. Wheeler's Loeb edition in the 2nd edition revised by G. P. Goold , and Georg Luck's commentary . I have also had a preview of J. B. Hall's forthcoming Teubner edition and I have used his apparatus, in which the traditional sigla for the principal manuscripts are retained.

The text is taken from Georg Luck's edition. I have also consulted P. Burman, S. G. Owen's editio maior, A. L. Wheeler's Loeb edition in the 2nd edition revised by G. P. Goold, and Georg Luck's commentary. I have also had a preview of J. B. Hall's forthcoming Teubner edition and I have used his apparatus, in which the traditional sigla for the principal manuscripts are retained.

In this paper, we construct a parallel image of the conventional Maxwell theory by replacing the observer-time by the proper-time of the source. This formulation is mathematically, but not physically, equivalent to the conventional form. The change induces a new symmetry group which is distinct from, but closely related to the Lorentz group, and fixes the clock of the source for all observers. The new wave equation contains an additional term (dissipative), which arises instantaneously with acceleration. This shows that the (...) origin of radiation reaction is not the action of a “charge” on itself but arises from inertial resistance to changes in motion. This dissipative term is equivalent to an effective mass so that classical radiation has both a massless and a massive part. Hence, at the local level the theory is one of particles and fields but there is no self-energy divergence (nor any of the other problems). We also show that, for any closed system of particles, there is a global inertial frame and unique (invariant) global proper-time (for each observer) from which to observe the system. This global clock is intrinsically related to the proper clocks of the individual particles and provides a unique definition of simultaneity for all events associated with the system. We suggest that this clock is the historical clock of Horwitz, Piron, and Fanchi. At this level, the theory is of the action-at-a-distance type and the absorption hypothesis of Wheeler and Feynman follows from global conservation of energy. (shrink)

It was shown in Dirac A117, 610; A118, 351, 1928) that the ultra-violet divergence in quantum electrodynamics is caused by a violation of the time-energy uncertainly relationship, due to the implicit assumption of infinitesimal time information. In Wheeler et al. it was shown that Einstein’s special theory of relativity and Maxwell’s field theory have mathematically equivalent dual versions. The dual versions arise from an identity relating observer time to proper time as a contact transformation on configuration space, which leaves (...) phase space invariant. The special theory has a dual version in the sense that, for any set of n particles, every observer has two unique sets of global variables \\) and \\) to describe the dynamics, where \ is the canonical center of mass. In the \\) variables, time is relative and the speed of light is unique, while in the \\) variables, time is unique and the speed of light is relative with no upper bound. In the Maxwell case, the two sets of particle wave equations are not equivalent. The dual version contains an additional longitudinal radiation term that appears instantaneously with acceleration, leading to the prediction that radiation from a cyclotron will not produce photoelectrons. A major outcome is the dual unification of Newtonian mechanics and classical electrodynamics with Einstein’s special theory of relativity, without the need for point particles, without a self-energy divergency and, without need for the problematic Lorentz–Dirac equation. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the dual theory of relativistic quantum mechanics. In our approach, we obtain three distinct dual relativistic wave equations that reduce to the Schrödinger equation when minimal coupling is turned off. We show that the dual Dirac equation provides a new formula for the anomalous magnetic moment of a charged particle. We can obtain the exact value for the electron g-factor and phenomenological values for the muon and proton g-factors. (shrink)

The use of assistance systems aimed at reducing road fatalities is spreading, especially for car drivers, but less effort has been devoted to developing and testing similar systems for powered two-wheelers. Considering that over speeding represents one of the main causal factors in road crashes and that riders are more vulnerable than drivers, in the present study we investigated the effectiveness of an assistance system which signaled speed limit violations during a simulated moped-driving task, in optimal and poor visibility conditions. (...) Participants performed four conditions of simulated riding: one baseline condition without Feedback, one Fog condition in which visual feedback was provided so as to indicate to the participants when a speed limit was exceeded, and two post-Feedback conditions with and without Fog, respectively, in which no feedback was delivered. Results showed that participants make fewer speeding violations when the feedback is not provided, after 1 month, and regardless of the visibility condition. Finally, the feedback has been proven effective in reducing speed violations in participants with an aggressive riding style, as measured in the baseline session. (shrink)

In “Wheeler and Thompson’s Appeal: refounding utilitarianism through equality between men and women?”, Benjamin Bourcier studies this Appeal in which, in response to James Mill’s article On Government, Anna Wheeler and William Thompson offer a radical critique of utilitarian thought, but also of Mill’s political exclusion of women and legitimization of patriarchy. In contrast to Mill, they defend the political inclusion and equality of women, in order to meet the aspirations of a society of equals and the greatest (...) happiness for all. (shrink)