Folk Psychology and the Bayesian Brain

Whilst much has been said about the implications of predictive processing for our scientific understanding of cognition, there has been comparatively little discussion of how this new paradigm fits with our everyday understanding of the mind, i.e. folk psychology. This paper aims to assess the relationship between folk psychology and predictive processing, which will first require making a distinction between two ways of understanding folk psychology: as propositional attitude psychology and as a broader folk psychological discourse. It will be argued that folk psychology in this broader sense is compatible with predictive processing, despite the fact that there is an apparent incompatibility between predictive processing and a literalist interpretation of propositional attitude psychology. The distinction between these two kinds of folk psychology allows us to accept that our scientific usage of folk concepts requires revision, whilst rejecting the suggestion that we should eliminate folk psychology entirely

To Each According to their Needs: Anarchist Praxis as a Resource for Byzantine Theological Ethics

I argue that anarchist ideas for organising human communities could be a useful practical resource for Christian ethics. I demonstrate this firstly by introducing the main theological ideas underlying Maximus the Confessor’s ethics, a theologian respected and important in a number of Christian denominations. I compare practical similarities in the way in which ‘love’ and ‘well-being’ are interpreted as the telos of Maximus and Peter Kropotkin’s ethics respectively. I further highlight these similarities by demonstrating them in action when it comes attitudes towards property. I consequently suggest that there are enough similarities in practical aims, for Kropotkin’s ideas for human organising to be useful to Christian ethicists

The Cosmology of St Maximus the Confessor as a Basis for Ecological and Humanitarian Ethics

This paper explores the cosmology of St Maximus the Confessor and its relevance for contemporary ethics. It takes as it’s starting point two papers on Maximus’ cosmology and environmental ethics (Bordeianu, 2009; Munteanu, 2010) and from there argues that we can not consider environmental ethics in isolation from other ethical issues. This, as both Ware and Keselopoulos have also pointed out, is because the environmental crisis is actually a crisis in the human heart and in human attitudes toward everything about us. The paper goes through some key areas in Maximus’ cosmology according to his own formula of creation – movement – rest and considers at each stage the implications of this theology for the way the human should be living and treating other beings. The main sources for this exploration are Ambiguum 7, Ambiguum 41, and The Mystagogia with especial focus on the doctrine of the logoi and the divisions of nature. The paper concludes that Bordeianu and Munteanu are right to consider Maximus’ theology to be of ecological relevance, but that this relevance comes from the radical ethical statement being made about human activity. Maximus’ theology points the human toward becoming in the likeness of Christ who unites heaven and earth through love. The love of Christ when considered in an ethical context stands as a formidable challenge to current attitudes and institutions that advocate the exploitation and destruction of human or non-human creation

Daring to Lead : Global perceptions of the IFHE Position Statement "Home Economics in the 21st Century"

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Competition Between Regions With Respect to Industrial Support - A Theoretical Model

In recent years it seems that both regions and cities appear to have become more eager to present themselves as regions or cities in which new or mobile firms in certain industrial sectors (especially perhaps biotechnology) should locate. At the same time, in the UK at least, there has been devolution of the administration of regional policy, albeit with specific targets being set by the national government. Thus cities and regions have become, at least in part, more able to combine their publicity with financial support for the particular industrial sector they wish to foster. In this paper a model is developed which has the following properties. Cities allocate monies between two types of expenditure, (i) support for a nascent industry and (ii) support for social policies, with payoffs that differ for different cities. It is shown that, if firms in the nascent industry are attracted by relatively high levels of support, cities will generally spend more on industrial support than the national government would. This simple model is similar to those developed in the literature on Tax Competition. This feature allows a commentary to be made on both the policy implications and possible extensions of the model.