[Review of] Paula Gunn Allen. The Woman Who Owned the Shadows

Paula Gunn Allen\u27s novel, The Woman Who Owned the Shadows, is important -- one of few written by an American Indian woman focusing on an Indian woman\u27s life. (Other examples are Sophia Alice Callahan\u27s Wynemia: A Child of the Forest, 1891, and Mourning Dove\u27s Cogewea, the Half Blood, 1927). Allen writes out of her Laguna Pueblo heritage (she says she is Laguna Pueblo/Sioux/Lebanese-American), and gives the reader a view of a contemporary Indian woman\u27s life through her character, Ephanie

Teaching Our Education Students to Teach Christianly

What does it mean to teach Christianly? We may not always agree on what it means. There can be no doubt, however, that the calling of teacher education departments in Christian post-secondary institutions is to prepare students to teach Christianly, whether in public or Christian schools. But how do we do this? I shall address this question by considering four themes: current conceptions of what it means to teach Christianly, an alternative model, the context of teaching Christianly, and some implications for our teacher education programs

The Daisystat: A model to explore multidimensional homeostasis

The Homeostat was a physical device that demonstrated Ashby’s notion of ‘ultrastability’. The components interact in such a way as to maintain sets of essential variables to within critical ranges in the face of an externally imposed regime of perturbations. The Daisystat model is presented that bears a number of similarities to Ashby’s Homeostat but which can also be considered as a higher dimensional version of the Watson & Lovelock Daisyworld model that sought to explain how homeostasis operating at the planetary scale may arise in the absence of foresight or planning. The Daisystat model features a population of diverse individuals that affect and are affected by the environment in different ways. The Daisystat model extends Daisyworld in that homeostasis is observed with systems comprised of four environmental variables and beyond. It is shown that the behaviour of the population is analogous to the ‘uniselector’ in the Homeostat in that rapid changes in the population allows the system to ‘search’ for stable states. This allows the system to find and recover homeostatic states in the face of externally applied perturbations. It is proposed that the Daisystat may afford insights into the evolution of increasingly complex systems such as the Earth system

Human Identity, Immanent Causal Relations, and the Principle of Non-Repeatability: Thomas Aquinas on the Bodily Resurrection

Can the persistence of a human being's soul at death and prior to the bodily resurrection be sufficient to guarantee that the resurrected human being is numerically identical to the human being who died? According to Thomas Aquinas, it can. Yet, given that Aquinas holds that the human being is identical to the composite of soul and body and ceases to exist at death, it's difficult to see how he can maintain this view. In this paper, I address Aquinas's response to this objection . After making a crucial clarification concerning the nature of the non-repeatability principle on which the objection relies, I argue that the contemporary notion of immanent causal relations provides us with a way of understanding Aquinas's defence that renders it both highly interesting and philosophically plausibl

Eat Y’Self Fitter: Orthorexia, Health, and Gender

Orthorexia is a condition in which the subject becomes obsessed with identifying and maintaining the ideal diet, rigidly avoiding foods perceived as unhealthy or harmful. In this paper, I examine widespread cultural factors that provide particularly fertile ground for the development of orthorexia, drawing out social and historical connections between religion and orthorexia (which literally means “righteous eating”), and also addressing how ambiguities in the concept of “health” make it particularly prone to take on quasi-religious significance. I argue that what makes this sort of disordered eating destructive to both men and women is ultimately a common urge to transcend rather than to embrace the realities of embodiment. In sum, I believe that orthorexia is best understood as a manifestation of age-old anxieties about human nitude and mortality—anxieties which current dominant sociocultural forces prime us to experi- ence and express in unhealthy attitudes toward healthy eating

Not Properly a Person: The Rational Soul and ‘Thomistic Substance Dualism’

Like Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas holds that the rational soul is the substantial form of the human body. In so doing, he takes himself to be rejecting a Platonic version of substance dualism; his criticisms, however, apply equally to a traditional understanding of Cartesian dualism. Aquinas’s own peculiar brand of dualism is receiving increased attention from contemporary philosophers—especially those attracted to positions that fall between Cartesian substance dualism and reductive materialism. What Aquinas’s own view amounts to, however, is subject to debate. Philosophers have claimed that ‘Thomistic substance dualism’ centers around two beliefs: the rational soul is an immaterial substance, and this immaterial substance is the human person. In this paper, I argue that labeling such an account ‘Thomistic’ proves dangerously misleading—not only does Aquinas himself explicitly deny both of these claims, but he denies them for philosophically significant reasons. Furthermore, I argue that Aquinas’s own position provides an account of human nature both more coherent and philosophically attractive

Self-Knowledge, Abnegation, and Ful llment in Medieval Mysticism

Self-knowledge is a persistent—and paradoxical—theme in medieval mysticism, which portrays our ultimate goal as union with the divine. Union with God is often taken to involve a cognitive and/or volitional merging that requires the loss of a sense of self as distinct from the divine. Yet affective mysticism—which emphasizes the passion of the incarnate Christ and portrays physical and emotional mystical experiences as inherently valuable—was in fact the dominant tradition in the later Middle Ages. An examination of both the affective and apophatic traditions demonstrates that, in addition to constituting a necessary stage on the path toward union with the divine, self-knowledge in medieval mysticism was seen not just as something to be transcended, but (particularly in the works of female mystics) as a means of overcoming alienation from embodied existence

Review of: Science Advice to the President (William T. Golden, ed. AAAS Press 2d Ed. 1993).

Review of: Science Advice to the President (William T. Golden, ed. AAAS Press 2d Ed. 1993). Acknowledgments, index of names, introductions, notes, tables. ISBN 0-87168-509-4 [340 pp. $29.95 paper. American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1333 H St. NW, Washington DC 20701.

What Has History to Do with Philosophy? Insights from the Medieval Contemplative Tradition

This paper highlights the corrective and complementary role that historically informed philosophy can play in contemporary discussions. What it takes for an experience to count as genuinely mystical has been the source of significant controversy; most current philosophical definitions of ‘mystical experience’ exclude embodied, non-unitive states -- but, in so doing, they exclude the majority of reported mystical experiences. I use a re- examination of the full range of reported medieval mystical experiences (both in the apophatic tradition, which excludes or denigrates embodied states, and in the affective tradition, which treats such states as fully mystical) to demonstrate how a better understanding of the historical medieval mystic tradition can serve as a valuable complement to ongoing philosophical discussions of religious and mystical experience

Entropy production in an energy balance Daisyworld model

Daisyworld is a simple mathematical model of a planetary system that exhibits self-regulation due to the nature of feedback between life and its environment. A two-box Daisyworld is developed that shares a number of features with energy balance climate models. Such climate models have been used to explore the hypothesis that non-equilibrium, dissipative systems such as planetary atmospheres are in a state of maximum entropy production with respect to the latitudinal flux of heat. When values for heat diffusion in the two-box Daisyworld are selected in order to maximize this rate of entropy production, the viability range of the daisies is maximized. Consequently planetary temperature is regulated over the widest possible range of solar forcing