The Cassiciacum dialogues mark an important point in St. Augustine’s spiritual journey from teacher of rhetoric to bishop of Hippo, and present Augustine as a Christian who had very recently found God, but was still unwilling to break off with the Greco-Roman philosophical tradition. Thus, Augustine designed his early philosophical writings in the old, classical manner. Although there is a vast body of scholarship on the Cassiciacum dialogues, only limited attention has been paid to the question of how significant a (...) role Augustine’s mother Monica plays in them. In this paper I argue that the term philosophical-contemplative companionship, borrowed from a new form of philosophical practice, can be applied to the participation of St. Monica in the De beata vita, and most likely to the Cassiciacum dialogues as a whole. (shrink)

Research has uncovered consistent gender differences in attitudes toward gay men, with women expressing less prejudice than men (Herek, 2003). Attitudes toward lesbians generally show a similar pattern, but to a weaker extent. The present work demonstrated that motivation to respond without prejudice importantly contributes to these divergent attitudes. Study 1 revealed that women evince higher internal motivation to respond without prejudice (IMS, Plant & Devine, 1998) than do men and that this difference partially mediates the relationship between gender and (...) attitudes toward gay men. The second study replicated this finding and demonstrated that IMS mediates the relationship between gender and attitudes toward lesbians. Study 2 further revealed that gender-role variables contribute to the observed gender differences in motivation to respond without prejudice. These findings provide new insights into the nature of sexual prejudice and for the first time point to possible antecedents of variation in motivation to respond without prejudice. (shrink)

Two recent and influential papers, van Rooij 2007 and Lassiter 2012, propose solutions to the proviso problem that make central use of related notions of independence—qualitative in the first case, probabilistic in the second. We argue here that, if these solutions are to work, they must incorporate an implicit assumption about presupposition accommodation, namely that accommodation does not interfere with existing qualitative or probabilistic independencies. We show, however, that this assumption is implausible, as updating beliefs with conditional information does (...) not in general preserve independencies. We conclude that the approach taken by van Rooij and Lassiter does not succeed in resolving the proviso problem. (shrink)