The aim of the present paper is to evaluate the notion of collective guilt feeling both in the light of research in affectivity and in collective intentionality. The paper is divided into an introduction and three main sections. Section 1) highlights relevant features of guilt‐family emotions such as the relation between feeling guilt and objective guilt, the relation between feeling guilt and its content, and the relation between feeling guilt and the ‘self’. Moreover, the distinction between feeling guilt and feeling (...) regret is given due attention. Section 2) examines Margaret Gilbert's arguments in favor of a collectivist view of collective guilt feeling , according to which groups do genuinely feel guilt. Against the collectivist position I argue for an individualist ‘membership account’ of collective guilt feeling in terms of individual members' we‐feeling of guilt. The membership account of collective guilt feeling is vindicated on grounds of a naturalist and non‐judgmentalist understanding of emotions, as well as on the logic of personal pronouns. It combines individualism regarding the subject of the feeling with collectivism regarding the irreducibility of we‐feelings and provides, as I further argue, the required moral force attributed to collective guilt feeling. The concern of section 3) is the question of the appropriate emotional response to collective wrongdoing. I argue against the view that group members are categorically ‘committed to feel guilt as a body’ for wrongdoings committed by the group. Given that individual members often do not participate in their groups' wrongdoings, it seems unjust to impose a requirement for feeling guilt upon them. I suggest that in a general account of the appropriate assessment of collective wrongdoing, feeling regret is the better candidate than feeling guilt for the role of the minimally required emotional response.For us collectively to feel guilt over our action A is for us to be jointly committed to feeling guilt as a body over our action A. [. . .] The parties [. . .] constitute, as far as possible, a single subject of guilt feelings .[A] collective cannot respond affectively [. . .], only its constitutive members can. The lack of an affective counter‐response is troubling, because the efficacy of responses of accountability partially depends upon affect. The response of shame, guilt, and regret help to register the significance of the harm. (shrink)

The paper defends the thesis that institutional virtue is properly modeled as a ‘‘consensual’’ property, along the lines of the Lehrer–Wagner model of consensus (LWC). In a first step, I argue that institutional virtue is not exhausted by duty-fulfilling, since institutions, contrary to natural individuals, are designed to fulfill duties. To avoid the charge of vacuity, virtue, if attributed to institutions, must be able to motivate supererogatory action. In a second step, I argue against dis- continuity of institutional virtue with (...) individual virtue. Two main arguments for discontinuity of collective properties display serious shortcomings when applied to virtues of institutions. Given that motivation for supererogatory action is neither inferred from statutory duties nor accommodates a right of reprobation, modeling institutional virtue on collective rationality or explaining it in terms of joint com-mitment both prove problematic. In a third step, I argue that LWC has the explanatory potential to account for institutional virtue. Due to its main features,iteration and evaluation, it provides a non-trivial analysis of continuity and thereby satisfies basic constraints on the notion of genuine institutional virtue. (shrink)

The contributions gathered in this volume present the state of the art in key areas of current social ontology. They focus on the role of collective intentional states in creating social facts, and on the nature of intentional properties of groups that allow characterizing them as responsible agents, or perhaps even as persons. Many of the essays are inspired by contemporary action theory, emotion theory, and theories of collective intentionality. Another group of essays revisits early phenomenological approaches to social ontology (...) and accounts of sociality that draw on the Hegelian idea of recognition. This volume is organized into three parts. First, the volume discusses themes highlighted in John Searle's work and addresses questions concerning the relation between intentions and the deontic powers of institutions, the role of disagreement, and the nature of collective intentionality. Next, the book focuses on joint and collective emotions and mutual recognition, and then goes on to explore the scope and limits of group agency, or group personhood, especially the capacity for responsible agency. The variety of philosophical traditions mirrored in this collection provides readers with a rich and multifaceted survey of present research in social ontology. It will help readers deepen their understanding of three interrelated and core topics in social ontology: the constitution and structure of institutions, the role of shared evaluative attitudes, and the nature and role of group agents. (shrink)

The paper investigates semantic properties of expressions that suggest the possibility that emotions are shared. An example is the saying that a sorrow shared is a sorrow halved. I assume that such expressions on sharing an emotion refer to a specific mode of subjective experience, displayed in first person attributions of the form 'We share E'. Subjective attributions of this form are intrinsically ambiguous on all levels of their semantic elements: 'emotion', 'sharing' and 'We'. One question the paper seeks to (...) answer is whether and in what respect these semantic ambiguities mirror an indeterminacy of emotional experience. Discussing 'aggregate sharing' (of a determinate) in distinction of mere 'distributive sharing' (of a determinable), I argue that there is no sufficient criterion to determine which mode of sharing an emotional experience shaped as 'We feel E' displays. Disambiguation of this intrinsic indeterminacy must recur to situational parameters of individuals' de re relatedness. (shrink)

Die Studie untersucht die systematischen Beziehungen der zentralen Begriffe in Bernard Bolzanos Erkenntnistheorie, die einen logisch-semantischen Realismus mit einer kausalistischen Metaphysik des Geistes verknüpft. Bolzano situiert grundlegende epistemische Aktivitäten wie Vorstellen, Urteilen und Ableiten im Spannungsfeld von logischen Relationen und dem Kausalnexus mentaler Episoden. Die Studie erläutert die Bedeutung der prominenten Begriffe 'Kraft' und 'Wahrscheinlichkeit' im Hinblick auf die erkenntnistheoretischen Belange von Wissen und Rechtfertigung. Der Begriff der Kraft begründet eine kausalistische Metaphysik von Geist und Welt und damit die Bedingungen (...) faktischer Erkenntnisverläufe. Der Begriff der Wahrscheinlichkeit bezeichnet Begründungsrelationen zwischen objektiven Propositionen, die für die rationale Berechtigung von Überzeugungen bestimmend sind. Zusammen konstituieren Faktivität und Normativität von Erkenntnisansprüchen die epistemische Wahrscheinlichkeit der "Zuversicht", die Urteilen einerseits assertive Kraft und andererseits die Berechtigung verleiht, sie als Erkenntnis anzunehmen. (shrink)

The contributions gathered in this volume present the state of the art in key areas of current social ontology. They focus on the role of collective intentional states in creating social facts, and on the nature of intentional properties of groups that allow characterizing them as responsible agents, or perhaps even as persons. Many of the essays are inspired by contemporary action theory, emotion theory, and theories of collective intentionality. Another group of essays revisits early phenomenological approaches to social ontology (...) and accounts of sociality that draw on the Hegelian idea of recognition. This volume is organized into three parts. First, the volume discusses themes highlighted in John Searle's work and addresses questions concerning the relation between intentions and the deontic powers of institutions, the role of disagreement, and the nature of collective intentionality. Next, the book focuses on joint and collective emotions and mutual recognition, and then goes on to explore the scope and limits of group agency, or group personhood, especially the capacity for responsible agency. The variety of philosophical traditions mirrored in this collection provides readers with a rich and multifaceted survey of present research in social ontology. It will help readers deepen their understanding of three interrelated and core topics in social ontology: the constitution and structure of institutions, the role of shared evaluative attitudes, and the nature and role of group agents. (shrink)

The paper evaluates Christopher Hookway's claim that individual epistemic vice can enhance the value of collective epistemic virtue. I suggest that this claim can be defended on the grounds of a dynamic account of collective intentional properties that is supplemented by an account of a spontaneous ordering mechanism such as the "intangible hand". Both these accounts try to explain how individual traits integrate into collective traits by way of aggregation. In this respect, they are different from normative and summative accounts (...) of plural subjects. I argue that it is the repeatable and self-amplifying nature of character traits that calls for a dynamic account of collective virtues. With regard to epistemic virtues and their role in the acquisition of knowledge I hold that their dynamic and self-amplifying character warrants their reliability, since it is this character that bottoms out in repeated acts of epistemally correct behavior that constitute a 'responsible practice'. The successful appliance of the latter amplifies the attitude it origins from. If epistemic virtues construed along these lines are attributed to collectives, a dynamic aggregate account supplemented by an account of an "intan-gible hand" device might explain how an aggregate of virtuous efforts of individuals can not only absorb a certain amount of vice but be even enhanced by the 'spice' of some non-intentional epistemically vicious side effects of epistemically virtuous en- deavor. (shrink)

The book contains contributions by leading figures in philosophy of mind and action, emotion theory, and phenomenology. As the focus of the volume is truly innovative we expect the book to sell well to both philosophers and scholars from neighboring fields such as social and cognitive science. The predominant view in analytic philosophy is that an ability for self-evaluation is constitutive for agency and intentionality. Until now, the debate is limited in two (possibly mutually related) ways: Firstly, self-evaluation is usually (...) discussed in individual terms, and, as such, not sufficiently related to its social dimensions; secondly, self-evaluation is viewed as a matter of belief and desire, neglecting its affective and emotional aspects. The aim of the book is to fill these research lacunas and to investigate the question of how these two shortcomings of the received views are related. (shrink)

The paper discusses Bernard Bolzano’s epistemological approach to believing and knowing with regard to the epistemic requirements of an axiomatic model of science. It relates Bolzano’s notions of believing, knowing and evaluation to notions of infallibility, immediacy and foundational truth. If axiomatic systems require their foundational truths to be infallibly known, this knowledge involves both evaluation of the infallibility of the asserted truth and evaluation of its being foundational. The twofold attempt to examine one’s assertions and to do so by (...) searching for the objective grounds of the truths asserted lies at the heart of Bolzano’s notion of knowledge. However, the explanatory task of searching for grounds requires methods that cannot warrant infallibility. Hence, its constitutive role in a conception of knowledge seems to imply the fallibility of such knowledge. I argue that the explanatory task contained in Bolzanian knowing involves a high degree of epistemic virtues, and that it is only through some salient virtue that the credit of infallibility can distinguish Bolzanian knowing from a high degree of Bolzanian believing. (shrink)

Les émotions peuvent être pénibles, voire néfastes. Pensons par exemple à la peur, la colère, la haine, la jalousie ou au mépris. De telles émotions sont souvent qualifiées de négatives. Mais que sont les émotions négatives et comment se distinguent-elles des émotions positives ? Plus généralement, qu’impliquent-elles pour notre compréhension des émotions ? Et quels sont concrètement leurs effets sur nos pensées et nos vies ? De plus, comment analyser l’ambivalence affective, comme quand on ressent à la fois de l’amour (...) et de la haine ? Réunissant dix contributions rédigées pour l’occasion, Les ombres de l’âme propose des éléments de réponses originaux à ces questions. Ce faisant, cet ouvrage jette les bases d’une philosophie des émotions négatives. (shrink)

Negative emotions are familiar enough, but they have rarely been a topic of study in their own right. This volume brings together fourteen chapters on negative emotions, written in a highly accessible style for non-specialists and specialists alike. It starts with chapters on general issues raised by negative emotions, such as the nature of valence, the theoretical implications of nasty emotions, the role of negative emotions in fiction, as well as the puzzles raised by ambivalent and mixed emotions. The second (...) part of the volume consists of studies of specific emotional phenomena, ranging from the emotion of being moved and the sense of uncanniness to jealousy, hatred, shame, contempt, anxiety, and grief. (shrink)

The paper investigates semantic properties of expressions that suggest the possibility that emotions are shared. An example is the saying that a sorrow shared is a sorrow halved. I assume that such expressions on sharing an emotion refer to a specific mode of subjective experience, displayed in first person attributions of the form 'We share E'. Subjective attributions of this form are intrinsically ambiguous on all levels of their semantic elements: 'emotion', 'sharing' and 'We'. One question the paper seeks to (...) answer is whether and in what respect these semantic ambiguities mirror an indeterminacy of emotional experience. Discussing 'aggregate sharing' in distinction of mere 'distributive sharing' , I argue that there is no sufficient criterion to determine which mode of sharing an emotional experience shaped as 'We feel E' displays. Disambiguation of this intrinsic indeterminacy must recur to situational parameters of individuals' de re relatedness. (shrink)

Negative emotions are familiar enough, but they have rarely been a topic of study in their own right. This volume brings together fourteen chapters on negative emotions, written in a highly accessible style for non-specialists and specialists alike. It starts with chapters on general issues raised by negative emotions, such as the nature of valence, the theoretical implications of nasty emotions, the role of negative emotions in fiction, as well as the puzzles raised by ambivalent and mixed emotions. The second (...) part of the volume consists of studies of specific emotional phenomena, ranging from the emotion of being moved and the sense of uncanniness to jealousy, hatred, shame, contempt, anxiety, and grief. (shrink)

Book review of Institutions, Emotions, and Group Agents: Contributions to Social Ontology, edited by Anita Konzelmann Ziv & Hans Bernhard Schmid. Springer, 2013.

There is currently no consensus regarding what measures are most valid to demonstrate perceptual processing without awareness. Likewise, whether conscious perception and unconscious processing rely on independent mechanisms or lie on a continuum remains a matter of debate. Here, we addressed these issues by comparing the time courses of subjective reports, objective discrimination performance and response priming during meta-contrast masking, under similar attentional demands. We found these to be strikingly similar, suggesting that conscious perception and unconscious processing cannot be dissociated (...) by their time course. Our results also demonstrate that unconscious processing, indexed by response priming, occurs, and that objective discrimination performance indexes the same conscious processes as subjective visibility reports. Finally, our results underscore the role of attention by showing that how much attention the stimulus receives relative to the mask, rather than whether processing is measured by conscious discrimination or by priming, determines the time course of meta-contrast masking. (shrink)

Toward situating philosophical collaborations with government and Non‐Governmental Organizations (NGOs), the author distinguishes two definitional uses of the term “public philosophy”: a “shared vision” definition and a “professional activity” definition. As varied examples of work with NGOs, she offer her work with three women's health organizations, a mental health law group, a privacy advocacy group, and a national academy. The author then offer her work with NIH, a national bioethics commission, and state court judges as examples of work with state (...) and federal government. Genetic privacy was understood as a key ethical and legal issue to arise in anticipation of the complete mapping of the human genome. (shrink)

Since its 1980s coining by Richard Falk, the ‘Grotian Moment’ concept has garnered popularity in international law discourse, denoting a rapid, paradigm-shifting development in international law. This concept builds upon a prevalent recollection of two past events as such paradigm-shifts. The first is, obviously, the ‘original’ Grotian Moment, anointing Grotius as the Father of International Law, mainly for publishing, in 1625, his ground-breaking treatise, De Jure Belli ac Pacis, which is said to had brought about a momentous paradigm-shift that gave (...) rise to modern (statist and secular), or even the first-ever-effective, international law. The second event is the post-ww2 Nuremberg international trial. Presumably, from its mid-seventeenth-century birth to Nuremberg, international law was starkly statist, and so individuals had generally not been its subjects. This, among other things, meant that international criminal law (icl) was not acceptable. Nuremberg is, therefore, celebrated as the first-ever international criminal tribunal, as icl’s birthplace and even more generally as the turning-point in international law’s attitude towards the individual. Simply put, Nuremberg is considered the prototype of a modern Grotian Moment. However, this paper shows that neither 1625 nor 1945 were truly Grotian Moments (their significance notwithstanding) and present’s likely causes for those myths. The paper further reveals that these myths, as well as the current embrace of the ‘Grotian Moment’ concept, are all manifestations of a larger, understudied phenomenon: that internationalists, evermore obsessed with perceiving themselves as cutting-edge, too often satisfy that fix by erasing the past. (shrink)

The Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI) is an ontology that provides terms with precisely defined meanings to describe all aspects of how investigations in the biological and medical domains are conducted. OBI re-uses ontologies that provide a representation of biomedical knowledge from the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) project and adds the ability to describe how this knowledge was derived. We here describe the state of OBI and several applications that are using it, such as adding semantic expressivity to (...) existing databases, building data entry forms, and enabling interoperability between knowledge resources. OBI covers all phases of the investigation process, such as planning, execution and reporting. It represents information and material entities that participate in these processes, as well as roles and functions. Prior to OBI, it was not possible to use a single internally consistent resource that could be applied to multiple types of experiments for these applications. OBI has made this possible by creating terms for entities involved in biological and medical investigations and by importing parts of other biomedical ontologies such as GO, Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (ChEBI) and Phenotype Attribute and Trait Ontology (PATO) without altering their meaning. OBI is being used in a wide range of projects covering genomics, multi-omics, immunology, and catalogs of services. OBI has also spawned other ontologies (Information Artifact Ontology) and methods for importing parts of ontologies (Minimum information to reference an external ontology term (MIREOT)). The OBI project is an open cross-disciplinary collaborative effort, encompassing multiple research communities from around the globe. To date, OBI has created 2366 classes and 40 relations along with textual and formal definitions. The OBI Consortium maintains a web resource providing details on the people, policies, and issues being addressed in association with OBI. (shrink)

Ethics consultation has become an integral part of the fabric of U.S. health care delivery. This article summarizes the second edition of the Core Competencies for Health Care Ethics Consultation report of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities. The core knowledge and skills competencies identified in the first edition of Core Competencies have been adopted by various ethics consultation services and education programs, providing evidence of their endorsement as health care ethics consultation (HCEC) standards. This revised report was prompted (...) by thinking in the field that has evolved since the original report. Patients, family members, and health care providers who encounter ethical questions or concerns that ethics consultants could help address deserve access to efficient, effective, and accountable HCEC services. All individuals providing such services should be held to the standards of competence and quality described in the revised report. (shrink)

For decades a debate has played out in the literature about who bioethicists are, what they do, whether they can be considered professionals qua bioethicists, and, if so, what professional responsibilities they are called to uphold. Health care ethics consultants are bioethicists who work in health care settings. They have been seeking guidance documents that speak to their special relationships/duties toward those they serve. By approving a Code of Ethics and Professional Responsibilities for Health Care Ethics Consultants, the American Society (...) for Bioethics and Humanities (ASBH) has moved the professionalization debate forward in a significant way. This first code of ethics focuses on individuals who provide health care ethics consultation (HCEC) in clinical settings. The evolution of the code's development, implications for the field of HCEC and bioethics, and considerations for future directions are presented here. (shrink)

Die Isländersagas sind seit jeher Schwerpunkt altnordistischer Forschung. Aus literaturwissenschaftlicher Perspektive ist ihren zahlreichen, oft minutiösen Beschreibungen von Kleidung bislang aber wenig Beachtung geschenkt worden. Vorliegende Arbeit untersucht die Bekleidung der Figuren im Hinblick auf soziale, geschlechtliche und emotionale Konstellationen innerhalb des Erzählkontexts.

Medicine was until recently a greatly respected profession supported by trust and faith on one side and compassion and care on the other. However, over the years, the relationship between doctors and patients has suffered. Doctors now find themselves in the news for all the wrong reasons. Labelled as 'murderers', 'knife happy', 'organ stealing thieves' or touts of pharmaceutical giants, they have now lost respect in the eyes of society. When and how did this happen? When did doctors go from (...) being 'Next to God' to maut ke saudagar, as the media is so fond of labelling them? Hippocratic Oath or Hypocrisy?: Doctors at Crossroads is the author's journey as a doctor over three decades, from a young medical student to an experienced paediatrician. She has used her experience to highlight serious issues--demanding patients, prescribing of unnecessary investigations, hospitals run like business houses, the role of big pharmaceutical industries and so on from the point of view of both doctors and patients. (shrink)

This book revisits psychology's appropriation of natural scientific methods. The author argues that, in order to overcome ongoing methodological debates in psychology, it is necessary to confront the problem of formalisation contained in the appropriation of methods of natural science. By doing so, the subject matter of psychology - the human being - and questions about the meaning of human existence can be brought to the centre of the discipline. Drawing on Garfinkel, Sacks, Edwards and Potter, the author sees ethnomethodologically (...) informed qualitative methods, which stem from phenomenology, as a possible alternative to statistical methods, but ultimately finds these methods to be just another method of formalisation.She returns to Husserlian phenomenology as a way to critique the centrality of method in psychology and shows that the adoption of natural scientific methods in psychology is part of the larger push to formalise and objectify all aspects of human existence. (shrink)

Anita Chari revives the concept of reification from Marx and the Frankfurt School to spotlight the resistance to neoliberal capitalism now forming at the level of political economy and at the more sensate, experiential level of subjective transformation. Reading art by Oliver Ressler, Zanny Begg, Claire Fontaine, Jason Lazarus, and Mika Rottenberg, as well as the politics of Occupy Wall Street, Chari identifies practices through which artists and activists have challenged neoliberalism's social and political logics, exposing its inherent tensions (...) and contradictions. (shrink)