This chapter contains sections titled: Interests and Obligations Self‐Knowledge Moral Development Through Humility, Courage, and Wisdom Character and the Common Good Further Down the Road Notes.

The perceived support of supernatural agents has been historically, ethnographically, and theoretically linked with confidence in engaging in violent intergroup conflict. However, scant experimental investigations of such links have been reported to date, and the extant evidence derives largely from indirect laboratory methods of limited ecological validity. Here, we experimentally tested the hypothesis that perceived supernatural aid would heighten inclinations toward coalitional aggression using a realistic simulated coalitional combat paradigm: competitive team paintball. In a between-subjects design, US paintball players recruited (...) for the study were experimentally primed with thoughts of supernatural support using a guided visualization exercise analogous to prayer, or with a control visualization of a nature scene. The participants then competed in a team paintball battle game modeled after “Capture the Flag.” Immediately before and after the battle, participants completed surveys assessing confidence in their coalitional and personal battle performance. Participants assessed their coalition’s prospects of victory and performance more positively after visualizing supernatural aid. Participants primed with supernatural support also reported inflated assessments of their own performance. Importantly, however, covarying increases in assessments of their overall coalition’s performance accounted for the latter effect. This study provided support for the hypothesis that perceived supernatural support can heighten both prospective confidence in coalitional victory and retrospective confidence in the combat performance of one’s team, while highlighting the role of competitive play in evoking the coalitional psychology of intergroup conflict. These results accord with and extend convergent prior findings derived from laboratory paradigms far removed from the experience of combat. Accordingly, the field study approach utilized here shows promise as a method for investigating coalitional battle dynamics in a realistic, experientially immersive manner. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy by Susan JamesRichard A. WatsonSusan James. Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Pp. vii + 318. Cloth, $35.00.Susan James shows how during the seventeenth century philosophers moved from the three souls of Aristotle and the tripartite soul of Thomas Aquinas in which passions and reasons compete for the attention of (...) the will, to a Cartesian view of man as a single soul in union with the body who wills under the influence of both passions and reasons, to a Hobbesian view that the soul is the body and that the bodily motions we call reasons and passions are desires; acts of will are merely the deciding desires in deterministic causal sequences of the material motions of the body that constitute desires. This sets up the contemporary view that, motions are caused by desires and beliefs, leaving behind the difficulties of integrating with one another Aristotelian souls, Thomistic faculties, and Cartesian mind and body. James conceives of this evolution as one of unification of mental and bodily powers, and of integration of the active and passive powers of the mind. This concourse also represents a development from theories meant to explain to theories calculated for control and finally to theories facilitating therapy. Aristotle and Thomas adapted their ontologies to perceived differences in powers and faculties, while Descartes and Hobbes worked toward an ideal of unity of science and nature. The Christian Descartes brought together all the substances and powers of nature under a single extended matter divided into parts by the single force of motion, but he excepted the human soul with its power of will to alter the course of nature. The atheist Hobbes simply dispensed with supernatural [End Page 168] mental substance and occult power of will in order to integrate the whole of nature (including sensing and reasoning) under a cause and effect sequence of moving material bodies in which the last desire in a sequence of human bodily motions is designated as an act of will.James intends her book “as a contribution to the reinstatement of the emotions within philosophy, to the… opinion that we need to take account of our emotional life if we are to understand… moral motivation and growth, the springs of action (rational and otherwise), and the nature of reasoning” (22). She agrees that the sharp division between ideas and passions or emotions is properly abolished to be replaced by the view that all ideas have an emotional component, and all passions an ideational component. This fits with the parallel development of the notion that all sensible perceptions are propositional, and the somewhat less widespread notion that all concepts have a sensible component.But did this development result in a view of passions and ideas, learning and knowing, thinking and action, that is more true to nature than Aristotelian ontology? It is very hard to answer this question, and despite her sympathies with the notion that all human thought is both conceptual and emotional, James does not try. The reason we don’t know lies under the surface of the movement from Aristotle to Hobbes (i.e., to Daniel Dennett) like a monster in the deep. The monster is the monotheistic God, the perfection and unity of which underlies the Western drive to a unitary view of nature including man. The possibility that this God could be a deceiver, and so all our sensations and ideas might not represent the real world, set up Cartesianism and modern hypothetico-deductive science. But lurking throughout James’ book is a more palpable dreadnought, a demoness, the woman Eve. The female is responsible for the Fall of Man, and thus the fear and suspicion of women that suffuses patriarchic Christianity, and is expressed openly by such philosophers as Malebranche. Bodily passions and emotions (particularly the concupiscent ones) are nasty, evil, irrational, overpowering; to wit, they are feminine. They are not to be trusted, and must be subdued. So while still driven by ideals of monotheism, Descartes and Hobbes do move beyond the dogmatic Christian association of the emotions with female treachery. Even so... (shrink)

We explored the possibility of a general brightness bias: brighter pictures are evaluated more positively, while darker pictures are evaluated more negatively. In Study 1 we found that positive pictures are brighter than negative pictures in two affective picture databases (the IAPS and the GAPED). Study 2 revealed that because researchers select affective pictures on the extremity of their affective rating without controlling for brightness differences, pictures used in positive conditions of experiments were on average brighter than (...) those used in negative conditions. Going beyond correlational support for our hypothesis, Studies 3 and 4 showed that brighter versions of neutral pictures were evaluated more positively than darker versions of the same picture. Study 5 revealed that people categorised positive words more quickly than negative words after a bright picture prime, and vice versa for negative pictures. Together, these studies provide strong support for the hypotheses that picture brightness influences evaluations. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Response to Eva Alerby and Cecilia Ferm, “Learning Music: Embodied Experience in the Life-World”Christine A. BrownI was recently asked to settle a friendly debate between two college graduates. The first, my daughter's boyfriend, argued that someone with talent and motivation could become as creative a composer without formal musical training as with it. The other, my daughter, vigorously countered that while someone might compose well on one's own, the (...) result would not be as versatile or thoughtfully developed as it could be with good formal instruction. I saw the musical educations of the debaters reflected in their arguments. My daughter had accumulated fourteen years of formal instruction in violin, cello, voice, and dance and took part in high school choral, theatrical, and orchestral performances. Her studies continued into college and from time to time she performs in community theater. Her boyfriend was the only musically trained member of his family. At his own request he studied piano for five years, later channeling his musical energies into a rock group. Though he did not study music in college, he continues to play keyboard and guitar. Both agree that the ongoing debate between them illustrates the strong connection between musical training and musical valuing. The life-world of their experiences shaped their judgments of musical quality and left imprints on their views of what matters more, talent or training. I will return to this scenario later.I find solid points of agreement with Eva Alerby and Cecilia Ferm starting with their premise that music learning is most effective when taught within a context. While some students prefer learning in a linear, rule-oriented setting, more often than not a musical concept will be comprehended best if it is first experienced within a variety of works. Regarding extra-musical contexts, furthermore, recent evidence supporting the integration of subject areas at the elementary level appears to extend the boundaries of musical learning in a positive direction. Additionally, the authors' description of embodied musical learning holds great interest. Their argument that musical learning must be appropriated within the body resonates strongly within me as I reflect upon performing and teaching piano. Experience with beginning level adult pianists suggests to me that once the awkwardness of newly-learned movements fades with time and effort, students often discover a close interaction between their physical and conceptual knowledge of music. Of related interest is the authors' definition of musicality as taking embodied musical knowledge and making it one's own. This surpasses physical mastery of an instrument and describes a personal [End Page 208] and emotional investment in music. It is at this point in the essay that the recognizable link between mind, body, and emotion in music is most clear.Alongside these engaging ideas, however, are statements throughout the essay that invite further questions or comments. First among these is the statement that the knowledge resulting from learning is not always what was intended or planned. While this is often the case, elaboration upon modes of knowledge in question would help clarify the authors' ideas. Since knowledge takes a variety of forms, as the authors imply, these forms should be explored, defined, and applied to the process of teaching and learning music.Related to that suggestion is my response to the statement that the aim of music education is to produce musical knowledge. I am assuming that musical knowledge includes an age-appropriate blend of performance skill, reading ability, ear training, historical and cultural connections, basic theoretical and stylistic understanding, and acquaintance with creative processes. In many regions of our country, public arts education has been de-valued to the extent that we must convince administrators, parents, and sometimes students, of its importance. Until this situation improves, I must personally consider the aim of music education as producing, alongside musical knowledge, the desire for music as a lifelong pursuit, be it active or passive. Without this desire, musical knowledge gained often goes unused. Referring to my opening anecdote, my daughter is not participating in music while her less extensively trained boyfriend is. I know of several students like her who gained expertise on an instrument and who have now stopped playing for... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Response to Eva Alerby and Cecilia Ferm, “Learning Music: Embodied Experience in the Life-World”Christine A. BrownI was recently asked to settle a friendly debate between two college graduates. The first, my daughter's boyfriend, argued that someone with talent and motivation could become as creative a composer without formal musical training as with it. The other, my daughter, vigorously countered that while someone might compose well on one's own, the (...) result would not be as versatile or thoughtfully developed as it could be with good formal instruction. I saw the musical educations of the debaters reflected in their arguments. My daughter had accumulated fourteen years of formal instruction in violin, cello, voice, and dance and took part in high school choral, theatrical, and orchestral performances. Her studies continued into college and from time to time she performs in community theater. Her boyfriend was the only musically trained member of his family. At his own request he studied piano for five years, later channeling his musical energies into a rock group. Though he did not study music in college, he continues to play keyboard and guitar. Both agree that the ongoing debate between them illustrates the strong connection between musical training and musical valuing. The life-world of their experiences shaped their judgments of musical quality and left imprints on their views of what matters more, talent or training. I will return to this scenario later.I find solid points of agreement with Eva Alerby and Cecilia Ferm starting with their premise that music learning is most effective when taught within a context. While some students prefer learning in a linear, rule-oriented setting, more often than not a musical concept will be comprehended best if it is first experienced within a variety of works. Regarding extra-musical contexts, furthermore, recent evidence supporting the integration of subject areas at the elementary level appears to extend the boundaries of musical learning in a positive direction. Additionally, the authors' description of embodied musical learning holds great interest. Their argument that musical learning must be appropriated within the body resonates strongly within me as I reflect upon performing and teaching piano. Experience with beginning level adult pianists suggests to me that once the awkwardness of newly-learned movements fades with time and effort, students often discover a close interaction between their physical and conceptual knowledge of music. Of related interest is the authors' definition of musicality as taking embodied musical knowledge and making it one's own. This surpasses physical mastery of an instrument and describes a personal [End Page 208] and emotional investment in music. It is at this point in the essay that the recognizable link between mind, body, and emotion in music is most clear.Alongside these engaging ideas, however, are statements throughout the essay that invite further questions or comments. First among these is the statement that the knowledge resulting from learning is not always what was intended or planned. While this is often the case, elaboration upon modes of knowledge in question would help clarify the authors' ideas. Since knowledge takes a variety of forms, as the authors imply, these forms should be explored, defined, and applied to the process of teaching and learning music.Related to that suggestion is my response to the statement that the aim of music education is to produce musical knowledge. I am assuming that musical knowledge includes an age-appropriate blend of performance skill, reading ability, ear training, historical and cultural connections, basic theoretical and stylistic understanding, and acquaintance with creative processes. In many regions of our country, public arts education has been de-valued to the extent that we must convince administrators, parents, and sometimes students, of its importance. Until this situation improves, I must personally consider the aim of music education as producing, alongside musical knowledge, the desire for music as a lifelong pursuit, be it active or passive. Without this desire, musical knowledge gained often goes unused. Referring to my opening anecdote, my daughter is not participating in music while her less extensively trained boyfriend is. I know of several students like her who gained expertise on an instrument and who have now stopped playing for... (shrink)

A meta-analysis of 190 cross-cultural emotion studies, published between 1967 and 2000, was performed to examine (1) to what extent reported cross-cultural differences in emotion variables could be regarded as valid (substantive factors) or as method-related (statistical artefacts, cultural bias), and (2) which country characteristics could explain valid cross-cultural differences in emotion. The relative contribution of substantive and method-related factors at sample, study, and country level was investigated and country-level explanations for differences in emotions were tested. Results indicate that (...) a correction for statistical artefacts and method-related factors reduced the observed cross-cultural effect sizes considerably. After controlling for valence (positive vs. negative emotions) and kind of study (self-report vs. recognition studies), the remaining cross-cultural variance was associated with subsistence mode, political system, values, and religiosity. Values explained more variance than did ecological or sociopolitical variables. It was concluded that both method-related factors (13.8% of variance explained) and culture-level factors (27.9% of variance explained) underlie observed cross-cultural differences. (shrink)

Photo by Alex Guillaume on Unsplash Introduction The problem of climate change raises some important philosophical, existential questions. I propose a radical solution designed to provoke reflection on the role of humans in climate change. To push the theoretical limits of what measures people are willing to accept to combat it, an extreme population control tool is proposed: allowing people to reproduce only if they make a financial commitment guaranteeing a carbon-neutral upbringing. Solving the problem of climate change in (...) the long run by halting the procreation of human beings is controversial. In the absence of human beings and consequent climate change, other animals and plant species would benefit from an atmosphere more conducive to prolonging their existence and even improving their ability to thrive. If someone were to invent something to reverse the effects of climate change and improve animals’ lives, then human beings’ presence would be justified by the invention. Whether the propagation of the human species is beneficial to anyone or anything but human beings themselves is difficult to answer. Perhaps human beings are unfit to tackle this issue, being unable to judge it objectively. Managing Procreation: An alternative to Piecemeal Approaches Measures aimed at reducing greenhouse gases by nudging individuals and corporations may have a positive effect, but if their behavior is not climate neutral, they continue to contribute to climate change. Consequently, as long as the number of people increases, reducing greenhouse gases is at best a mitigation tool. If humans could rely solely on renewable energy, decreasing the population arguably would not be necessary. Significantly reducing the number of people appears to provide a solution to both problems: people who do not exist do not contribute to climate change, and renewable energy could meet the demand of a smaller population. One option is to let only those who produce the problem pay for its solution. One could determine the expected annual emission of greenhouse gases per person, assuming an average life expectancy, and calculate the costs to compensate them by, e.g., installing extra solar panels. Those expected costs could then be paid by the parents of each new person annually over the first eighteen years of that person’s life by dividing the total expected costs by eighteen. There are also practical difficulties. It would be difficult to determine the payment necessary. What should be done if a child has been born whose parents cannot afford to pay? In addition, child benefits could be canceled, contrary to recent incentives for child births instated in Italy,[1] where additional benefits will be made available to pay for childcare, and Hungary,[2] where women with four children or more will be exempted for life from paying income tax. A transition period could exist once the policy has been adopted, since it would be unreasonable to confront those who are already pregnant with costs they could not reasonably have expected. While the analysis is both hypothetical and theoretical, the impracticality is a noteworthy obstacle. There are several practical issues that cannot be addressed here, like the difficulty of calculating the added negative effects of each new individual and the unlikelihood that many citizens will support politicians who propose adopting policies that discourage having children. The upshot of what I have proposed is that climate change can be solved in the long run without financial costs to society as a whole, notwithstanding the transitional measures that would bring costs with them. Managing Procreation to Reduce Suffering Should this be deemed too harsh a stance, it is important to consider the basic issue of whether it is justified to introduce measures to reduce the number of people in an already overpopulated world, especially if climate change leads to additional suffering. One need not agree with Benatar, but his perspective must at least be taken seriously: It is curious that while good people go to great lengths to spare their children from suffering, few of them seem to notice that the one guaranteed way to prevent all the suffering of their children is not to bring those children into existence in the first place.[3] Benatar argues that non-existence is preferable to existence,[4] which raises the question why new people should be created at all. Those who question whether this planet will be habitable for future generations presuppose that such generations will exist. If people are not brought into existence, they may be said to be deprived of what life has to offer, but life must not be presupposed to be something positive. Whether this is the case in fact merits an inquiry of its own. A solution to the problem of climate change despite an increased population does not equate to a positive outcome since it merely means that something negative is removed. After all, solving the problem is not a means to an end, but a means to a means, the latter means being a means to a happy life, which does not automatically ensue from a solution to the problem. Benatar, as an anti-natalist, argues that procreation is morally wrong. His basic idea is that there is an asymmetry between pleasure and pain and that the pleasure that is not experienced by someone because that person does not exist is not something bad whereas the absence of pain that is not experienced – for the same reason – is something good.[5] Accordingly, “The reason why we do not lament our failure to bring somebody into existence is because absent pleasures are not bad.”[6] One may question whether such a perspective suffices to prove that coming into existence is always a harm, but the assertion that coming into existence exposes a new being to potential harm is clear. Objections A drawback of the proposed radical solution, placing the financial impediment on procreation, is that it will not solve climate change in the short run. A significant drop in the number of people may have a positive effect in the long run, but for now the behavior of the people in existence is the problem. Other climate change mitigation policies would necessarily continue. Additionally, there are important practical reasons to continue to procreate. The benefits for the elderly are paid for by the labor force. It is a problem that new generations are created as mere means to benefit older people. Perhaps more troubling, a pyramid scheme is created: by the time those people have themselves become old, a new labor force must have been brought into existence, a process that must presumably continue. If a consideration for people in developing countries to have children is that they cannot provide for themselves at an advanced age, while benefits are either lacking or insufficient, developed countries could collectively fund a pension scheme.[7] This may be low-cost if it is tailored to the living standard in the countries in question and given the life expectancy. Such a pension scheme should be predicated on the countries’ efforts in reducing the birth rate. If the labor force decreases, the economy may suffer. The focus on economic growth is arguably one of the causes of climate change, but if the number of people is reduced, the living standard does not have to be compromised, since the economy can then still grow. If fewer people began to use natural resources and nonrenewable energy at higher per capita rates, then the procreation might not be beneficial to the climate. It would need to be accompanied by regulations on use. One may also object that only wealthy people will be able to afford children. This is correct, but there is no right to have a child one cannot afford. The right to procreate does not entail the right to have as many children as one wants.[8] Yet in many countries, like the United States, it is a fundamental right that is constitutionally protected. There are numerous social, emotional, and even biological reasons why people choose to procreate. These may include the joy of having a family, the hope that children may bring in society, and the intergenerational transference of knowledge. People may have a strong desire to raise children or even a religious duty. If someone procures a sports car that is highly polluting, it would be justifiable to impose a tax in such a case. Many taxes and fines are imposed on corporate polluters. Procreation is significantly different but if the issue is regarded with some distance, then a climate change prevention tax could be appropriate. Some may argue that raising children is expensive already, which nonetheless does not deter people from having children. The tax I propose would be additional and specifically dedicated to carbon neutrality, but it would be difficult to predict whether it would discourage procreation. One last objection may be that for those now dedicated to sustainability for preserving the earth for the sake of future generations, there would be little or no incentive to continue any climate change mitigation efforts at all. If they sense they cannot afford to procreate, they may simply use every natural resource rather than save the earth for animals or for next generations. In a democracy, this problem does not exist if the majority can afford to procreate and agree with legislation on the basis of which such behavior is discouraged or punished. CONCLUSION Prior to their existence, there is no obligation to bequeath the earth to next generations. Such generations will only exist if they are actually created, and there is no obligation to create them. The lack of existence should not be confused with harm. Climate change provides an important reason to stem overpopulation. Ironically, fast rates of procreation may lead to the earth becoming uninhabitable for humans altogether. The radical solution that has been proposed here is an unrealistic scenario. For now, the average global birth rate is just over 18 per thousand people, but there is a need to ensure that the number of people is not greater than the planet can endure. While it is better to prevent problems than to solve them, the interest in procreation and its associated joys, usefulness, and cultural value make mass reduction in the population unlikely. Some countries have smaller average family size than others and can act as models for reducing population in a less radical way. The need to continue efforts to reduce climate change persists. Whether it would curb population growth or not, an additional financial burden applied to neutralizing each person’s offspring’s carbon footprint provides a meaningful thought exercise that could help alleviate the pressure on current climate mitigation strategies. [1] The Local Italy, How Italy’s new ‘Family Act’ aims to increase the plunging birthrate, https://www.thelocal.it/20200612/what-you-need-to-know-about-italys-new-family-act/. [2] BBC, Hungary tries for baby boom with tax breaks and loan forgiveness, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-47192612. [3] David Benatar, Better never to have been, 6. [4] David Benatar, Better never to have been, 44, 58. [5] David Benatar, Better never to have been, 14, 30, 38. [6] David Benatar, Better never to have been, 35. [7] Alastair Leithead, “Can Niger break out of its cycle of poverty?”, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-41018081; Sebastien Malo, “Fewer children, fewer climate risks? Niger ponders a controversial option”, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-niger-climate-change-familyplanning-idUSKBN1WM11E. [8] Sarah Conly, “The Right to Procreation: Merits and Limits,” American Philosophical Quarterly 42, no. 2 : 105-115, 105, 106. (shrink)

The paper builds on the postulate of “myths we live by,” which shape our imaginative life (and hence our social expectations), but which are also open to reflective study and reinvention. It applies this principle, in particular, to the concepts of love and vulnerability. We are accustomed to think of the condition of vulnerability in an objectifying and distancing way, as something that affects the bearers of specific (disadvantaged) social identities. Against this picture, which can serve as a pretext for (...) paternalist and controlling attitudes to the groups in question – notably to women – Anderson urges us to reimagine our vulnerability as a condition not merely of exposure to violence but of openness to mutual affection, love, and friendship. Hegel’s celebrated image of the owl of Minerva, which takes wing only with the coming of dusk, suggests an association of (philosophical) wisdom with negativity – with the experience of death or loss. Anderson, by contrast, proposes an alternative and more hopeful image of the dawn of enlightenment, in the guise of new ethical dispositions shaped by an emancipatory (and so, no longer an oppressive or sexist) conception of our capacity for love. Her main interlocutors or influences in this piece are Judith Butler (who contributes the idea of a “relational ontology”), Michèle Le Doeuff, and Mary Midgley. (shrink)

The current investigation examined the bidirectional effects of cognitive control and emotional control and the overlap between these two systems in regulating emotions. Based on recent neural and cognitive findings, we hypothesised that two control systems largely overlap as control recruited for one system (either emotional or cognitive) can be used by the other system. In two experiments, participants completed novel versions of either the Stroop task (Experiment 1) or the Flanker task (Experiment 2) in (...) which the emotional and cognitive control systems were actively manipulated into either a high or low emotional-load condition (achieved by varying the proportions of negative-valence emotional cues) and a high and a low cognitive control condition (achieved through varying the proportion of conflict-laden trials). In both experiments, participants’ performance was impaired when both emotional and cognitive control were low, but significantly and similarly improved when one of the two control mechanisms were activated – the emotional or the cognitive. In Experiment 2, performance was further improved when both systems were activated. Our results give further support for a more integrative notion of control in which the two systems (emotional and cognitive control) not only influence each other, but rather extensively overlap. (shrink)

According to the fitting attitude (FA) analysis of value concepts, to conceive of an object as having a given value is to conceive of it as being such that a certain evaluative attitude taken towards it would be fitting. Among the challenges that this analysis has to face, two are especially pressing. The first is a psychological challenge: the FA analysis must call upon attitudes that shed light on our value concepts while not presupposing the mastery of these concepts. The (...) second challenge is normative: the FA analysis must account for the fittingness of the relevant attitudes in terms of a kind of normativity intimately related to these attitudes, but again without presupposing the mastery of the relevant value concepts. In this paper, we show that real progress is possible if we pay close attention to the nature of the attitudes recruited by the analysis. More specifically, we claim that an FA analysis that appeals to emotions conceived as evaluative attitudes — as opposed to, for instance, evaluative judgements or evaluative perceptions — has the best prospects of meeting the two challenges and of putting the FA analysis on a strong footing. (shrink)

continent. 2.2 (2012): 155–158 Michel Serres. Biogea . Trans. Randolph Burks. Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing. 2012. 200 pp. | ISBN 9781937561086 | $22.95 Conveying to potential readers the significance of a book puts me at risk of glad handing. It’s not in my interest to laud the undeserving, especially on the pages of this journal. This is not a sales pitch, but rather an affirmation of a necessary work on very troubled terms: human, earth, nature, and the problematic world we made. (...) It is this world that aspirates the silence (so to speak), and therefore the subject which, along with the development of the “made world” exports the excess augmentation of the cosmically missing, this silence of the natural, et cetera. Had we learned from Locke that lesson of “labor,” to consume what we need… but perhaps we need more than what matters? Serres’ Biogea has several functions on this manner, if it is indeed a book to be consumed. First, readers searching for novelistic entertainment have a place to dwell. Biogea deserves a place in your back pocket; biographical generosity and poetic fluidity should satisfy most textual fetishes. For lay philosophers who want to refresh their acumen, Biogea deserves a place on the book shelf, one already reads a sorely needed postmodern tune-up here. Serres’ style is clearly French; he leaves few cheese crumbs on his words, rather preciseness and breathing in the work give way to a sweeping manner that breaks the narrative line of sight. A circular narrative and anachronistic fragmentation of terms allows an abyssal atmosphere to swell, if only to pump into the book the externality of its broader text. Biogea aspires to a higher standard and the book, at times, is thinking this negentropic problem too. Univocal, the publisher, has crafted a book appropriate for the hands to hold and the translations are an achievement of an otherwise difficult writer to translate. Terms are the conditions of a broader text. It is important to note that Serres’ content is as much a thinking of terminal ports. There is a regard for the transportation technology of the written word. For me, this is the mark of genius, a craftiness that tells of a book device that I may trust. Serres is an accomplished thinker and a necessary voice to check the putative trendiness of anti-postmodernist and market-driven theory of endless cultural liquidation. Offering interventions on subjectivity as an open system we are given a chance to affirm the human, not merely to discard it, but to engage its poetic image emotion, the calibratory silent sense of the analogic world; the terms on which we base our efforts. 1 The human is the center of its own negation, constantly mediating it. Something deeper at stake appears in the work then, and it is quite obvious from the onset. Certainly, a book is an intensification of possible text and those who brought this actual book into existence have captured a rarity in regards to the subject matter and artistic accomplishment. I mentioned terms as conditions, so let us understand Biogea as bio-yea, a yes to bios . An affirmation of living and accepting presence for all of its defiance of images, words, and things temporal. Therefore Serres’ existence and its existants plays parts; out of linearity and still like a porous bone pumping blood it manufactures into the fleshy life it becomes. Starting from a man named silence chaos emerges, or the man “Old Taciturn” takes up a journey anticipating a great flood. In other words, a development akin to the one in Genesis. In dealing with this ancestral occupation, fusing Genesis with contemporary philosophical terms, Serres initiates this anachronistic fragmentation under the forming subjectivity of his own autobiography. This mutation in the open system is precisely one of Serres’ terms. There an abyss is at work, stated, but also measured by heels on the ground—the abyss dispatching earthen tensions, that which plays our tunes, that which we abide by and recognize in volcanoes, rivers, oceans, earthquakes and weaponry in the battles of the world. Set in later stages of the book, such tensions are harnessed through scientific principles in an attempt to unify the terms of natural force if only to terminate the world. Thus the elevation of the earth into the world is clearly set forth. Here already, and few pages in, a resonance is set forth under appellations such as the river Garonne, a subjectivity as much as it is inhuman, the river is the inhuman that makes us human. I get the sense that Serres is taking up a challenge issued by Wallace Stevens; namely, that the great poems of heaven and hell have been written, but that only the poem of the earth has resisted composition. 2 On this level we cannot avoid the killing factor of silence, given that our cognition blocks its pure, radical obliteration. Thus a silence of attunement to the earth is in a novel dialectic of the rithmic and rhythm. A technological world, a triumph of termination is set forth. If a text imposes its will given the reader who authorizes it, it is made to convey or convect a presupposition to a reader or its inhabitant(s). Text is therefore both, in-content, contenting, contentedness, and in reading it, a way to navigate self-destruction (dis-content). Here then would one note that the “inhuman” reveals itself, “an aperiodic rhythm of lovers and beloved…the sea as our friend…but as our enemy…maternal vivifying sea.” The sea is an open book, or vaginal birth canal, where the engagement of text comes forth: “…woman sea, open vulva.” One sees like the sea, but only after it, when the uninhabitable truth of inhabiting it switches the polarity of the sailors soul: “I was seeing like the sea” (9-11). In other words, we are invited to embrace the nonsense of the visible. At this point I am taken to Jean-François Lyotard’s work The Inhuman , specifically the first entry on negentropy that would be congruent with Serres’ thematic. 3 The human being exports, deports, or transplants its relation through text, through the system— and this is its sense or relation to silence, to music. Unaware of Serres’ proximity to this work, the concept of gender interrelation as regards a solar catastrophe runs clear. It would be, on this basis, that Serres references his peers, the other texts that, as mentioned above, are discarded in philosophy today. For students of philosophy what we have here is perhaps a gift, a needed project. If silence and death are at work, there is a political valence to deal with, and here, much like the domain of the text and the dominion of the reader, we confront the world of natural, fluid violence. The anti-postmodernist critique is in part based on a weak idea that the loss of ideology, of a world vision, motivates the “correlationist” project. 4 Serres seems to offer another way to view this when he notes that whereas persons “sometimes kill,” it is clearly “the collective” that “always kills” (17). What is the collective today, if not an organizing function we never see yet acts in its favor in the name of truth? One feels a sense of enigma here, if only to link to what Stevens remarked of communism as a “grubby faith,” providing this applies for capitalism as well, namely any ideology of progress overly interested in absolutes. Here we get the sense that the inhuman, silence, this type of killing, always killing, could not be matched by human-made, political dynamos. Or that if it comes to an equilibrium, a catastrophe is never too far from us to read with our heels. We are left to note that the forces of nature presuppose and permeate political systems, the more these systems obtain force, the more the system takes upon itself the proper name of nature that motivates its dissemination, albeit falsely. This note, that in an age of ecocide and technological captivity (sustainability and transparency) political regimes won’t grow our soul-learning ears any larger than our tongues, stands clear to us. The promise of technological desubjectification is here pushed aside. Regarding politics, Serres illustrates this fact: Where did this corpse come from? Who was it? Who killed it? I don’t know. I won’t try to find out. I refuse to get vengeance for it. And I only see Garonne. For our victims, today, are the rivers, too. Their waters have irrigated my life, enchanted my thought, invigorated my body; I’ve known them to be threatening, untamable, as dangerous as the sea when it rages. Yes, murderous. They decided to control their courses; dams, sometimes senseless, destroying sites and valleys, reduced entire populations to servile displacements; programs for the irrigation of thirsty farmland, often beneficial of course, completed their drying up.(22) Serres enters into his idea concerning the captivity of language from the natural into a world system: For thousands of years, we have been licking things with our tongues, covering and daubing them so as to appropriate things for ourselves. If language boils down to a convention, this convention took place between the speakers without consulting the thing named, become as a result the property of those who covered it in this way with their drawn or voiced productions. Malfeasance analyzes these acts of appropriation. Thus every inert object, every living thing as well, sleeps under the covers of signs, a little in the way that, today, a thousand posters shouting messages and ugly riots of color drown, with their filthy flood, the landscapes, or better, exclude them from perception because the meaning, almost nil, of this false language and these base images forms an irresistible source of attraction to our neurons and eyes. This appropriation covers the world’s beauty with ugliness. (38-39) Technological concealment coming to bear, we begin to get a sense of another commentary on the condition of sensing, driving home the necessity of a text dealing with such subject matter to be what its terms insist. Thus toward new openings: The new opening. As low beneath our feet as you like, the Biogea opens us to another space, high enough for us to be able to acquire a wisdom there, that of redeveloping this same place differently from our fathers, this place that’s still politically cut up by old hatreds, beneath the flood of tears and blood that we call history. Without this soft place, spiritually very old, but newly conceived in this way, without the juridical construction of a common good, opposed to our filthy ownership, I don’t see how our planet, hard, will survive. Hardness that depends on a softness, material belonging that depends on this temporary rented location (51). Serres enters into a summit on the content and the structure of his work. Archimedes is brought in with the concept of three volcanoes. Meaning fire, but as well earth, water, air. For it was Archimedes’ war machines that sought to lift the earth, thus bringing in the question of principles of science: “can a principle be invented while controlling its consequences?” (66-7). May the earth be put in a sentence, terminated by terminology, appellations, gone wild? By means of these element-dominating laws, this old physicist began to tear nature away from the ancient myths; by a strange return, today we’re plunging our successes back into the anxieties and terrors from which that ancient physics was born. Yes, our new history of science and technology is plunging, today, as though in a loop, into the fundamental human myths from which Empedocles’ first laws came. A major progression and a regression on the nether side of the origins. Consequently, the contemporary time requires that we try to return to that unity in which the principles of hate and love are at the same time human, living, inert and global. We will never attain a deontology of our knowledge and actions without thinking the subjective, the objective, the collective, and the cognitive all together simultaneously. Here, hate and love are the result of these four components.(71) Working then on the concept of fire-starting mirrors to the atomic annihilation of the Second War, Serres works into the subjectivity in question on the matter of rhythm—say rithmic— precisely at that point: Knowledge is changing today. The all-political is dying; the monarchy of the sciences said to be hard is coming to a close. The science of the things of the world will have to communicate just as much as the things of the world do, which do it much better than humans do, who don’t always want to do it. Let’s celebrate two changes this morning. The first one strikes a new blow to our narcissism. No, knowledge and the world don’t resemble our analytical enjoyments of refined cutting up, of endless debates and of exclusions full of hate. They, on the contrary, form a bloc and a sum, alliance and alloys. Uniting the fields of knowledge among themselves the way the things are connected among themselves, the second newness puts into place sets united by interlacing, webs and simplexes that combine with the things of the world, themselves combined, the combined knowledge that understands them.(130-1) Biogea closes on its opening flood thematic, approaching the initial telos of Genesis. Here the trees are brought into a position with atmosphere, the opaque abyssal reservoir, the tomb of the sun, sea in the polarity of the earthen heaven and hell. The poem of the earth then is silent but deadly, indeed, as funny as that phrase is, mainly a tomb gas. The meaning of the living and the non-meaning of things converge in the muteness of the world; this meaning and non-meaning plunge there and come out, the ultimate eddy. Mundus patet: through a fissure, through an opening, a fault, a cleft come noises, calls as small as these apertures. I’m listening, attentive, I’m translating, I’m advancing in the scaled-down meaning and science. Mundus patet: should the world open greatly, it will launch me into its silence. The totality remains silent. Knowledge expanded in elation. White origin of meaning, fountain of joy. (198) Final Remarks One test of a review is the long term trajectory the referee thinks the book will have. I see Serres’ text lending greatly into the vision of Biogea . In fact, in the vision of the novel inquiries of Stephen Jay Gould’s work there is something to be thought on the level of the individual and the species; namely, that humanity and its uniqueness is in its deferral, its thinking and naming, a thinking surrounded by silence that filters into everything, that pulls us through the world, the kinetic pulse we recognize, and all of that we cleave away in the base philosophical maxim of difference itself. Unique individuals are spatial creatures: we dwell, and we ought to get good at it. Yet this is an imaginative space that, if you are crazy enough to believe it, de-term-ine the conditions of its own terms. That is why we are not merely creating spaces on the acceleration of time, or so this ignoramus thinks, to accidentally transcend. Imagination already has this insatiable silence that we drink up and fail to manifest. Space is timeless. The imagination itself, shared by humans for themselves, their objects, and the species as a whole, is a non-defined space of relation; a whole human trajectory as part of nature, and part of worlds that are the other side of thinking nature, the consequence of it, at least our attempt to do so. Our survival is based on our deliberation, our caution, our natural deconstructive sense toward this silence that is already part of the song, sung, singing of this century without end. Good books will let us inhabit this space and recognize a form of life. Serres’ text moves toward dwelling, as noted, in masterful and accessible ways. The pitched battles are the falling replays of anemic and dead politics. As soon as we realize there is humanity, we may be able to enjoy the end of it, our inhuman capability of listening to silence. NOTES 1. See Michel Serres. The Parasite . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2007. 2. Wallace Stevens, “Imagination as Value” [ca. 1945], in Collected Poetry and Prose . New York: The Library of America. 1997. 724-39. 3. Jean-François Lyotard. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time . Trans. Geoffrey Bennington & Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 1992. 4. See the introduction: Quentin Melliassoux. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency . Trans. Ray Brassier. New York: Continuum. 2008. EDITOR'S NOTE: This review was updated on August 8, 2012. Substantial edits include block quotes from the book under review as well as the inclusion of comments from the author. (shrink)

While research has focused on why certain entrepreneurs elect to create innovative solutions to social problems, very little is known about why some social entrepreneurs choose to scale their solutions while others do not. Research on scaling has generally focused on organizational characteristics often overlooking factors at the individual level that may affect scaling decisions. Drawing on the multidimensional construct of moral intensity, we propose a theoretical model of ethical decision making to explain why a social entrepreneur’s perception of moral (...) intensity of the social problem, coupled with their personal desire for control, can significantly influence scaling decisions. Specifically, we propose that higher levels of perceived moral intensity will positively influence the likelihood of scaling through open as opposed to closed modes in order to achieve greater speed and scope of social impact. However, we also propose this effect will be negatively moderated by a social entrepreneur’s higher levels of desire for control. Our model has implications for research and practice at the interface of ethics and social entrepreneurship. (shrink)

We commonly appeal to emotions to explain human behaviour: we seek comfort out of grief, we threaten someone in anger and we hide in fear. According to the standard Humean analysis, intentional action is always explained with reference to a belief-desire pair. According to recent consensus, however, emotions have independent motivating force apart from beliefs and desires, and supplant them when explaining emotional action. In this paper I provide a systematic framework for thinking about the motivational structure (...) of emotion and show how it is consistent with the Humean analysis. On this picture, emotions are not reducible to beliefs and desires, instead their primary motivational force comes from their role as modulators of desires—they control the strength of our occurrent desires. Emotions therefore motivate actions through the belief-desire system instead of overriding it. (shrink)

Facial electromyography research shows that corrugator supercilii ('frowning muscle') activity tracks the emotional valence of linguistic stimuli. Grounded or embodied accounts of language processing take such activity to reflect the simulation or ‘reenactment’ of emotion, as part of the retrieval of word meaning (e.g., of “furious”) and/or of building a situation model (e.g., for “Mark is furious”). However, the same muscle also expresses our primary emotional evaluation of things we encounter. Language-driven affective simulation can easily be at odds with the (...) reader’s affective evaluation of what language describes (e.g., when we like Mark being furious). To examine what happens in such cases, we independently manipulated simulation valence and moral evaluative valence in short narratives. Participants first read about characters behaving in a morally laudable or objectionable fashion: this immediately led to corrugator activity reflecting positive or negative affect. Next, and critically, a positive or negative event befell these same characters. Here, the corrugator response did not track the valence of the event, but reflected both simulation and moral evaluation. This highlights the importance of unpacking coarse notions of affective meaning in language processing research into components that reflect simulation and evaluation. Our results also call for a re-evaluation of the interpretation of corrugator EMG, as well as other affect-related facial muscles and other peripheral physiological measures, as unequivocal indicators of simulation. Research should explore how such measures behave in richer and more ecologically valid language processing, such as narrative; refining our understanding of simulation within a framework of grounded language comprehension. (shrink)

Emotion dysregulation (ED) is a vulnerability factor for affective disorders that may originate from deficits in cognitive control (CC). Although measures of ED are often designed to assess trait-like tendencies, the extent to which such measures capture a time-varying (TV) or state-like construct versus a time-invariant (TI) or trait-like personality characteristic is unclear. The link between the TV and TI components of ED and CC is also unclear. In a 6-wave, 5-month longitudinal study, community participants (n = 1281) completed (...) the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS-16), a commonly used measure of ED and measures of CC. A latent variable (trait-state-occasion) model showed that the proportion of TI factor variance (.80) was greater than the TV factor variance (.19). Although TV factor stability was significant, the coefficients were small in magnitude. Furthermore, regression weights for the ED TI factor (average β = −.62) were significant and larger than those for the TV factor (average β = −.10) in predicting latent CC at each of the six-time points. These findings suggest that ED, as assessed by the DERS-16, is largely TI and this TI component is more strongly linked to CC than the TV component. (shrink)

The uniqueness of Psychiatry as a medical speciality lies in the fact that aside from tackling what it considers as illnesses, it has perchance to comment on and tackle many issues of social relevance as well. Whether this is advisable or not is another matter; but such a process is inevitable due to the inherent nature of the branch and the problems it deals with. Moreover this is at the root of the polarization of psychiatry into opposing psychosocial and biological (...) schools. This gets reflected in their visualization of scope, in definitions and in methodology as well. Whilst healthy criticism of one against the other school is necessary, there should be caution against hasty application of one's frame of reference to an approach that does not intend to follow, or conform to, one's methodology. This should be done within the referential framework of the school critically evaluated, with due consideration for its methods and concepts. Similarly, as at present, there is no evidence to prove one or the other of these approaches as better, aside from personal choice. We can say so even if there is a strong paradigm shift towards the biological at present. A renaissance of scientific psychoanalysis coupled with a perceptive neurobiology which can translate those insights into testable hypotheses holds the greatest promise for psychiatry in the future. This suggests the need for unification of diverse appearing approaches to get a more comprehensive and enlightened worldview. It requires a highly integrative capacity. Just as a physicist thinks simultaneously in terms of particles and waves, a psychiatrist must think of motives, emotions and desires in the same breath as neurobiology, genetics and psychopharmacology. However, the integration must be attempted without destroying the internal cohesiveness of the individual schools. This will give a fair chance for polarization in which a single proper approach in psychiatry could emerge, which may be a conglomerate of diverse appearing approaches of today, or one which supersedes the rest. A synthesis of cognitive psychology and neuroscience offers the greatest promise at present. (shrink)

Introduction: Many individuals and families are currently experiencing a high level of COVID-19-related stress and are struggling to find helpful coping mechanisms. Mindfulness-based interventions are becoming an increasingly popular treatment for individuals experiencing depression and chronic levels of stress. The app draws from scholarly evidence on the efficacy of mindfulness meditations and builds on the pre-existing apps by incorporating techniques that are used in some therapies such as cognitive behavioral therapy and mindfulness-based cognitive therapy.Methods: Participants were randomly assigned to a (...) 4-week mindfulness and self-compassion-based cognitive smartphone intervention or a wait-list control group. They were instructed to engage in self-compassion and mindfulness practices and a cognitive restructuring task. They also completed measures that evaluated their levels of depression, stress, anxiety, self-compassion, wisdom, psychological well-being, and subjective well-being. The intervention group was also instructed to track their weekly engagement with the app. Standardized effect sizes for between-group differences were calculated using Cohen's d for complete case analyses.Results: Complete case analyses from baseline to the end of this randomized controlled trial demonstrated significant moderate between-group differences for depressive symptoms and decisiveness. Moderate between-group differences were also found for self-compassion such that significant improvements in self-kindness, common humanity, mindfulness and decreases in self-judgement, isolation, and overidentification were observed. A small between-group difference was found for emotional regulation. Moreover, a significant moderate within-group decrease in stress and anxiety symptoms was also observed in the intervention group.Conclusions: Serene is an effective intervention that promotes increased levels of self-compassion and emotional regulation. Engaging with Serene may help reduce depressive symptoms through mindfulness, self-compassion, and cognitive restructuring which help reduce overidentification with one's negative emotions. As individuals rebalance their thinking through cognitive restructuring, they can identify the varying stressors in their life, develop action plans and engage in adaptive coping strategies to address them. Serene may promote greater self-understanding which may provide one with a more balanced perspective on their current upsetting situations to positively transform their challenges during the pandemic. (shrink)

In truth, however, value is here the active factor in a process, in which, while constantly assuming the form in turn of money and commodities, it at the same time changes in magnitude, differentiates itself by throwing off surplus-value from itself; the original value, in other words, expands spontaneously. For the movement... is its own movement... is automatic expansion... able to add value to itself... living off-springs...golden eggs...an independent substance....It differentiates itself as original value from itself as surplus value; as (...) the father differentiates himself from himself qua the son, yet both are one and of one age: for only by the surplus value of £10 does the £100 originally advanced become capital, and so soon as this takes place, so soon as the son, and by the son, the father, is begotten, so soon does their difference vanish, and they again become one, £110.3. Marx (1967, 1:171-73)The future must no longer be determined by the past....Anticipation is imperative...in order to be more than herself...“impossible” subject, untenable in a real social framework....But secretly, silently, deep down inside, she grows and multiplies...she goes and passes into infinity....Heterogeneous, yes...she does not cling to herself; she is dispersible, prodigious, stunning, desirous and capable of others, of the other woman that she will be, of the other woman she isn't, of him, of you...she is everywhere, she exchanges...in the exchange that multiplies....She does not “know” what she's giving, she doesn't measure it...she finds not her sum but her differences....In one another we will never be lacking. Cixous (1986, 309-20)If God is dead, everything is permitted, then the conclusion imposing itself within the text of our experience is that the response to God is dead, is nothing is any longer permitted. Lacan (1991, 139)It is therefore absolutely impossible to control capitalism from the metalevel, because capitalism itself is deconstructive.Karatani (1995, 71). (shrink)

In truth, however, value is here the active factor in a process, in which, while constantly assuming the form in turn of money and commodities, it at the same time changes in magnitude, differentiates itself by throwing off surplus-value from itself; the original value, in other words, expands spontaneously. For the movement... is its own movement... is automatic expansion... able to add value to itself... living off-springs...golden eggs...an independent substance....It differentiates itself as original value from itself as surplus value; as (...) the father differentiates himself from himself qua the son, yet both are one and of one age: for only by the surplus value of £10 does the £100 originally advanced become capital, and so soon as this takes place, so soon as the son, and by the son, the father, is begotten, so soon does their difference vanish, and they again become one, £110.3.Marx (1967, 1:171-73)The future must no longer be determined by the past....Anticipation is imperative...in order to be more than herself...“impossible” subject, untenable in a real social framework....But secretly, silently, deep down inside, she grows and multiplies...she goes and passes into infinity....Heterogeneous, yes...she does not cling to herself; she is dispersible, prodigious, stunning, desirous and capable of others, of the other woman that she will be, of the other woman she isn't, of him, of you...she is everywhere, she exchanges...in the exchange that multiplies....She does not “know” what she's giving, she doesn't measure it...she finds not her sum but her differences....In one another we will never be lacking.Cixous (1986, 309-20)If God is dead, everything is permitted, then the conclusion imposing itself within the text of our experience is that the response to God is dead, is nothing is any longer permitted.Lacan (1991, 139)It is therefore absolutely impossible to control capitalism from the metalevel, because capitalism itself is deconstructive.Karatani (1995, 71). (shrink)

This essay proposes an approach to understanding changes in political responses to crime in England and Wales over the last third of the twentieth century and developments in criminological knowledge over the same period. To explore the association between these in some empirical detail, we argue, would provide a historical?sociological understanding that is currently lacking, notwithstanding Garland's significant intervention in The Culture of Control. We take issue with some aspects of Garland's account, on both methodological and substantive grounds, and (...) delineate certain distinctions between his ?history of the present? and the historically situated hermeneutics that we favour. The latter, we suggest, can be more attentive to particular political and intellectual struggles that have had a formative bearing on the current field and, as such, offer new perspectives on the position of crime and punishment in contemporary political culture. (shrink)

The ways in which we exercise intentional agency are varied. I take the domain of intentional agency to include all that we intentionally do versus what merely happens to us. So the scope of our intentional agency is not limited to intentional action. One can also exercise some intentional agency in omitting to act and, importantly, in producing the intentional outcome of an intentional action. So, for instance, when an agent is dieting, there is an exercise of agency both with (...) respect to the agent’s actions and omissions that constitute her dieting behavior and in achieving the intended outcome of losing weight. In our mental lives we exercise intentional agency both in performing mental actions and when we intentionally produce certain outcomes at which our mental actions are aimed. The nature and scope of our intentional agency in our mental lives with respect to controlling the acquisition of mental states such as belief, desire, and intention is a topic that is of interest in its own right. In this essay, I will focus solely on our control over coming to believe. Understanding what sort of control we have our beliefs has far-reaching implications. For instance, theorizing about self-deception and wishful thinking is aided by theorizing about what if any intentional agency we can exercise with respect to acquiring beliefs. Another often mentioned concern that motivates thinking about doxastic agency comes from religion (when conversion requires a change of belief). We also hold persons morally and epistemically responsible for beliefs they have or fail to have. Finally, some deontological theories of epistemic justification require that agents be able to exercise a robust form of doxastic control. Fruitful work on any of these problems requires that we have an account of our intentional agency in acquiring beliefs. There are at least three loci of doxastic control. The first is over acquiring beliefs. The second is over maintaining beliefs. The third is over how we use our beliefs. I am chiefly concerned with the first locus of doxastic control in this essay, but I will say something about the second locus along the way. Also, I will only consider one way we might exercise control over acquiring beliefs. Specifically, I will present an argument against direct doxastic voluntarism (DDV). By “DDV” I mean to refer to the thesis that it is conceptually possible for agents to consciously exercise the same sort of direct voluntary control over coming to acquire a doxastic attitude—such as belief, suspension of belief, and disbelief—that they exercise over uncontroversial basic actions. If DDV is correct, then coming to believe can be a basic action-type. DDV, or something very close to it, was Bernard Williams’ target in his 1973 paper, “Deciding to Believe.” Williams’s argument is widely regarded as having been a failure. But I think that Williams was on to something in his paper. Hence, in this paper, while I do not attempt to resurrect Williams’s argument, I develop and defend a revised argument for a thesis that is quite close to Williams’s. I will proceed as follows. First, I will discuss Bernard Williams’ (1973) failed attempt at showing that DDV is conceptually impossible. This will be followed by a discussion of some constraints on our belief-forming activities. I will then clarify my target a bit more than Williams does in his original paper. Finally, I will present my own argument against the conceptual possibility of DDV. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Commentary on “Towards a Design-Based Analysis of Emotional Episodes”Margaret A. Boden (bio)The theoretical work of Wright, Sloman, and Beaudoin is a significant contribution to our understanding of the nature and function of emotions, and potentially also to therapeutic method. Their message that emotions, as controlling and scheduling mechanisms, are essential to any complex intelligent system (that is: one with multiple and potentially conflicting motives, and situated in (...) a changing and unfriendly world) is important. It encourages cognitive psychologists to regard emotions as a central aspect of intelligence, not to sideline (or even to forget) them, as is too often done. In addition, it shows—at least in general outline—how emotions might be understood in computational terms.Critics of computational psychology too often assume that emotions and motivation must lie outside its scope. This is not so, although it is true that relatively little computational work has been done in this area. Interestingly, the very early days of AI saw a comparatively high proportion of models of multiple goal-seeking, affective processes, and even personality (see, for example, the papers in Tomkins and Messick 1963). But, inevitably, these were so crude as to be almost useless in illuminating the nature of emotion and motivation. As AI-workers and their psychologist colleagues found to their cost, it is difficult enough to model the pursuit of one goal, never mind the pursuit of several mutually conflicting goals. Accordingly, personality and emotion soon faded from the scene as preferred topics of computational research—but not before I too had argued that they could, in principle, be so addressed (Boden 1965; 1972).I suggested—in the sketchiest terms—that the concepts of William McDougall’s personality theory could be interpreted in a computational fashion (Boden 1965; 1972). His concept of sentiment, for example, marks what Wright et al. call “goal-sets,” and his master sentiment of self-regard relates to the descriptive and normative aspects of the self-image to which they draw our attention. He even described emotions as (conscious) control mechanisms, enabling the subject to monitor the incipient excitement of distinct types of motivation, and (sometimes) to adjust behavior so as to facilitate or inhibit the otherwise-inevitable response. What the target-authors have done is to put subtle and sophisticated computational flesh onto these minimalist theoretical bones.McDougall himself, of course, will be turning in his grave. He saw affect as partly conscious (as well as dispositional), and argued that consciousness—and purposive behavior too—cannot possibly [End Page 135] be given a mechanistic, or physicalist, explanation. Despite Wright et al.’s persuasive anti-reductionist remarks about the necessity for highly abstract (psychological) levels of explanation, he would not have accepted that such explanations could be computationally grounded. He even insisted that the neurophysiological ground of goal-seeking behavior involved a special sort of energy, or horme, intrinsically directed to specific ends. Presumably, no professional reader today would agree with McDougall on that point. But many may agree with him about consciousness. And many more will insist that consciousness is a crucial aspect—perhaps the crucial aspect—of emotion. Such critics will doubtless point out that our three authors explicitly “factor out,” or refuse to discuss, consciousness as such.Wright et al.’s rhetorical reserve on this point is defensible on two counts. First, even though emotions do involve conscious sensations, the dispositional and control aspects of affect are at least as important. Indeed, it is evident from the quotations from individuals reacting to bereavement that people often describe the phenomenology of grief in terms of these sorts of factors, rather than in a “purely qualitative” fashion (whatever that might be). Even so, these dispositional aspects of emotion are often overlooked, or regarded as less significant than the conscious phenomenology. And second, theoretical psychologists in general sideline consciousness: either they ignore it entirely, or they take it for granted philosophically and ask about the conditions under which it appears or disappears. They are well advised to do so, since we do not yet understand this concept (more accurately: this mixed bag of related concepts) at the philosophical level. Even a journal whose title has “Philosophy” as its leading... (shrink)

We build on the emerging research that shows aversive subordinate workplace behaviors are likely related to abusive supervision in the workplace. Specifically, we develop and test a moderated-mediation model outlining the process of abusive supervision based on the stressor-emotion model of counterproductive work behavior. We argue that subordinate interpersonal deviance prompts supervisor negative emotions, which then leads supervisors to engage in abusive supervision. We also argue that subordinate organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) is likely to play a crucial role (...) in predicting abusive supervision. We argue that interpersonal deviance is more likely to prompt abusive supervision through supervisor negative emotions when the magnitude of an employee’s engagement in OCB is weaker. Study 1, a time-lagged field study, tests and provides support for the relationships among our key variables (Hypotheses 1–3). Study 2, utilizing multisource field data (i.e., subordinate–supervisor dyads), replicates the results from Study 1 and provides support for the entire moderated-mediation model while controlling for tenure with supervisor, subordinate task performance, and subordinate conscientiousness. We find general support for our predictions. We conclude with a discussion of theoretical and practical implications as well as future research directions. (shrink)

When Oxford published Emotion and Adaptation, the landmark 1991 book on the psychology of emotion by internationally acclaimed stress and coping expert Richard Lazarus, Contemporary Psychology welcomed it as "a brightly shining star in the galaxy of such volumes." Psychiatrists, psychologists and researchers hailed it as a masterpiece, a major breakthrough in our understanding of the emotional process and its central role in our adaptation as individuals and as a species. What was still needed, however, was a book for general (...) readers and health care practitioners that would dispel the myths still surrounding cultural beliefs about emotion and systematically explain the relevance of the new research to the emotional dramas of our everyday lives.Now, in Passion and Reason, Lazarus draws on his four decades of pioneering research to bring readers the first book to move beyond both clinical jargon and "feel-good" popular psychology to really explain, in plain, accessible language, how emotions are aroused, how they are managed, and how they critically shape our views of ourselves and the world around us. With his co-author writer Bernice Lazarus, Dr. Lazarus explores the latest findings on the short and long-term causes and effects of various emotions, including the often conflicting research on stress management and links between negative emotions and heart disease, cancer, and other aspects of physical and psychological health. Lazarus makes a strong case that contrary to common assumption, emotions are not irrational--our emotions and our analytical thought processes are inextricably linked.While not a "how-to" book, Passion and Reason does describe how readers can interpret what lies behind their own emotions and those of their families, friends, and co-workers, and how to manage them more effectively. Exploring fifteen emotions in depth, from love to jealousy, the authors show how the personal meaning we give to the events and conditions of our lives trigger such emotions as anger, anxiety, guilt, and pride. They provide fascinating vignettes to frame a "biography" of each emotion. Some are composite case histories drawn from Dr. Lazarus's long career, but most are stories of people the Lazaruses have known over the years--people whose emotional fears, conflicts, and desires mirror readers' own. The Lazaruses also offer a special chapter on the diverse strategies of coping people use in managing their emotions, and another, "When Coping Fails," on psychotherapy and its approaches to emotional stress and dysfunction, from traditional Freudian psychoanalysis to continuing research into relaxation techniques, meditation, hypnosis, and biofeedback.Packed with insight and compellingly readable, Passion and Reason will enrich all readers fascinated by our emotional lives. (shrink)

Conflicts of interest are rampant in the American medical community. Today it is not uncommon for doctors to refer patients to clinics or labs in which they have a financial interest (40% of physicians in Florida invest in medical centers); for hospitals to offer incentives to physicians who refer patients (a practice that can lead to unnecessary hospitalization); or for drug companies to provide lucrative give-aways to entice doctors to use their "brand name" drugs (which are much more expensive (...) than generic drugs). In Medicine, Money and Morals, Marc A. Rodwin draws on his own experience as a health lawyer--and his research in health ethics, law, and policy--to reveal how financial conflicts of interest can and do negatively affect the quality of patient care. He shows that the problem has become worse over the last century and provides many actual examples of how doctors' decisions are influenced by financial considerations. We learn how two California physicians, for example, resumed referrals to Pasadena General Hospital only after the hospital started paying $70 per patient (their referrals grew from 14 in one month to 82 in the next). As Rodwin writes, incentives such as this can inhibit a doctor from taking action when a hospital fails to provide proper service, and may also lead to the unnecessary hospitalization of patients. We also learn of a Wyeth-Ayerst Labs promotion in which physicians who started patients on INDERAL (a drug for high blood pressure, angina, and migraines) received 1000 mileage points on American Airlines for each patient (studies show that promotions such as this have a direct effect on a doctor's choice of drug). Rodwin reveals why the medical community has failed to regulate conflicts of interest: peer review has little authority, state licensing boards are usually ignorant of abuses, and the AMA code of ethics has historically been recommended rather than required. He examines what can be learned from the way society has coped with the conflicts of interest of other professionals --lawyers, government officials, and businessmen--all of which are held to higher standards of accountability than doctors. And he recommends that efforts be made to prohibit and regulate certain kinds of activity (such as kickbacks and self-referrals), to monitor and regulate conduct, and to provide penalties for improper conduct. Our failure to face physicians' conflicts of interest has distorted the way medicine is practiced, compromised the loyalty of doctors to patients, and harmed society, the integrity of the medical profession, and patients. For those concerned with the quality of health care or medical ethics, Medicine, Money and Morals is a provocative look into the current health care crisis and a powerful prescription for change. (shrink)

From Plato through the nineteenth century, the West could draw on comprehensive political visions to guide government and society. Now, for the first time in more than two thousand years, Tracy B. Strong contends, we have lost our foundational supports. In the words of Hannah Arendt, the state of political thought in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has left us effectively “thinking without a banister.” _Politics without Vision_ takes up the thought of seven influential thinkers, each of whom (...) attempted to construct a political solution to this problem: Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, Lenin, Schmitt, Heidegger, and Arendt. None of these theorists were liberals nor, excepting possibly Arendt, were they democrats—and some might even be said to have served as handmaidens to totalitarianism. And all to a greater or lesser extent shared the common conviction that the institutions and practices of liberalism are inadequate to the demands and stresses of the present times. In examining their thought, Strong acknowledges the political evil that some of their ideas served to foster but argues that these were not necessarily the only paths their explorations could have taken. By uncovering the turning points in their thought—and the paths not taken—Strong strives to develop a political theory that can avoid, and perhaps help explain, the mistakes of the past while furthering the democratic impulse. Confronting the widespread belief that political thought is on the decline, Strong puts forth a brilliant and provocative counterargument that in fact it has endured—without the benefit of outside support. A compelling rendering of contemporary political theory, _Politics without Vision_ is sure to provoke discussion among scholars in many fields. (shrink)

BackgroundThe emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) in medicine has prompted the development of numerous ethical guidelines, while the involvement of patients in the creation of these documents lags behind. As part of the European PROFID project we explore patient perspectives on the ethical implications of AI in care for patients at increased risk of sudden cardiac death (SCD).AimExplore perspectives of patients on the ethical use of AI, particularly in clinical decision-making regarding the implantation of an implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD).MethodsSemi-structured, future scenario-based (...) interviews were conducted among patients who had either an ICD and/or a heart condition with increased risk of SCD in Germany (n = 9) and the Netherlands (n = 15). We used the principles of the European Commission’s Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI to structure the interviews.ResultsSix themes arose from the interviews: the ability of AI to rectify human doctors’ limitations; the objectivity of data; whether AI can serve as second opinion; AI explainability and patient trust; the importance of the ‘human touch’; and the personalization of care. Overall, our results reveal a strong desire among patients for more personalized and patient-centered care in the context of ICD implantation. Participants in our study express significant concerns about the further loss of the ‘human touch’ in healthcare when AI is introduced in clinical settings. They believe that this aspect of care is currently inadequately recognized in clinical practice. Participants attribute to doctors the responsibility of evaluating AI recommendations for clinical relevance and aligning them with patients’ individual contexts and values, in consultation with the patient.ConclusionThe ‘human touch’ patients exclusively ascribe to human medical practitioners extends beyond sympathy and kindness, and has clinical relevance in medical decision-making. Because this cannot be replaced by AI, we suggest that normative research into the ‘right to a human doctor’ is needed. Furthermore, policies on patient-centered AI integration in clinical practice should encompass the ethics of everyday practice rather than only principle-based ethics. We suggest that an empirical ethics approach grounded in ethnographic research is exceptionally well-suited to pave the way forward. (shrink)

Studying disorientation is studying how, through our bodies, culture and technology, we humans are connected to our environment, and what happens when this connection is weakened or severed. What happens, of course, depends again on our environment, bodies, culture and technology: the world around us becomes at times uncanny, unfamiliar or dangerous when we get disoriented. Disorientation can be exciting and refreshing—an invitation to explore, to leave behind nagging desires for control and certainty, and to embrace instead a (...) class='Hi'>more spontaneous relationship with our surroundings. Getting lost shapes our consciousness, not only by transforming our perception of the world around us, but by transforming our sense of who we are in that world, and what possibilities are open to us within it.In this chapter, we analyse the phenomenology of disorientation to elucidate the role that emotions play in distributed cognitive processes that involve multiple agents and cognitive artefacts. The feeling of disorientation destabilises our horizon of experience and turns the world around us unfamiliar or alien. This feeling embodies our disconnection to the agents, the cognitive artefacts, and the environment around us. A proper analysis of the phenomenology of both orientation and disorientation uncovers the role feelings play in distributed cognitive processes: emotions serve as a form of evaluative regulation that contributes to, on the one hand, the syncing of the different elements of a distributed cognitive process, and on the other, to the eventual disengagement of the agent from an unreliable distributed cognitive process. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:"And Her Substance Would Be Mine":Envy, Hate, and Ontological Evacuation in Josephine Hart's SinA. Samuel Kimball (bio)Envy involuntarily testifies to a lack of being that puts the envious to shame.—René Girard, A Theatre of EnvySin, offspring of snt-ya, "that which is," in Germanic sun(d)jo, "it is true," "the sin is real," and ultimately from es-, "to be," source of am, is, sooth, soothe; of the Sanskrit roots sat- and (...) sant-, "existing, true, virtuous"; of the Latin, esse, "to be," from which is derived such words as essence, presence, absence, and represent; of the Greek roots einei, "to be" as well as ont-, "being," which provides the name for the philosophical study of being itself, ontology.—Adapted from The American Heritage Dictionaryof Indo-European RootsI: Ruth Garton's Envious NarrationThe etymology of sin suggests that the evil it names reveals something fundamental about being, something ruinous and yet unavoidable, something that endangers or even nullifies being and yet is inseparable from it, even essential to it. In Josephine Hart's second novel, Sin, this something is a species of Girardian desire in the form of a monstrous envy, which impels the first-person narrator, Ruth Garton, to a lifelong hatred of her cousin and stepsister, Elizabeth. The focus of Ruth's confessional narrative, envy, drives Ruth to take covert and increasingly virulent revenge against her quasi-sibling in a self-deluding attempt to appropriate not only the objects of Elizabeth's desire but ultimately Elizabeth's desire itself and the apparent ontological fullness that Ruth attributes to it. Over the course of her life, then, Ruth loses the promise [End Page 239] of her name in her ruthless pursuit of her enemy. As she becomes increasingly frustrated in her efforts to destroy her sister's life, Ruth finally turns her hatred of her nemesis against herself as well as the readers to whom she appeals for understanding. If envy heightens Ruth's consciousness to the point where she can perceive that her desire signals her ontological emptiness, nevertheless, it so captures her, so dominates her emotional and cognitive life, that she is unable to find a way to affirm her own—or anyone else's—being in the world. The result is a spectacular narrative record of the cost of recognizing but being unable to resist the mimeticism of desire.1II. The Girardian Dynamic of SinAs Girard has demonstrated, one of the most difficult existential challenges is to understand that desire is mimetically mediated. The result is that we come into our desire only through someone else's and always want something more and other than we think we want. Behind every move to possess a particular object is a largely unrecognized and in principle unsatisfiable desire for absolute satisfaction in the form of ontological completeness, self-sufficiency, intactness. On the one hand, Girard writes, "by the example of his own desire…the model conveys to the subject the supreme desirability of the object" (1977, 146). On the other hand, since to desire mimetically means to come into desire through the other rather than through oneself, by this same example the model conveys to the subject the contingency, the dependency, the secondariness, hence the emptiness of the subject's desire, even the subject's lack of desire, the lack that, paradoxically, constitutes his or her desire. Therefore, to be subjected to the other's want ultimately has the effect of signaling the seeming priority, fullness, and self-origination of this other person's desire. For this reason Girard asserts that "man... desires being, something he himself lacks and which some other person seems to possess" (146).If at first the other person models the desire that the subject lacks, it is in the logic of mimesis that the other will become a rival and, unless the rivalry is somehow interrupted or abrogated, inevitably an enemy to be destroyed. The subject will become locked into a potentially deadly game of trying to obtain the same object that the model desires, so as to experience the satisfactions—ultimately, the sense of being—that the object in question seems to provide... (shrink)

Kwong-loi Shun argues that our reactions to situations of danger to others needn’t be understood in terms of empathy for those others, but can be fully anchored in what is bad about the situations themselves. My reply begins by pointing out cases where the desire to help and/or emotional reactions to what is bad for others don’t seem to involve empathy and then showing how empathy actually works in those cases. It goes on to argue that empathy allows a (...) deeper and more nuanced explanation of our responses and non-responses to dire situations than the appeal to the badness of those situations makes possible. Bringing in empathy forces one to go beyond Shun’s attempt to stay within Chinese tradition.However, the reply to Shun goes on to demonstrate how our understanding of empathy and of many other aspects of our moral psychology can be deepened and enhanced by bringing in the distinctive Chinese ideas of yin and yang—conceived as complementary rather than as opposites or contraries. Via a revived and fine-tuned notion of yin/yang Chinese thought has much to teach Western philosophers. (shrink)

The present narrative review seeks to unravel where we are now, and where we need to go to delineate the active ingredients in psychotherapy delivered by conversational agents (e.g., chatbots). While psychotherapy delivered by conversational agents has shown promising effectiveness for depression, anxiety, and psychological distress across several randomized controlled trials, little emphasis has been placed on the therapeutic processes in these interventions. The theoretical framework of this narrative review is grounded in prominent perspectives on the active ingredients in psychotherapy. (...) Based on search terms derived from various theoretical perspectives, we conducted a systematic literature search of four scientific databases and identified 17 studies. Across the selected studies, three themes emerged: relationship variables, emotional venting, and cognitive factors. While methodological issues compromise the epistemic value of this evidence base, core questions also remain to be answered. Such questions include, but are not limited to, whether humans can form affectionate bonds to inanimate beings and whether these kind of mental health treatments should be understood as psychotherapy or something else. Researchers should therefore be cautious when applying theories of psychotherapy in the realm of conversational agents. We conclude the paper by introducing recommendations for future research, which we hope will help instigate methodologically sound studies in this field. (shrink)

In order to uncover the inner workings of our capacities, we look to ‘effects’. Most of us have the capacity to distinguish between spoken ‘ba’ and ‘fa’ sounds. One thought is that this is achieved through aural sensitivities that detect changes in vibration picked up by the eardrum. But the McGurk Effect suggests that there is more to the story. Without changing the incoming vibrations, sound experience can be modulated by showing a video of a mouth making a ‘ba’ (...) sound or a ‘fa’ sound with a consistent sound overlaid. We learn that our overall auditory experiences are at least in part determined by visual cues in addition to what’s first picked up by our eardrums. The McGurk Effect gives us a hint into the inner workings of audition and helps us better understand the capacity to discriminate sounds of a certain sort. -/- In the present paper, the focus is on emotional capacities and a well known effect – recalcitrance. Recalcitrant emotions, such as fearing the dog even though one knows that the dog is harmless or being angry with one’s partner even when one realises it was only in a dream that the partner was nasty, have played the role of effect in much theorising about emotions. But in my view, we’ve stayed a bit too close to home, aiming to fit the effect into a paradigm – the representationalist paradigm – that isn’t fit for purpose. I will use this criticism as a launching off point to introduce a different way of thinking about emotions that is better suited to making sense of recalcitrance. I will argue that emotions are transitions between representational states rather than being representational states themselves. The view is better suited to make sense of recalcitrance and, at the end of the paper, I will offer reasons for thinking that main points that speak in favour of a representationalist approach to emotion can be recaptured or explained away by the transitions view. (shrink)

The evaluations involved in shame are, intuitively at least, of many different sorts. One feels ashamed when seen by others doing something one would prefer doing alone (social shame). One is ashamed because of one’s ugly nose (shame about permanent traits). One feels ashamed of one’s dishonest behavior (moral shame), etc. The variety of evaluations in shame is striking; and it is even more so if one takes a cross-cultural perspective on this emotion. So the difficulty – the “unity (...) problem” of shame- turns out to be the following: is there a common trait shared by all shame evaluations that will allow us to differentiate these evaluations from those that feature in other negative self-reflexive emotions like anger at oneself or self disappointment? Some progress is perhaps accomplished if we say that, in shame, a given trait or behavior is evaluated as degrading or as revealing one’s lack of worth. Still, even if we agree with this last claim, truth is that these answers are less illuminating than we might wish. A theory of shame should surely further elucidate the aspect of one’s identity relevant for shame, namely, the self of shame. In this connexion, philosophers have referred to “self-esteem,” “self-respect” or the “social self,” significantly disagreeing thus on which aspect of one’s identity is at stake in shame. After critically discussing the different solutions to the problem, we offer our own. Shame, we claim, consists in an awareness of a distinctive inability to discharge a commitment that goes with holding self-relevant values. This conception solves the unity problem while illuminating other aspects of this emotion. (shrink)

Knee proprioception deficits and neuroplasticity have been indicated following injury to the anterior cruciate ligament. Evidence is, however, scarce regarding brain response to knee proprioception tasks and the impact of ACL injury. This study aimed to identify brain regions associated with the proprioceptive sense of joint position at the knee and whether the related brain response of individuals with ACL reconstruction differed from that of asymptomatic controls. Twenty-one persons with unilateral ACL reconstruction of either the right or left knee, as (...) well as 19 controls matched for sex, age, height, weight and current activity level, performed a knee joint position sense test during simultaneous functional magnetic resonance imaging. Integrated motion capture provided real-time knee kinematics to activate test instructions, as well as accurate knee angles for JPS outcomes. Recruited brain regions during knee angle reproduction included somatosensory cortices, prefrontal cortex and insula. Neither brain response nor JPS errors differed between groups, but across groups significant correlations revealed that greater errors were associated with greater ipsilateral response in the anterior cingulate, supramarginal gyrus and insula. This is the first study to capture brain response using fMRI in relation to quantifiable knee JPS. Activated brain regions have previously been associated with sensorimotor processes, body schema and interoception. Our innovative paradigm can help to guide future research investigating brain response to lower limb proprioception. (shrink)

Background: Physicians sometimes are asked by co-workers for prescriptions to deal with their medical problems. These “hallway” requests typically occur outside a formal doctor-patient relationship. There are professional guidelines on serving as physician for family members and friends, but no guidelines address writing prescriptions for co-workers. The frequency of these requests and the factors physicians consider in responding to them have not been examined.Objectives: To obtain data on the frequency of these requests and physicians’ attitudes and practices in responding to (...) them, and to explore the ethical considerations in writing prescriptions for co-workers.Design: A survey was administered to all physician faculty and residents in an academic department of internal medicine. The questions included whether the respondent had ever been asked for a prescription by a co-worker and how often the respondent had received such requests and written such prescriptions in the previous three months. Respondents also were asked to rate how likely they would be to write such a prescription in 15 hypothetical scenarios.Results: Of the 113 respondents who completed surveys, 68 percent reported having been asked for a prescription by a co-worker. Among those who had ever been asked, 59 percent had been asked one or more times during the previous three months and 88 percent had ever written such a prescription. Also, 88 percent of all respondents stated they were “very likely” or “likely” to write the prescription in one or more of the hypothetical scenarios.Conclusions: Most physicians in our sample had been asked for prescriptions by co-workers, and most had written such prescriptions. Many respondents indicated a willingness to write such prescriptions in a variety of scenarios, despite the absence of a formal doctor-patient relationship. Further discussion of the ethical considerations in writing prescriptions for co-workers is needed. (shrink)

ABSTRACTNegative emotion influences cognitive control, and more specifically conflict adaptation. However, discrepant results have often been reported in the literature. In this study, we broke down negative emotion into integral and incidental components using a modern motivation-based framework, and assessed whether the former could change conflict adaptation. In the first experiment, we manipulated the duration of the inter-trial-interval to assess the actual time-scale of this effect. Integral negative emotion was induced by using loss-related feedback contingent on (...) task performance, and measured at the subjective and physiological levels. Results showed that conflict-driven adaptive control was enhanced when integral negative emotion was elicited, compared to a control condition without changes in defensive motivation. Importantly, this effect was only found when a short, as opposed to long ITI was used, suggesting that it had a short time scale. In the second experiment, we controlled for effe... (shrink)

continent. 1.4 (2011): 253—278. A Sense of French Politics Politics itself is not the exercise of power or struggle for power. Politics is first of all the configuration of a space as political, the framing of a specific sphere of experience, the setting of objects posed as "common" and of subjects to whom the capacity is recognized to designate these objects and discuss about them.(1) On April 14, 2011, France implemented its controversial ban of the niqab and burqa , commonly (...) referred to as the Islamic veil, in public places. On the coattails of the 2004 prohibition of religious artifacts, including the less concealing hijab or Islamic headscarves, in schools, the veil ban sparked equal outrage across both political and theological spectra, and many on both sides of the debate were quick to inquire about enforcement. As Steven Erlanger reports, “The police do not have the authority under the law to remove full veils, only to fine or require citizenship lessons for those who violate the new law.”(2) While the legal and social implications of this interdiction are ripe for study, the reprisals for breaking the law, notably compulsory citizenship classes, illuminate the strategic governmentality underlying the French government's targeting of the Muslim community, particularly those elements it considers affiliated with fundamentalist factions and/or terrorist organizations, if only through fashion—an integral component of French citizenship. Indeed, in allowing the (fashion) police to mandate instructional courses in citizenship for offenders, France implies that any Muslim choosing to wear the niqab or burqa , perhaps even for those who are already citizens, must not be aware of the subtle nuances of dress indicative of the French citizenry within public space. Furthermore, the degree of instruction requisite to citizenship, which clearly can and must be updated as the state sees fit, cements the imagined relation between citizens and states within the discourses on the veil ban. As Sharma contends, “Concepts of citizenship are the ideological glue that bonds the nation to the state. Citizenship provides the legal framework through which the state performs its role as ruler for the nation.”(3) Speaking for/as the state, French President Nicolas Sarkozy declared in a 2009 presentation before members of the government and other citizens that the burqa “is not welcome on the territory of France.”(4) Although there is nothing unique, especially recently, about a nation-state taking extreme measures to guard itself against what it deems to be threats to its sovereignty, the way in which the ongoing discourses on hijab have (d)evolved, which coincide with recent pronouncements by governmental leaders in Germany, Britain, and France that policies of multiculturalism have “failed,”(5) points toward nationalist reterritorializations, which is also to say physical and ideological re-appropriations, of public space within democratic milieux, which remain predicated upon the mediation of spaces. As Panagia deduces from Rancière, “Democracy […] is not an institutional form of government […], but an appearance whose visibilities and audibilites arise out of the dissonant blur of the everyday.”(6) Ultimately, the veil ban represents a calculated move to regulate the every day, which is to say the micropolitics of, that which is visible and invisible within French society, which makes it nothing short of a struggle to manage (the sensation of) bodies. Re-situating the political within the context of sense, Rancière argues that the fundamental essence of politics lies within the distinction between consensus and dissensus , and whereas most consider politics proper as fundamentally concerned with the fluid operations of the state— consensus , Rancière actually locates the political within events that disrupt the normative sensory order of things— dissensus . He explains, “Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time.”(7) This reformulation of politics centers on agency and, albeit perhaps unintended, representationality and offers a useful formulation for spatializing the discourses surrounding the Islamic veil, which are mired within seemingly senseless policies and practices of objectification. Instituting a normative “regime of visibility,” the French veil ban encapsulates the political economy of agency, now both mediated and representational, under the rule of nationalist governmentalities in increasingly transnational contexts.(8) Adjudicating presence within public space signals a concern with the sensory aspects of agency itself—what Rancière terms the “distribution of the sensible,” which is “a matrix that defines a set of relations between sense and sense: that is, between a form of sensory experience and an interpretation which makes sense of it.”(9) To be concerned with sense is to focus upon the body, and this somatic repositioning of the (fashionable) citizen within the territory of the state augurs the resurgence of nationalist bio-politics within Europe, since, as Hage explicates, “Nationalism, before being an explicit practice or a mode of classification, is a state of the body. It is a way of imagining one's position within the nation and what one can aspire to as a national.”(10) The French government's attempt to make (bodily) sense of public space for its citizens by and through policies aimed against a burqa-clad Muslim minority, which might only apply to “less then 400 to fewer than 2,000” women(11), reveals the necessary, yet mercurial, transmutation of public space into national space through bio-political strategies of sense-making, which, as Hage observes, denotes that “nationalists perceive themselves as spatial managers.”(12) At the center of this concern over public space is the equally contentious dimension of governing female Islamic identity, which has become one of the main critiques levied against Islam from outsiders who view the veil in its various forms as a clear sign of the religion's actual and symbolic violence against women, even if such critiques remain ensconced within nationalist discourses. As Halim and Meyers argue, “Although Western news media may focus their coverage of Muslim women on the debate over whether and the extent to which the veil may by oppressive to the women who wear it, they have exhibited little interest in the physical oppression of violence against women in Islamic countries.”(13) While it falls outside of the scope of this analysis to arbitrate all of the dimensions of this debate, understanding some of the issues related to female identity and hijab within public space are crucial to this study. As these topics are extraordinarily complex, even and perhaps especially within the Muslim community, it is necessary to provide some context concerning the value, purpose, and meaning of the Islamic veil, which has a rich and arduous history. The Art of the Veil At present, there are only two countries, Iran and Saudi Arabia, that require women to wear hijab , which is a decidedly problematic term and concept whose locus is itself caught within a struggle of sensation. Noting the strategic reterritorialization of the term, Berger explains: The choice of the name, hijab , now widely adopted to designate the “Islamic veil,” it itself interesting, although the semantic shift it operates is not directly commented upon by its users. Although the design (both the cut and the symbolic function) of the hijab and the Iranian chador are indeed the same, as opposed, for instance, to the traditional Algerian haik , the word hijab has come to replace the term chador popularized by the Iranian revolution, as a properly Arabic (hence Koranic) designation. This discursive shift points to the successful reclaiming of the national revolution in Iran by a transnational pan-Islamic movement, whose language of reference can only be Koranic Arabic.(14) While the hijab is certainly a point of contention within various countries dealing with immigrant Islamic populations (of which France has the largest in Europe as part of its colonial legacy in Algeria), it is clear that the veil is a historically contextualized artifact of Muslim identity with a variety of manifestations, even as forces outside of and within Islam seek to codify its actual and symbolic value. Ultimately, the varieties of hijab , including the full-faced burqa and niqab , are complex assemblages of meaning that speak to the multitudinous flows of Islamic identities over time and space. As Gökariksel and McLarney observe, “Wearing a certain style of veil may simultaneously be a disciplinary practice crucial to the cultivation of piety (Mahmood 2005; Gokariksel 2009) and a gendered performance of social distinction in terms of class, taste, and urbanity (White 1999; Navaro-Yashin 2002; Gokariksel and Secor 2009) or of ethnicity and race (Dwyer 1999).”(15) The ideological marketplace from which the varieties of hijab ebb and flow serves both as a reflection of the ever-present materiality and dynamic functionality of spiritual economies, which are derivative of the equally ubiquitous flows of transnational capital driving agency and representationality within our historical moment. Keeping these dual, yet deeply interconnected, capital ecologies as the site of exploration for how the veil is represented within public space, one might begin to sense what lurks behind such veiled agendas. Examining the symbolic and representational nature of the Islamic “veil” in its various forms, this project situates the decidedly political contestations of public space at stake in the French ban alongside recent condemnations of multiculturalism as calculated efforts to re-distribute the sensible so as to valorize national identity within increasingly transnational and globalized socio-economic spaces, which collapse exchange values between distinct, yet interwoven, economies of (cultural/material/spiritual) capital. As the discourses on the veil rely upon representational imag(in)ings, it seems fitting to explore the political economy and art of the veil through the phenomenon of street art, which, much like hijab , is a complex assemblage of meaning of sensation mired in representationality and capital exchange. As street artists have taken up hijab in various forms, the movement offers a lens with which to situate critical responses to the veil debate across both spiritual and material economies. Situating this street art both aesthetically and historically, Lewisohn explains, “'Street art' is a sub-genre of graffiti writing and owes much to its predecessor. Though there is a good deal of crossover between the genres, they are distinct and separate in their own right.”(16) Evolving out of the graffiti explosion of the late 1970's and 1980's, street art broke the unspoken rules of the artistic underground by challenging and re-examining one's sensory experience of art in public space by experimenting with both content and form in ways that harken back to the Situationist International, which as a collective challenged one's experience of urban space through various media and experiential phenomena. Again, Lewisohn observes, “It's important to note street art's break with the tradition of the tag, and its focus on visual symbols that embrace a much wider range of media than graffiti writers would use.”(17) From stencils to prints and murals to one-liners, street artists developed a reputation for critical social and political commentary, and while it is certainly the case that not all street art is intentionally political, in challenging the normative “regime of visibility,” as Rancière puts it, of public space, street artists—even if unconsciously—call into question the common sensory experience of the politics underlying the formation of (nationalist) space.(18) Indeed, Rancière refers to the partisan sensory managers as “police,” who ultimately forge “the rules governing the circulation of appearances, of their visibility and audibility, and the proper distribution of bodies therein.”(19) As such, one can sense that street art's relationship with the police is tenous for a variety of reasons. Writing about his own experience as a street artist, Shepard Fairey observes, “With street art, there's no committee deciding whether I can put my work up on the street, there's no censorship, and I have total freedom of expression, and that concept of freedom is expressed just by using the street as a medium.”(20) As Fairey and other street artists demonstrate, the medium, to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, is the most glaring aspect of street art's message, and even as it now finds itself in galleries and usurped by private collectors, the ethos of the movement remains relavent to politics as it is, first and foremost, concerned with the configuration and experience of space. Just as examining the punishments for breaking the veil ban can map the terrain of French politics, a representational genealogy of street artist's deployment of hijab and female Muslim identity can assist in mining the depths of public space as a site of bio-political control and contestation in light of recent events in France and the rising tide of anti-multiculturalist rhetoric across Europe, even though the Islamic presence there is radically heterogenous. Using the work of Shepard Fairey, Princess Hijab, br1, and Banksy, this paper sets out to answer a number of key questions concerning the deployment of hijab, and female Islamic identity in particular, within street art as a movement now integral to and critical of the economies of exchange underlying global capitalism, which as a force of influence cannot be underestimated as a driver in the resurgence of nationalist biopolitical governmentalities. Although there exists a litany of artists to choose from, the aforementioned quartet of designers integrate hijab into their work in a seminal and critical fashion, and all have been working with the veil in some way prior to the French ban, which grants some additional context to their usage of it as a symbol in regards to the breakdown of multiculturalism across Europe, even if unconsciously. Although each artist depicts various amalgamations of hijab in their respective corpus, they share common tropes that raise significant questions concerning the veil debate, namely: what are the conditions of possibility for hijab to become a marker of Islamic identity within public space? How can we make sense of the representational topologies within street art's utilization of the hijab and female Islamic identity in light of the French ban? How might these aesthetic imag(in)ings simultaneously inhabit and combat normative discourses concerning hijab , multiculturalism, female Islamic identity, and public space? With these considerations as a backdrop, it is first necessary to outline more fully the hijab as a representative marker of female Islamic identity. The (Veiled) Writing on the Wall

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The emotions have long been an interest for those studying ancient Greece and Rome. But while the last few decades have produced excellent studies of individual emotions and the different approaches to them by the major philosophical schools, the focus has been almost entirely on negative emotions. This might give the impression that the Greeks and Romans had little to say about positive emotion, something that would be misguided. As the chapters in this collection indicate, there (...) are representations of positive emotions extending from archaic Greek poetry to Augustine, and in both philosophical works and literary genres as wide-ranging as lyric poetry, forensic oratory, comedy, didactic poetry, and the novel. Nor is the evidence uniform: while many of the literary representations give expression to positive emotion but also describe its loss, the philosophers offer a more optimistic assessment of the possibilities of attaining joy or contentment in this life.The positive emotions show some of the same features that all emotions do. But unlike the negative emotions, which we are able to describe and analyze in great detail because of our preoccupation with them, positive emotions tend to be harder to articulate. Hence the interest of the present study, which considers how positive emotions are described, their relationship to other emotions, the ways in which they are provoked or upset by circumstances, how they complicate and enrich our relationships with other people, and which kinds of positive emotion we should seek to integrate. The ancient works have a great deal to say about all of these topics, and for that reason deserve more study, both for our understanding of antiquity and for our understanding of the positive emotions in general. (shrink)

Greater emphasis on ethical issues is needed in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. The fiction for specific purposes (FSP) approach, using optimistic science fiction texts, offers a way to focus on ethical reflection that capitalizes on role models rather than negative examples. This article discusses the benefits of using FSP in STEM education more broadly, and then explains how using optimistic fictions in particular encourages students to think in ethically constructive ways. Using examples of science fiction (...) texts with hopeful perspectives, example discussion questions are given to model how to help keep students focused on the ethical issues in a text. Sample writing prompts to elicit ethical reflection are also provided as models of how to guide students to contemplate and analyze ethical issues that are important in their field of study. The article concludes that the use of optimistic fictions, framed through the lens of professional ethics guidelines and reinforced through ethical reflection, can help students to have beneficial ethical models. (shrink)

Emotion plays a significant role in our reasoning even without awareness, perhaps especially for individuals who have difficulties tolerating strong, negative emotions. Opportunity for reflection may help such individuals decide when emotions should influence reasoning. Two studies attempted to clarify the relationships among reasoning, emotions, and emotion tolerance (measured with the Affect Intolerance Scale). The first examined the effect of affect intolerance on a reasoning task. Participants were asked to determine whether conclusions logically followed from (...) both emotional and neutral if–then statements. Emotion had a small effect on performance on the reasoning task, unmoderated by affect intolerance. The second study examined whether reflection on emotional responses impacts performance on the same reasoning task. Participants asked to reflect on their emotions performed more poorly on the reasoning task than participants asked to reflect on the task’s cognitive aspects. People who endorse greater affect tolerance performed better in the cognitive reflection condition than the emotional reflection condition. People with less tolerance performed the same in both conditions. Overall, these studies support previous findings that emotion can negatively impact performance on reasoning tasks but suggest a more complex relationship for affect intolerance. (shrink)

Sound symbolism refers to non-arbitrary associations between word forms and meaning, such as those observed for some properties of sounds and size or shape. Recent evidence suggests that these connections extend to emotional concepts. Here we investigated two types of non-arbitrary relationships. Study 1 examined whether iconicity scores (i.e. resemblance-based mapping between aspects of a word’s form and its meaning) for words can be predicted from ratings in the affective dimensions of valence and arousal and/or the discrete emotions of (...) happiness, anger, fear, disgust and sadness. Words denoting negative concepts were more likely to have more iconic word forms. Study 2 explored whether statistical regularities in single phonemes (i.e. systematicity) predicted ratings in affective dimensions and/or discrete emotions. Voiceless (/p/, /t/) and voiced plosives (/b/, /d/, /g/) were related to high arousing words, whereas high arousing negative words tended to include fricatives (/s/, /z/). Hissing consonants were also more likely to occur in words denoting all negative discrete emotions. Additionally, words conveying certain discrete emotions included specific phonemes. Overall, our data suggest that emotional features might explain variations in iconicity and provide new insight about phonemic patterns showing sound symbolic associations with the affective properties of words. (shrink)

Currently, much hope for the protection of nature is pinned on the science of ecology. Without suggesting that we should pay less serious attention to science, I argue for a more pluralistic approach to the environmental and technological problems facing our time. I maintain that when ecology changes attitudes and ways of life, it does so by importing a language of engagement with nature rather than by remaining confined to a strictly scientific account. This language of engagement, which shows (...) how nature and natural things can be engaged by humans in a multiplicity of ways, I call disclosive discourse. Disclosive discourse, however, is not used exclusively by ecologists and other scientists. To the contrary, the great literary writers exemplify in their writings the ways this discourse can present nature and natural things in their most profound and powerful appeal. Moreover, disclosive discourse is not limited to words: artworks, too, are disclosive. By characterizing the deeper problem with which we are faced differently, as fundamentally technological rather than environmental, a more diversified plurality of alternatives to technology, not limited to those having to do with primarily nature, can be brought into relief and encouraged. (shrink)

In his writings, McKibben confronts us with a fundamental choice. The choice is not whether to drill ever deeper, deep-water oil wells or invest in further exploration for new oil fields because we will be running out of fossil fuel, as he argues. Nor is the choice whether to burn cleaner coal. The choice is not even whether to develop more efficient and less polluting technologies, more fuel-efficient and cleaner-burning automobiles, for instance, or whether to recycle or develop (...) wind and solar power or tilt farm policies away from industrial agriculture. He encourages these latter, of course, but they are by themselves insufficient answers to the deeper challenges of our time. For example, efficient and cleaner... (shrink)

In this study, we investigated whether differences in the experience of regret may be a potential explanation for damaging behaviours associated with psychopathy and criminal offending. Participants were incarcerated offenders (n = 60) and non-incarcerated controls (n = 20). Psychopathic traits were characterised with the Psychopathic Checklist: Screening Version. Regret was assessed by responses to outcomes on a simulated gambling task. Incarcerated offenders experienced a reduced sense of regret as compared to non-incarcerated controls. We obtained some evidence that specific psychopathic (...) factors and facets could differentially relate to the experience and use of emotions. Our data provide initial evidence of important associations between negative emotions and decision behaviour in the context of criminal offending. (shrink)

Can we use technology in the pursuit of a good life, or are we doomed to having our lives organized and our priorities set by the demands of machines and systems? How can philosophy help us to make technology a servant rather than a master? Technology and the Good Life? uses a careful collective analysis of Albert Borgmann's controversial and influential ideas as a jumping-off point from which to address questions such as these about the role and significance of technology (...) in our lives. Contributors both sympathetic and critical examine Borgmann's work, especially his "device paradigm" apply his theories to new areas such as film, agriculture, design, and ecological restoration and consider the place of his thought within philosophy and technology studies more generally. Because this collection carefully investigates the issues at the heart of how we can take charge of life with technology, it will be a landmark work not just for philosophers of technology but for students and scholars in the many disciplines concerned with science and technology studies. (shrink)

The United States leads the world in incarceration, and the United Kingdom is persistently one of the European countries with the highest per capita rates of imprisonment. Yet despite its increasing visibility as a social issue, mass incarceration - and its inconsistency with core democratic ideals - rarely surfaces in contemporary Anglo-American political theory. Democratic Theory and Mass Incarceration seeks to overcome this puzzling disconnect by deepening the dialogue between democratic theory and punishment policy. This collection of original essays initiates (...) a multi-disciplinary discussion among philosophers, political theorists, and criminologists regarding ways in which contemporary democratic theory might begin to think beyond mass incarceration. Rather than viewing punishment as a natural reaction to crime and imprisonment as a sensible outgrowth of this reaction, the volume argues that crime and punishment are institutions that reveal unmet demands for public oversight and democratic influence. Chapters explore theoretical paths towards de-carceration and alternatives to prison, suggest ways in which democratic theory can strengthen recent reform movements, and offer creative alternatives to mass incarceration. Democratic Theory and Mass Incarceration offers guideposts for critical thinking about incarceration, examining ways to rebuild crime control institutions and create a healthier, more just society. (shrink)

The appliances people adopt, and the way they use them, can critically influence the sustainable energy transition. People are often attracted to appliances with many setting options that offer them more control. Yet, operating many setting options can have negative consequences for users and the management of sustainable energy systems, which may obstruct sustainability goals. We aim to study how to reduce the preference for many setting options without reducing the perceived attractiveness of the appliance. In line (...) with our theorizing we found that people opt for appliances with fewer setting options when they are asked to reflect on which options they would like to have from a list of possible setting options, while being equally satisfied with the appliance. In addition, we show that this is especially the case when asking people to select which setting options they would like an appliance to have, as this will feel like they gain options, rather than asking them which options they are willing to give up as this feels like losing options that their appliance could have. Our findings offer relatively easy and cost-efficient ways to decrease people’s desire for many setting options on appliances, decreasing stress on the user and the energy system, while ensuring satisfaction with and acceptance of the appliance. (shrink)

Trait mindfulness confers emotional benefits and encourages skillful emotion regulation, in part because it helps people more deliberately attend to internal experiences and external surroundings. Such heightened attentional control might help skillfully deploy one’s attention towards certain kinds of stimuli, which may in turn help regulate emotions, but this remains unknown. Testing how trait mindful people deploy attention when regulating their emotions could help uncover the specific mechanisms of mindfulness that confer its emotional benefits. The present (...) study aimed to determine whether high trait mindfulness is associated with sustained attention biases to (i.e. longer gaze at) emotional scenes, when all participants are given the emotion regulation goal of staying in a positive mood. To measure this, we used eye tracking to assess selective attention to positive, neutral, and negative photographs. Higher trait mindfulness was associated with both a stronger attention bias for positive (vs. neutral and vs. negative) images, as well as greater success staying in a positive mood during viewing. Surprisingly, this attention bias towards the positive images did not mediate the relationship between mindfulness and maintenance of positive mood. Future work should compare visual attention to other emotion regulation strategies that may maximise positive affect for mindful people. (shrink)

Cell line immortalisation is a growing component of African genomics research and biobanking. However, little is known about the factors influencing consent to cell line creation and immortalisation in African research settings. We contribute to addressing this gap by exploring three questions in a sample of Xhosa participants recruited for a South African psychiatric genomics study: First, what proportion of participants consented to cell line storage? Second, what were predictors of this consent? Third, what questions were raised by participants during (...) this consent process? 760 Xhose people with schizophrenia and 760 controls were matched to sex, age, level of education and recruitment region. We used descriptive statistics to determine the proportion of participants who consented to cell line creation and immortalization. Logistic regression methods were used to examine the predictors of consent. Reflections from study recruiters were elicited and discussed to identify key questions raised by participants about consent. Approximately 40% of participants consented to cell line storage. The recruiter who sought consent was a strong predictor of participant’s consent. Participants recruited from the South African Eastern Cape, and older participants, were more likely to consent; both these groups were more likely to hold traditional Xhosa values. Neither illness nor education were significant predictors of consent. Key questions raised by participants included two broad themes: clarification of what cell immortalisation means, and issues around individual and community benefit. These findings provide guidance on the proportion of participants likely to consent to cell line immortalisation in genomics research in Africa, and reinforce the important and influential role that study recruiters play during seeking of this consent. Our results reinforce the cultural and contextual factors underpinning consent choices, particularly around sharing and reciprocity. Finally, these results provide support for the growing literature challenging the stigmatizing perception that people with severe mental illness are overly vulnerable as a target group for heath research and specifically genomics studies. (shrink)