I attempt to save akrasia from the skeptical doubt and denial as to its possibility in a new way. I argue that the akratic agent – the akrates – has unconscious reason(s) for the akratic action. Moreover, the akrates does not weigh and value the reasons for and against the akratic action in full awareness, including their emotive significance, consciously experienced as feelings. He follows his feelings favoring the akratic action (since he does not tolerate or resist them), and does (...) not let his unconscious emotions, supporting the wanted, chosen action, play a causal role in impelling him to perform this action. (shrink)

This paper shows the close relationship between morality and emotions, as emotions were defined and understood by classical Greek and Roman philosophers. Particular attention is paid to the nature of anger, and also to the distinction between full-fledged emotions, which depend on rational judgments and which, accordingly, only human beings are capable of experiencing, and what the Stoics called “pre-emotions,” which were common to human beings and other animals.

Emotional attenuation in a second language is believed to be one of the main causes of the Moral Foreign Language effect (MFLe). However, evidence on the mediating role of emotion in the relationship between language and moral judgements is limited and mainly derives from unrealistic moral dilemmas. We conducted two studies to investigate (1) whether the MFLe is present in both unrealistic (Study 1) and realistic (Study 2) moral dilemmas, and (2) whether this effect can be attributed to reduced emotionality. (...) In Study 1, the MFLe was found in the moral judgements made by Spanish-English bilinguals. However, the same pattern was not observed in Greek Cypriot-English bilinguals’ moral judgements, and this result was attributed to the prominent role of English in Cyprus. In Study 2, the MFLe extended to realistic moral dilemmas when the outcome of the action entailed the violation of a social norm. Study 1 and Study 2 also revealed that these bilinguals experienced a wide range of emotions in their L1 and L2, which did not differ significantly across languages. Mediation analyses further indicated that the MFLe was not mediated by emotional blunting, which made us consider alternative explanations for the MFLe. (shrink)

It sometimes seems to us that our judgments about what we ought to believe diverge from what we in fact believe. I may be perfectly aware that I am not particularly risking my life by flying, for instance, and yet, as I tighten my seatbelt in preparation for takeoff, I may nevertheless embrace the seemingly paradoxical thought that I am likely to die in a matter of mere seconds. In moments like this, it can feel to us like we are (...) experiencing a failure of rationality, as we seem to embrace a belief that we ourselves judge to be unreasonable. That is why philosophers have characterized these kinds of cases as akratic believing. Certainly, they leave us with that same funny feeling, that familiar dread that... (shrink)

Leading figures in ancient philosophy present nineteen original papers on three key themes in the work of Richard Sorabji. The papers dealing with Metaphysics range from Democritus to Numenius on basic questions about the structure and nature of reality: necessitation, properties, and time. The section on Soul includes one paper on the individuation of souls in Plato and five papers on Aristotle's and Aristotelian theories of cognition, with a special emphasis on perception. The section devoted to Ethics concentrates upon Stoicism (...) and the complex views the Stoics held on such topics as motivation, akrasia, oikeitsis, and the emotions. It also includes one paper on the influence of Greek ethics in Modern Philosophy. The volume also contains a fascinating "intellectual autobiography" by Sorabji himself, and a full Bibliography of his works. (shrink)

The present paper proposes an integrative account of social forms of practical irrationality and corresponding disruptions of individual and group-level emotion regulation. I will especially focus on disruptions in emotion regulation by means of collaborative agential and doxastic akrasia. I begin by distinguishing mutual, communal and collaborative forms of akrasia. Such a taxonomy seems all the more needed as, rather surprisingly, in the face of huge philosophical interest in analysing the possibility, structure and mechanisms of individual practical irrationality, with very (...) little exception, there are no comparable accounts of social and collaborative cases. However, I believe that, if it is true that individual akrasia is, in the long run, harmful for those who entertain it, this is even more so in social contexts. I will illustrate this point by drawing on various small group settings, and explore a number of socio-psychological mechanisms underlying collaborative irrationality, in particular groupthink. Specifically, I suggest that in collaborative cases there is what I call a spiralling of practical irrationality at play. I will argue that this is typically correlated and indeed partly due to biases in individual members' affect control and eventually the group's with whom the members identify. (shrink)

Don't tell terrible stories—everyone here has enough of their own. Everyone here has a whole bloody sack of terrible stories, and at the bottom of the sack is a hammer the narrator uses to pound you on the skull the instant you dare not believe your ears. Or to pound you when you do believe. Not long ago I saw a tomboyish girl on Khreshchatyk Street demand money of an elderly woman, threatening to bite her and infect her with syphilis. (...) Don't stroll through Volodymyr Hill Park, don't stroll around the botanical garden, and especially don't stroll on Kontraktova Square. Don't stroll anywhere. Don't go to the pavilion with the Golgotha panorama near St. Alexander's Church. Not even the twelve-meter-tall crucified Christ will save you. Don't go outside when it's dark and people turn into shadows a shade darker than dark. Also don't go where you can be seen from far away. Not to imply that people used to be like a bunch of lilies, but now they stink like a cellar of cabbage.The city, which earlier might have had some fun, is now going crazy. It's like a fish in warm water: it doesn't react to anything, swims slowly like it doesn't care if it swallows a hook or not. The excitement and exaltation pass into oppression, just as our necks have sunk into our shoulders, our shoulders into our lumbars, our lumbars into our nether regions. The holiday turns into a funeral, the parades into explosions, depression into mania. Winter passes into summer, people turn into beasts, the hours into ages, and the ages into hours. It's worth simply walking around the city to see a soldier from an unknown army taking a piss near the opera. Farther on is a row of identical old widows selling ball gowns and candelabra. Then there are the aristocrats and manufacturers who throw so much at the prostitutes that they'll soon be richer than their wives.I returned late through the Kyryliv Wood, not heeding all the warnings that I myself have given here. It really is dangerous—the place is famous for it. There's a madhouse nearby, caves where criminals and the sick can hide out. Also, once upon a time, as they say in fairy tales, the great dragon Zmei Gorynich lived here beside the Puchai River. The stench in these places drives away the most committed misanthropes and even one type of philanthrope—that is, perverts. It sounds dumb, but the stench is cleansing. I don't know where it comes from. After the operating theaters and the rooms with amputees, the stench no longer repelled or attracted me; it just was. And this was a great place to think. As I walked, I considered an incident with our patient.The patient, a respectable individual whose name carries too much weight for me to state it directly, one day began to assault people. He nearly strangled a merchant who he believed asked too much for a beaver coat. He likewise wanted to kill his business partner when he didn't say hello loudly enough. But the worst was, he lost all shame of his own nakedness. At first it was the police who took care of it. When our future patient slipped off his pants and undergarments, he was taken to Kyrylivska, which has had means for dealing with such cases dating back to the day when unhinged Cossacks and composers from Kyiv Mohyla Academy were taken there.During the examination we determined that the patient was experiencing a severe breakdown. His wife added that lately, more than once, he had allowed himself strong words in front of the children and often suffered from ennui. Furthermore, she said, the patient had been undergoing treatment for “the French disease” for some years—which was, obviously, where we needed to start.“Syphilis!” Skorsky spat out the matchstick he was chewing on. He was a specialist on the psychological aspects of diseases related to the venereal. “Tertiary syphilis! When poorly treated, over time ‘the French disease’ can destroy the central nervous system. Hence the patient's chicanery. Such theater!”Skorsky and I had not spoken since the incident at Bilinsky's. Meanwhile, something significant had happened to him. The most boring person on earth, Skorsky had simply caught fire. He said hello and kibitzed. I even heard the doctor got drunk alone in his office, then wandered through the forest. Could he be using narcotic substances?“Cocaine!” was the doctor's second proclamation. It was his favorite treatment for the psychological complications of syphilis. Skorsky himself never took what he called “the universal drug”—good for alcoholism and toothaches, neuroses and morphine dependency—though he had read in an article by a respectable Viennese physician, who used cocaine as a panacea, that it was not addictive. That doctor subsequently recanted, but Skorsky paid no attention. He believed the retraction was made under pressure from pharmacologists who had no incentive to cease production of the medications that cocaine might supplant. Their representatives either paid or threatened the Viennese to repent.As the patient was escorted to his room, he assaulted the orderly, Alevtyna. They tried pulling him off her, but, though he released his fingers from her neck, he buried his teeth in her leg. The poor orderly, who had not until then been attacked by a psychotic, nearly died of fear. Later, panic set in over Skorsky's diagnosis. He told her about the consequences of syphilis: grotesque patterns on one's face due to infection of the skin, mucous membranes, cartilage, and bones. He went on about the devastation to the central nervous system, which they had just observed in real life: “The face starts to look like lace some mangy dogs fought over before rolling in the mud.”Alevtyna, who had not yet regained her faculty of speech, straightened up. Ignoring the slavering male orderlies, she bared her leg to get a better look at the wound. She then ran down the hall and out into the garden, where she fell on the ground to rip up grass and small bunches of daisies. Alevtyna ate them along with the soil in their roots.“Minor hysteria. She needs fifteen milligrams of cocaine.”Skorsky took a snuff box out of his pocket and scooped up some white powder with a toothpick made from a goose feather. He gave the order to close Alevtyna's mouth and one of her nostrils, forcing her to snort the medication.We fretted over her so long that evening fell. I decided to walk down, along the ravine, behind the church.It was unlikely there were any large beasts there, but something was rustling. The pits and mounds, ravines, paths, graves of witches whose living sisters flew in the treetops from time to time, the whispers of the forest spirits, the spirits of the nutcases who died in the hospital, the spirits of the monks from the St. Cyril Monastery, Zmei Gorynich and the bogatyrs who wanted to defeat him. The city would be calmer without this forest. I saw the gaps between the trees and went off in the direction of the tram tracks.As I was coming out of the forest, there was a patch of Amanita muscaria that had been trampled into porridge. A bit farther on, the body of Professor Bilinsky lay killed in the blackberry bushes. The way he was lying it looked as though he had not struggled before death. I quickly examined his body but saw nothing out of the ordinary. There were no wounds, no dirt under the fingernails. Animals had not yet smelled the carrion, but swarms of various insects covered him. Oh, why did I have to find the putrid body?The best thing would be to take the tram to his house to inform his relatives. The doors closed, and I noticed my own calm. This death had not evoked any emotions in me other than a feeling of responsibility, the need to tell the family. But also—some alarm at the thought of who the murderer could be. I knew that it was murder.“Your nose is bleeding.” A woman as round as an onion, carrying two baskets full of strawberries, offered me an ironed and starched handkerchief.“Have I dirtied my shirt?”“No, it's as neat as a pin. It's just your nose that's dirty. Wipe it now before you spray blood on my strawberries.”“No one will see the red on red.”“Ah, but it's salty!”“You know why it's not sweet? We'd drink it like syrup.”“Those with Christ in their heart do not talk that way.”“Are your strawberries expensive?”“Why? What?”“I'm checking to see if you have God in your heart.”“Child, if you knew how I have to work for this berry! I have to weed it a hundred times. In a week, the quitch grass grows as high as a horse. And I water it with water I carry from the stream, it kills my arms... ”“How much are the berries?”“They're not for sale. Anyway, soon money won't mean a thing. Soon all money, all these papers made from the skins of sinners on their satanic presses will be annulled. What matters is how we treat each other.”“So if I try your strawberries for free, my ‘thank you’ will be enough?”“Hands off!” she said and thwacked my fingers.I heard loud laughter behind me—same laughter as from the café near the Continental. There was no one sitting near Alina. (This is what fate looks like, remember.) Without asking, I sat next to her, away from the old lady.“Excuse me, but the night before last didn't you, yes, didn't you intrude on my privacy?” She started right away.“I saw it a little differently. Who was that young man with the mustache who paid me for you?”“Are you checking to see if you can flirt?”The tram stopped. People got on and off.“Are you coming back from the hospital?” she asked. “Don't be shocked. My uncle works there. He's told me all about you.”“An uncle by the name of Skorsky?”(Remember: this is what fate looks like.)“Yes. Skorsky's been strange recently—says things that make me wonder if he hasn't lost his mind. Have you noticed anything?”“I don't know.”“You know perfectly well.”“Where are you going?” I tried to change the subject.“I have to send something to my theater friends in Odesa. By the way, they'll be putting on Oedipus Rex soon in Kyiv—in Ukrainian.”“Greek tragedy in Ukrainian! That's a first.”“Exactly. The troupe is rehearsing now in Odesa. The theater where they will perform this fall is being remodeled.”“Wait. Now I remember where I've seen you before—it was at a performance! Vynnychenko's Black Panther and White Bear, at the Bergonier on Fundukleivska.“The same director is doing the Oedipus. He's my friend.”“He's your friend in what sense?”“Again with that tired subject. By the way, I've been thinking about you.”“And I about you.”“That's good. I was thinking not about you, to be precise, but about that elevator you invited me on.”“Who was that man with you?”“Like a broken record! Even if he had been my fiancé, I'm not bought or inherited. I'm not a brooch or a hundred acres of land, and I'm not a house in Kaniv!... Who was with you when you saw Black Panther?“Ah, so.”“Answer!”“That was my mother. She looks very young. She is coming to Kyiv the day after tomorrow. I can introduce you.”“Oh, this is my stop.”I looked out the window and realized that I had long since passed the stop for Bilinsky's.“Can we see each other again?”“We can. But you have only one chance.”Alina the anarchist wrote something on a scrap of paper and handed it to me.Morning, not morning but a thick porridge (I hate porridge). Dew, thick spit, crushed fruits, urine, all on the sparkling cobblestones. The sun, just barely having made its appearance, is already scorching. The human masses scurry and grumble like poorly digested food inside a stomach.I walked diagonally across St. Sofia's Square, then along the perimeter, then one edge, then again diagonally across. I went underground. The basement café of the Continental Hotel was practically empty. I again asked the server to bring the cloth with the embroidered portrait, but I couldn't remember the musician's last name, only that it ended with -sky. The server said that -sky was currently in the southern cities of Yalta and Odesa. I added that Kurbas, the director, Alina's friend, was also in Odesa, rehearsing Oedipus Rex, and that he'd previously put on Black Panther.I was bored, so I walked along Khreshchatyk and then headed down, calling to mind all the Kyiv churches of Podil: there's Birth of Christ, St. Nicholas on the Shore, Intercession, Pyrohoshcha, Holy Presentation, St. Dymytrii Rostovsky, St. Illia's. And also the Epiphany Brotherhood Monastery, Ascension Convent, and St. Katherine's, all these whipped-cream churches on the waffles of our streets. A few of them reminded me of themselves by appearing suddenly out of nowhere.The smells on Kontraktova Plaza where commerce buzzed were like multicolored light bulbs turning on one after another. Here you could catch the aroma of Balabukha jam, which blended with the next smell, English shoe polish at the Raiskys’ shop. Then the crunchy-smelling cabbage from old women standing in a row like herons and spitting out the shells of sunflower seeds. Farther on, the stench of a good-sized rat that crawled under Mrs. Shevchuk's shop where she sells broadcloth. Oh, she can't scream: no, she'll quietly dig that rat out herself so as to not scare off her clients.I bought a paper and two pairs of underwear. I asked two laughing young chambermaids who were secretly puffing in a grape-filled yard for a smoke. I wandered around Podil until evening when I came across a sawmill near the Dnipro that surprisingly smelled pleasantly of mazut fuel oil. The weather was dry, yet in the middle of the road was an enormous puddle, a deep dark black. A forty-year-old woman in a pale pink dress stood near it. The theatricality of it all provoked me to pose her a question,“Ma'am, what should I do?”But she paid me no attention. I shouted,“What should I do?”“What to do, what to do?” she said in Polish. “Jump in the water and swim so far away that you cannot return.”I quickly crossed a section of the forest. The wind brought a mixture of unpleasant air, like a stinky handkerchief held under one's nose. Passing the trees, I saw light in the spaces between them and exited at the hospital.Outside the windows, two orderlies lay in chairs with their heads thrown back. Two others—fools—ran around the yard in different directions, peering out at... something. The lights on the first floor of the hospital were on, and the staff milled about.“You're just in time!” said Ivan, a tall, young orderly.“For what?”“Your patient ran away! We went into his room and he wasn't there.”“What patient?”“The one who bit Alevtyna,” said Danylo, the other orderly, short and middle-aged.“That's Skorsky's patient, not mine.”I had no intention of helping them. This was all history—like my family, Kyiv, and my previous life. I had no intention of thinking about it. I wanted to go to my office, pack up my field surgery kit, and get out. So what? Their psychotic syphilitic ran away—it happened.Of course, that patient could have something to do with Bilinsky's murder. But that was no longer my problem.“What a strange coincidence!” the doctor on duty said. “Comrade doctor, the other one responsible for this patient was just here.”“And where is he now?”“He took off toward the church to look for the patient.”“Didn't the patient escape earlier?”“Don't know.”“How do you not know? You had better call the police, moron, before he kills someone. And get those sleeping orderlies to look for him.”“They can't... ”“Why not? Should I go wake them?”“They're on morphine.”“And you, I can see, have lost your mind. Go, catch your psycho! If it turns out that he killed Bilinsky—and on your watch—you can't imagine what's in store for you.”I adjusted my homburg and set off in the direction of St. Cyril's, that unwelcoming monolithic cube. I glanced around—what if our escaped syphilitic were to jump out of the bushes and bite or strangle me. I looked around because I wasn't sure of my actions, wasn't sure of my choices. Tripping over a clump of clover, I reached the open doors of the church. I couldn't stop myself from going in.The walls and ceiling were covered with frescoes. There was what used to be an angel rolling up the sky on the southern column of the narthex. But also graffiti: people scratched their names on it so as not to be forgotten—their idea of eternity. Prince Volodymyr the Great compared this activity to the desecration of graves. The vandals paid a fine and were beaten with canes. During the raids of Batu Khan, the church was deserted and cracks appeared all over it. Wild martens and feral dogs sought shelter here; insects swarmed under the ceiling with its red mosaics. Birches grew in its midst. Water seeped in the cracks, the water became ice, the ice widened the cracks, more water seeped in the cracks, becoming more ice that further widened the cracks, the wall split and nearly fell over, and then the wall fell over. Yet the angel is still rolling up the sky... When I reached the exit, I heard a rustling behind me. I turned after I stepped outside: in the depths of the church, like a stick in a pot of tar, stood a man with a large bag thrown over his shoulder and a revolver pointed right at me.“Is that you, Doctor?“Don't move!”“What's... Skorsky, what's with you?”“Don't move, I say!”“What are you doing here?”And finally I understood... Skorsky was himself the psycho! (Really, I had known for a while.)“You are the murderer! I knew it! But—why?”“Shut up.”“It was you. You! The stolen cigarettes, the strange behavior, Bilinsky. If I shout, everybody will come running. They've already called the police!”There was heavy breathing behind me. And then a gun rang out.The city is overgrown with new buildings. They encircle everything that was once on the periphery. Kyiv has become an old lady that can no longer restrain herself in the face of pastries. The city climbs farther. It steps over the swamps, turns the old rivers into a series of lakes; the other bodies of water it drives into canals. The grain that falls from the wild wheat is black. When the sun heats it, the grain melts and trickles into the earth. St. Cyril's stands indestructible. No one spackles the small cracks in its walls with either expensive putty or glues, nor with cheap cement and whitewash. One day a small fox appears in the doorway. It runs inside and along the floor of simple gray tiles. The gods watch from the walls, watch and fall into ruin. The fox runs to the iconostasis. Before it is a time-darkened Virgin Mother and Child in oil on sheets of zinc. The fox runs the metal steps that wind up to the second floor. The fox runs past all the vaults, naves, all the frescoes. A buckthorn seed flies in through a broken window. It will be the first. Soon the buckthorn will grow everywhere. A dumb hare will make its nest in the buckthorn bushes and nightingales will settle in the upper branches to sing until the end of the world. The fox runs between the thick rays that penetrate the windows. It catches one of the rays, squints its eyes, and warms itself in the sun.The shot rang out, but I did not fall. I looked around—and on the church threshold was our syphilis patient bearing a rod. His head lay on the rocks by the doorway.“If only he'd been at the stage of nose deformity! Just imagine: a hole instead of a nose plus a hole from the bullet—like an extra pair of eyes!” Skorsky laughed at the corpse.“We need to call the orderlies.”“They heard the shot. They'll run here on their own. You see, Professor Bilinsky believed it would take two or three years to wrap up this patient's case,” Skorsky told me. “But I took care of it much faster!”“Excuse me, but I'm going crazy in this city. I thought that you were Bilinsky's murderer.”“Just so. Why not? I am Bilinsky's murderer.”“Don't tease. You've changed a lot recently, so... ”“Yes, I've started killing people. You might term such a change significant.”“You have the right to irony.”“I am not being ironic.”“Let's call it sarcasm.”“It's the honest-to-God truth.”“And yes, you have the right to mock me.”“Well then, let's be done. To the horses!”“What horses?”“Alina's waiting!”Alina, her uncle Skorsky, a few others I didn't know, and I rode like the wind that ripped off my homburg and carried it back to Kyiv.“There's a fresco in the choir loft at St. Cyril's where Vrubel painted himself and patients from the hospital as the apostles. When I came across it by accident, I really believed they were saints,” Alina said.“I've never been up there. I've only seen the church from below.”“Remember the way back so you can see it sometime.”“The Puchai River used to flow here. You shouldn't trust the landscape,” Skorsky said, reaching for something, perhaps his bag, just when we left the darkness of the trees and saw the endless steppe ahead of us.We rode all night without stopping. Though no one was chasing us. Though we had nowhere to be. We rode like beasts released from a cage. The promises of the horizon turned what we'd left behind into a cage fit for those from whom freedom had been severed, like an anomaly, at birth.The pre-morning sky looked at first like a sack of turnips—filled with something heavy. But with each verst, the sky became lighter. When it was finally light enough to see clearly, we arrived at a knoll at the foot of a stone wall that from a distance had appeared to be a gigantic piece of halva. The exterior ruins of the castle gave no hint of how it was when all was fine here, when people defended themselves successfully from the nomads’ raids. From far off, the wreckage looked like a natural agglomeration of stones—a rocky elevation, no more: a cluster of cliffs. It would rain a few hundred more times, a few hundred more winds from a few hundred directions would blow on this heap, and it would collapse as though nothing had ever been here.A few stalks of wheat grew from one of the rocks. Someone had probably cast a handful of grain here for some birds that forgot to eat it.“Who could this castle belong to?” I asked Skorsky.“I reckon the Swan Princess,” the doctor rejoined, hoping to sound knowledgeable.From behind one of the piles of gray sandstone emerged a young man in a black reptilian coat and a white papakha as lush, bright, and out of place as a dahlia. His name was Artem. The heat was melting our brains, but he was dressed like that, in rooster fashion, which was popular among the otamans. Artem helped Alina dismount her horse and tried to kiss her on the lips, but she offered him a cheek instead.Had she been racing to see this clown?We entered the yard—the ruins had fashioned an internal space that was more or less protected, at least from strangers’ eyes. It turned out that there were even places where it was possible to hide from the rain, and from there the ruins didn't look half bad.In the center of the court was a table, and on it a wooden bucket with pink gladiolas. How romantic! It all looked like it came from outer space. Where on earth, in the middle of the steppe, far from any village or town, did this table, this simple table, come from? And the gladiolas? The steppe hadn't been plowed in so long that any cultivars would have gone wild, degenerated, dried up completely.A campfire crackled nearby—a little preview of what we would soon do to the houses, villages, and cities. Artem the otaman brought over a cezve from the fire and poured the first portion into a small, copper cup for Alina. He also got out a porcelain cup with images of rosy cherubim—but how...?“Who else would like coffee?”Only Skorsky and I responded. The question excited me, even distracted me from the thought of the kiss I had recently witnessed and the Kyiv I had recently left.“It's obvious who the professors here are; cultured people drink coffee. Are you both doctors?”“Uh-huh.”“For wolves of the steppe, like us, doctors are gold, even more precious than gold. Actually, a Hippocrates like you should eat more, because those in your profession will soon be worth your weight in gold. Work on your figures, both of you.”“Who will take pity on the horses that have to carry us?”“We'll find the horses. And very large doctors can be transported on machine-gun carts. We'll need to seat the otamans near you. Only a fool would shoot at a doctor.”“I think we'll find quite enough fools here.”“With your beard, Doctor, you look like Tsar Nicholas II. But even so you won't be shot. You might even be canonized!”“We've only just arrived and you're going on about executions,” Skorsky grumbled and checked to make sure that he still had his bag.“Apologies, apologies, pardonnez-moi. But you are not merely a doctor. A venereologist! Skorsky, you're a specialist! A venereologist is the most important person in wartime. The most valuable! You are the botanists of war. You can't imagine what varieties of flowers grow here, and these beds have long awaited a proper gardener. Or even just a man with a scythe!”“Bite your tongue,” Alina said. “I don't need to listen to this.”“Yes, yes, of course. Excuse me, my r—. ” He almost said “rose.”We rested all day. We went down to a surprisingly close river overgrown with lilies. We rowed the boats left by fishermen. I talked to Skorsky. He took his bag everywhere, refusing even to swim so he wouldn't have to part with it. I asked him what he had in it, but he said it wasn't my damned business.Alina rowed with the otaman to the middle of the river. They were having a loud discussion. She was waving her hands. The current carried their boat downstream slowly and smoothly. What a nuisance, that current!I tried to meet with Alina one-on-one, but she was avoiding me. In the morning I was confused, by lunch I was sad, and after lunch I got angry.In the evening, I lay on the hot grass and drank another cup (I have no idea where they got such good coffee), which had no effect at all on my sleep. I watched the Perseids. Every year, the Earth passes through the tail of Comet Swift-Tuttle. People can see the meteor shower and make a wish. I wished. I counted forty-seven falling stars. All forty-seven of my wishes were for the same thing.Around the campfire, they were sitting, talking. I saw how he tickled her face with a piece of grass and she brushed him off in annoyance. Then they were screaming at each other. Later they again spoke kindly, after which they again quarreled. My joy grew after each tiny mistake that Artem made. I wanted him to show the worst he was capable of.They were screaming at each other, but all I could hear was beautiful opera singing. The stars fell to the sound of their screaming. The stars blessed my joy.Then this happened: Alina kicked the fire, scattered burnt kindling, and burned some of the grass. Artem grabbed her by the arm, but she broke away from him and ran off to the horses.“Go then! I guarantee you'll get to Katerynoslav and return with your tail between your legs.”“I'm going to Huliai-Pole! To Father Makhno!”I jumped up and ran after her.“Where do you think you're going?” Artem shouted.Really—where was I going? I was going after her: to Huliai-Pole, to Katerynoslav, to Rome, to Washington, to Istanbul, to Montevideo... “Go to sleep,” he said. “Come morning, this coquette will be here, right as rain. We've already been through this show. Tomorrow she'll be right here next to my boot!”... No, she won't.In some sort of shape we entered some town. There were some buildings that were some colors, some trees, some streets, some roads, and some signs. Posts, flustered birds’ nests, echoes, colors, shapes—each of some kind. A wedding procession was coming toward us. If you want to make orange, you need to add yellow to red, and then bam—it's black. If you want to salt the soup, shake in a little, and then bam—two handfuls. You want to say a kind word, and then bam—a punch in the face. I was rocked around like a watermelon on a boat and threw up my breakfast straight into the horse's fluffy mane. Sanko found this hilarious, but I said I'd pulverize him. So Sanko sped ahead.No one knew anything about Alina. The daytime sky was like a poorly washed bowl. The sun was a squashed, rotten apricot. The night sky looked like the sole of a boot to me. The moon was a dirty cheap copper coin that had gotten stuck to the sole. Everything seemed spoiled to me, irrelevant, unnecessary. Without her, this journey was a waste of time.“You'd better stay away from everyone,” Artem said. “You'll infect us with your pining, and pining is worse than the clap.”The wedding procession was before us. The young couple, still utter children, walked so calmly it was as if they didn't see us. As if we were made of a light breeze—our bodies, clothes, our horses and their iron shoes—of the lightest gasses. As if we were visible only to ourselves and the coal-black dog that barked, panting and gasping.The wedding was headed straight for us. We were in the middle of the road, and so were they. We approached each other slowly, a wave going toward a wave. Some ten meters before their indifferent faces, I noticed the color of the bride's eyes. And the coral-colored tulips that fell on the road before her. Round goose eggs on meaty stems, the flowers were falling and falling before her. The bride's eyes were almond shaped.“Hey there,” Artem shouted at me. “Wake up!”I came to and saw the whole village, everyone there, not realizing my group had turned left onto a side street away from the procession. The tulips disappeared—where'd they get tulips in the fall? I was sitting alone on my horse in the middle of the road, and the entire wedding procession came to a stop. I moved to the side, and the throng marched on, cutting off our escape route. We rode a few more meters and came across the synagogue.“You know what, you're right,” said the otaman.“Who is?”“Oleksii is the only one here who's right.”“About what?”Artem turned his horse and raced back. Everyone stood still while he ran his horse into the crowd and began firing his revolver. People scattered in all directions. Artem trotted, cackling like an imbecile. The horse kicked an old guy in the mouth. The man fell, spitting out his gold teeth. We rode up to the commotion and formed ranks, but none of us wanted to join the otaman.The bride stopped in the middle of the street. On both sides were buildings and trees, as well as dust, sky, and sun. She stood still, beautiful, as if nothing had happened. Then she adjusted her garland and walked calmly on.“Well, should we get some sugar now?” Artem laughed, looking at the bride, and off he went toward the sugar factory.It was then I noticed that all of the houses had shutters—fuchsia, blue, ocher—and that all the shutters were closed.We flew toward the dirty building, whistling and shouting. If there had been aesthetes among the otamans, they would certainly have razed the abomination in this field after seizing it. They would have spread soil on top and sown buckwheat. Long live buckwheat!, that wonderful crop. Like hunting dogs hot on the trail, we raced to our defenseless victim, with the baying of hundreds of hounds behind us. The field shook beneath us. We became an artist's canvas, evolving from Realism to Romanticism, Romanticism to Expressionism, Expressionism to Suprematism. If we had been painted in black and white, we would have been splotches (until the ink ran, annihilating all remaining patches of white).Two men stood near the gate—unarmed and undressed, in nothing but their undershirts and boots. Our fervor, our kinship with the elements, our entirety, were all for naught.“Jesus Christ! What bores!” Artem exclaimed. “How boring you are!”“Maybe boring for us, but fireworks for them,” Sanko said, dismounting his horse.“The fear of death engenders creativity,” our otaman—a distinguished philosopher of the early twentieth century, that demonic breed—prophesied.He went on, “Excuse me, but with all due respect, we are not going to search you. Just show us right away where the money is. Why are there so few of you? Don't say there's not much money. I want piles and piles of money! If you don't show it to us, we'll print our own on your skin. Believe me, we will.”We entered the factory grounds. There were no workers, only an enormous mountain of sugar beets that looked like a pile of coal from a distance and a pile of dead rats from up close.“So, did you have a good year?” Artem asked a man in an undershirt.“Not really—too dry.”“Nah, that's fine. You wouldn't have been able to gather most of the harvest this year anyway. There's a fire burning across all of Ukraine, all of Russia. The whole world!”While Artem tossed thoughts like well-chewed sunflower seeds into the crowd, the two men quietly stepped aside and then ran fast ahead to the factory's main hall. The gigantic door slammed shut. The gate was locked behind us! The windows were smashed! The factory roared from inside like a cumbersome machine starting up. Bullets whirred through every window.“Bastards! It's a trap! Quick, after me!”Still on horseback, Artem bounded over to a vast window, low to the ground, and smashed it mercilessly. He broke the frame and jumped inside on his horse. I and a few others followed. We broke into their lair, threw open the doors, and let the other warriors inside.Iron vats of hot sugar were steaming, pipes were clattering; machinery groaned.“Parasites!” Artem gritted his teeth. “I'll get you. I'll get you red sons of bitches. Painted whores!”At the word “painted,” his horse fell to the ground. Lying prone, Artem continued fighting, but the red soldiers wouldn't let him stand. Fighting nearby, I rode over to assist but did not know where to aim. Artem got up, ran forward, and brought his sword down on the head of the closest soldier, all the way to the middle of his skull, to the bridge of his nose. It was like butchering a pig. Artem thrust the sword into the buttock of another who was fleeing and cut off his leg at the bend in the knee.“I'll cut off every last one of your asses! Cut off your asses!” Artem bellowed.A half hour later, the dead were lying, the captured sitting, and the victors doing anything they pleased.“Skorsky, are there a lot of casualties?” I asked the doctor, whose hour it was. I hoped not, because I was too tired to help him.“Just a few. The dead are already dead, and the wounded are not ours.”Though Skorsky rarely asked my help, and though I'd become an ordinary soldier, the doctor in me was still present in the most unpleasant attribute—knowledge. Others saw an eviscerated man, pieces of dusty flesh smeared with clay, soil, sand, and straw. I saw a perfectly formed kidney hanging perfectly from the rest of its body like a child's mitten from its coat. You could try this death on for size. Wear it like a sanbenito of the Inquisition.Artem counted the money and then lay on the floor alongside the gigantic sugar mountain in the middle of the room. From time to time, the crystals rustled as they fell.“I didn't think you'd be such a fighter!” the otaman said without turning toward me. “I thought you'd be healing us. You'd keep to the rear and we'd hide you like a girl. But here you are, in the vanguard, like a lion!”“I got excited,” I told him, choosing not to react to the “girl” part.“’Cause Alina said there was no sense counting on you to fight.”“Really?”“Does that sting?”“Why would it? I'm a doctor—not everyone is. It requires a brain. Unlike waving a sword.”“Yeah, yeah. I gave her gladiolas. We were lying in the boat near that castle, doing all manner of things, and she told me all about you. How you met.”“You were lying in that boat talking about me?”“It was the day before you left Kyiv. You agreed to go with the anarchists so quickly!”“Were you surprised? Doctors make fast decisions.”“But you probably had great prospects. Your parents are rich, right?”“And who are your parents?”“Probably all your relatives fled abroad—bourgeois. Why did you stay?”“What the hell's your point?”“Alina, by the way, died a while ago. Probably.”“Don't jinx her.”“Listen here,” he said, staring at the ceiling. “And listen good. If you have designs on her—dead or alive—it's best you castrate yourself now.”“After you.”“If I want to kill somebody, you know, I just do it.”At last he looked at me. I was lying on the floor nearby and looking in his direction, sweaty and relaxed, my appearance complemented by my disdain for his opinion, his authority, his stupid hat. His everything.Artem raised his arm above his head, stuck a finger in the sugar mountain, and licked it. We both got up. Had I anticipated this turn of events, I would have readied a gift for him. Artem held his revolver. Under my hand I found a knife the workers used for gathering beets: it was a deliberately sharpened arc they sank into the swollen brassicas. I jumped up and quickly stepped around the sugar mountain.Artem's bullet hit a pane and broke the glass.“Not man enough for hand-to-hand?”The otaman shot again.“You should've challenged me to a duel, you romantic!”Encrusted with white crystals, I charged Artem from the sugar mountain. We fell in, and the sugar stuck in our hair, mustaches, nostrils, armpits.The gang ran in to get us apart, then backed off because it had nothing to do with them. By now the sugar mountain had burst its banks. Of the once perfect pyramid, a deformed mound remained.Wounded, Artem fell on the sugar mound, turning the white red.I stood before the gang sugar-coated and holding a bloody hook. The old otaman was drawing his last breath. Blood trickled from the corner of Artem's mouth and streamed from the left side of his breast.“What's the commotion?” Old Roman had just come in.“Be quiet,” the boys told him. And a good thing they did.“You killed him? You killed the otaman!”“Shut your mouth,” the boys told him.“You... ”I slugged Roman's stinky herring mouth. How did that son of a bitch find pickled herring in a sugar factory? My fist was now bigger and stronger than ever before, a steel anvil that could split nails and shatter memorial plaques. The unfortunate man's jaw twisted like an upper millstone that had gone off track from the lower.“Let's get out of here and go to Makhno's camp,” I gave my first order.We galloped so fast the grass burned beneath us. The birds and bugs had no time to fly out of the way; hooves trampled the burrows of rodents who didn't dare crawl out of their holes for a long time after. We raced like no one had ever raced before.The steppe, that sly fox, pretended to be an innocent fool. The steppe said, “I'm like Adam: I don't even know my own name.” But its grass harbored the tracks of thousands of armies and the heels of Herodotus, the crunch of Trypillia vessels, and the smell of Scythian hemp, Roman coins, clay figures of wolf people, the chevrons of Denikin's army, glass from the Chekists’ ruby stars, traces of uranium from flying saucers. I threatened it: “Steppe, show me your layers, or I will burn you, plow you under, flood you.” But it just replied: “I'm like Adam: I don't yet know my name.”I lost geography as if it were a silver coin. It fell out of my pocket and rolled through the feather grass that blanketed the steppe in white foam. The open space ahead was so endless that the whole world might as well have been steppe. If people ended up here from somewhere else, they would conclude they were on another planet. The coin fell and became an argentum, became one with the ring on the hand of the princess who had one green eye and one blue, with the twisted candlestick at the monastery on the other side of the steppe, with melted ingots. It broke down into simpler elements, simpler and simpler yet. The horse carried me spreading the seeds of northern plants to the south, just as southern riders had once brought flowers and weeds to the north. And then I turned back. Just as I had no geography, I had no time. Every night I fell asleep with the thought that the next day I would again race. Through all spacelessness, all timelessness. I exchanged one horse for another, got on a train, on a boat, traversed forty versts on foot—in rain that brought the river up to the road, in heat that overturned cattle. The earth I walked on became mine. Mine was the water in the lakes and springs, clean water, dirty water, enlightened water, contaminated with oil, stinking of algae, of fish that died in wells, stinking of the memory of atrocities, water as clean as broken bread. The water did not become Alina.I was doing this for her: I got the basturma out from under my saddle, sodden with the horse's sweat, sliced the throat of a rich man whose daughter I had danced with at a ball, climbed into a vat of beet juice and took a sugar bath, carried out the expropriation of the savings banks, wiped the sweat from my face with my shirt—and the cloth turned red; I didn't know from what. If it was someone else's blood, I didn't care; if it was my own, even less.We mostly came across Reds. We scraped them up like old red paint on a door in order to repaint the boards black. Black looked better. Red is tasteless, but black has style. Healthy men died before us of myocardial rupture like bunnies found in the nest. The ones whose hearts were sewn of steel wire envied the deceased. Seizing estates, banks, distilleries, and prisons reminded us of gathering in the harvest. If you're too lazy to pick an apple, you can shake the tree; some of the fruit gets bruised when it falls. We seized buildings like we were shaking apple trees. No one picked the fruits, we just shook: shook under the beds, under the tables, behind the curtains. No, there was no picking. We just shook until the red juice spurted from the apples.Near the Khorol River with Father Makhno and me in charge, we captured sixteen machine guns and four cannons, as well as five hundred prisoners who immediately came over to our side. The villagers voluntarily gave us bread and cheese, chickens and kvas. People joined us. The front of the machine-gun cart said “You can't run,” and “You won't catch us” at the back. We took factory after factory. Millions of karbovantsi, thousands of poods of sugar, weapons. We smashed the telephone exchanges and captured the telegraphs. We made alliances with some and then with others. Lenin, Wrangel, Frunze, the Germans, Chinese, Australians, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Cleopatra, Maria Theresa Walburga Amalia Christina. We ran the steppe. There were a hundred thousand of us. There were three hundred thousand of them. There were three hundred thousand of us. There were a million of them. There were two million of them. We were all of humanity. We were so many that we were none.The nobles’ estates were long ago forsaken. In the people's deepest trunks lay silks and guipure laces that were once perhaps used only to cover a table. Five steps from the barn in the direction of the pear tree, some silver candlesticks are buried; there's a plaster figure of an angel in the chicken coop, covered with shit and feathers.I was reluctant to be going to my home, but I didn't see any way out. Fate intended me to be a different being from the one I was before.Here my grandfathers and great-grandfathers were born. Here the ones who caused my grandfathers and great-grandfathers to flee had stopped. When we were still far off I noticed that someone was in the house. It was our men—Skorsky had brought them here, about twenty in all. I asked Sanko, whom I had walked with side by side more than once, where the doctor was now. All the men answered that he was around somewhere, but I didn't see him that evening.In 1918, the spirit of my great-grandfather Stepan, along with my mother and uncle, had gotten into a britzka and scrambled off to Paris, to Napoleon, against whom my great-grandfather had fought with the Cossacks, to whom the Russians promised to return self-rule. Following him in the cart went the soul of Grandpa Oleh, who lost a finger when he cut down the old linden near the house; his second finger was blown off by a cannonball near Balaklava, and later his entire hand was cut off by some Turk. Next went the spirit of my father, also Stepan, who did not take part in any war but died of measles at the age of forty. They all got the hell out of here. First, they went to Kyiv, led by my mother, Tamara Makarivna, in order to collect Uncle's family and me, their son. And their son, it turns out, has now come back to rob his own home (I didn't drive my war buddies away, did I?). It's a shame that I didn't know where the bathtub was, or whatever they bathed me in when I was small. It would have been good to walk through the ranks of anarchists with that basin and tell them all to spit into it.Remembering every room, I carried Alina upstairs to my mother's bedchamber. There was no longer furniture or pictures, only bare walls. The bed and mattress remained, but that was enough. Mother hated noise, so she set up her room far away from the running in the halls and the creaks on the stairs. I adjusted the mattress; in a gap, looking like a stalk of wheat, there lay a gold bracelet that she lost in the haste and that the thieves could not find in the mayhem. I tucked it into my pocket.The place could still be saved. It was strong, built under the leadership of my grandfather, who knew how to do it right. He built a sawmill, a gristmill, a dress factory (today it's probably been ransacked, maybe even by our own men).Alina had a complete, displaced break in her right fibula. We needed water first. I went downstairs—the guys were dragging out the piano like an old cow to the slaughter.“What are you doing with that?”“Taking it out.”“Why?”“What's it to you? We want to have fun.”“Can you play?”“We're not your bourgeois lily-handed bitches.”They couldn't play, but they were famous at destruction. “Noise is the music of the new time,” one of the smarter among them might have said. “But noise is the opposite of music. Just as a rose is the opposite of your ugly mugs,” I'd have responded if there was anyone to say it to. I could also have said that this was a Bosendorfer grand piano, that it was very valuable—but do the guys not deserve such a luxury?“Why are you so boring? We're relaxing.”“Then let me play a little first.”“Go ahead, but fast. One-two.”So I played. As before. My fingers ran up and down the black and white keys, which weren't simply keys of these, the simplest, colors. These were the keys that remembered my fingers specifically—achieved by that slovenly German Katerina, our governess. She knew a bundle of languages, could play the piano, and was interested in the latest scientific discoveries. But she had not an ounce of sympathy for anyone who couldn't master anything on the first try. More than once she hit my pinkie against the black key that remembered every one of its four thousand touches. She would pound it on the key and shout, “Si bémol! Si bémol,” and later bang my fingers and translate, “B flach! B flach!”I played. I could not expose myself, so the only thing I could do was believe in miracles. What if these coarse men saw value in this bit of furniture so unintelligible to them? And what if they didn't destroy it, this emblem of my childhood, my land, my air, which I could protect in no other way? My air. My water.“Shchedryk, shchedryk, shchedrivochka,” one of them who recognized the tune began to sing along.“Look at you.” They did not expect music from me, who had until recently been drinking blood like water.They said, “Again, again!”A group of curious men gathered around me. They were ordinary farmers, thieves, and recidivists, peasants and workers, everyone except for Skorsky. They needed this music as they needed baths. The music cleansed them from the inside, perhaps. They had not heard anything besides the whistle of a bullet, the neighing of a horse, or the knocking of a chisel and the whirring of a saw, amputating limbs, for a long time.But it could not go on long. I did not close the piano lid, just stood and went to fetch water for Alina, leaving the unfinished song for later. The well was to the north—that is, at the “Head.” My father once promised to give me a compass if I could learn to identify the ends of the earth by means of the sun. And to make it easier to remember, I gave each one of them a name: the east where the day begins was “Right” (my right hand), the west “Left,” the north “Head,” and the south “Feet.” Back when I could still do whatever I wanted all day long, I would wake in the morning and say: I'm going to the Feet. The mound was at the Feet, Left had the river, Right had the forest. It was only to the Head that I rarely went, because a village was located there. When the villagers saw me, they would speak in whispers and avoid the master's son.... I wiped her brow and her burning, sunken cheeks. I lay down next to her to feel the heat of her skin.When the fire in Alina calmed slightly, I went out into our orchard. My father had once been given a gift from Japan—a tulip tree that blossomed with yellow-green flowers. It had to have grown in the time that I was away. It would have been fatal had it been cut down. I again took the stairs down into the drawing room and came across nobody—they had all disappeared in search of food or were hidden away in their burrows. In the middle of the hall, like an opened rib cage, was the piano, irreparably shattered.B Flach! B Flach!Translation © Ali Kinsella 2022. (shrink)

The 13 contributions of this collective offer new and challenging ways of reading well-known and more neglected texts on akrasia (lack of control, or weakness ...

It has been said that our ability to identify and describe consciousness is like that of a fish describing water. Since a fish has always been immersed in water it cannot provide an accurate description. It stands to reason then that those who have experienced alternative states of consciousness have unique insight into the nature of consciousness. The historic use of imagery, music, poetry and other creative forms to describe as well as communicate not only emotion, not only intellectual data, (...) but also states of consciousness – states of ‘being’ is well documented. Celtic poetry, Greek mythology, African ritual rhythms and contemporary creative works can be viewed as notational systems that encapsulate states of consciousness and could be investigated as such. As our creative instruments become more sophisticated our ability to express states of consciousness does as well and as a natural extension of this creative process, the artists’ exploration of consciousness equally intensifies and expands. As the Surrealists explored sub-consciousness, what areas of consciousness does contemporary creativity explore? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:In Search of the Sense and the Senses:Aesthetic Education in Germany and the United StatesAlexandra Kertz-Welzel (bio)The dream that art is able to humanize human beings is very old. One person fascinated by this idea claimed:The creative artist educates and perfects through his work the nation's capacity for appreciation, just as conversely the general feeling for art thus developed and sustained creates the fruitful soil which is the condition (...) for the birth, the growth, and the activity of creative forces.1The author asserted that art has educational power and is able to improve appreciation as well as activate creative energy. Art is a way to transform the individual through its aesthetic power.Although these ideas sound similar to some approaches in arts education, this quotation does not represent the ideas of an art educator or a music educator. It is a quotation from one of the most powerful and most dangerous believers in the transforming power of art and music, in particular—Adolf Hitler (1889-1945). His ideology matched perfectly with the ideas of German music education in the 1930s, and therefore music education was a significant part of the school curriculum during the Third Reich. One of the most tempting ideas for music educators is the claim that music is capable of transforming human beings and their society.The idea of the educational power of music starts at least with Plato. Since the 1950s, aesthetic education has emphasized the aesthetic value and educational power of music. The German and the American concepts of aesthetic education are significantly different, but as a result of historical developments, they also share some similarities.The main intent of this paper is to analyze crucial issues of aesthetic education that exist in Germany and the United States. By comparing the two approaches, some core issues of music education will also be revealed in terms of idealistic dreams that are intent on making the world a better place [End Page 102] through music. This leads to some interesting insights concerning the significance but also the ambiguity of art for societies.The Roots: Ancient Greece, Schiller, and Holistic DreamsThe origin of the term aesthetics can be found in the Greek word aisthesis, which means perception through the senses.2 This meaning of aisthesis is originally not related to art. It concerns all kinds of sensations through seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, and tasting. In Greek philosophy, aisthesis as a way of experiencing the world through the senses is opposite to cognition in terms of an intellectual way of realization, the theoria. But given that art is something one can perceive through the various senses, aisthesis also concerns art.Most theories of aesthetic education refer to the ancient Greek idea of music, the musiké, which is a unity of music, dance, and literature. Plato emphasized the educational power of music and its effects on character development: "Musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul.... "3 Since music is so powerful, the correct use and the correct kind of music are important. According to Plato, art is a way to learn about truth and ideas through beauty. But art is also dangerous, because the senses "lie" and art is only an imitation of truth. For Plato, the senses are not as clear as the intellect.Plato's concerns about the ambivalence of sensorial perception are typical for the way aisthesis and aesthetics have been understood throughout the history of philosophy. The tension between a "true" intellectual approach to knowledge and an inferior approach through the senses is one aspect of the well-known mind-body dichotomy.During the eighteenth century, the era of enlightenment, Alexander Baumgarten (1714-62) introduced the term aesthesis into the philosophical discussion.4 In his book Aesthetica (published in 1750), he attempted to justify sensorial perception and emotions as a unique way of understanding the world. Baumgarten was not interested in the arts at all and tried to establish aesthetics as the science of sensuous cognition in order to improve the sensuous capacity for cognition. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was the... (shrink)

This paper discusses _My Life in the Dromokaiteion_ by the Greek poet Romos Philyras (1898-1942). Reading the text within the scope of the medical humanities, brings out Philyras’ work as an early example of pathography or autopathography. The story revolves around the poet’s admission to the psychiatric hospital and how he experienced his days there. He describes his emotions, the hospital environment, other patients, their treatment and the nursing staff. Philyras’ text is a first-person narrative on how people (...) with mental health problems see their new social setting, but also how doctors and nurses see patients. _My Life in the Dromokaiteion_ is an autobiographical account which eloquently describes not only the distance between the nursing staff and patients, but also the distance between inside society (the patients of the hospital) and outside society. (shrink)

Presentations of tragic theater in ancient Greece both represent and elicit the sharing of emotions. The theory behind this is cognitive: In order to share the emotions of another, you must understand the situation of the other. In keeping with the theory, tragic texts emphasize the importance of understanding.Ancient Greek poets did not conceive that one person could respond emotionally to another without understanding the situation of the other, ideally through having lived through a similar situation — (...) if not, then by imagining oneself in that situation. The word we translate as “compassion” is cognitive at root — “with-knowing,” sungnōmosune. Its cognate in modern Greek, sungnōme, still means “pardon me,” but.. (shrink)

The objective of this doctoral dissertation is to interpret the explanation of akrasia that the Dutch philosopher Benedictus Spinoza (1632-1677) gives in his work The Ethics. One is said to act acratically when one intentionally performs an action that one judges to be worse than another action which one believes one might perform instead. In order to interpret Spinoza’s explanation of akrasia, a large part of this dissertation investigates Spinoza’s theory of emotion. The first chapter is introductory and outlines Spinoza’s (...) categorisation of mental states and his conception of the relation between the mind and the body. The second chapter deals with Spinoza’s epistemology and the relation between cognitive mental states and states of the brain. The third chapter argues that Spinoza holds that emotions are non-cognitive mental states that are caused by cognitive mental states. The fourth chapter interprets Spinoza’s discussion of the emotions of Joy and Sadness insofar as they are mental states. The fifth chapter suggests that when Spinoza says that the power of our body is increased or decreased when we are joyful or sad, he means that when we are joyful or sad then, at the same time, our heart and perhaps the organs of our digestive system are affected in such a way that our bodily health is increased or decreased. The sixth chapter points to three problems that concern Spinoza’s definitions of the psychophysical states of pleasure, pain, cheerfulness and melancholy, and offers slightly altered definitions of these states. The seventh chapter interprets the various aspects of Spinoza’s conception of the emotion of Desire, both insofar as it is a state of the mind and insofar it is a state of the body, as well as the relation between the emotion of Desire and man’s striving for self-preservation. The eighth chapter discusses what Spinoza writes on the strength of emotions and the way in which we make value judgments in order to finally interpret why it is, according to Spinoza, that ‘we so often see the better for ourselves but follow the worse’. (shrink)

Preview: Shusterman, as a philosopher who draws from the work of John Dewey, has pragmatic expectations for art. For Dewey, communing with art was an intensification of experience, that is to say being in the world. For art is full of meaning, and it is in human nature to rush to search for meanings. Experience is only satisfactory if it enriches what is lived in it. Dewey’s message was one of the first voices to warn of the alienation of art. (...) According to it, its consumption should give people a chance for emotional and spiritual compassion. Richard Shusterman’s attitude toward art is similar: “As experience, art is obviously part of our lives, a particularly vivid form of our experienced reality, rather than a mere fictional imitation of it.” -/- Shusterman has developed his own concept of aesthetics, which he has called “somaesthetics” – the aesthetics of the soma. The Greek word soma here means a feeling, animated, purposeful body. Also, the term “aesthetics” is understood in a different way than its usual wider usage, according to which aesthetics is a theory of art and beauty. Shusterman refers to the old, original Greek word aisthetikos meaning sensory perception. The somaesthetic project’s goal is to combine theory with practice and consider the body in two ways: on the one hand, as a medium enabling cognition through perception, and on the other, as an external form of representation. That is why somaesthetics is interested in activities that expand and explore body awareness, such as meditation, yoga, and treatments that shape the appearance, including cosmetics and fashion. One of the main tasks of somaesthetics is to eliminate the dominant attitude toward the body in Western philosophy, which sees it as an obstacle to cognition. (shrink)

Downton Abbey is, at its most basic, a story driven by intimate, romantic relationships: Mary and Matthew, Bates and Anna, Sybil and Branson, Lord and Lady Grantham, and many others. As viewers, we root for (or against) these characters as they fall in love, quarrel, break up, reconcile, have children, and deal with separation and death. But what do we get out of this? Is it merely an emotional “rush,” or is it something more meaningful? In this essay, I’ll attempt (...) to answer this question by examining how the relationships portrayed in Downton Abbey might look to the characters of Plato’s Symposium, one of the first (and most famous) philosophical treatments of love. The residents of Downtown Abbey provide ideal models for exploring and critiquing the various “theories of love” offered by the Symposium’s characters. Thomas’s defense of James, for example, provides a great illustration of Phaedrus’s claim about the relationship between love and courage, while Mary’s early struggles illuminate Pausanias’s suggestion that “pure” love can be achieved only by following (well-designed) social rules. By contrast, Bates and Anna help give content to Aristophanes’ s idea that love involves finding your “missing half,” while Carson’s and Mrs. Hughes’ relationship exemplify the sort of “order” celebrated by Eryximachus. Edith, for her part, seems to have fallen for Agathon’s sophistical claim that romantic love can only truly be experienced by the young and beautiful. Finally, Socrates’s famous account of the “ladder of love” can be seen most vividly in the transformative relationship of Sybil and Bronson. Along the way, we’ll consider what is really meant by “Platonic love,” and consider what the characters of Downton Abbey can teach about this invaluable philosophical concept. (shrink)

근대도덕철학을 대표하는 칸트윤리학이나 공리주의 도덕이론은 ‘무엇을 하는 것이 옳거나 의무인가’하는 문제에 초점을 맞추었으며 덕의 문제는 무시해 왔다. 근대도덕철학자들과 달리 흄의 도덕이론에서는 덕윤리의 특징들을 발견할 수 있다. 우리는 이를 흄의 『인성론』2권 〈정념론〉의 ‘의지와 동기이론’, 그리고 ‘성격이론’에서 찾을 수 있다. 흄의 덕이론은 도덕적 평가에 있어 행위자가 중심이라는 점과 감정으로부터의 행위를 강조하고 행위의 옳음을 유연하게 이해한다는 특징을 가지고 있다. 나는 이러한 점을 드러내기 위해 흄의 동기이론에서 자제력없음(아크라시아)이 문제가 될 수 있는지를 살펴보고 ‘역-아크라시아(inverse akrasia)’의 문제를 통해 어떤 점에서는 덕이 구체성과 결정력과 관련하여 규칙이나 원리보다 (...) 더 낫다는 사실을 보이고자 한다. (shrink)

Primary affects exist at an ecological-communicative level of analysis, and therefore are not identifiable with specific brain regions. The constructionist view favored in the target article, that emotions emerge from “more basic psychological processes,” does not specify the nature of these processes. These more basic processes may actually involve specific neurochemical systems, that is, primary motivational-emotional systems (primes), associated with specific feelings and desires that combine to form the “cocktail” of experienced emotion.

This is a collection of essays dealing with such topics as personal identity, fear of death, self-deception, akrasia, jealousy, the virtues and their vicissitudes, and practical reasoning. Despite the wide range of these topics, the author's method and style yield a strong sense of continuity. Each essay calls attention to the historical contexts in which human actions, virtues, and vices have been defined, and to the psychological complexities that have often been neglected in more exclusively epistemological studies of reason and (...) emotion. The book is divided into four sections. "Persons and Personae" characterizes as a philosophical dream the project of deriving normative political and moral principles from a single foundational conception of personhood. Intractable debates about moral issues tend to arise whenever the practical contexts governing diverse definitions of personhood are blurred. We may learn more about such practical contexts, and therefore about the uses and abuses of the concept of a person, by tracing the literary representations of human agency in the characters, figures, selves, and individuals depicted in Biblical narratives, Greek dramas, medieval mystery plays and Chaucerian tales, romantic and social novels, and twentieth-century short stories, plays, and science fiction. (shrink)

Affection in triune consciousness -- Ricoeur in search of a philosophy of the "heart" -- Cognition and volition, or reason and will -- Faculties or powers of the mind -- Affectivity and values: two modern views -- Reason and desire from Socrates to the Stoics -- Augustine: "love transformed into will" -- Thomas Aquinas: the primacy of intellectual love -- The unravelling of Triune consciousness.

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has taken a significant toll on mental health; people around the world are experiencing high levels of stress and deteriorated wellbeing. The past research shows that positive emotions can help people cultivate a resilient mindset; however, the reality created by the global crisis itself limits the opportunities for experiencing positive emotions. Thus, it is unclear to what extent their effect is strong enough to counter the psychological impact of the current pandemic. Here, (...) the author reports the findings of a survey conducted across two large representative samples in the United Kingdom and the United States during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. A linear regression model revealed that the presence of positive emotions is strongly linked with resilience, in particular for individuals experiencing more negative emotions. These results show that positive emotions are particularly important to mental health in the context of high stress, reflected by increased levels of negative emotional experiences. These results are also consistent with the existential positive psychology perspective, which posits that even negative emotions can contribute to wellbeing once they are transformed. The author discusses the potential of positive emotions to transform suffering and thereby ameliorate the negative impact of the present collective crisis. (shrink)

To date, the most substantial accounts of our engagement with literature have focused on prose-fiction, in particular the novel, drawing on issues of plot, character and narrative in explaining our understanding of literary works. These accounts do not consider how the poetic features of a literary work may affect our reading experience and how this contributes to the meaning of the work. In this thesis I show the philosophical importance of the experience of reading poetry for the role it can (...) play in inquiry, in particular, how such an experience can facilitate philosophical thinking and active inquiry. Adopting a reader-response view of our engagement with poetry, I argue that the experience of reading lyric poetry can make a valuable contribution to philosophical inquiry by enriching our conceptual understanding. The reading experience helps us to forge explicit awareness of our concepts and the networks of associations and beliefs that determine our use of them. Understanding poetry necessarily requires attending to the unity of form and content, and the particular perspectives on offer in the poem. This complex whole sustains perspectives and emotions where character and narrative are lacking. I argue that the perspectival nature of our reading experience is important for philosophical inquiry into aspects of human life. Encountering the perspectives of the poem helps to activate our own perspectives through our emotional and intellectual responses, bringing into focus what we value. I apply this argument to the moral domain, arguing that poetry can facilitate moral inquiry in particular by exposing moral significance in our concepts, helping us to feel what is at stake, and by testing our moral understanding. The way in which the poetic examples discussed engage us emotionally, imaginatively and cognitively (through the reading experience) help us address moral questions from distinctive and valuable perspectives, which provide us with moral insights of value in philosophical inquiry. (shrink)

Ambivalence is often presented through cases of defeated ambivalence and multivalence, in which opposed attitudes suggest mutual isolation and defeat each other. Properly understood, however, ambivalence implies the existence of poles that are conflictually yet rationally interlinked and are open to non-defeated joint conduct. This paper considers cases that range from indecisiveness and easy adoption of conflicting attitudes, to tragically conflicted deliberation and to cases of shifting between self-deceptively serious attitudes. Analyzing such cases as variants of defeated ambivalence, I argue (...) that the phenomena of defeated ambivalence are marginal to ambivalence even though they are by the same token exemplary of it. The poles in such cases are connected as opposing attitudes in such a way that the attitudes and the opposition are both undermined. The article focuses on two forms of vague multivalence, one of which is taken from Heidegger’s analysis of curiosity. (shrink)

Coastal environments are increasingly shown to have a positive effect on our health and well-being. Various mechanisms have been suggested to explain this effect. However, so far little focus has been devoted to emotions that might be relevant in this context, especially for people who are directly or indirectly exposed to the coast on a daily basis. Our preregistered qualitative study explored how coastal residents experience the emotions they feel at the coast and how they interpret the effect (...) these emotions have on them. We conducted semi-structured interviews with a purposive sample of eight Belgian coastal residents aged 21–25 years old. The interviews were analyzed with the approach of interpretative phenomenological analysis. Five superordinate themes were identified and indicate that, for our participants, the coast represents a safe haven in which they can experience emotional restoration, awe, and nostalgia. These emotional states are accompanied with adaptive emotion regulating strategies, such as reflection and positive reappraisal, that may facilitate coping with difficult thoughts and feelings. Our study demonstrates the importance of investigating specific emotions and related processes triggered at the coast and how these could contribute to the therapeutic value of the coast. (shrink)

Although emotions play a crucial role in understanding and encouraging sustainable behavior and decision-making, many open questions currently remain unanswered. In this review, we advance three broad areas of particular theoretical and applied importance that affective science and emotion researchers could benefit from engaging with: (1) “ sustainable emotions” or empirically testing the possibility of positive reinforcing feedback loops between anticipatory and experienced emotions following the adoption of sustainable behaviors, (2) “ non- Western emotions” or exploring (...) the extent to which people's understanding and experience of climate-relevant emotions differs across non-WEIRD populations, and (3) “ impactful emotions” or the need to carefully differentiate the conceptual and empirical role of emotions in encouraging the adoption of low-impact (e.g., recycling) versus high-impact (e.g., flying less) environmental behaviors. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Art of Silent Reading It's All in the Mind Ideal Presence and Radford's Problem Faulty Foundations Home away from Home? The Text and the Real Seeing and Being Told Suspension of Disbelief Yet Again.

Emotions play an important part in moral life. Within clinical ethics support (CES), one should take into account the crucial role of emotions in moral cases in clinical practice. In this paper, we present an Aristotelian approach to emotions. We argue that CES can help participants deal with emotions by fostering a joint process of investigation of the role of emotions in a case. This investigation goes beyond empathy with and moral judgment of the (...) class='Hi'>emotions of the case presenter. In a moral case deliberation, the participants are invited to place themselves in the position of the case presenter and to investigate their own emotions in the situation. It is about critically assessing the facts in the case that cause the emotion and the related (moral) thoughts that accompany the emotion. It is also about finding the right emotion in a given situation and finding the right balance in dealing with that emotion. These steps in the moral inquiry give rise to group learning. It is a process of becoming open towards the perspectives of others, leading to new insights into what is an appropriate emotion in the specific situation. We show how this approach works in moral case deliberation. A physician presents a situation in which he is faced with a pregnant woman who is about to deliver multiple extremely premature infants at the threshold of viability. The moral deliberation of the case and the emotions therein leads to the participants’ conclusion that “compassion” is a more adequate emotion than “sadness”. The emotion “sadness” is pointed towards the tragedy that is happening to the woman. The emotion “compassion” is pointed towards the woman; it combines consideration and professional responsibility. Through the shift towards compassion, participants experienced more creativity and freedom to deal with the sad situation and to support the woman. The paper ends with an analysis and reflection on the deliberation process. In the conclusion we argue for more attention to emotions in clinical ethics support and offer some directions for doing this in the right way. (shrink)

There is more akrasia than meets the eye: it can occur in speech and perception, cognitively and emotionally as well as between decision and action. The lures of akrasia are the same as those that are exercised in ordinary psychological and cognitive inferential contexts. But because it is over-determined and because it occurs in opaque intentional contexts, its attribution remains highly fallible.

The paper addresses two questions regarding the interpretation of akrasia among the Stoics, offered by Marcelo Boeri in his book Appearance and Reality in Greek Thought: On the one hand, can Chrysippus’s monistic adaptation of the Platonic model of the divided soul set forth in Book iv of the Republic provide a philosophically satisfactory explanation of the classical phenomenon of akrasia? On the other hand, is this phenomenon the true explanandum of this adaptation? The paper shows that the answer (...) to both these questions could be negative and thus different from the answer provided by Boeri in his book. The argument is based on the analysis of Plutarch vm 446f-447b and on the analysis of the classical problem of akrasia. (shrink)

While extensive scholarship has been dedicated to the emotional experiences of transplant patients, little is known about the emotional experiences of transplant co‐ordinators. Semi‐structured face‐to‐face interviews conducted with ten transplant co‐ordinators who have worked for more than 20 years in this job. The transplant co‐ordinators spoke of negative feelings and moral distress with regard to futile care of deceased donor family members as well as of living donors. Transplant co‐ordinators experience intense negative feelings, emotional pain, and moral distress on a (...) daily basis. Transplant co‐ordinators play a pivotal role in the process of obtaining consent for live or dead donation of organ; however, their well‐being and job satisfaction are impaired by contradictions between their moral values and the tasks they are instructed to perform. The study exposes the silent emotional suffering of transplant co‐ordinators; main findings show that the transplant co‐ordinators are torn between contradictory expectations and a gap between values and praxis. It is recommended to offer them training and support for the sake of their retention. (shrink)

_Emotional Presence in Psychoanalysis_ provides a detailed look at the intricacies of attaining emotional presence in psychoanalytic work. John Madonna and a distinguished group of contributors draw on both the relational and modern psychoanalytic schools of thought to examine a variety of different problems commonly experienced in achieving emotional resonance between analyst and patient, setting out ways in which such difficulties may be overcome in psychoanalytic treatment, practical clinical settings and in training contexts. A focused review of relevant comparative literature (...) is followed by chapters featuring individual clinical case studies, each illustrating particularly challenging aspects. The uniqueness of this book lays not simply in the espousal of the commonly accepted importance of emotional resonance between analyst and patient; rather it is in the way in which emotional presence is registered by both participants, requiring a working through, which at times can be not only difficult but dangerous. Such efforts involve a theory which enables the lens to understanding, an effective methodology which guides intervention. The book also calls for the art of the analyst to construct with patients meanings which heal, and possess the heart to persist in commitment despite the odds. _Emotional Presence in Psychoanalysis_ is about patients who suffer, struggle, resist and prevail. It offers distinctive, transparently told accounts of analysts who engage with patients, navigating through states of confusion, hatred and more controversial feelings of love. Emotional Presence in Psychoanalysis features highly compelling material written in an accessible and easily understood style. It will be a valuable resource for psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists, psychologists and clinical social workers as well as teachers, trainers and students seeking to understand the power and potential of the analytic process and the resistances to it. (shrink)

After discussing de Sousa's view of emotion in akrasia, I suggest that emotions be viewed as nonconceptual perceptions of value (see Tappolet 2000). It follows that they can render intelligible actions which are contrary to one's better judgment. An emotion can make one's action intelligible even when that action is opposed by one's all-things-considered judgment. Moreover, an akratic action prompted by an emotion may be more rational than following one's better judgement, for it may be the judgement and not (...) the perception which is in error. By contrast, "cool" akrasia is genuinely puzzling; it is not clear whether it exists. (shrink)

Autistic children do not consistently show conventional signs of social engagement, which some have interpreted to mean that they are not interested in connecting with other people. If someone does not act like they are interested in connecting with you, it may make it difficult to feel connected to them. And yet, some parents report feeling strongly connected to their autistic children. We conducted phenomenological interviews with 13 mothers to understand how they experienced connection with their 5- to 14-year-old nonspeaking (...) autistic children. Mothers of nonspeaking autistic children represent a unique group in which to study connection because their children both may not seem interested in connecting with them and have limited ability to communicate effectively using speech, a common way people connect with each other. The mothers in this study interpreted a range of child behaviors—some unconventional, but many conventional—as signs that their children were interested in connecting with them, (re)framed child behaviors that could undermine connection as caused by factors unrelated to the relationship, and expressed several convictions that may help build and sustain connection in the face of uncertainty about the meaning of their children’s behavior. Even though their autistic children may not consistently act in conventional socially oriented ways, these mothers reported perceiving their children’s behavior as embedded within an emotionally reciprocal relationship. (shrink)

Phenomenology is the general study of the structure of experience, from thought and perception, to self-consciousness, bodily-awareness, and emotion. It is both a fundamental area of philosophy and a major methodological approach within the human sciences. Experiencing Phenomenology is an outstanding introduction to phenomenology. Approaching fundamental phenomenological questions from a critical, systematic perspective whilst paying careful attention to classic phenomenological texts, the book possesses a clarity and breadth that will be welcomed by students coming to the subject for the (...) first time. Accessibly written, each chapter relates classic phenomenological discussions to contemporary issues and debates in philosophy. The following key topics are introduced and explained: the methodological foundations of phenomenology intentionality as the ‘mark of the mental’ and the problem of non-existent objects perceptual experience, including our awareness of things, properties, and events the experience of body, self, and others imaginative and emotional experience detailed discussions of classical phenomenological texts, including: Brentano's _Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint _ Husserl's _Logical Investigations_, _Cartesian Meditations, _and On_ the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time _ Heidegger’s _History of The Concept of Time,_ and _Being and Time _ Stein's _On the Problem of Empathy _ Sartre's _Transcendence of the Ego_, _Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions,_ and _The Imaginary _ Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception. Also included is a glossary of key terms and suggestions for further reading, making this book an ideal starting point for anyone new to the study of phenomenology, not only in Philosophy but related disciplines such as Psychology and Sociology. (shrink)

Emotion is central to human character, infiltrating our physiological functions and our mental constitution. In sport, athletes feel emotion in specific ways, from joy to anger and despair. This is the first book to examine emotion in sport from a philosophical perspective, building on concepts developed by ancient Greek and modern philosophers. For instance, how is Aristotle's concept of catharsis applied to the sports field? How about power as advanced by Nietzsche, or existentialism as discussed by Kierkegaard? Emotion in (...) Sports explores the philosophical framework for the expression of emotion and relates it to our psychological understanding, from the perspective of both athlete and spectator. A fascinating and useful read for students, researchers, scholars, and practitioners in the fields of sport sciences, philosophy, and psychology. (shrink)

The following text is the first ever translation into English of a writing by German phenomenologist Hermann Schmitz (*1928). In it, Schmitz outlines and defends a non-mentalistic view of emotions as phenomena in interpersonal space in conjunction with a theory of the felt body’s constitutive involvement in human experience. In the first part of the text, Schmitz gives an overview covering some central pieces of his theory as developed, for the most part, in his massive System of Philosophy, published (...) in German in a series of volumes between 1964 and 1980. Schmitz’s System is centred on the claim that the contemporary view of the human subject is the result of a consequential historical process: A reductionist and ‘introjectionist’ objectification of lived experience culminating in the ‘invention’ of the mind (or ‘soul’) as a private, inner realm of subjective experience and in a corresponding ‘grinding down’ of the world of lived experienced to a meagre, value-neutral ‘objective reality’. To counter this intellectualist trend, Schmitz puts to use his approach to phenomenology with the aim of regaining a sensibility for the nuanced realities of lived experience—hoping to make up for what was lost during the development of Western intellectual culture. Since both this text and the overall style of Schmitz’s philosophising are in several ways unusual for a contemporary readership, a brief introduction is provided by philosophers Jan Slaby and Rudolf Owen Müllan, the latter of whom translated Schmitz’s text into English. The introduction emphasises aspects of Schmitz’s philosophy that are likely to be of relevance to contemporary scholars of phenomenological philosophy and to its potential applications in science and society. (shrink)