Anger and disgust may have distinct roles in sexual morality; here, we tested hypotheses regarding the distinct foci, appraisals, and motivations of anger and disgust within the context of sexual offenses. We conducted four experiments in which we manipulated whether mutual consent (Studies 1–3) or desire (Study 4) was present or absent within a counter-normative sexual act. We found that anger is focused on the injustice of non-consensual sexual acts, and the transgressor of the injustice (Studies 1 and 3). Furthermore, (...) the sexual nature of the act was not critical for the elicitation of anger—as anger also responded to unjust acts of violence (Study 3). By contrast, we hypothesised and found that disgust is focused on whether or not a person voluntarily engaged in, desired or consented to a counter-normative sexual act (Studies 2–4). Appraisals of abnormality and degradation were the primary appraisals of disgust, and the sexual nature of the act was a critical elicitor of disgust (Study 3). A final study ruled out victimisation as the mechanism of the effect of consent on disgust and indicated that the consenter's sexual desire was the mechanism (Study 4). Our results reveal that anger and disgust have differential roles in consent-related sexual offenses due to the distinct appraisals and foci of these emotions. (shrink)

Hope, gratitude, fear, and disgust may all be key to encouraging preventative action in the context of COVID-19. We pre-registered a longitudinal experiment, which involved monthly data collections from September 2020 to September 2021 and a six-month follow-up. We predicted that a hope recall task would reduce negative emotions and elicit higher intentions to engage in COVID-19 preventative behaviours. At the first time point, participants were randomly allocated to a recall task condition (gratitude, hope, or control). At each time point, (...) we measured willingness to engage in COVID-19 preventative behaviours, as well as experienced hope, gratitude, fear, and disgust. We then conducted a separate, follow-up study in February 2022, to see if the effects replicated when COVID-19 restrictions were relaxed in the UK. In the main study, contrary to our pre-registered hypothesis, we found that a gratitude recall task elicited more willingness to engage in COVID-19 preventative behaviours in comparison to the neutral recall task. We also found that experienced gratitude, hope, and fear were positively related to preventative action, while disgust was negatively related. These results present advancement of knowledge of the role of specific emotions in the COVID-19 pandemic. (shrink)

Homophobia has decreased in past decades, but gut-level disgust towards gay men lingers. It has been suggested that disgust can be reduced by inducing its proposed opposite emotion, elevation. Rese...

In recent years, there have been a number of moral panics in Western societies about the existence of religious courts and tribunals in general and Shariah law in particular. In England and Wales, these concerns came to the fore following the 2008 lecture by the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, on ‘Civil Law and Religious Law in England’. In that lecture, Williams drew upon the work of the Canadian scholar Ayelet Shachar endorsing her concept of ‘transformative accommodation’. In (...) this article, we return to the work of Shachar in the light of our recent empirical study which examined the divorce jurisdiction of three religious tribunals in detail: a Jewish Beth Din; a matrimonial tribunal of the Roman Catholic Church; and a Muslim Shariah Council. We suggest that the focus upon Shachar’s concept of ‘transformative accommodation’ by Williams and subsequent commentators is unfortunate given that Shachar actually proposes ‘transformative accommodation’ as just one variant of what she refers to as ‘joint governance’ (albeit her preferred variant). We propose that the umbrella concept of ‘joint governance’ and its other variants can be developed in a way that could prove to be more useful than ‘transformative accommodation’. (shrink)

ABSTRACTObjective: This study was designed to improve our understanding of prospective memory changes in ageing, and to identify the cognitive correlates of PM decline, using a virtual environment, to provide a more realistic assessment than traditional laboratory tasks.Design: Thirty-five young and 29 older individuals exposed to a virtual town were asked to recall three event-based intentions with a strong link between prospective and retrospective components, three event-based intentions with a weak link, and three time-based intentions. They also underwent retrospective episodic (...) memory, executive functions, binding in working memory, processing speed, and time estimation assessments.Results: Older individuals recalled fewer intentions than young adults. While age-related PM decline affected the recall of both prospective and retrospective components, the recall of the latter seemed more challenging for older individuals when the link was weak. This PM decline was linked to an age-related decline... (shrink)

BackgroundPatient skepticism concerning medical innovations can have major consequences for current public health and may threaten future progress, which greatly relies on clinical research.The primary objective of this study is to determine the variables associated with patient acceptation or refusal to participate in clinical research. Specifically, we sought to evaluate if distrust in pharmaceutical companies and associated psychosocial factors could represent a recruitment bias in clinical trials and thus threaten the applicability of their results.MethodsThis prospective, multicenter survey consisted in the (...) administration of a self-questionnaire to patients during a pulmonology consultation. The 1025 questionnaires distributed collected demographics, socio-professional and basic health literacy characteristics. Patients were asked to rank their level of trust for pharmaceutical companies and indicate their willingness to participate in different categories of research.Logistic regression was used to determine factors contributing to “trust” versus “distrust” group membership and willingness to participate in each category of research.ResultsOne thousand patients completed the survey, corresponding to a response rate of 97.5%. Data from 838 patients were analyzed in this study.48.3% of respondents declared that they trusted pharmaceutical companies, while 35.5% declared distrust. Being female, inactive in the employment market, and not-knowing the name of one’s disease are factors related to declared distrust. Distrust-group membership is associated with unwillingness to participate in certain categories of trials such as pre-marketing and industry-sponsored trials.ConclusionDistrust in pharmaceutical companies is associated with a specific patient profile and with refusal to participate in certain subcategories of trials. This potential recruitment bias may explain the under-representation of certain categories of patients such as women in pre-marketing drug trials. (shrink)

«Neither with you nor without you»Francois Truffaut, La femme d’à coté No one can deny that there is a problem between Wittgenstein and analytic philosophers. To put it mildly, there are tensions between Wittgenstein’s and Wittgensteinian styled reflections and the views and practice of a lot of contemporary analytic philosophers, such that they often seem to be strange bedfellows, when they are bedfellows at all. Of course we know that Wittgenstein did not get along very well with Russell, t...

This paper proposes a biosemiotic conception of theories, as non-intentional organic theories, which is based on an analysis and comparison of philosopher Norwood Russell Hanson’s account of theories and zoologist Jakob von Uexküll’s theory of organisms. It is argued that Hanson’s proposals about scientific theories and their relation to observation are semiotic in nature and that there exists a correspondence between Hanson’s depiction of the relationship between theories, observation, and reality and von Uexküll’s views on the relationship between organisms (...) and their environments. This correspondence supports an account of theories that depicts them as organic extensions of our perceptual physiology. Among the epistemological consequences of this account are the following: The kind of correspondence that is established through theories between a subject and reality is related rather to a subject’s actions than to a faithful representation of every aspect of the world, it suggests a strong emphasis on the creative aspects of knowledge acquisition, and it urges a reassessment of the evolutionary epistemology of theories. (shrink)

Katherine Wilson-Chevalier propose avec Patronnes et mécènes en France à la Renaissance une somme qui marquera l’histoire du mécénat féminin. Les Anglo-Saxons ont un joli nom pour définir ce patronage au féminin, ils parlent de matronage, et c’est précisément à cette pratique qu’est consacré cet ouvrage fondamental. Il nous propose une galerie de fortes femmes destinées à jouer un rôle politique dans la France du XVIe siècle, mais aussi protectrices des arts. Certaines sont fort connues et se...

In "Pascal's Mugging" (Bostrom 2009), Pascal gives away his wallet for an extremely tiny chance of an extremely large reward. In this continuation of Bostrom's story, Pascal's friend counsels him to take into account the possibility of making mistakes about his true expected utilities, and they consider to what extent this will help Pascal make plans to avoid future muggings.

This chapter deals with the myths: atheism is a bad bet (Pascal's Wager); atheism is only for an educated elite; and atheism is doomed in a postsecular age. The argument that atheism is a bad bet starts off with an invitation to acknowledge an uncertainty as to whether or not God exists. Even assuming atheism is true, there's a legitimate question as to whether this might not be too harsh a truth for some or many people, one not easily embraced (...) by people who have no worldly hopes. Individuals whose lives are seriously constrained by personal circumstances may continue to seek meaning in some external purpose, perhaps provided by God, rather than in their “inner freedom.” For atheism to become more widely attractive it may be that much social and economic progress will need to be made, altering the conditions in which people actually live and work. (shrink)

We prove a representation theorem for preference relations over countably infinite lotteries that satisfy a generalized form of the Independence axiom, without assuming Continuity. The representing space consists of lexicographically ordered transfinite sequences of bounded real numbers. This result is generalized to preference orders on abstract superconvex spaces.

Claire Katz & Lara Trout, Emmanuel Levinas. Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers ; Thomas Bedorf, Andreas Cremonini, Verfehlte Begegnung. Levinas und Sartre als philosophische Zeitgenossen ; Samuel Moyn, Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas between Revelation and Ethics ; Pascal Delhom & Alfred Hirsch, Im Angesicht der Anderen. Levinas’ Philosophie des Politischen ; Sharon Todd, Learning from the other: Levinas, psychoanalysis and ethical possibilities in education ; Michel Henry, Le bonheur de Spinoza, suivi de: Etude sur le spinozisme de Michel (...) Henry, par Jean-Michel Longneaux ; Jean-François Lavigne, Husserl et la naissance de la phénoménologie. Des Recherches logiques aux Ideen: la genèse de l’idéalisme transcendantal phénoménologique ; Denis Seron, Objet et signification ; Dan Zahavi, Sara Heinämaa and Hans Ruin, Metaphysics, Facticity, Interpretation. Phenomenology in The Nordic Countries ; Dimitri Ginev, Entre anthropologie et herméneutique ; Magdalena Mărculescu-Cojocea, Critica metafizicii la Kant şi Heidegger. Problema subiectivităţii: raţiunea între autonomie şi deconstrucţie. (shrink)

Space and time are geometrical notions that Sophie Germain, a French mathematician, discusses on several occasions in her Pensées diverses, however not only in a geometrical way but also in terms of a philosophical and moral understanding: she speaks of a human’s lifespan, the space they occupy, their place in creation and the knowledge toward which they always aim. This mixture of mathematical and philosophical thinking brings out Germain’s dream: she wants to apply the language of numbers to moral (...) and political issues. As such this chapter aims to examine Germain’s mathematical understanding of space and time in order to discover her moral theory. Furthermore, in a purely hypothetical context (because one does not know which authors she has read), I compare Germain’s moral thinking to Pascal’s moral and mathematical thoughts in Pensées. We underline the possible inspiration by Pascal by highlighting the similarities between these authors concerning space and time, which both treat mathematically and philosophically. These authors agree that time and space can be measured, and thus provide constant and mathematically uniform elements. At the same time, time and space provide the framework for moral thinking. The latter is not “capable” of enjoying the present moment; he is on a quest for the future. For Germain, this results into knowledge, but for Pascal, this is a sign of an unhappy life in which people do not find rest and are constantly looking for a diversion. (shrink)

Thick terms and concepts, such as honesty and cruelty, are at the heart of a variety of debates in philosophy of language and metaethics. Central to these debates is the question of how the descriptive and evaluative components of thick concepts are related and whether they can be separated from each other. So far, no empirical data on how thick terms are used in ordinary language has been collected to inform these debates. In this paper, we present the first empirical (...) study, designed to investigate whether the evaluative component of thick concepts is communicated as part of the semantic meaning or by means of conversational implicatures. While neither the semantic nor the pragmatic view can fully account for the use of thick terms in ordinary language, our results do favour the semanticist interpretation: the evaluation of a thick concept is only slightly easier to cancel than semantically entailed content. We further discovered a polarity effect, demonstrating that how easily an evaluation can be cancelled depends on whether the thick term is of positive or negative polarity. (shrink)

Is it tautological to call an action "wrongful discrimination?" Some philosophers and political theorists answer this question in the affirmative and claim that the term "discrimination" is intrinsically evaluative. Others agree that "discrimination" usually conveys the action’s moral wrongness but claim that the term can be used in a purely descriptive way. In this paper, we present two corpus studies and two experiments designed to test whether the folk concept of discrimination is evaluative. We demonstrate that the term has undergone (...) a historical development and is nowadays no longer used purely descriptively. Further, we show that this evaluation cannot be cancelled without yielding a contradiction. We conclude that the descriptive use of "discriminatory" is a thing of the past. (shrink)

This book explores contributions by some of the most influential women in the history of philosophy, science, and literature. Ranging from Sappho and Sophie Germain to Stebbing and Evelyn Fox Keller, this work ultimately demonstrates the impact these non-canonical, sometimes unknown or hidden, sources had, or may have had, on the recognized male leaders in their fields, from Aristotle to Pascal, Kant, Whitehead, and Russell. Chapters reflect philosophical pluralism, both analytic and continental themes, and cover figures reaching across (...) the entire history of ideas in the West, from pre-historic times to the twentieth century. Anyone interested in coming to know or in preparing to teach women in the history of philosophy, science, and literature will appreciate this collection and its myriad insights into the still unrecognized voices of non-canonical sources across these disciplines. (shrink)

What is the connection between causation and responsibility? Is there a best way to theorize philosophically about causation? Which factors determine and influence what we judge to be the cause of something? Bringing together interdisciplinary research from experimental philosophy, traditional philosophy and psychology, this collection showcases the most recent developments and approaches to questions about causation. Chapters discuss the diverse theoretical ramifications of empirical findings in experimental philosophy of causation, providing a comprehensive survey of key issues such as the perception (...) and learning of causal relations, omission, normative considerations, mechanism, voluntariness and legal theories of causation. With novel contributions from both experts and rising stars, Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Causation demonstrates the value of empirical work and opens new domains of inquiry at the cutting edge of the field. (shrink)

Many views rely on the idea that it can never be rational to have high confidence in something like, “P, but my evidence doesn’t support P.” Call this idea the “Non-Akrasia Constraint”. Just as an akratic agent acts in a way she believes she ought not act, an epistemically akratic agent believes something that she believes is unsupported by her evidence. The Non-Akrasia Constraint says that ideally rational agents will never be epistemically akratic. In a number of recent papers, the (...) Non-Akrasia Constraint has been called into question. The goal of this paper is to defend it... for the most part. (shrink)

'China, by her resources and her population, is capable of being the greatest power in the world after the United States.' Bertrand Russell, The Problem of China In 1920 the philosopher Bertrand Russell spent a year in China as Professor of Philosophy at the University of Beijing, where his lectures on mathematical logic enthralled students and listeners, including Mao Tse Tung, who attended some of Russell's talks. Written at a time when China was largely regarded by the (...) West as backward and weak, The Problem of China sees Russell rise above the prejudices of his era and presciently assess China's past, present and future. Russell brings his analytical and insightful eye to bear on some fundamental aspects of China's history and politics, cautioning China against adopting a purely Western model of social and economic development, which he regarded as characterized by a combination of greed and militarism. Beginning with an overview of nineteenth-century Chinese history and considering China's relations with Japan and Russia, Russell then contrasts Chinese civilization with Western. He devotes a fascinating chapter to the character of the Chinese, which he argues is complex but ultimately defined by a 'pacific temper'. With uncanny foresight, Russell predicts China's resurgence, but only if it is able to establish an orderly government, promote industrial development under Chinese control and foster the spread of education. This Routledge Classics edition includes a new introduction by Bernard Linsky. (shrink)

Studies on rational conjecture, inference, and reckoning.

Epistemologists often assume that rationality bears an important connection to the truth. In this paper I examine the implications of this commitment for permissivism: if rationality is a guide to the truth, can it also allow some leeway in how we should respond to our evidence? I first discuss a particular strategy for connecting permissive rationality and the truth, developed in a recent paper by Miriam Schoenfield. I argue that this limited truth-connection is unsatisfying, and the version of permissivism that (...) supports it faces serious challenges; so, for mainstream permissivism, the truth problem is still unsolved. I then discuss a strategy available to impermissivists, according to which rationality bears a quite strong connection to truth. I argue that this second strategy is successful. (shrink)

Believing rationally is epistemically valuable, or so we tend to think. It’s something we strive for in our own beliefs, and we criticize others for falling short of it. We theorize about rationality, in part, because we want to be rational. But why? I argue that how we answer this question depends on how permissive our theory of rationality is. Impermissive and extremely permissive views can give good answers; moderately permissive views cannot.

William James famously tells us that there are two main goals for rational believers: believing truth and avoiding error. I argues that epistemic consequentialism—in particular its embodiment in epistemic utility theory—seems to be well positioned to explain how epistemic agents might permissibly weight these goals differently and adopt different credences as a result. After all, practical versions of consequentialism render it permissible for agents with different goals to act differently in the same situation. -/- Nevertheless, I argue that epistemic consequentialism (...) doesn’t allow for this kind of permissivism and goes on to argue that this reveals a deep disanalogy between decision theory and the formally similar epistemic utility theory. This raises the question whether epistemic utility theory is a genuinely consequentialist theory at all. (shrink)

What are the main features that influence our attribution of moral responsibility? It is widely accepted that there are various factors which strongly influence our moral judgments, such as the agent’s intentions, the consequences of the action, the causal involvement of the agent, and the agent’s freedom and ability to do otherwise. In this paper, we argue that this picture is incomplete: We argue that social roles are an additional key factor that is radically underestimated in the extant literature. We (...) will present an experiment to support this claim. (shrink)

This book develops a unique phenomenology of plurality by introducing Hannah Arendt’s work into current debates taking place in the phenomenological tradition. Loidolt offers a systematic treatment of plurality that unites the fields of phenomenology, political theory, social ontology, and Arendt studies to offer new perspectives on key concepts such as intersubjectivity, selfhood, personhood, sociality, community, and conceptions of the "we." _Phenomenology of Plurality_ is an in-depth, phenomenological analysis of Arendt that represents a viable third way between the "modernist" and (...) "postmodernist" camps in Arendt scholarship. It also introduces a number of political and ethical insights that can be drawn from a phenomenology of plurality. This book will appeal to scholars interested in the topics of plurality and intersubjectivity within phenomenology, existentialism, political philosophy, ethics, and feminist philosophy. (shrink)

Although the word-frequency effect is one of the most established findings in spoken-word recognition, the precise processing locus of this effect is still a topic of debate. In this study, we used event-related potentials (ERPs) to track the time course of the word-frequency effect. In addition, the neighborhood density effect, which is known to reflect mechanisms involved in word identification, was also examined. The ERP data showed a clear frequency effect as early as 350 ms from word onset on the (...) P350, followed by a later effect at word offset on the late N400. A neighborhood density effect was also found at an early stage of spoken-word processing on the PMN, and at word offset on the late N400. Overall, our ERP differences for word frequency suggest that frequency affects the core processes of word identification starting from the initial phase of lexical activation and including target word selection. They thus rule out any interpretation of the word frequency effect that is limited to a purely decisional locus after word identification has been completed. (shrink)

Does motor behavior early in development have the same signatures of habituation, dishabituation, and Spencer-Thompson dishabituation known from infant perception and cognition? And do these signatures explain the choice preferences in A not B motor decision tasks? We provide new empirical evidence that gives an affirmative answer to the first question together with a unified neural dynamic model that gives an affirmative answer to the second question.In the perceptual and cognitive domains, habituation is the weakening of an orientation response to (...) a stimulus over perceptual experience. Switching to a novel stimulus leads to dishabituation, the re-establishment of the orientation response. In Spencer-Thompson dishabituation, the renewed orientation response transfers to the original stimulus. The change in orientation responses over perceptual experience explains infants' behavior in preferential looking tasks: Familiarity preference early during exposure and novelty preference late during exposure. In the motor domain, perseveration in the A not B task could be interpreted as a form of familiarity preference. There are hints that this preference reverses after enough experience with the familiar movement. We provide a unified account for habituation and patterns of preferential selection in which neural dynamic fields generate perceptual or motor representations. The build-up of activation in excitatory fields leads to familiarity preference, the build-up of activation in inhibitory fields leads to novelty preference. We show that the model accounts for the new experimental evidence for motor habituation, but is also compatible with earlier accounts for perceptual habituation and motor perseveration. We discuss how excitatory and inhibitory memory traces may regulate exploration and exploitation for both orientation to objects and motor behaviors. (shrink)

In the wake of the Supreme Court Decision, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Minkoff, Vullikanti, and Marshall (2024) argue that the unraveling of the constitutional right to abortion t...

Credences, unlike full beliefs, can’t be true or false. So what makes credences more or less accurate? This chapter offers a new answer to this question: credences are accurate insofar as they license true educated guesses, and less accurate insofar as they license false educated guesses. This account is compatible with immodesty; : a rational agent will regard her own credences to be best for the purposes of making true educated guesses. The guessing account can also be used to justify (...) certain coherence constraints on rational credence, such as probabilism. The chapter concludes by discussing some advantages of the guessing account over rival accounts of accuracy. (shrink)

What determines qualitative sameness and difference? This book explores four principal accounts of the ontological basis of properties, including universals, trope theory, resemblance nominalism, and class nominalism, considering the assumptions and ontolological commitments which are required to make each into a plausible account of properties. -/- The latter half of the book investigates the applications of property theory and the different conceptions of properties which might be adopted with these in mind: first, the possibility and desirability of individuating properties, and (...) the distinction between sparse and abundant conceptions of properties; second, the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic properties; third, the relationship between properties and their causal powers, and whether this is necessary or contingent; fourth, the relationship between properties and causation, modality, and laws of nature; finally, whether properties exist objectively, and if they do, what our epistemic position is with respect to such entities. (shrink)

Bernard Williams identifies Hume as “in some ways an archetypal reconciler” who, nevertheless, displays “a striking resistance to some of the central tenets of what [Williams calls] ‘morality’”. This assessment, it is argued, is generally correct. There are, however, some significant points of difference in their views concerning moral responsibility. This includes Williams’s view that a naturalistic project of the kind that Hume pursues is of limited value when it comes to making sense of “morality’s” illusions about responsibility and blame. (...) It is, Williams maintains, only when we consider moral responsibility in genealogical terms, which gives attention to the importance of culture and history, that we can find a way of exposing the various prejudices and illusions of “the morality system”. Nevertheless, despite these differences, what Hume and Williams share is a fundamental commitment to provide a more “truthful” and “realistic” understanding of moral responsibility and our human ethical predicament. (shrink)

Sophie Grace Chappell develops a picture of what philosophical ethics can be like, once set aside from the idealising and reductive pressures of conventional moral theory. Her question is 'How are we to know what to do?', and the answer she defends is 'By developing our moral imaginations'.