Logic as a discipline starts with the transition from the more or less unreflective use of logical methods and argument patterns to the reflection on and inquiry into these methods and patterns and their elements, including the syntax and semantics of sentences. In Greek and Roman antiquity, discussions of some elements of logic and a focus on methods of inference can be traced back to the late 5^th century BCE. The Sophists, and later Plato (early 4^th c.) displayed an interest in sentence analysis, truth, and fallacies, and Eubulides of Miletus (mid-4^th c.) is on record as the inventor of both the Liar and the Sorites paradox. But logic as a fully systematic discipline begins with Aristotle, who systematized much of the logical inquiry of his predecessors. His main achievements were his theory of the logical interrelation of affirmative and negative existential and universal statements and, based on this theory, his syllogistic, which can be interpreted as a system of deductive inference. Aristotle’s logic is known as term-logic, since it is concerned with the logical relations between terms, such as ‘human being’, ‘animal’, ‘white’. It shares elements with both set theory and predicate logic. Aristotle’s successors in his school, the Peripatos, notably Theophrastus and Eudemus, widened the scope of deductive inference and improved some aspects of Aristotle’s logic.

In the Hellenistic period, and apparently independent of Aristotle’s achievements, the logician Diodorus Cronus and his pupil Philo (see the entry Dialectical school) worked out the beginnings of a logic that took propositions, rather than terms, as its basic elements. They influenced the second major theorist of logic in antiquity, the Stoic Chrysippus (mid-3^rd c.), whose main achievement is the development of a propositional logic, crowned by a deductive system. Regarded by many in antiquity as the greatest logician, he was innovative in a large number of topics that are central to contemporary formal and philosophical logic. The many close similarities between Chrysippus’ philosophical logic and that of Gottlob Frege are especially striking. Chrysippus’ Stoic successors systematized his logic, and made some additions.

The development of logic from c. 100 BCE to c. 250 CE remains mostly in the dark, but there can be no doubt that logic was one of the topics regularly studied and researched. At some point Peripatetics and Stoics began taking notice of each other’s logical systems, and we witness some conflation of both terminologies and theories. Aristotelian syllogistic became known as ‘categorical syllogistic’ and the Peripatetic adaptation of Stoic syllogistic as ‘hypothetical syllogistic’. In the 2^ndcentury CE, Galen attempted to synthesize the two traditions; he also professed to have introduced a third kind of syllogism, the ‘relational syllogism’, which apparently was meant to help formalize mathematical reasoning. The attempt of some Middle Platonists (1^st c. BCE–2^nd c. CE) to claim a specifically Platonic logic failed, and in its stead, the Neo-Platonists (3^rd–6^th c. CE) adopted a scholasticized version of Aristotelian logic as their own. In the monumental—if rarely creative—volumes of the Greek commentators on Aristotle’s logical works we find elements of Stoic and later Peripatetic logic as well as Platonism, and ancient mathematics and rhetoric. Much the same holds for the Latin logical writings by Apuleius (2^nd c. CE) and Boethius (6^th c. CE), which pave the way for Aristotelian logic, thus supplemented, to enter the Medieval era.

More at:  https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-ancient/

(Contributed by Heather Williams, H.W., M.)

BUCK, a richly textured and visually stunning film, follows Buck Brannaman from his abusive childhood to his phenomenally successful approach to horses. A real-life horse-whisperer , he eschews the violence of his upbringing and teaches people to communicate with their horses through leadership and sensitivity, not punishment. Buck possesses near magical abilities as he dramatically transforms horses – and people – with his understanding, compassion and respect.

A truly American story about an unsung hero and one of the most successful documentaries of the year, BUCK is about an ordinary man who has made an extraordinary life despite tremendous odds.

(Amazon.com)

The psychology of what happens when we think our opponents are less than human is troubling.

On Tuesday night, Eric Trump told Sean Hannity how he really feels about Democrats and his father’s political opponents: “I’ve never seen hatred like this. To me, they’re not even people.”

The statement is of the hyperbolic sort that commonly plays on Fox News’s opinion programming. But this is considerably more troubling. The language is plainly dehumanizing, and such language — historically and psychologically — is dangerous.

Now, Eric Trump’s phrasing is unlikely to incite anything horrible. It was a flip remark that he probably put little thought into.

But let’s take this as an opportunity to remember that the language we use to talk about people we disagree with matters deeply. Dehumanization is already disturbingly prevalent in America. We don’t need influential people stoking it further.

Dehumanization is a mental loophole that allows us to dismiss other people’s feelings and experienceLook back at some of the most tragic episodes in human history and you will find words and images that stripped people of their basic human traits. In the Nazi era, the film The Eternal Jew depicted Jews as rats. During the Rwandan genocide, Hutu officials called Tutsis “cockroaches” that needed to be cleared out.

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The dark psychology of dehumanization, explained

In the wake of World War II, psychologists wanted to understand how the genocide had happened. And we got Stanley Milgram’s infamous electroshock experiment, which showed how quickly people cave to authority. There was also Philip Zimbardo’s “prison experiment,” which showed how easily people in positions of power can abuse others. At Stanford, Albert Bandura showed that when participants overhear an experimenter call another study subject “an animal,” they’re more likely to give that subject a painful shock. If you think of murder and torture as universally taboo, then dehumanization of the “other” is a psychological loophole that can justify those acts.

From these experiments and those that followed, it became clear that “it’s extremely easy to turn down someone’s ability to see someone else in their full humanity,” Adam Waytz, a psychologist at Northwestern University, told me earlier this year. Studies find even children as young as 5 years old see the world in terms of us versus them.

In the months since Donald Trump’s election, it’s become shockingly commonplace for Americans to blatantly dehumanize Muslims and Mexican immigrants — and then use violence against them. Hate crimes against Muslims in the US are at their highest levels since 2001. And there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence (and some empirical research too) that America is becoming a coarser, meaner place.

Eric is not the only Trump to use dehumanizing language. You may recall that Donald Trump Jr. compared Syrian refugees to a bowl of Skittles. And one of the president’s favorite vocal tics is say people who fail at things are “like dogs.”

Dehumanizing beliefs are linked to aggression

In the 1970s, Bandura predicted that dehumanization would lead to increased aggression. Today, there’s something similar: Willingness to dehumanize others predicts aggressive attitudes — and perhaps actions — towards those people. Dehumanization makes you less likely to believe a person is capable of having agency (i.e. an independent mind) and experience (i.e. the ability to feel complicated emotions). You can start to see a person as more animal than human.

Dehumanization likens our opponents “to disease, disease carriers, or … a faceless horde,” Nick Haslam, one of the world’s leading experts in dehumanization psychology, told me early this year. “That helps you have less compassion for them; that allows you to see them as morally unequal and not deserving.”

Simply put: Dehumanization is a mental loophole that lets us harm other people.

We can’t kid ourselves. Inside us all is the same mental machinery that fueled the atrocities of the past century. “We think others to death and then invent the battle-axe or the ballistic missiles with which to actually kill them,” writes the philosopher Sam Keen. Turning on dehumanization won’t immediately lead to massacre, but it does make it easier to make life marginally worse for the marginalized. And yes: dehumanization exists in America today, particularly towards Muslims and immigrant groups. It’s self-sustaining: Believing you have been dehumanized is correlated with willingness to dehumanize and act violently against others.

It matters that Eric Trump said this. We often look to the powerful and influential for cues on how to behave. If it’s okay for the rich and successful Eric Trump to believe his father’s opponents are less than human, then others may too.

(Contributed by Suzanne Deakins, H.W., M.)

She came from the stars. To many tribes she came, though each knew her by a different name. You might see her now as two young Sioux hunters first saw her, walking barefoot, like a vision, across the low rolling hills of the prairie. They had climbed to the top of one such hill, looking for game, for some sign of movement on the broad rolling sea of grasses. Far away they saw a dot upon the horizon. They watched it carefully. By the time it disappeared behind the hill before them, they were almost certain it was human.

With bated breath they waited. At last, upon the crest of the hill, a young woman appeared wearing a beautiful white buckskin dress, decorated with dark porcupine quills. At her side she carried a skin pouch. An eagle feather, woven into her long, braided, black hair, caught the light of the early afternoon. Remarking upon her extraordinary beauty, the first of the warrior braves exclaimed how he would like couple with her there in the sun-warmed prairie grass.

“Put aside such thoughts,” spoke the other brave. “This is a sacred woman, a vision perhaps, certainly not one to be approached in that manner.”

But to his surprise, the woman in white buckskin smiled at the lusty warrior and said to him, “Come to me. You shall have what you desire.”

And so the second brave was left standing alone on the prairie, watching as his brother walked off, apparently enjoying the mysterious woman in the swirling cloud of dust that for a while hid them both from sight. When the dust had settled enough to see, there was the woman, bringing slowly together the stitches of her dress. At her feet, partially decomposed, lay a corpse, alive with worms, beetles and a cloud of hungry flies.

Then White Buffalo Calf Woman—who was the form in which the Great Spirit had come to teach the people of the plains—spoke to the young brave, who now remained alone and said, “A man who looks first to a woman’s outer beauty will never know her beauty divine, for there is dust upon his eyes and he is as good as blind. But a man who sees in a woman the spirit of the Great One and who sees her beauty first in spirit and in truth, that man will know God in that woman; and should she choose to lie with him, he will share with her in enjoyment more fully than the former every could. And all will be as it should.”

‘You, when you looked upon me, were not blind to my beauty, but your first thoughts were, “Who is she, this beautiful woman? What is it that makes her countenance glow so in the afternoon sun? What thoughts are those that dance behind her eyes? From what land does she come? With what tidings?”

“And so, my young friend, have no fear. You, too, shall have what you desire.”

“You and your friend symbolize two paths that the men of a tribe can take. If you seek first the sacred vision of the Great Spirit, you will see as the Creator sees, and in that seeing, you will find that what you need from the earth will come readily into your hands. But if you seek first to secure your early desire and forget the spirit, you will die inside.”

“In olden days, most of the men took your path; but in this age many men are now going the path of your fallen brother. What you saw in the cloud was a speeded up lifetime; your brother lived many years in those moments while you saw only a swirl of dust. It was not so bad for him as you might imagine. He lived a life that many in this forgetful age would even say was a ‘good’ one. But he was ruled ever by his passions. In the end, his body turned to dust, for all his thoughts were dust. He had forgotten not only the Great Spirit, but his own spirit as well. He contributed nothing of meaning to me, to womankind, or to the people of the plains.”

By Laura Geggel, Senior Writer | June 5, 2017 (livescience.com)

For more than a millennium, scholars have noticed a curious correlation: Atheists tend to be more intelligent than religious people.

It’s unclear why this trend persists, but researchers of a new study have an idea: Religion is an instinct, they say, and people who can rise above instincts are more intelligent than those who rely on them.

“Intelligence — in rationally solving problems — can be understood as involving overcoming instinct and being intellectually curious and thus open to non-instinctive possibilities,” study lead author Edward Dutton, a research fellow at the Ulster Institute for Social Research in the United Kingdom, said in a statement.

Smart cookie

In classical Greece and Rome, it was widely remarked that “fools” tended to be religious, while the “wise” were often skeptics, Dutton and his co-author, Dimitri Van der Linden, an assistant professor of psychology at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands, wrote in the study.

The ancients weren’t the only ones to notice this association. Scientists ran a meta-analysis of 63 studies and found that religious people tend to be less intelligent than nonreligious people. The association was stronger among college students and the general public than for those younger than college age, they found. The association was also stronger for religious beliefs, rather than religious behavior, according to the meta-analysis, published in 2013 in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Review.

But why does this association exist? Dutton set out to find answer, thinking that perhaps it was because nonreligious people were more rational than their religious brethren, and thus better able to reason that there was no God, he wrote.

But “more recently, I started to wonder if I’d got it wrong, actually,” Dutton told Live Science. “I found evidence that intelligence is positively associated with certain kinds of bias.”

For instance, a 2012 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology showed that college students often get logical answers wrong but don’t realize it. This so-called “bias blind spot” happens when people cannot detect bias, or flaws, within their own thinking. “If anything, a larger bias blind spot was associated with higher cognitive ability,” the researchers of the 2012 study wrote in the abstract.

One question, for example, asked the students: “A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?” The problem isn’t intuitive (the answer is not 10 cents), but rather requires students to suppress or evaluate the first solution that springs into their mind, the researchers wrote in the study. If they do this, they might find the right answer: The ball costs 5 cents, and the bat costs $1.05.

If intelligent people are less likely to perceive their own bias, that means they’re less rational in some respects, Dutton said. So why is intelligence associated with atheism? The answer, he and his colleague suggest, is that religion is an instinct, and it takes intelligence to overcome an instinct, Dutton said. [8 Ways Religion Impacts Your Life]

Basic instinct

The religion-is-an-instinct theory is a modified version of an idea developed by Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics, who was not involved in the new study.

Called the Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis, Kanazawa’s theory attempts to explain the differences in the behavior and attitudes between intelligent and less intelligent people, said Nathan Cofnas, who is pursuing a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom this fall. Cofnas, who specializes in the philosophy of science, was not involved with the new study.

The hypothesis is based on two assumptions, Cofnas told Live Science in an email.

“First, that we are psychologically adapted to solve recurrent problems faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors in the African savanna,” Cofnas said. “Second, that ‘general intelligence’ (what is measured by IQ tests) evolved to help us deal with nonrecurrent problems for which we had no evolved psychological adaptations.”

The assumptions imply that “intelligent people should be better than unintelligent people at dealing with ‘evolutionary novelty’ — situations and entities that did not exist in the ancestral environment,” Cofnas said.

Dutton and Van der Linden modified this theory, suggesting that evolutionary novelty is something that opposes evolved instincts.

Philosophical take

The approach is an interesting one, but might have firmer standing if the researchers explained exactly what they mean by “religious instinct,” Cofnas said.

“Dutton and Van der Linden propose that, if religion has an instinctual basis, intelligent people will be better able to overcome it and adopt atheism,” Cofnas said. “But without knowing the precise nature of the ‘religious instinct,’ we can’t rule out the possibility that atheism, or at least some forms of atheism, harness the same instinct(s).”

For instance, author Christopher Hitchens thought that communism was a religion; secular movements, such as veganism, appeal to many of the same impulses — and possibly ‘instincts’ — that traditional religions do, Cofnas said. Religious and nonreligious movements both rely on faith, identifying with a community of believers and zealotry, he said.

“I think it’s misleading to use the term ‘religion’ as a slur for whatever you don’t like,” Cofnas said.

Religion and stress

The researchers also examined the link between instinct and stress, emphasizing that people tend to operate on instinct during stressful times, for instance, turning to religion during a near-death experience.

The researchers argue that intelligence helps people rise above these instincts during times of stress. [11 Tips to Lower Stress]

“If religion is indeed an evolved domain — an instinct — then it will become heightened at times of stress, when people are inclined to act instinctively, and there is clear evidence for this,” Dutton said. “It also means that intelligence allows us to be able to pause and reason through the situation and the possible consequences of our actions.”

People who are able to rise above their instincts are likely better problem-solvers, Dutton noted.

“Let’s say someone had a go at you. Your instinct would be to punch them in the face,” Dutton told Live Science. “A more intelligent person will be able to stop themselves from doing that, reason it through and better solve the problem, according to what they want.”

The study was published May 16 in the journal Evolutionary Psychological Science.

Original article on Live Science.

(Contributed by Suzanne Deakins, H.W., M.)

Published on Jun 6, 2017

Although I thought I might get to Genesis II in this third lecture, and begin talking about Adam & Eve, it didn’t turn out that way. There was more to be said about the idea of God as creator (with the Word as the process underlying the act of creation). I didn’t mind, because it is very important to get God and the Creation of the Universe right before moving on 🙂 .

In this lecture, I tried to outline something like this: for anything to be, there has to be a substrate (call it a potential) from which it emerges, a structure that provides the possibility of imposing order on that substrate, and the act of ordering, itself. So the first is something like the precosmogonic chaos (implicitly feminine); the second, God the Father; the third, what the Christian West has portrayed as the Son (the Word of Truth).

Tickets for the next lecture(s) (and as for the rest of the series, as a whole) are available at http://jordanbpeterson.com/bible-series

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“Love feels no burden, thinks nothing of its trouble, attempts what is above its strength, pleads no excuse for impossibility, for it thinks all things are lawful for itself and all things are possible”

“Love flies, runs, leaps for joy; it is free and unrestrained. Love gives all for all, resting in One who is highest above all things, from whom every good flows and proceeds. Love does not regard the gifts, but turns to the Giver of all good gifts. Love knows no limits, but ardently transcends all bounds. Love feels no burden, takes no account of toil, attempts things beyond its strength; love sees nothing as impossible, for it feels able to achieve all things. Love therefore does great things; it is strange and effective; while he who lacks love faints and fails.”

― Thomas à Kempis, The Inner Life

Thomas à Kempis (1380 – July 25, 1471) was a German who became a canon regular in the Netherlands and authored The Imitation of Christ, one of the most popular and best known Christian books on devotion. Wikipedia