Our work aimed to study the relationships between different dimensions of school climate, moral disengagement, empathy, and bullying behaviors (perpetration and victimization). The study sample consisted of 629 students (304 boys and 325 girls) aged 12–14 years (M= 12.55,SD= 0.67). Results showed how different dimensions of school climate predicted moral disengagement, empathy, and victimization, and these, in turn, predicted bullying perpetration. The results show the need to generate favorable educational environments to reduce the levels of moral disengagement and victimization and (...) to increase empathy in students as a strategy to prevent negative consequences related to bullying. (shrink)

Hartmut Rosa advances an account of the temporal structure of society from the perspective of critical theory. He identifies three categories of change in the tempo of modern social life: technological acceleration, evident in transportation, communication, and production; the acceleration of social change, reflected in cultural knowledge, social institutions, and personal relationships; and acceleration in the pace of life, which happens despite the expectation that technological change should increase an individual's free time. According to Rosa, both the structural (...) and cultural aspects of our institutions and practices are marked by the "shrinking of the present," a decreasing time period during which expectations based on past experience reliably match the future. When this phenomenon combines with technological acceleration and the increasing pace of life, time seems to flow ever faster, making our relationships to each other and the world fluid and problematic. It is as if we are standing on "slipping slopes," a steep social terrain that is itself in motion and in turn demands faster lives and technology. As Rosa deftly shows, this self-reinforcing feedback loop fundamentally determines the character of modern life. (shrink)

There are many ways in which a speaker can confuse their audience. In this paper, I will focus on one such way, namely, a way of talking that seems to manifest a cross-level kind of cognitive dissonance on the part of the speaker. The goal of the paper is to explain why such ways of talking sound so twisted. The explanation is two-pronged, since their twisted nature may come either from the very mental states that the speaker thereby makes manifest, (...) or from how the speaker chooses to express themselves (even if there is nothing wrong with their mental states). So-called ‘Moore-paradoxical’ utterances are but one example of the phenomenon, and the explanation of what is wrong about them is subsumed under a more general explanation here—one that captures also the twisted-ness of utterances whereby questions are raised or intentions expressed. (shrink)

In this paper I present reasons for us to accept the hypothesis that suspended judgment has correctness conditions, just like beliefs do. Roughly put, the idea is that suspended judgment about p is correct when both p and ¬p might be true in view of certain facts that characterize the subject’s situation. The reasons to accept that hypothesis are broadly theoretical ones: it adds unifying power to our epistemological theories, it delivers good and conservative consequences, and it allows us to (...) assess processes of reasoning involving attitudes of suspended judgment. (shrink)

Contingentism depicts normativity as one of our human effective possibilities rather than as a metaphysical bottleneck which we should necessary fulfill. The book is a critical survey of Richard McKay Rorty’s “neo-pragmatism”, in the light of various theoretical arguments as well as of his own resourceful attempts to renew philosophy from within its practice.

Resumen: El presente artículo propone que la 31ª Bienal de Sao Paulo entraña un afán emancipador para los "sin tierra" - errantes, migrantes y viajeros. Para ello se conforma como un cuerpo sin órganos, que despliega estrategias liberadoras promoviendo: desarticulación, experimentación, vagabundeo y tránsito de sujetos y pueblos. Esta Bienal, en tanto CsO, mueve intensidades como flujos sensibles por los intersticios de los proyectos artísticos dispuestos en organismo. Acá el CsO es un conjunto de prácticas reservadas a desterritorializar los estratos (...) del "organismo social" y hacer estallar los órganos estructurados en dichos sistemas.: This article shows that the 31st Sao Paulo Biennial has an emancipatory affinity for the landless - wanderers, migrants, and travelers. As such it becomes a Body without Organs that displays liberating strategies, promoting disarticulation, experimentation, wandering, and the transit of subjects and peoples. This Biennial, as a BwO, moves intensities as sensible flows through the interstices of the artistic projects inside the organism. Here, the BwO becomes a set of practices that deterritorialize the strata of the "social organism", making the structured organs in these systems explode. (shrink)

How do engineers respond to ethical dilemmas that occur in practice? How do they view their individual and collective responsibilities? How do they make decisions before all the facts are in? Using the space shuttle programme as the framework, this book examines the role of ethical decision making in the practice of engineering. In particular, the book considers the design and development of the main engines of the space shuttle as a paradigm for how individual engineers perceive, articulate, and resolve (...) ethical dilemmas in a large, complex organisation. A series of in-depth case studies show engineers at work on various stages of the project as they balance budgets, deadlines and risks. By documenting the historical development of a single system, the book provides a unique opportunity to explore the complex interactions between political, organisational and technical pressures and engineering and management decisions. (shrink)

Este artículo tiene como objetivo ofrecer una revisión y reinterpretación al problema teórico en la teoría de Darwin en el que se pone en relación el principio de divergencia y la competencia entre los seres vivos. Respecto a este asunto ha habido dos interpretaciones fundamentales. La primera de ellas es la de aquellos que defienden que la divergencia se ve favorecida porque implica una reducción de la competencia a la que se enfrentan los seres vivos que se desplazan de nicho (...) ecológico. Por otro lado, algunos abogan — aunque es una posición menos extendida— por una interpretación en la que la reducción de la competencia no es la ventaja, sino que lo es la especialización y, por tanto, el incremento en la competitividad, es decir, el tener mejores herramientas o capacidades para competir. En este artículo se defiende esta última tesis, fundamentalmente sostenida por William Tammone, pero desde otra perspectiva y sustentada en otros argumentos que se nutren de la propuesta de Trevor Pearce acerca de la noción de economía natural de Darwin. (shrink)

La tesis central de este artículo es que la concepción de la razón pública propuesta por John Rawls, incluso en su versión “inclusiva”, es demasiado restrictiva y viola el principio liberal de legitimidad y la tesis de la neutralidad del estado, que constituyen elementos centrales de la teoría política de Rawls y del liberalismo político en general. Finalmente, se propone una concepción alternativa de la razón pública liberal, centrada únicamente en un deber básico de civilidad, el deber de reciprocidad, a (...) la que denominaré la concepción “abierta” de la razón pública. (shrink)

Rousseau et l'exegese biblique du XVIIIe siecle -- Des pratiques bibliques du XVIIIe siecle a la lecture-consolation de Rousseau -- Intertextualite biblique dans l'ouvre de Rousseau -- Intertexte biblique et representation de soi -- Le Levite d'Ephraim : reecriture biblique -- Schemes de la pensee du religieux -- Ouvre de doctrine : la lettre a Christophe de Beaumont -- Etre Chretien de Jacques : les lettres ecrites de La Montagne.

This work develops the ethical attitude of courageous vulnerability through the integration of the phenomenon of involuntary memory in Marcel Proust's work and ...

The significance of critical phenomenology for psychiatric praxis has yet to be expounded. In this paper, I argue that the adoption of a critical phenomenological stance can remedy localised instances of hermeneutical injustice, which may arise in the encounter between clinicians and patients with psychosis. In this context, what is communicated is often deemed to lack meaning or to be difficult to understand. While a degree of un-shareability is inherent to subjective life, I argue that issues of unintelligibility can be (...) addressed by shifting from individualistic conceptions of understanding to an interactionist view. This takes into account the contextual, historical and relational background within which meaning is co-constituted. I conclude by providing a corrective for hermeneutical injustice, which entails a specific attentiveness towards the person’s subjectivity, a careful sensitivity to contingent meaning-generating structures, and a degree of hermeneutical flexibility as an attitude of openness towards alternative horizons of possibility. (shrink)

Are there representations in the brain? It depends on what you mean by representations, and it depends on what you want them to do for you—both in terms of the causal role they play in the system, and in terms of their explanatory value. But ideally, we would like an account of representation that allows us to assign a representational role and content to the appropriate mechanistic precursors of behavior that in fact play that role and conversely, search for the (...) mechanistic realizers of representational roles that are posited by our models of behavior and cognition. Such an account would be methodologically valuable in neuroscience. Lately, people have started asking similar questions about deep neural networks. What representations do they learn and use, and what is the relation between those representations and the sometimes impressive capacities these networks exhibit? More philosophically puzzling, perhaps, is the question of why the internal activities or dispositions labeled as such in neuroscience and AI research should count as representations at all. I think we can give a unified answer to both sets of questions, in the form of a kind of representational pragmatism. What makes something a representation just is that we can identify and re-identify it as such, and moreover, that we can manipulate it effectively to do whatever it is that we think representations ought to do for us in that particular context. For the first condition, the idea is that so long as we have some probe that allows us to pick out the relevant causally effective candidate, we should consider that to be a candidate representation-relative-to-that-probe. The second condition can be understood as a kind of anti-gerrymandering constraint: one ought to be able to intervene on the candidate, and see effects of that intervention consistent with the functional role the representation is supposed to play. Naturally the details need to be spelled out for different contexts—and I will articulate them for a few illustrative cases—which effectively allows for a kind of pluralism about representation depending on the setting and the kinds of questions being asked. With the extra components filled in, representational pragmatism can make sense of existing practices in neuroscience and AI, as well as their relationship to naturalistic theories of representation in philosophy. (shrink)

Philosophical proponents of predictive processing cast the novelty of predictive models of perception in terms of differences in the functional role and information content of neural signals. However, they fail to provide constraints on how the crucial semantic mapping from signals to their informational contents is determined. Beyond a novel interpretative gloss on neural signals, they have little new to say about the causal structure of the system, or even what statistical information is carried by the signals. That means that (...) the predictive framework for perception can be relabeled in traditional, non-predictive terms, with no empirical consequences relevant to existing or future data. To the extent that neuroscientific research based on predictive processing is both innovative and productive, it will be due to the framework’s suggestive heuristic effects, or perhaps auxiliary empirical claims about implementation, rather than a difference in the information-processing structure that it describes. (shrink)

Virtue ethics has often been regarded as complementary or laissez-faire ethics in solving business problems. This paper seeks conceptual and methodological improvements by developing a virtue character scale that will enable assessment of the link between organizational level virtue and organizational performance, financial or non-financial. Based upon three theoretical assumptions, multiple studies were conducted; the content analysis of 158 Fortune Global 500 firms ethical values and a survey of 2548 customers and employees. Six dimensions of organizational virtue (Integrity, Empathy, Warmth, (...) Courage, Conscientiousness and Zeal) are identified through confirmatory factor analysis, and validated against satisfaction measure. Strategic implications of virtue characters are discussed. (shrink)

The strong influence of pragmatism in the early 20th-century international debate, its subsequent and apparently inexorable decline, and its recent revival are intertwined with the fate of other currents of thought that have marked the development of contemporary philosophy. This volume clarifies the most recent events of this development focusing on key theoretical issues common both to American classic philosophical tradition and analytical thought. Many essays in this volume belong to what we can call “new” pragmatism, namely a pragmatist perspective (...) that is different from the postmodernist “neo” pragmatism à la Rorty. The volume shows that both pragmatists and analytic thinkers stress the importance of logic and scientific method in order to deal with philosophical problems and seek for a clarification of the relation between our ethical values and our understanding of natural facts. Moreover, the anti-skeptic attitude that characterizes pragmatism as well as most part of analytic philosophy, and their common attention to the problems of language and communication are emphasized. The more sophisticated tools for addressing both theoretical and methodological problems developed by analytic philosophy are pointed out, and the essays show the possible integration of these two forms of speculation that, for too a long time, mutually disregarded one another. (shrink)

The brain is often taken to be a paradigmatic example of a signaling system with semantic and representational properties, in which neurons are senders and receivers of information carried in action potentials. A closer look at this picture shows that it is not as appealing as it might initially seem in explaining the function of the brain. Working from several sender-receiver models within the teleosemantic framework, I will first argue that two requirements must be met for a system to support (...) genuine semantic information: 1. The receiver must be competent —that is, it must be able to extract rewards from its environment on the basis of the signals that it receives. 2. The receiver must have some flexibility of response relative to the signal received. In the second part of the paper, this initial framework will be applied to neural processes, pointing to the surprising conclusion that signaling at the single-neuron level is only weakly semantic at best. Contrary to received views, neurons will have little or no access to semantic information (though their patterns of activity may carry plenty of quantitative, correlational information) about the world outside the organism. Genuine representation of the world requires an organism - level receiver of semantic information, to which any particular set of neurons makes only a small contribution. (shrink)

Delusions are often portrayed as paradigmatic instances of incomprehensibility and meaninglessness. Here we investigate the relationship between delusions and meaning from a philosophical perspective, integrating arguments and evidence from cognitive psychology and phenomenological psychopathology. We review some of the empirical and philosophical literature relevant to two claims about delusions and meaning: delusions are meaningful, despite being described as irrational and implausible beliefs; some delusions can also enhance the sense that one’s life is meaningful, supporting agency and creativity in some circumstances. (...) Delusions are not incomprehensible representations of reality. Rather, they can help make sense of one’s unusual experiences and in some circumstances even support one’s endeavours, albeit temporarily and imperfectly. Acknowledging that delusions have meaning and can also give meaning to people’s lives has implications for our understanding of psychotic symptoms and for addressing the stigma associated with psychiatric conditions. (shrink)

In this paper I argue against the received view that the anti‐nativist arguments of Book I of Locke's Essay conclusively challenge nativism. I begin by reconstructing the chief argument of Book I and its corollary arguments. I call attention to their dependence on (what I label) “the Awareness Principle”, viz., the view that there are no ideas in the mind of which the mind either isn't currently aware or hasn't been aware in the past. I then argue that the arguments' (...) dependence on this principle is question begging on two counts. Unless this principle is defended, Locke's arguments beg the question against Descartes and Leibniz because their nativism implies the denial of the Awareness Principle. And even when Locke defended the principle, his arguments remain question begging because they presuppose the empiricism they aim to prove. The disclosure of the question‐begging status of these arguments debunks a seemingly powerful way of attacking nativism. (shrink)

In this paper I argue against the received view that the anti-nativist arguments of Book I of Locke’s Essay conclusively challenge nativism. I begin by reconstructing the chief argument of Book I and its corollary arguments. I call attention to their dependence on (what I label) “the Awareness Principle”, viz., the view that there are no ideas in the mind of which the mind either isn’t currently aware or hasn’t been aware in the past. I then argue that the arguments’ (...) dependence on this principle is question begging on two counts. Unless this principle is defended, Locke’s arguments beg the question against Descartes and Leibniz because their nativism implies the denial of the Awareness Principle. And even when Locke defended the principle, his arguments remain question begging because they presuppose the empiricism they aim to prove. The disclosure of the question-begging status of these arguments debunks a seemingly powerful way of attacking nativism. (shrink)

Multiple realizability says that the same kind of mental states may be manifested by systems with very different physical constitutions. Putnam ( 1967 ) supposed it to be “overwhelmingly probable” that there exist psychological properties with different physical realizations in different creatures. But because function constrains possible physical realizers, this empirical bet is far less favorable than it might initially have seemed, especially when we take on board the richer picture of neural and brain function that neuroscience has been uncovering (...) over the past forty years, in which all sorts of brain activities play crucial roles beyond all-or-nothing electrical signaling. Because of its evolutionary history, the brain’s metabolic and informational processes are inextricably intertwined. The resulting complex integrated functions impose more constraints on possible realizers than the clean, single-purpose functions usually cited as examples in discussions of multiple realizability—with ramifications for the functionalist and computationalist foundations of cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

It is not yet clear which response behavior requires self-regulatory effort in the moral dilemma task. Previous research has proposed that utilitarian responses require cognitive control, but subsequent studies have found inconsistencies with the empirical predictions of that hypothesis. In this paper we treat participants’ sensitivity to utilitarian gradients as a measure of performance. We confronted participants (N = 82) with a set of five dilemmas evoking a gradient of mean utilitarian responses in a 4-point scale and collected data on (...) heart rate variability and on utilitarian responses. We found positive correlations between tonic and phasic HRV and sensitivity to the utilitarian gradient in the high tonic group, but not in the low tonic group. Moreover, the low tonic group misplaced a scenario with a selfish incentive at the high end of the gradient. Results suggest that performance is represented by sensitivity correlated with HRV and accompanied with a reasonable placement of individual scenarios within the gradient. (shrink)

Recently in the philosophical literature there has been some effort made to understand the proper application of the theory of utilitarianism to worlds in which there are infinitely many bearers of utility. Here, we point out that one of the best, most inclusive principles proposed to date contradicts fundamental utilitarian ideas, such as the idea that adding more utility makes a better world.

Isidore of Seville did not leave behind any specifically trinitarian, Christological or pneumatological treatises. We find his theological doctrine evident in sections throughout his works although, as a result of the effort of a good compiler and synthesizer, it is not difficult to trace the passages in which the bishop of Seville deals with each one of these subjects. With regard to the doctrine on the Holy Spirit, the chapter dedicated to the third person of the Trinity in the first (...) book of the Sententiae offers a fairly complete summary of the matter. The following pages are intended to present the content of that chapter and to place it within the context of the rest of Isidore’s theological output. Therefore, in addition to paying close attention to the text of the Sententiae, we will seek its dependence or influence, as the case may be, on other treatises of Isidore, mainly in these three: Etymologiae, De fide catholica and Liber differentiarum [II]. Augustine, Gregory the Great and the theological contribution of the Spanish councils are presented as Isidore’s main sources. (shrink)

There has been little research on the vocabulary of the Greek novelists. Gasda studied that of Chariton in the last century. He compared some of his terms with those of other authors and he concluded he should be placed in the sixth century A.D. Then Schmid considered that Chariton's language was not Atticist, and dated his novel in the second century or beginning of the third. In 1973 Chariton's language was studied by Papanikolaou. His research dealt above all with several (...) syntactic aspects and the use of some vocabulary, which led him to conclude that this language was closer to the koiné than that of the other novelists. But Papanikolaou went further in his conclusions: finding no trace of Atticism in Chariton, he considered him a pre-Atticist writer and, using extra-linguistic data, such as the citing of the Seres, the Chinese , placed him in the second half of the first century B.C. This chronology has been accepted by some, but already Giangrande has observed that this lack of Atticisms could have been intentional, in which case that date would be questionable. (shrink)

Dreyfus and Dreyfus’ influential phenomenological analysis of skill acquisition proposes that expert performance is guided by non-cognitive responses which are fast, effortless and apparently intuitive in nature. Although this model has been criticised for over-emphasising the role that intuition plays in facilitating skilled performance, it does recognise that on occasions a form of ‘detached deliberative rationality’ may be used by experts to improve their performance. However, Dreyfus and Dreyfus see no role for calculative problem solving or deliberation when performance is (...) going well. In the current paper, we draw on empirical evidence, insights from athletes, and phenomenological description to argue that ‘continuous improvement’ among experts is mediated by cognitive control in three distinct sporting situations. We conclude by arguing that Sutton et al. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 42, 78–103 ‘applying intelligence to the reflexes’ approach may help to elucidate the process by which expert performers achieve continuous improvement through analytical/mindful behaviour during training and competition. (shrink)

While the concept of adaptive preferences is an important tool for criticizing injustice, it is often claimed that using the concept involves showing disrespect for persons judged to have adaptive preferences. In this paper, I propose an account of adaptive preferences that does the relevant political work while still showing persons two centrally important kinds of respect. My account is based in what I call an indirect substantive account of autonomy, which places substantive requirements on the options available to a (...) person, rather than on the option that she ultimately prefers. This allows us to pinpoint cases in which a person's circumstances have rendered her insufficiently autonomous, without saying that any conception of the good must be non-autonomous tout court. (shrink)