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In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Between God and the President: Literature and Censorship in North AfricaHafid Gafaiti (bio)Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.—George Bernard ShawThose who fight with the pen will perish by the sword.—Slogan of the Algerian Muslim fundamentalistsIf you speak up, you die. If you don’t speak up, you die. So, speak up and die!—Tahar Djaout, the first writer assassinated in the context of the current Algerian political crisisIn the (...) West, censorship has been understood for the most part as the state’s control over cultural production. Many critics in the postwar period, however, have argued that other forms of censorship, such as market censorship, are comparable to the actions of the state. The Christian right’s attacks on art in the United States in the 1980s and early 1990s together with Congressional moves to disempower and dismantle the NEA have generated a new set of debates about censorship in this country. It was understood that the extreme right sought to repress cultural productions carrying a message of ethnic and sexual difference, targeting the works by rappers, the photographer Mapplethorpe, Madonna’s music videos, and so on. The right provided rhetoric to support the privatization of public space, the control of language and public images, and the promotion of “safe” art.While many critics refer to this as the “new censorship,” structurally it is exactly the same as the “old” censorship, that is, state control intervening in the liberal subject’s absolute right to free expression. It appears that the dichotomy between the left’s claim for the absolute freedom of the artist and the right’s attempt to repress it is most often conceived in moral terms and is paradigmatic of the Western liberal oppositional categories used to describe censorship.This position views the relationship between art and censorship as either a bourgeois romantic opposition to political order or a corrupt collaboration by opportunistic apparatchiks. It leaves no room for what Michael Holquist, for example, calls “negotiation.” Moreover, it does not take into account the fact that—in Third World or socialist contexts, for example—the way certain intellectuals view their role vis-à-vis the state, society, and/or the people determines their degree of cooperation with censorship mechanisms.The problem with this Manichean vision is that it implies a notion of censorship that is ahistorical: it posits that there is an essential distinction between the censor and the [End Page 59] creator or free mind. On the one hand, as Miklos Haraszti accurately outlines, at least until very recently in the Eastern European context:Censorship is no longer a matter of simple state intervention. A new aesthetic culture has emerged in which censors and artists alike are entangled in a mutual embrace. Nor is it as distasteful as traditional critics of censorship imagine. The state is able to domesticate the artist because the artist has already made the state his home.[5]On the other hand, as Richard Burt rightly suggests:What counts as censorship is not always clear. Indeed, it is hard to see how one could call many contemporary cases censorship without either seriously distorting the traditional understanding of the term or redefining it to include so many practices—ranging from institutional regulation of free expression, market censorship, cutbacks in government funding for controversial art, boycotts, lawsuits, and marginalization and exclusion of artists based on their gender or race to “political correctness” in the university and the media—that the term is overwhelmed, even trivialized, its usefulness as a tool of cultural criticism called into question.[xiii]Recent events, not only in the United States but also in other parts of the world such as Algeria, the case on which I will concentrate, show that one cannot seriously conceive the question of censorship along the lines of closed, distinct, conceptual categories expressing absolute oppositions. In other words, it is necessary to take the concept of censorship out of the realm of morality and locate it in the world of history, to displace it from the framework of philosophy and move it to the context of culture.In this essay, I will analyze the exercise of censorship in Algeria in... (shrink)

The book reconstructs the history of Western ethics. The approach chosen focuses the endless dialectic of moral codes, or different kinds of ethos, moral doctrines that are preached in order to bring about a reform of existing ethos, and ethical theories that have taken shape in the context of controversies about the ethos and moral doctrines as means of justifying or reforming moral doctrines. Such dialectic is what is meant here by the phrase ‘moral traditions’, taken as a name for (...) threads of moral discourse, made in turn of other interwoven threads, including transmission of shared codes, appeals to reform of prevailing custom, rational argument about the justification of some precept on the basis of some shared general teaching or principle, and rational argument about the ultimate basis for principles and justification of authoritative teaching. That is, the approach adopted to the reading of ethical texts depends on a firm belief in the fact that philosophers hardly created any ethical doctrine out of nothing. The main point this book tries to highlight is how different philosophical theories emerged and followed each other as a result of attempts at accounting for what was going on in the world of moral traditions. Changes were propelled by controversies between different schools, and highly abstract arguments were the unintended effects of moves made by controversialists forced to transform (and occasionally to turn upside down) their own doctrines in order to face the challenge posed by other arguments. This is the reason why the book examines not only texts that already enjoy pride of place in the history of philosophy (Aristotle, Kant, Hegel), but also other texts usually treated in the histories of religions (the Bible, the Talmud, the Quran), and others considered to be much less philosophical (Plutarchus, Pufendorf). -/- 1. Plato and a response to ethical scepticism. Two different traditions of morality in VI-V century Greece are described. The birth of philosophical questioning of traditional morality and temporal and spatial variation of custom is described within the context of the v century crisis, the demise of traditional aristocratic and tyrannical rule and the birth of democracy. Two conflicting answers to the challenge are reconstructed, namely conventionalist or immoralist theories formulated by the Sophists and the eudemonist and intellectualist Socratic theory. Plato’s own reformulation of Socrates answer to the Sophists is reconstructed. His psychological views, his classification of the four cardinal virtues and his political theory are described as parts of a unitary system, culminating in an extremely realist moral ontology identifying the idea of the good with the essence of the (moral and extra-moral) world itself. -/- 2. Aristotle and the invention of practical philosophy. Aristotle’s invention of practical philosophy as a field separated from first philosophy is shown to be an implication of his break with Plato moral ultra-realism. Aristotle’s agenda in his moral works is arguably dependent on a polemical intention, namely dismantling Socratic intellectualism. The semi-inductive or virtuously circular method of practical philosophy is illustrated, starting with the received opinions of the better and wiser individuals and trying dialectically to sift what is left of mistake and inconsistence in such opinions, finally trying to correct mistakes and make the overall practical science more consistent. The chapter illustrates then the relationship of individual ethics, or ‘monastics’, with the art and the science of the pater familias, or ‘economics’, and the science of the ruler and citizen, or politics. The nature of virtues, or better, excellences of character, is discussed, highlighting the basic role of hexis, or ‘disposition’. Prudence, or better practical wisdom, is the focus of the chapter. Its relationship with bouleusis or deliberation is examined, and its autonomous status vis-à-vis theoretical knowledge is stressed. -/- 3. Diogenes and philosophy as a way of life. The chapter provides an overview of Hellenistic ethics, which almost amounts to Hellenistic schools of philosophy, in so far as ‘philosophy’ became in these centuries primarily the name for a way of life. The typical character of the Cynical movement is highlighted, that of a school of life, not a school aimed at providing any kind of intellectual training was to be provided. -/- 4. Epicurus and ethics as self-care. The peculiar character of the Epicurean school is described, a combination of a science of well-being aiming, more than at pleasure as in the popular view, at reduction of useless suffering, of unnecessary needs, and at a balanced selection of pleasures of the best and most durable kind. -/- 5. Epictetus and ethics as therapy of the passions. The various phases of Stoicism are described, and the shifting place given to ethics in the Stoic system of idea, culminating in the paradoxical view of ethics, its impossibility in principle notwithstanding, as the only truly significant and necessary part of philosophy. Cicero is treated, showing how his own synthesis of various Hellenistic trends is as a truly philosophical enterprise, deserving serious consideration after one or two centuries when he was confined to the role of literate. Epictetus is chosen as the best example of what the Stoic tradition could yield, an art of living based on sophisticated introspection, in turn aimed at making a kind of cognitive therapy possible, dismantling obnoxious passions at their root by systematically correcting false representations. -/- 6. Philo and the reconciliation of Torah and Platonism. A reconstruction of basic ideas from a few books of the Hebrew Bible is provided, starting with the Prophetic tradition and the focus on God’s mercy as the source of motivation and standard for human behaviour. Then a comparative analysis is undertaken of a parallel tradition, namely the three codifications of the Torā (Law or, better, Instruction), highlighting how a core of moral ideas may be recognized as a basis and preamble of codification of civil law, cultural practice, and regulation of ritual purity. The importance of Leviticus is stressed as the turning point when emphasis mercy, typical of the Prophetic tradition, is combined with the legal tradition, yielding the change in sensibility of the Second Temple time. Philo of Alexandria is described as one of the three leading figures – together with Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Yeshua – at the apex the emergence of the mentioned new sensibility, gradually including mercy as an essential part of justice and establishing the starting point of both the Rabbinic and the Christian tradition. This consists precisely in the precept of one’s neighbour’s love or of the golden rule, two eventually identical precepts whose meaning is arguably more sober and sensible than the long-lasting Christian tradition deriving from John and Augustine has made us believe and no novelty vis-à-vis so-called Ancient-Testament teachings. -/- 7. Augustine and Christianity as Neo-Platonism. The first section examines the moral doctrines of so-called 'ethical Treaties' from the Talmud, a group of treaties, among which the best known is Pirqé Avot, that were left out of the six "orders" of the canon as they did not fit in any of the six groups of issues ritual or legal on which the division was based. According to Maimonides, their peculiar theme is provided by the Deòt, 'opinions', i.e., mental dispositions, that is, the translation of the Greek term hexeis and Arab akhlak (in turn providing in this language the name for ethics as such). The three topics I reconstruct are: i) the notion of Torah: The Torah is understood as the world order itself, or as the ‘Wisdom’ that existed even before creation and was ‘the tool by which the world was built’; however, the Torah is an earthly and human entity, as it was "received" by humans, and from that very moment belongs to them; ii) the relationship between love of God and love of neighbour; the treaties require us to study and practice the Torah ‘for its own sake’, that is, require us to act out of love, not out of fear or hope of reward; iii) the idea of sanctification of daily life: having disappeared with the destruction of the Temple the possibility of any conflict between liturgical service and everyday life, the latter is assumed to be in itself divine service: to give food to the poor has the same value as sacrifices in the Temple, and as an implication, the insistence become recurrent on the goodness of created things in themselves along with a polemic against ascetic currents. The conclusions drawn are: i) the moral teachings of the Talmud and those of Yeshua are, rather than similar, virtually identical; one may safely say that the precept of love and the golden rule are central ones for all Talmudic rabbis, that mercy plays an indispensable role alongside with justice, and the latter is not a different thing from one’s neighbour’s love; ii) a peculiarity of Talmud rabbis facing Yeshua is the idea of study as worship, and knowledge as a source of justice; but this is an idea of Judaism after the Temple's destruction that cannot be attributed to the Pharisees of Yeshua’s time; iii) the relation of study and practice in the Talmud parallels that between faith and deeds in Paul's epistles, that is, respectively faith or learning are a necessary and sufficient condition to be recognized as righteous , but deeds are the inevitable effect of either faith or learning. The sayings ascribed to Yeshua are examined first, yielding the conclusion that a close equivalent may be found for every saying in Talmudic literature and yet the whole is ascribed to one rabbi, with rather consistent stress on God’s mercy and unconditional forgiving as the mark of true imitation of God. Thus, Yeshua’s teaching is pure Judaism. The third section describes briefly the galaxy of Gnostic currents and Manichaeism, trying to sketch the profile of moral teachings resulting from an encounter of Asian spiritual traditions, Hellenistic lore and sparks of teachings from apocalyptic Jewish currents. The last section summarizes the turbulent history of several encounters between Christian currents and Hellenistic philosophical schools. The first one was with late Cynicism. Recent, rather controversial, literature discovered the jargon and a few topics from the Stoic-Cynical popular philosophy in a few books from the New Testament itself. This, far from proving that Rabbi Yeshua had been influenced by cynic preachers, is a proof of the necessity felt by Christian preachers to translate the original ‘Christian’ teaching into a Greek lexicon deeply impregnated with cynic terminology. The second was with Platonism, yielding the mild and temperate moral teaching of Clemens of Alexandria, teaching the sanctity of nature and the human body, the joy of moderate fruition of ‘natural’ kinds of pleasures, and the beauty of the marital life – in short, the opposite of the standard picture of Medieval Christianity. Ambrose of Milan brings about a different kind of synthesis, namely with Middle Platonism, where Stoic themes prevail. The most shocking case is Augustine, where an early Manichean education is overcome in a former phase by a synthesis of Plotinian Neo-Platonism and Christian preaching, yielding a sustained polemic with the Manicheans and rather optimistic views on life and Creation, the body and sexuality, and Hebrew-Judaic tradition not far from Clemens of Alexandria. In a later phase, occasioned by controversy on the opposite front, with such Christian currents as the Pelagians and Donatists, Augustine comes back to heavily anti-Judaic and world-denying ascetic attitudes where is earlier Manichean upbringing seems to emerge again. The tragedy of medieval Christianity will be the later Augustine’s overwhelming influence. A final section is dedicated to the monastic tradition where a curious mixture of world-denying asceticism with an astonishingly penetrating ‘science’ of introspection emerges. -/- 8. Al Farabi and the reconciliation of Islam and Platonism. The Qurān and the qadit, that is, collections of sayings ascribed to the prophet Muhammad contain a wealth of precepts and catalogues of virtues mirroring moral contents from the Jewish and the Christian traditions, among them the basic notion of imitation of the Deity, where mercy is assumed to be its basic trait. An important tradition within Islam, namely Sufism, stressed to the utmost degree the role of mercy, turning Islam into a mystic doctrine centred on retreat from the world, abandonment to God’s will, and a peaceful and fraternal attitude to our fellow-beings. A secular literary tradition originating in the Sassanid Empire, the literature of advice to the Prince had for a time a widespread influence in the newly constituted Arabic-Islamic commonwealth. In a later phase, the legacy of Hellenic philosophy made its way into the intellectual elite of the Islamic world. The first important legacy was Platonic, and the Republic became the main text for Islamic Platonism. Al-Farabi wrote an enjoyable remake of the Platonic Republic, arguing that the citizen’s virtues were the basis on which the political building needs to rest. The secular lawgiver is enlightened by the light of reason in his everyday practice of governance, but room is made for the Prophet as the voice of revealed truth that confirms and completes the rational truth that philosophy may afford. In a second phase also Aristotelian and Stoic influence were assimilated. Miskawayh’s treatise was the masterwork at the time Arabic philosophy reached its Zenith. It is a treatment of the soul’s diseases and their remedies, combining the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean with the Stoic doctrine of the passions and elements of Galenic medicine. Towards the eleventh-twelve centuries a war raged among theologians and philosophers, finally won by the former with disappearance of philosophy as such. The newly established mainstream, yet, was no kind of intolerant fanaticism. It drew from the work of mystic theologian Al-Ghazālī, the best heir of Sufism, teaching a tolerant and peaceful attitude to our fellow-beings and a passive attitude to destiny as an expression of the Divine will. -/- 9. Moshe ben Maimon and the reconciliation of Torah and Aristotelian ethics. The encounter between the Talmudic tradition and Hellenic philosophy had taken place a first time in Alexandria at the time of Philo but the two traditions had parted way again. In fact, the kind of Platonic Judaism founded by Philo survived only within Christianity, in the fourth Gospel and then in writings by Clemens of Alexandria. The Talmudic literature had absorbed just less striking traits from the Hellenic Philosophy, namely an idea of ethics as care of the self and a role for the education of character as propaedeutic to theoretical knowledge. In the Arabic-Islamic world, a second round started when Jewish authors writing in Arabic undertook the task to prove the full compatibility of the tradition deriving from Torah and Platonic philosophy. The culmination of this attempt is provided by Moshe ben Maimon who tried to use Aristotelian ethics as a language into which the teaching from the Pirké Avot could be translated. -/- 10. Thomas Aquinas and the reconciliation of Christian morality and Aristotelian ethics. In the first section the fresh start is described of philosophical ethics in Latin Europe at the turn of the Millennium. In a first phase, Anselm and Peter Abelard built on a Platonic and Augustinian legacy. In this phase. remarkable innovations are introduced, including Abelard’s claim of the obliging character of erring consciousness. In a second phase, the rediscovery of Nicomachean Ethics thanks to Latin translation of Arabic versions gives birth to a new wave of ethical studies, recovering the very idea of Aristotelian practical philosophy, with the potential implication of full legitimization of natural morality, i.e. ethics without Revelation. Aquinas’s ethics is a theological ethics out of which it would be vain to try to extract a self-contained philosophical ethics. His treatment of topics in philosophical ethics, yet, does not boil down to repetition of Aristotelian arguments but is rather a creative reshaping of such arguments. For example, he introduces also in the practical philosophy a first principle parallel to the principle of non-contradiction; and he also carries out a synthesis of Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and neo-Platonism. Even though it is essentially moral theology, Aquinas’s doctrine - unlike Augustine – grants full citizenship to "natural" morality, firstly by rejecting the claim that the corruption of human nature due to the original sin is so radical as to leave "pure nature" incapable of moral goodness. The doctrine is presented in a more sophisticated formulation in a few of the Quaestiones, such as De Malo and De Veritate, in the Summa contra Gentes and in the commentaries to Aristotle than in the famous Summa Theologica, but the latter work includes the only or the largest exposition of some decisive part of the theory. Thus, the Summa Theologica should be read for what it is more than criticized for not being what it was not meant to be. It was not meant to be the brilliant synthesis of all that Reason he had been able to produce with what Revelation had added about which the Neo-Thomists used to dream, but rather a manual for the training of preachers and confessors, where theoretical claims are not too demanding and a few serious tensions are left. Besides a jump between the Prima Secundae and the Secunda Secundae, being the former an essay in virtue theory and the latter a handbook for confessors, the most serious tension is perhaps the one between the ethics of right reason presented in most of Ia-IIae and the eudemonistic ethics developed in quaestiones 1-5 of the same part; the alternative ethical theory which also may be found in Augustine, the Stoic view of a cosmic reason eventually coincident with the moral law, was believed by Anselm (followed by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham) to be incompatible with eudemonism. It is questionable whether Thomas could reduce the tension proving that it is just an apparent tension, in so far as the right reason and bliss derived from knowledge of God tend to coincide, but this is just a conjecture. Thomas’s ethics is a virtue ethic, not a law-based one, and moral judgment focuses on the virtues, particularly charity, not on the commandments and even less on absolute prohibitions; Thomas, however, would not have considered a drastic alternative between law and the virtues such as the one which has been advanced in late twentieth-century philosophy to be justified. Nonetheless, when it discusses ‘special’ virtues, it ceases to be an ethics of virtue and becomes a disappointing and often contradictory discussion of legal and illegal acts. Such a discussion takes most of the time ‘reasonable’ middle positions on controversial issues but not the alternative approach that Aristotelianism would have made possible; even when some occasional Aristotelian claim shows up, such as money’s barrenness as a reason against usury, this seems to be made by an author who apparently ignores the Aristotelian Thomas of the Prima Secundae. It is an ethic of human autonomy which recognizes the binding character of the individual conscience and, potentially, even a duty to disobey unjust laws. It is true that what Thomas writes in his discussion of death penalty and persecution of heretics is simply disgusting, and yet we should blame Thomas the man, not Thomist ethical theory. Finally, Thomas’s ethics is not ethical ‘absolutism’, as both traditionalist Catholic theologians and secularist enemies of dogmatic morality tend to believe. It is instead an ethic of prudential judgment. Exceptions to this approach – or better results of logical fallacies – are such claims as the absolute character of negative precepts and of the existence of "intrinsically evil acts", claims that simply cease to make sense in the light of Thomas’s own distinction between human act and natural act, carrying consequences Thomas did not live long enough to draw or was not consistent enough to dare to draw. -/- 11. Francisco de Vitoria and casuistry. The first topic illustrated is the discussion about the notion of pura natura, namely the human condition after the original sin and before divine revelation. The core notion was already there in Aquinas but was later developed by Caietanus (Thomas de Vio) with a number of interesting implications: firstly a view of human nature as such much more positive than Augustine’s and his followers’ view, including both Calvinists and Jansenists; secondly, the implication that the philosopher’s morality, as opposed to the Christian’s morality, is a quite respectable kind of morality; thirdly, that theocracy and prosecution of the unfaithful lacked justification, with more far-fetching consequences than Aquinas himself had dared to draw. The second topic is casuistry, a new name for a comparatively older way of thinking, which was already there in late Stoicism and Cicero as well as in the Talmudic literature. This is an approach aimed at yielding probable enough solutions for doubtful cases even in absence of completely safe staring points. The genre developed from medieval reference books for confessors and became by the sixteenth-century a sophisticated tool-box for dealing with various fields of applied ethics. Francisco Vitoria, the main authority of Baroque Scholasticism, was a controversial figure, among the proponents of the new discipline of casuistry and a consistent proponent of more separation between the religious and the civil authority, stricter limits to the legitimacy of war, innate rights of non-Christian nations in the New World based on the notion of pura natura, providing a standard of ‘natural’ goodness, previous to revelation, on which the Indian nations were judged to live in a naturally good condition, provided with the institutions of family, justice, and religion had accordingly a right to full respect by Christian sovereigns. Bartolomé de Las Casas, arguing along similar lines, was the leader of a historical battle in defence of the rights of the Indios. -/- 12. Michel de Montaigne and the art of living. A short description of one of the Renaissance Phyrronism, one of the classical philosophies revived in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Montaigne combines the sceptical epistemology with an understanding of ethics – indeed of philosophy as a whole – in terms of an art of living inspired by two basic ideas, sagesse, that is, practical wisdom as the only kind of rationality available after theology, science, and tradition have declared bankrupt, and an aesthetic ideal of self-transformation through the art of writing and introspection. -/- 13. Pierre Nicole and neo-Augustinianism. The chapter illustrates first the vicissitudes of Augustinianism newly born after the late medieval triumph of Thomist Aristotelianism in the alternative Protestant and Catholic versions processed by the Calvinists and the Jansenists. Then it illustrates the doctrines of Pierre Nicole, Blaise Pascal’s best disciple, on the impossibility of introspection, on the ubiquity of self-deception, on the incurably evil character of the passion of love, and on the two moralities, the one of the man of the world, the morality of honesty which is indispensable for granting peace and order but devoid of any true value for eternal salvation, since the same external behaviour may be prompted by opposite motivations, and the morality of charity, the only true one but also useless to society. The third topic is Pierre Malebranche’s view of self-deception as a ubiquitous phenomenon accounting for human action and responsibility and his reformulated theory of self-love, no less ubiquitous than for Nicole and yet not as incurably evil, given the distinction between morally indifferent and even necessary amour de soi and vicious amour proper, a distinction on which the whole of Rousseau’s moral and political theory rests. -/- 14. Samuel von Pufendorf and the new science of morality. The chapter is dedicated to the discovery of the idea of a ‘new moral science’. Hugo Grotius is discussed first highlighting the real character of his project, much closer to the Thomist idea of a natural law accessible to non-corrupted human reason when human beings are living in a state of pura natura. Then Hobbes’s combination of scepticism, voluntarism, and conventionalism is described and both the continuity with Grotius’s new science, in the search for non-revealed rational morality, and the break with him, in the adoption of voluntarism and refusal of an intellectualist view of natural law, are illustrated. Pufendorf’s work is illustrated as a synthesis of the two previous attempts and the – up to Schneewind underestimated – paradigmatic example of the new science of morality. -/- 15. Richard Cumberland and consequentialist voluntarism. The chapter gives an overview of eighteenth-century Anglican ethics, noticing how the Cambridge tradition gave special weight to natural theology as opposed to positive or revealed theology – and how two Cambridge fellows, John Gay and Thomas Brown, elaborated on Cumberland’s (and Malebranche’s, as well as Leibniz’s) strategy for finding a third way between intellectualist view and voluntarist view of the laws of nature. The result of their elaboration was a kind of a rational-choice account of the origins of natural laws, where a law-giver God chooses among a number possible sets of laws on a maximizing criterion, and God’s maximandum is happiness for his creatures. The chapter notices also how such a solution aimed at solving at once the problem of evil and that of the foundation of moral obligation by proving how God’s choice was justified as far as it was the one minimising the amount of suffering in the world. 16. Richard Price and intuitionism. The chapter describes first the doctrines of the Cambridge Platonists, an example of hyper-rationalist reaction to Calvinism. Secondly it describes the sophisticated and universally ignored – from Sidgwick to Anscombe –version of what was later labelled ‘ethical intuitionism’ – showing how it escapes familiar objections and misrepresentations of intuitionism – from Mill to Rawls – in grounding its argument on transcendental arguments while carefully avoiding recourse to introspection and psychological evidence, which has been taken as a too easy target by critics of intuitionism. Thirdly, the chapter discusses Whewell’s ‘philosophy of morality’, as opposed to ‘systematic morality’, not unlike Kant’s distinction between a pure and an empirical moral philosophy. Whewell worked out a systematization of traditional normative ethics as a first step before its rational justification; he believed that the point in the philosophy of morality is justifying a few rational truths about the structure of morality such as to rule hedonism, eudemonism, and consequentialism; yet a system of positive morality cannot be derived solely from such rational truths but requires consideration of the ongoing dialectics between idea and fact in historically given moralities. Whewell’s intuitionism turns out closer to Kantian ethics than commentators have made us believe until now, and quite different from what Sidgwick meant by intuitionism. -/- 17. Adam Smith and the morality of role-switch. The chapter describes first, Hutcheson’s attempt at basing the ‘new science’ of natural law on different bedrock than Pufendorf and the English Platonists, namely a moral sense, a faculty whose existence is assumed to be proved on an empirical basis. The second step is a reconstruction of Hume’s rejoinder in terms of a new science of man including morality on an ‘experimental’ basis, that is, a ‘Newtonian’ hypothetical-deductive approach, distinguished from Hutcheson’s allegedly uncritical descriptive approach to human nature. The third step is a reconstruction of Adam Smith theory of morality understood as emerging from a spontaneous interplay of exchanges of situations (the most basic meaning of the word ‘sympathy’ as construed by this author). -/- 18. Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism. The bulk of the chapter is dedicated to the doctrines of Jeremy Bentham. The Enlightenment spirit that suggested the idea of a new morality, free from religion, is illustrated. The notion of utility is illustrated as well as the subsequent formulations of the principle of utility. The idea of felicific calculus is discussed, showing how its inner difficulties prompted several reformulations of the principle of utility in order to avoid undesirable implications of proposed formulations. The role of the thesis of spontaneous convergence between interest and duty is discussed, showing how it left numberless questions open, and the distinction between the virtues of prudence, justice and beneficence is described as a way out of the deadlocks of classical utilitarianism. After Bentham, Mill’s reformed utilitarianism is reconstructed, showing how it is a kind of mixed system – as closer to common sense as it gives up Bentham’s claims to consistency and simplicity – resulting as unintended consequences from the controversies in which Mill was too keen to engage. The hidden agenda of the controversy between Utilitarianism and Intuitionism, going beyond the image of the battle between Prejudice and Reason, is described, showing how both competing philosophical outlooks turn out to be more research programs than self-contained doctrinal bodies, and such programs appear to be implemented, and indeed radically transformed while in progress thanks to their enemies no less than to their supporters. -/- 19. Immanuel Kant, practical reason and judgment. The chapter argues that Kant took from Moses Mendelssohn the idea of a distinction between geometry of morals and a practical ethic. He was drastically misunderstood by his followers precisely on this point. He had learned from the sceptics and the Jansenists the lesson that men are prompted to act by deceptive ends, and he was aware that human actions are also empirical phenomena, where laws like the laws of Nature may be detected. His practical ethics made room for judgment as a holistic procedure for assessing the saliency of relevant moral qualities in one given situation; this procedure yields the same results as the geometry of morals does for abstract cases but does so immediately and without balancing conflicting duties with each other, since what makes for the salient quality of a situation is perceived from the very beginning. Kant's practical philosophy is richer than the received image, making room for an ‘empirical moral philosophy’ or moral anthropology including treatment of commerce, needs, value and price, happiness and well-being; the overall social theory and philosophy of history is less different from Adam Smith's than the received image makes believe; the paradox of happiness is central to Kant's philosophy; a distinction between happiness and well-being is clearly drawn; the distinction plays a basic role in establishing a link between the economic and the moral life. -/- 20. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the critique of abstract universalism. The chapter describes first the Romantic movement and the implications some of its concerns, rescuing passions, community, tradition, the individual as the bearer of a unique destiny, and the longing for organic unity between the individual, mankind and nature. Hegel’s contribution is discussed then, highlighting how, on the one hand, he shared a number of these concerns and on the other he had more rationalist leanings. The notion of morality is the pivotal point of the reconstruction, highlighting how Hegel construes this notion as a key to his own diagnosis of the malaise of modernity – the separation of individual and Gemeinschaft – and how his attack on Kant turns around this very idea. -/- 21. Friedrich Nietzsche against Christianity and the Enlightenment. The chapter illustrates first the idea of deconstruction of the back-world of values. Nietzsche claims to be legitimate heir of the French moralists, Leibniz, Kant and Hegel, in so far as he allegedly carries out to its deepest implications their discovery of what lies behind traditional naïve belief in the existence of an objective realm of values just waiting for description by the philosopher. The two exemplars form which genealogy draws inspiration are the classical philologist’s historical reconstructions of lost meanings and the chemist’s decomposition of elements. Then the genealogy of the notions of good and evil carried out in the first dissertation of Genealogy of morals is illustrated with its paradoxical conclusion that will to power is in fact the only ‘genuine’ kind of goodness. The third point illustrated is the dialectic of ascetism and self-realization with its ambiguous outcome. The suggested interpretation of such outcome is that Nietzsche’s normative ethics is a kind of virtue ethics taking an aesthetic ideal as a normative standard -/- 22. George Edward Moore and ideal utilitarianism. The chapter discusses the ideas of common sense and common-sense morality in Sidgwick. I argue that, far from aiming at overcoming common-sense morality, Sidgwick aimed purposely at grounding a consist code of morality by methods allegedly taken from the natural sciences to reach, also in ethics, the same kind of “mature” knowledge as in the natural sciences. His whole polemics with intuitionism was vitiated by the a priori assumption that the widespread ethos of the educated part of humankind, not the theories of the intuitionist philosophers, was what was worth considering as the expression of intuitionist ethics. In spite of a naïve positivist starting-point, Sidgwick was encouraged by his own approach in exploring the fruitfulness of coherentist methods for normative ethics. Thus, Sidgwick left an ambivalent legacy to twentieth-century ethics: the dogmatic idea of a “new” morality of a consequentialist kind, and the fruitful idea that we can argue rationally in normative ethics albeit without shared foundations. Then it reconstructs the background of ideas, concerns and intentions out of which Moore’s early essays, the preliminary version, and then the final version of Principia Ethica originated. I stress the role of religious concerns, as well as that of the Idealist legacy. I argue that PE is more a patchwork of rather diverging contributions than a unitary work, not to say the paradigm of a new school in Ethics. I add a comparison with Rashdall’s almost contemporary ethical work, suggesting that the latter defends the same general claims in a different way, one that manages to pave decisive objections in a more plausible way. I end by suggesting that the emergence of Analytic Ethics was a more ambiguous phenomenon than the received view would make us believe, and that the wheat (or some other gluten-free grain) of this tradition, that is, what logic can do for philosophy, should be separated from the chaff, that is, the confused and mutually incompatible legacies of Utilitarianism and Idealism. -/- 23. Edmund Husserl and the a-priori of action. The chapter illustrates first the idea of phenomenology and the Husserl’s project of a phenomenological ethic as illustrated in his 1908-1914 lectures. The key idea is dismissing psychology and trying to ground a new science of the a priori of action, within which a more restricted field of inquiry will be the science of right actions. Then the chapter illustrates the criticism of modern moral philosophy carried out in the 1920 lectures, where the main target is naturalism, understood in the Kantian meaning of primacy of common sense. The third point illustrate is Adolph Reinach’s theory of social acts as a key the grounding of norms, a view that basically sketches the very ideas ‘discovered’ later by Clarence I. Lewis, John Searle, Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas. A final section is dedicated to Nicolai Hartman, who always refused to define himself a phenomenologist and yet developed a more articulated and detailed theory of ‘values’ – with surprising affinities with George E. Moore - than philosophers such as Max Scheler who claimed to Husserl’s legitimate heirs. -/- 24. Bertrand Russell and non-cognitivism. The chapter reconstructs first the discussion after Moore. The naturalistic-fallacy argument was widely accepted but twisted to prove instead that the intuitive character of the definition of ‘good’, its non-cognitive meaning, in a first phase identified with ‘emotive’ meaning. Alfred Julius Ayer is indicated as a typical proponent of such non-cognitivist meta-ethics. More detailed discussion is dedicated to Bertrand Russell’s ethics, a more nuanced and sophisticated doctrine, arguing that non-cognitivism does not condemn morality to arbitrariness and that the project of a rational normative ethics is still possible, heading finally to the justification of a kind of non-hedonist utilitarianism. Stevenson’s theory, another moderate version of emotivism is discussed at some length, showing how the author comes close to the discovery of the role of a pragmatic dimension of language as a basis for ethical argument. Last of all, the discussion from the Forties about Hume’s law is described, mentioning Karl Popper’s argument and Richard Hare’s early non-cognitivist but non-emotivist doctrine named prescriptivism. -/- 25. Elizabeth Anscombe and the revival of virtue ethics. The chapter discusses the three theses defended by Anscombe in 'Modern Moral Philosophy'. I argue that: a) her answer to the question "why should I be moral?" requires a solution of the problem of theodicy, and ignores any attempts to save the moral point of view without recourse to divine retribution; b) her notion of divine law is an odd one more neo-Augustinian than Biblical or Scholastic; c) her image of Kantian ethics and intuitionism is the impoverished image manufactured by consequentialist opponents for polemical purposes and that she seems strangely accept it; d) the difficulty of identifying the "relevant descriptions" of acts is not an argument in favour of an ethics of virtue and against consequentialism or Kantian ethics, and indeed the role of judgment in the latter is a response to the difficulties raised by the case of judgment concerning future action. A short look at further developments in the neo-naturalist current is given trough a reconstruction of Philippa Foot’s and Peter Geach’s critiques to the naturalist-fallacy argument and Alasdair MacIntyre’s grand reconstruction of the origins and allegedly unavoidable failure of the Enlightenment project of an autonomous ethic. -/- 26. Richard Hare and neo-Utilitarianism. The chapter addresses the issue of the complex process of self-transformation Utilitarianism underwent after Sidgwick’s and Moore’s fatal criticism and the unexpected Phoenix-like process of rebirth of a doctrine definitely refuted. A glimpse at this uproarious process is given through two examples. The first is Roy Harrod Wittgensteinian transformation of Utilitarianism in pure normative ethics depurated from hedonism as well as from whatsoever theory of the good. This results in preference utilitarianism combined with a ‘Kantian’ version of rule utilitarianism. The second is Richard Hare’s two-level preference utilitarianism where act utilitarianism plays the function of eventual rational justification of moral judgments and rule-utilitarianism that of action-guiding practical device. -/- 27. Hans-Georg Gadamer and rehabilitation of practical philosophy. The post-war rediscovery of ethics by many German thinkers and its culmination in the Sixties in the movement named ‘Rehabilitation of practical philosophy’ is described. Among the actors of such rehabilitation there were a few of Heidegger’s most brilliant disciples, and Hans-Georg Gadamer is chosen as a paradigmatic example. His reading of Aristotle’s lesson I reconstructed, starting with Heidegger’s lesson but then subtly subverting its outcome thanks to the recovery of the central role of the notion of phronesis. -/- 28. Karl-Otto Apel and the revival of Kantian ethics. Parallel to the neo-Aristotelian trend, there was in the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy a Kantian current. This started, instead than the rehabilitation of prudence, with the discovery of the pragmatic dimension of language carried out by Charles Peirce and the Oxford linguistic philosophy. On this basis, Karl-Otto Apel singled out as the decisive proponent of the linguistic and Kantian turn in German-speaking ethics, worked out the performative-contradiction argument while claiming that this was able to provide a new rational and universal basis for normative ethics. An examination of his argument is some detail is offered, followed by a more cursory reconstruction of Jürgen Habermas’s elaboration on Apel’s theory. -/- 29. John Rawls and public ethics as applied ethics. Rawls’s distinction between a “political” and a “metaphysical” approach to one central part of ethical theory, namely the theory of justice, is interpreted as a formulation of the same basic idea at the root of both the principles approach and neo-casuistry, both discussed in the following chapter, namely that it is possible to reach an agreement concerning positive moral judgments even though the discussion is still open – and in Rawls’ view never will be close – on the basic criteria for judgment. -/- 30. Beauchamp and Childress and bioethics as applied ethics. The chapter presents the revolution of applied ethics while stressing its methodological novelty, exemplified primarily by Beauchamp and Childress principles approach and then by Jonsen and Toulmin’s new casuistry. -/- . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Touching TestAI and the Future of Human IntimacyMartha J. Reineke (bio)Each Friday, the New York Times publishes Love Letters, a compendium of articles on courtship. A recent story featured Melinda, a real estate agent, and Calvin, a human resources director.1 They had met at a market deli counter. On their first date, a lasagna dinner at Melinda's home, Calvin posed the question, "What are you looking for in (...) a man?" To his surprise, Melinda reached into her pocket and pulled out a two-page list, "Melinda's Husband Traits." Her 46-item list begins with "Christian, honor God, put Him first" and includes as entry number 37, "He likes to be touched and likes to touch me." Notwithstanding laudable features of Melinda's inventory, if David Levy, President of the International Computer Games Association and an expert on artificial intelligence (AI), is correct in his predictions, in the years ahead, women like Melinda who know exactly what they are looking for in a husband will desire something radically new: a robot. After all, artificial agents will soon possess or improve on every quality the romantically inclined previously have sought in a human partner. [End Page 123]Levi predicts robots will be preferred romantic partners by the middle of this century.2 Capable of providing erotic satisfaction and creating deep emotional bonds with human partners, these robots will be an achievable outcome of AI engineering that already has brought to market industrial and service robots, virtual pets, and caregiver robots for the elderly. Levi offers a research-based inventory of traits a robot will offer its human partner: kindness and understanding, a sense of humor, expressiveness, intelligence, and sociability.3 He pinpoints additional features that will facilitate romance: The ideal robot partner will elicit erotic attraction, give evidence of readiness for a serious relationship with its verbal assertions, and possess a capacity for mutual intimacy.4 Levi's argument is intentionally provocative, for he emphasizes the centrality of sex to future robot/human pairings, waxing rhapsodic about the performative superiority of robots to humans in the sexual act.5Elaborating on potential human love relationships with robots, Levi asserts that a robot will need to master imitation if a human is to want it as a romantic partner. Not only is imitation a central aspect of every human-to-human relationship, but also imitation has been identified by researchers as a crucial element in romantic desire.6 Levi states that human-to-human attraction is founded on similarities between prospective partners in appearance, personality, and social context. It is sustained only through what Levi calls "reciprocal liking."7 For romantic relationships between humans and robots to flourish, they too must engage in acts of reciprocal imitation.In highlighting the necessity of imitation in effective robot and human interactions, Levi draws close to René Girard's theory of "mimetic desire." According to Girard, imitation structures all "wanting,"8 delineating what we aspire to look like or hope to possess and determining what we value, take comfort in, or experience as a threat. Indeed, the individual is never the origin point of its desires. Each of us always desires mimetically—according to the desire of the other.9 As Scott Garrels confirms in Mimesis and Science, researchers studying imitation in developmental, comparative, and social psychology, as well as in neurophysiology and cognitive neuroscience, support Girard's claims: Imitation is fundamental in human life.10 Likewise, Girard concurs with Levi that romantic relationships are primary examples of imitative desire. As described by Girard in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, imitative behaviors form the romantic triangles that feature prominently in fiction: for example, Odette and the many men enchanted by her in Proust's In Search of Lost Time; Anselmo, Lotario, and Camilla in Don Quixote; and Velchaninov and Troussotzki, along with Troussotzki's deceased wife and prospective fiancée, in Dostoyevsky's The Eternal Husband.11 [End Page 124]Notwithstanding similarities in Levi and Girard's views of imitation, they differ in a crucial respect. Only Girard acknowledges just how extraordinarily fraught mimesis can become. When imitators compete (e.g., for things, status, and experiences), they will contest... (shrink)

"In this concluding volume of his impressive study of the history of Western thought about the nature of love, Irving Singer reviews the principal efforts that have been made by 20th-Century thinkers to analyze the phenomenon of love.... [T]he bulk of the book is taken up with critical accounts of the modern thinkers who have systematically called into question the possibility itself of love as a union of distinct human selves. For the most part, these critiques are effectively executed, and (...) they bring a high level of critical acumen to bear on skeptical theses about love that are now too often accepted as truisms."—Frederick A. Olafson, _Los Angeles Times Book Review_ "Irving Singer... has developed a method of historical analysis flexible enough to deal with all kinds of love, from Greek homosexual love in Plato, to the _philia_ and _agape_ of the New Testament, to the courtly love of medieval romance, to the Romantics, for whom love was magic.... [This] final volume brings us to the present. In 'The Modern World,' Singer offers readings of Freud, Proust, and Sartre, among others. He shows how their work was formed in reaction to the 19th-century ideal of 'merging' of the identities of lover and beloved. More often than not, the great modern writers portray love as impossible, as a field of failure and regret.... This masterpiece of critical thinking is a timely, eloquent, and scrupulous account of what, after all, still makes the world go round."—Thomas D'Evelyn, _Christian Science Monitor_ "This is the third of a three-volume history of the philosophy of love. It begins with Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, and Nietzsche in the nineteenth century and treats Freud, Proust, Bergson, D. H. Lawrence, G. B. Shaw, Santayana, Sartre, and others in the twentieth. Although the author's approach is primarily historical, he intersperses critical remarks throughout. Most of the major themes which are discussed by philosophers of love make their way into this history, including friendship, sexual love, and the distinction between love that is based on the value of the beloved and love that bestows value on the beloved. Singer devotes a number of pages to his own views on falling in love, being in love, and staying in love.... Singer's exposition is lucid and organized; his criticisms are insightful."—_Ethics_ "In this third volume of historical overview of the development of the Western conception of love, Singer uses writers, philosophers, and psychologists to provide the reader with an overview of love in the late 19th and 20th century.... Analyzing authors such as Tolstoy, Proust, D. H. Lawrence, and Shaw and philosophers such as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Santayana, as well as Freud, Singer... links each contributor's thoughts to the influence of previous writers and also provides some psycho-historical insight into their personal lives that might have been either a source or direct result of their views. In this final volume, Singer proceeds to look at not just the 'great men' influence but also provides a chapter overviewing scientific contributions to our understanding of love.... Singer's work is a significant contribution to understanding the social construction of important, abstract social and personal values. By tracing love through different historical periods through a variety of voices, Singer has created a rich history of the struggle between the ideal and the real, between the dreams of what love should provide and the reality of what relationships have been in each historical period. By personalizing the voice through psychohistorical analysis, Singer also provides insight into the shaping of ideas through the intimate struggles of the shapers."—Mark V. Chaffee, _Contemporary Psychology_. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to reveal with an overall approach, how the psycho-social background, starting from woman image in first periods and reach modern day, is embraced by outstanding theorists of modern psychology, and also how these collected works are reflected in their definitions of woman. If it is considered that woman has been discussed with reflections against and not from primary sources throughout history, it can be seen that the most essential roots of woman narrations can be (...) found in oral culture and the parts of written texts are made over symbol, metaphor, proposition and story. However myths (stories) that take place in oral and partly written culture about primitive man, are sacred tales, they will also present data regarding human image. Therefore with a limited effort of human being to understand the infinite, it can be understood what human being think, feel and how they interpret rather than gods/goddesses ontology. From this point of view, this article that consists of two parts, first of all will mention especially about perception of Goddess in those reflected to image of God, maintaining its efficiency in conscious or unconscious as a system of symbols intrinsic to human nature and cultural code background and then the woman image will be roughly discussed with a descriptive style over the world of mythology, psychology and faith. In the second part, it will be examined in detail how all the written and oral information about understanding woman by modern anthropologists are interpreted with the perspective of modern psychology specific to theorists such as Freud, Jung and Fromm. Eventually, it will be emphasized that past and future are integrated with information, experience and feelings with an active relationship; perception and approach of woman have stayed up to date in time continually; mythology, psychology and religion are important factors within this matter.Summary: Human being has also used historical, temporal and spatial attributions for God. Infinite human being has expressed their thoughts about the finite God by analogy. Despite the dominance of male gender in the images of God in these analogies which are the products of human experience, female Gods that is to say Goddesses are not few. The matter of how the image of goddess come to the fore in a distinctly male-dominant society is a noteworthy matter. The narration of Earth Mother over female symbol in myths in which the harmony is constantly secured within the inner and exterior world and mention about living in harmony with the universe is an important data in order to understand female characteristics attributed to God. Human being has also used historical, temporal and spatial attributions for God. Infinite human being has expressed their thoughts about the finite God by analogy.The woman subject is influenced by transferred life experience within the historical process, and it is an undeniable fact that ancient “woman perception” has reflections to the present day. Within the history of humanity, striking definitions about woman can be seen in sacred statements in symbol language. Therefore, it is proper to examine primarily the image of sacred and then examine female meaning that is charged on that image. The aim of this study can be summed up with two themes: a) try to understand the general framework of reflections of the present image of woman, style of narration and comprehension in psychological, sociological, and religious terms by getting help from myths which mention about ancient image of God, although there is centuries old difference between those stories and us, b) reveal the image of woman in Freud, Jung, and Fromm’s approach which establishes a bond between mythology that is a system of symbols special to human nature and human psychology and discuss this subject by using psychology of religion.When reviewed ancient Far East and Middle East myths and also Ancient Greek mythology, it can be seen that gods are not cloistered supernatural beings who do not have abstract personalities and also do not lead a wholly metaphysic life. The crucial issue here is; the reality that Gods and Goddesses are shown as a model to both man and woman. Psychologists who examine religion in terms of psychology state that first outcomes about the image of God come up not with behavior but with emotion. The attributions of gender, related to the emotion in question are cited during the transfer of those emotions as well. Therefore; philosophers, culture and religion historians, theologians, anthropologists, archaeologists, psychologists, and sociologists have contributed to this transfer when they discuss the cult of God or Goddess throughout the history. It is interesting that the usage of the term of God maintains while the usage of the term of Goddess decreases. Civilization historians claim that the appearance of divine religions particularly quickens the course of transition from goddess to god. According to them, during this period in which there is a transfer from polytheist image of God to monotheist image of God, the quantitative change in the perception of God comes with a qualitative change. According to Fromm, during this power gathering period, there has been a transfer from mother and feminine (woman) centered religion to father and masculine (man) centered religious experience/ God image. According to him, in the second stage of humanity development, “the children of Earth Mother turn into the children of divine father”, there is a transition from unconditional love of mother to authoritarian sympathy of father, from an image of supplemental and surrounding Goddess to authoritarian image of God who makes requests by his nature, lays down principles and laws, and supports the power and search for a successor to deliver the power.The perception of women who led to Prophet Adam deviated from the truth and expelled from heaven is spread around especially the regions of one-God religions. This has strengthened the idea that divine religions have a negative view towards women. Including Islam, the reason of all divine religions’ encountering with claims that they have a negative approach against woman stem from applying to that religions’ human resources rather than essential religious sources which are existing or lost earliest forms.Oedipus complex is an important thesis of Freud which explains the development of religion and morals; establish the base of his psychology, and in fact, important in terms of his making connection with difference of kinds and flow or non-flow of request and needs while explaining human behaviors. According to Freud who points to sexuality and aggression which are the most powerful two instinct in the biology of male or female; the first three or five years of a newly born human- this is the period in which the basic part of personality is formed- the definition of self is extremely influenced by his/her gender (in both biological and sociocultural terms). Freud who put forward father-son conflict in the struggle to survive between Zeus and his sons in Moses and Monotheism (1998c) and Totem and Taboo (1998a), makes an explanation about the origin of religion and humanity over two male characters. Jung pays attention to goddess image as much as the image of god and do not approach this situation only as a polytheism or sociocultural explanation or childish appearances of a primitive mind. He accepts goddesses as a reflection of archetypes in human. Male has a feminine side, female has a masculine side, and a unity occurs when both complete each other. According to Fromm, a taxonomy referring to woman and man is primarily a sociology-based approach rather than a biology-based one. Fromm (1995) thinks that the whole depiction shows individuals’ own desire and needs, that is to say, their psychology rather than a theology. Transition from mother (woman) centered religion to father (man) centered religious experience and God image is essentially one of the most important breaking/inversion points of human being, not humanity. As a result, it can be said that it is an important point to clearly understand the story of mankind to examine that intense freshness at hand and centeredness of quantitative and qualitative changes of divine or God image of ancient societies come down after psychological, sociological, religious, economic, political, and cultural changes. (shrink)

The emphasis that the modernity gives to disengagement and beginning leads one to think that the modernity itself is in fact a culture that initiares crisis. Even if there is no initial crisis, it can be created through the ambivalent nature of modernity. Behind the concept of crisis lies the notion that history is a continuous process or movement that opens the door to nihilistic understanding which stems from the idea of contemporary life and thought alienation through the pessimistic meaning (...) of the word. There is a dialectical relationship between the ideas of modernity and progress, and the decadence, and the main theme of Nietzsche's philosophical career. Since the death of Hegel, who made the idea of crisis plausible, everything is nothing but a counter-movement not only in Germany, but also in Europe. The first of these counter-movements is romanticism with its objection to the mind which is liberated from the bonds of tradition. The main thesis of the present article is, between reactiveness of romanticism -on the surface- and the modernity; from one side romanticism's consuming modernity, which is its mirror image, while at the same time feeding from it and modernity's manipulating the ideas developed against it and monopolizing them thanks to its ambivalent nature. For this purpose, following an an anti-enlightenment thinker Nietzsche's, anti-romantic footsteps which at the same time feeds from the romantic heritage, an attempt will be made to analyze the relationship between modernity and romanticism. Another goal of this article is to allow a comparison of how the intellectual development in the West finds its response on the modernization process of our country by probing how the modernization experience of early period Islamist's who experienced this process in a feeling of "backwardness" and with a wounded consciousness and anxiety has led to a shallow romantic worldview. SummaryRomance and romanticism are the main topics of this article. Romanticism is a period, whereas romance is a spiritual attitude not limited to this period, therefore, even today it’s existence is felt. In other words, it is not specific to the Germans. This term is often used to correspond to certain aspects of European intellectual life in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, for instance between 1790 and 1850. In its extremely diverse definitions, the most "romantic" definition in our opinion, belongs to Novalis: “I'm romanticizing by giving a high meaning to ordinary things, a mysterious reputation to the ordinary, the honor of the unknown to the known, an infinite look to the finite.” The rejection of existing social reality, the experience of loss, the melancholic longing and the search for loss are the main components of the romantic motive. This study is based on the argument that there is a dialectical relation between romanticism and modernity, which is known as an opposing movement against enlightenment thought. The intellectual feature, which contains the opposite of modernity itself, makes this argument plausible. In addition, the view of modernity as a crisis culture due to the emphasis on disengament and beginnings offers us the possibility to establish a relationship between modernity, which accepts itself as decadence, and romance. Behind the concept of crisis lies the idea that history is a continuous process or movement opening the door to the nihilist understanding in which modern life and thought are alienated in a pessimistic sense. Thus, Allan Megill defines historicism as a prerequisite for nihilism. According to the author, Prophets of Extremity, if the history has no direction to be changed, maintained or lost when wandering in history, it also cannot have a "crisis". The suggestion of "God is dead" is the most concise expression of this crisis. In this crisis state of nihilism, it is a completely forlorn condition of living in the present. Today, which is in the absolute forlorn state; the savior declares his belief that he is devoid of all sorts of features, things that let us reconcile with the current situation of things. In the face of this situation, when people see that the present becomes completely forlorn, they move in two opposite directions with a desire to regenerate culturally: They either have to go back to the past or head for the future. However, every attempt to determine what the future or the past posess will require them to be real, belonging to the present. This will return us to the forlorn state. Nietzsche embraces both opposing sides, but does not attempts choose between them. This is the place where Nietzsche dictates that today is corrupt taking a radical attitude against romanticism fed by the notion of crisis. The fact that modernity has given up its critique of reason, which is revealed by its dialectic, had a great influence on Nietzsche's putting distance between himself and romantics. That is to say, in response to enlightened thought, although romantics speak of unity, apparently, they could not prevent emergence of emotion against mind, local against the universal, individual against social, in other words, the emergence of the second values, which they believed that these were belittled and despised by Enlightenment. Therefore, romantics seem like they could not save themselves from being caught in the web of dialectics in the account they entered that is based on the subject-object distinction in cartesian thought. It is because modernity acts with the consciousness that the life is established on the occurrence and decadence. Based on this, we can say that decadence is inevitable. This decadence (distortion) from the outside may be through movements developed against it, or experienced within itself (even if no one attempts to destroy it). Modernity, with the awareness that it cannot escape from the decadence, wants to arbitrate itself by turning this decadence in its favor by manipulating it. In other words, the modernity dramatizes the feeling of crisis considering itself decadence and the seemingly contradictory ideas of avant-garde and decadence become almost synonymous. It must be the reason why Nietzsche identifies modernity with decadence Modernity manages to put the decadence in its body at the center of attraction by producing self-opposing movements, monopolizing and manipulating. In short, both romanticism and avant-garde movements are the movements that are emerged not against modernity but from itself. Just like an apple worm, they both consume modernity and feed on it. They act as a mirror. Although they seem to criticize, as movements that have emerged from it, they allow the modernity to complete and correct the deficiencies. As a result of this, we can say that romantic critical movements are developed against the world and are shaped by modernity, beginning with the idea of enlightenment, and moved forward in the track of modernity.While romanticism developed in the West as opposed to modernity, in Ottoman-Turkish thought, it was seen as the rhetoric of retardation and regretting of backwardness from civilization. It is inevitable that the experience of modernization in a sense of backwardness, with a wounded consciousness and urgency, will open up space for romance. In our modernization adventure starting with Tanzimat, it is a fact that there has not been a drastic reckoning due to Enlightenment on an intellectual basis, industrialization on an economic basis, programs of revolutionary and nationalist formations on a political basis. Therefore, in Turkish thought, it is not possible to talk about a critical tradition developed against modern paradigm. The status of being audience to what was being experienced in Europe, resulting from superiority was transformed into grudge due to the defeats in the military field. Due to the decadence experienced in the present, inability to find the solution to the problems of its age, melancholic state of mind because of being stuck in the golden age experienced in the past, in the case of a preference, led to a romantic world view because of the appeal of its simplicity to imitate what was once lived in the past. Thus, it is very natural that the direction of Namık Kemal, the cult personality of Islamist-Turkish thought, is towards the past even when talking about progress and civilization. Seeing the 19th century Europe as a re-implementation of ideas and institutions that are actually Islamic, Namık Kemal, in our opinion, showed us a clear example of a typical Islamist romanticism and an example of occidentalist approach regarding that the West learned the civilization from Muslims. In fact, the exact equivalent of this approach displayed in Turkish cogito without even knowing that it is romantic, emerging in the personality of Namık Kemal and in the feeling of backwardness,with a hectic and injured consciousness, is kitschization. So much so that, the state of being kitsch also explains the current situation of Islamic geography which is far from creating a tradition for at least a century, and it clearly tells the usual romantic end. (shrink)

We investigated the extent to which people could generate sequences of responses based on knowledge acquired from the Serial Reaction Time task, depending on whether it felt subjectively like the response was based on pure guessing, intuition, conscious rules or memories. Norman and Price argued that in the context of our task, intuition responses were the same as guessing responses. In reply, we argue that not only do subjects apparently claim to be experiencing different phenomenologies when saying (...) intuition versus guess, but also intuition and guess responses are associated with different behaviors. We found that people could control the knowledge when generating responses felt to be based on intuition but not those felt to be pure guessing. We present further evidence here that triplets associated with intuition but not guessing were also processed fluently. (shrink)

The study of social, ethical, and political issues from a naturalistic perspective has been pervasive in social sciences and the humanities in the last decades. This articulation of empirical research with philosophical and normative reflection is increasingly getting attention in academic circles and the public spheres, given the prevalence of urgent needs and challenges that society is facing on a global scale. The contemporary world is full of challenges or what some philosophers have called ‘existential risks’ to humanity. Nuclear wars, (...) natural and/or engineered pandemics, climate change, global totalitarianism, and emergent technologies, are some of the challenges mentioned by many authors devoted to the study of long-term potential risks for the survival of the human species. However, while there are many reasons to be a pessimist about the future of humanity, there is also a lot of ink wasted in showing that the world today is far better than we had in the past and also that there have been many instances of social and moral progress in the last centuries. Some authors have even claimed that “we have made more progress over the last 100 years than in the first 100,000”. According to ‘our world in data’, some of the most relevant advances of humanity in the last centuries have to do with the reduction of poverty and/or inequality, better health and security, the decline of violence and war, and the development of democracy and institutional mechanisms to guarantee individual freedom and rights. Yet, there is a more concrete concern that our world faces nowadays, and requires a particularly detailed analysis. In a few words, the advance in information and communication technologies, the huge volume of people migration because of prevalent instances of global inequality, and the reality of an interconnected world that just mirrors an extensive history of massive human intergroup relations open the question about the feasibility of social and moral progress in the contexts of diverse, multicultural, and unequal societies. This makes it crucial to reflect not only on whether human societies may keep advancing on a path of social progress, but how this can be achieved by addressing the challenges of inequality and potential intergroup conflict. This concern closely relates to the further consolidation of democratic values and the achievement of a more generalized consideration of the equal moral value of human individuals far from group, ethnic, or collective distinctions. This vision of progress follows the moral convictions that have been considered right and worthy to be pursued by most ethical theories explored by philosophers and social scientists so far. This work aims to contribute to the study of the mechanisms and feasibility of social and moral progress grounded on the precept of human equality and is guided by the idea that social and moral progress in a plural world requires the accomplishment of a more democratic and tolerant society. These forms of progress have already been defined by philosophers Allen Buchanan and Russel Powell as inclusivist forms of moral progress. According to these authors, inclusivist moral progress is featured by the transformation of moral judgments, motivations, and norms guided by the rejection of “group-based restrictions on moral standing and moral status” (2018). The work of Buchanan and Powell is fundamental for the argumentation developed in this work since they have pioneered a more complex debate in the field of evolutionary social sciences and philosophical anthropology. In brief, these authors have inquired how human nature, conceptualized by the advances in evolutionary thinking and the empirical sciences, is related to our moral convictions and the possibilities that we have to establish certain forms of social and moral progress. The work of Buchanan and Powell contributes to the debate on moral progress by incorporating empirically-informed concepts and arguments. With this objective in mind, they develop their discussion around a generalized tension between exclusivist and inclusivist forms of moral progress. This tension revolves around the question of whether and to what extent human moral concerns, motivations, and norms, are limited or bounded by social identities, group thinking, or collective values. This question is at the center of this work. In other words, I aim to answer whether and to what extent the nature of our social and moral cognition hinders or enables the development of inclusivist forms of morality and moral progress. As I mentioned so far, the distinction between exclusivist and inclusivist forms of morality has a practical implication and facilitates the reflection on the mechanisms and feasibility of concrete forms of progress based on the precept of human equality, which is the road to progress that we should follow according to most ethical theories. The distinction between exclusivist and inclusivist morality is not used here as a form of summarizing highly divergent descriptive approaches to morality, but as a way to address the practical implications of morality research, particularly around the question of the feasibility of social forms of progress based on the precept of equality and tolerance. My objective then has less to do with offering a conceptualization of human morality or with the proposition of a new ethical perspective. Instead, I aim to identify, from an empirically informed perspective, what enables the achievement of egalitarian forms of social progress, to subsequently offer a normative reflection about what we should do if we want to accomplish such inclusivist forms of progress. This task is of great relevance, having in mind that some theoretical proposals on the matter have claimed that human prosocial behavior and morality are constrained by exclusivist fixed tendencies as a product of our evolutionary history. According to these views, human morality is a group-centered cognitive and behavioral expression that has severe limits in its scope and extent, which hinders in the end the emergence of inclusivist forms of moral concerns and behaviors. These claims align with the philosophical intuition about the ‘dissociation of empathy’, or the fact that human individuals tend to express empathy and sympathy preferably for members of their group whereas their empathic and moral concern and recognition for outgroup individuals tend to be reduced or eliminated in real-life social interactions. Multiple theorists have expressed, however, that these assumptions are wrong for empirical and philosophical reasons, which results in a serious challenge to the conception of human morality as exclusivist by nature. Furthermore, simple intuition and practical experience constantly show us that human individuals can develop and endorse a broad spectrum of moral considerations and adopt an arguably inclusivist stance concerning the kind of persons or agents that deserve moral concern. Moreover, and adopting a historical perspective, the expansion of cultural and commercial exchanges, the consolidation of democracy, the development of welfare states, or the emergence of institutions based on the concept of universal human rights, have partially driven human progress based on the impartial concern for the well-being of persons. These historical instances of cultural evolution and institutional design have shown that it is feasible to promote behaviors and attitudes grounded in impersonal prosocial and inclusivist principles. This optimistic perspective, however, still begs the question of the exact relationship between social, cultural, and historical contexts, and the emergence of certain behavioral expressions of inclusivist morality. This is crucial since a great number of human individuals around the world still do not make part of these instances of social progress, and some authors have suggested that such instances of social and moral progress are particularly favored by the contexts of the WEIRD world, that is the world of Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic societies. Some of these approaches consider moral inclusivity a ‘luxury good’ and follow the ‘dependency thesis’ according to which the expression of moral inclusivity depends on the presence of very concrete material conditions that trigger inclusivist and impersonal prosocial tendencies that human beings are not able to express in threatening contexts without physical security. This thesis is problematic for various reasons and has led to incomplete explanations about the enabling and causal factors of inclusivist moral progress, as well as unsatisfactory suggestions about what we should do to foster the accomplishment of more generalized instances of progress based on inclusivist concerns. In an attempt to contribute to this debate, the main objective of this thesis is to offer an alternative proposal about the nature of human morality and a more detailed reflection on what we should do if we want to further accomplish such instances of progress. More precisely, this work adopts a particular developmental and constructivist vision of human morality to answer the question of how feasible it is to reach generalized forms of social progress based on the precepts of moral inclusivity. Furthermore, it offers some ideas about what are the most adequate and favorable conditions to foster such progress both at the individual and the collective level. At this point, a preliminary clarification of some starting points is necessary. In the first place, and contrary to what other authors have proposed when debating moral progress from an empirically-based approach, my perspective adopts a radical developmental and constructivist perspective, following particularly the conceptual and empirical ideas of the social-domain theory in moral psychology. From this perspective, morality is a domain of normative and social knowledge that develops and emerges in human interactions. Moral concerns, judgments, and norms are not only the result of the expression of innate adaptive intuitions, nor the product of social conformity and a simple process of mirroring the normativity that communities have established to organize their social life. Human individuals, instead, construct moral concerns and judgments during their situated interactions. More specifically, the constructivist tradition claims that we need to research how moral concerns, judgments, and reasons emerge in social interactions and how human beings construct the content of their moral knowledge in the first place. Based on these ideas, morality is defined here as the result of a constructive process through which human individuals, by the means of constant interactions on a background of mutual respect and recognition, develop evaluative concerns about how we ought to treat others, and how to ‘care’ and ‘respect’ others’ well-being, needs, and vulnerabilities. This developmental-constructivist theory of human psychology contributes to an alternative understanding of the origins of moral variability and informs a very particular normative stance about the most desirable contexts needed for the urgent accomplishment of inclusivist forms of morality in contemporary societies. This is so given that the very same definition of morality adopted presupposes the feature of inclusivity. The main objective of this work is then to argue, based on a developmental perspective, what are the most favorable conditions to foster the development of moral inclusivity and what we should do to accomplish concrete instances of moral progress that truly help us to overcome our most urgent moral challenges. The whole thesis is organized as follows. In part I, I show how received visions about human social evolution have informed conceptions of morality as an adaptive function evolved to solve the challenges of cooperative life. Based on these assumptions, some theories argue that human morality is limited by the boundaries of group thinking, and always obeys the mandates of collective interests and the will of the majority. However, this conception has problematic implications from a normative and ethical perspective. The aim of Chapter 1 is to present this introductory debate in detail. In chapter 2, I consider a relevant amount of scientific evidence that helps to consolidate a more optimistic and inclusivist perspective about the starting conditions of human prosocial behavior. Later, I will summarize some ideas offered to explain the possible evolutionary mechanisms that led to the consolidation of these inclusivist capacities. However, I will also show how evolutionary theories that share the same adaptationist foundations but initially seem relevant to explain the feasibility of moral inclusivity, result incomplete when considering the complexity of moral behavior and its ethical implications. Part II is devoted to presenting a developmental alternative to the adaptationist versions around the starting conditions of morality. In this section, I first summarize the epistemological, conceptual, and empirical basis of a constructivist perspective already proposed by several authors in the last decades. This is the goal of chapter 3. More precisely, I adopt the conceptualization of morality established by the social-domain theory school and clarify its conception of the situated development of moral concerns, motivations, and norms. All these ideas are essential for my argumentation on the feasibility of inclusivist moral progress offered later. Chapter 4 provides a more detailed idea of constructivist thinking about moral development, by analyzing one particular dimension: the development of moral concerns for fairness and the sense of justice in distributive dilemmas. In Part III, I assume a constructivist perspective on morality to contribute to the philosophy of moral progress. In particular, I discuss the implications of such a perspective for the conceptualization of human moral nature and discuss what are the most favorable conditions for moral inclusivity to emerge. Answering that question is of enormous relevance since favoring the transition of human societies towards more inclusivist forms of moral concern and behavior supposes a more generalized accomplishment of our most urgent moral convictions. Previous developmental or culturally-sensible attempts to explore this issue are already on the market. As mentioned before, most authors have approached the topic by situating the cultural evolution and development of (inclusivist) moral progress in the WEIRD world. For instance, some of these authors claim that very concrete material conditions (mostly present in the Western World) have been necessary for triggering inclusivist and impersonal prosocial tendencies that human beings are not able to express in threatening contexts without physical security. Despite their interest in explaining inclusivist morality and the feasibility of inclusivist forms of progress following a naturalistic and culturally situated approach, these theories are problematic for two main reasons. In the first place, most of the authors that explain moral progress tend to focus exclusively on the consolidation of liberal values in the Western world and the underlying adoption of laws, social-epistemic practices, and public narratives about tolerance and inclusivity, as unequivocal signs of inclusivist morality. Nevertheless, there is an enormous distance between the institutional and public support of inclusivist moral values or the construction of public images of tolerance and inclusivity, and the real materialization of impersonal moralities in situated social interactions. Secondly, the variability of human moral behavior is far bigger than most of the theories in moral psychology and moral progress tend to assume. Accordingly, inclusivist and exclusivist forms of morality may develop simultaneously in similar or divergent geographical and socio-ecological environments, including those with harsh conditions such as competition for scarce resources, potential intergroup conflict, and risks of disease transmission. In addition, harsh environmental conditions are usually present in almost all societies around the globe, and the presence of socio-ecological conditions such as physical security and prosperity, predominant in highly resourced populations, do not prevent the existence of exclusivist moral tendencies. My model explores a different perspective on the relationships between cultural, institutional, and historical factors, and the situated development of human morality. This supposes a clear distinction from previous approaches to the matter since it offers a different view on what we should do to pursue further instances of inclusivist social progress. In the fifth chapter, I first analyze the proposals of some defenders of the ‘dependency’ theory. The attention is focused on the ‘Evolutionary Developmental Model’ proposed by Buchanan and Powell (2018). Based on a critique of this approach, I will argue that to explain the evolution and development of human morality in its multiple manifestations, it is essential to put focus on social interactions. This also involves a different perspective on human-environment relations that in line with a constructivist worldview makes an innovative contribution to the philosophy of moral behavior and moral progress. Later, in the sixth chapter, I will define my alternative relational view of inclusivist morality and I will offer my view on how to establish favorable conditions that make inclusivist morality possible. Complementing the constructivist approach, my conception is based on the essential role of equality and individuality and on how moral inclusivity is favored if moral concerns do not develop driven by the accomplishment of group-centered, binding, and communitarian concerns and values. In brief, my relational model suggests that the accomplishment of moral inclusivity not only depends on the overall achievement of certain levels of physical security or economic prosperity. Instead, its development is favored by transforming the interactional contexts in which moral concerns towards autonomy and individuality emerge. In arguing so, I will need to start with a critique of contemporary situated and embodied approaches in ethics. Then, I will show how societies guided by the accomplishment of group-centered values of power, dominance, and relational inequality tend to express exclusivist moral behaviors, while individualistic societies tend to be more inclusivist. Starting from this diagnosis, my final attempt is then to reflect on which are the best conditions for the moral valuation of individuality to emerge and what we should do to promote the accomplishment of moral inclusivity at the societal level. (shrink)

Procreative obligations are often discussed by evaluating only the consequences of reproductive actions or omissions; less attention is paid to the moral role of intentions and attitudes. In this paper, I assess whether intentions and attitudes can contribute to defining our moral obligations with regard to assisted reproductive technologies already available, such as preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), and those that may be available in future, such as reproductive genome editing and ectogenesis, in a way compatible with person‐affecting constraints. I (...) propose the parent–child relationship argument, which is based on the moral distinction between creating and parenting a child. Hence, I first argue that intentions and attitudes can play a role in defining our moral obligations in reproductive decisions involving PGD. Second, I maintain that if we accept this and recognize reproductive genome editing and ectogenesis as person‐affecting procedures, we should be committed to arguing that prospective parents may have moral reasons to prefer reproduction via such techniques than via sexual intercourse. In both cases, I observe an extension of our procreative responsibility beyond what is proposed by the consequentialist person‐affecting morality. (shrink)

Chapter 1 First Person Access to Mental States. Mind Science and Subjective Qualities -/- Abstract. The philosophy of mind as we know it today starts with Ryle. What defines and at the same time differentiates it from the previous tradition of study on mind is the persuasion that any rigorous approach to mental phenomena must conform to the criteria of scientificity applied by the natural sciences, i.e. its investigations and results must be intersubjectively and publicly controllable. In Ryle’s view, philosophy (...) of mind needs to adopt an antimentalist stance to achieve this aim. Antimentalism not only definitively rejects the idea that mind is a substance separated from the body, it also denies that mental phenomena radically differ from physical phenomena by virtue of several unique features. Most problematically, mental phenomena have a conscious character (mental states are related to specific qualitative feelings) and are accessible only to the first-person (only the subject knows directly what s/he is experiencing inside his/her mind). Ryle takes a strong stance on antimentalism going so far as to maintain that an approach to mind which aims to meet the criteria of scientificity set by the natural sciences must avoid any reference to internal, unobservable mental states. In his view (which is considered a specifically philosophical version of psychological behaviorism and also addresses questions put forward in psychological research), mental states can be redescribed in terms of behavioral dispositions. In this chapter, we address the historical roots of the antimentalist view and analyze its relation to the later tradition of research on mind. We show that, compared to the antimentalist stance, functionalism and cognitivism take a step back when they maintain that direct reference to mental states is necessary since mental states cause and therefore explain human behavior. This step backwards is often interpreted as a return to mentalism. However, this is only partially true. Indeed, we suggest that these later traditions retain one important element of Ryle’s antimentalism, i.e. the idea that mental states must be uniquely identified using external and publicly observable criteria, while excluding any reference to introspection and those qualitative dimensions of a mental state, which are accessible only to the first-person. According to the perspective we put forward, this epistemological stance has continued to influence contemporary research on mind and current philosophical and psychological theories which both tend to exclude the subjective qualities of human experience from their accounts of how the mind works. The issue we raise here is whether this is legitimate or whether subjective qualities do play a role with respect to the way our mind works. The conclusion of this chapter anticipates the argument the book makes in in favor of this latter position, starting from a particular angle, i.e. the problem of how we categorize concepts related to our internal states. -/- Chapter 2 The Misleading Aspects of the Mind/Computer Analogy. The Grounding Problem and the Thorny Issue of Propriosensitive Information -/- Abstract. After the crisis of behaviorism, cognitivism and functionalism became the predominant models in the field of psychology and of philosophy, respectively. Their success is mainly due to the new key they use for interpreting mental processes: the mind/computer analogy. On the basis of this analogy, mental operations are seen as cognitive processes based on computations, i.e. on manipulations of abstract symbols which are in turn understood as informational unities (representations). This chapter identifies two main problems with this model. The first is how these symbols can relate to and communicate with perception and thus allow us to identify and classify what we perceive through the senses. Here we limit ourselves to presenting this issue in relation to the classical symbol grounding problem originally put forward by Harnad on the basis of Searle’s Chinese room argument. An attempt to address the problem raised here will be made in chap. 3. The second point we discuss in relation to the mind/computer analogy concerns the idea of information it fosters. Indeed, following this analogy, information is something available in the external world which can be captured by the senses and transmitted to the central system without being influenced or modified by the procedures of transmission. This perspective does not take into account that – unlike computers – in living beings information is acquired by means of the body. As Ulric Neisser has already pointed out, the body is itself an informational source that provides us with additional sensory experience that influences (modifies or complements) the information extracted from the external world by the senses. To develop this line of analysis and to determine exactly what information is provided by the body and how this might influence cognition, we examine Sherrington’s and Gibson’s positions. Moving on from their views, we qualify bodily information in terms of ‘proprioception’. We use ‘proprioception’ in a broad sense to describe any kind of experience we have of our internal states (including postural information as well as sensations related to the general state of the body and its parts). Following Damasio’s and Craig’s studies, we further elaborate this position, arguing that living beings are equipped with an internal propriosensitive monitoring system which maps all the changes that constantly occur in our body and that give us perceptual (‘proprioceptive’ or propriosensitive) information about what happens inside us. Moreover, relying on Goldie’s and Ratcliffe’s view, we show that emotional information can also be considered as a form of ‘proprioception’ which contributes to determining everything we perceive. This analysis leads us to the second main thesis of this book: ‘proprioception’ is a form of internal perception and it is an essential component of the sensory information we can access and use for all cognitive purposes. -/- Chapter 3 Semantic Competence from the Inside: Conceptual Architecture and Composition -/- Abstract. Concepts are essential constituents of thought: they are the instruments we use to categorize our experience, i.e. to classify things and group them together in homogeneous sets. Here we define concepts as the internal mental information (representations) that allows us, among other things, to master words in natural language. By analyzing the way in which individuals master word meanings we explore a number of hypotheses regarding the nature of concepts. Following Diego Marconi’s research, we differentiate between two kind of abilities that underpin lexical competence – so-called ‘referential’ and ‘inferential competence’ – and we suggest that, in order to support these abilities, concepts must also include two corresponding kinds of information, i.e. inferential and referential information. We point out that the most widely used and acknowledged theories of concepts do not make this distinction, instead broadly characterizing the information used for categorization in terms of propositionally described feature lists. However, we show that while feature lists can explain inferential competence, they do not account for referential competence. To address the issue of referential competence we examine Ray Jackendoff’s hypothesis that to account for the possibility of linking perceptual and conceptual information we need to assume the existence of a (visual) representation that encodes the geometric and topological properties of objects and bridges the gap between the percept and the concept. Furthermore, we analyze the extension of this work by Jesse Prinz who introduced the notion of a proxytype, a perceptual representation of a class of objects that incorporates structural and parametric information related to their appearance. However, as we point out, proxytypes can only explain the relationship between perception and concepts with respect to instances that can be perceived through the senses and that belong to the same class by virtue of their physical similarity. We suggest that this notion be extended to include larger conceptual classes. To accomplish this, we further develop Mark Johnson, George Lakoff and Jean Mandler’s idea of a schematic image and argue that conceptual representations include a perceptual schema. Perceptual schemata are non-linguistic, structured experiential gestalts (patterns or maps) that make use of information taken from all sensory modalities, including body perception. They accomplish a quasi-conceptual function: they allow us to recognize and to classify different instances. In this work, we hypothesize that perceptual schemata are an essential component of concepts, but not identical to them. Instead, we suggest that concepts include both perceptual and propositional information with perceptual schemata providing the ‘perceptual core concept’ that grounds related propositional information. -/- Chapter 4 In the Beginning There Were Categories. The Bodily Origin of Prelinguistic Categorical Organization: The Example of Folkbiological Taxonomies -/- Abstract. Studies of categorization in psychology and the cognitive sciences have made use of the notions of ‘category’ and ‘concept’ without precisely defining what is meant by either; in fact, often these terms have been used as synonyms, making it difficult to address specific issues related to conceptual development. This chapter begins by discussing the definitions of, as well as the distinctions between, ‘categories’ and ‘concepts’ in the classical philosophical tradition (Aristotle, Kant and Husserl). We introduce our view of categories with reference to Husserl. Categorization is defined as the way in which our experience is originally (pre-linguistically) organized in a passive and fully unconscious manner on the basis of universal structuring principles. Conceptualization is explained as a later process in which the earlier categorical macro-classes are further subdivided into more specific and detailed sets; this later process also relies on linguistic learning and exposure to culture. On the basis of Ray Jackendoff, Jean Mandler, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s work, we hypothesize that categorization is a two-step process that begins with the formation of homogeneous sets of entities partitioned into regions that describe the ontological boundaries of the objects that humans perceive (categories) and continues at a later stage with the development of more specific classifications (concepts). In this chapter, we mainly address three related issues: Why should we assume that there is categorical organization which precedes the development of a conceptual system? How do categories and concepts relate to each other? Shall we hypothesize that categories are innate or that they are formed before concepts on the basis of information and organizational structure available at a very early developmental stage? We show that categorical partitions are necessary for categorization and, following Mandler, that the general categories we form at an early age do not match our adult superordinate concepts. As for the third issue, we argue that there might be no need to assume that categories are innately present in the human mind, since their formation can be explained – at least in certain cases – by basic mechanisms that work on body (propriosensitive) information. This hypothesis will not be discussed in general, but in relation to a particularly relevant example of categorical partition, i.e. the folk-biological dichotomy between ANIMATE/INANIMATE. This is compared with other dichotomies that derive from it, but are not directly categorical such as LIVING/NON-LIVING and BIOLOGICAL/NON-BIOLOGICAL. -/- Chapter 5 Internal States: From Headache to Anger. Conceptualization and Semantic Mastery -/- Abstract. Here we ask if we can also apply the distinction between referential and inferential competence we introduced in Chapter 3 to words that do not refer to things that are perceived using the external senses, especially to words/concepts that denote bodily experiences (such as pain, thirst, hunger, etc.) or emotions. We introduce and discuss the hypothesis that – even though such words/concepts do not refer to intersubjectively identifiable entities in the external world – they do have a kind of referent that can be accessed via direct perception, more specifically ‘proprioception’, as we have defined it in terms of all propriosensitive information we can consciously access. In the first part of the chapter, we specifically consider terms denoting bodily experiences such as ‘pain’ or ‘hunger’ and argue that their referents are identified and classified from a first-personal point of view on the basis of four main characteristics: their specific intensity, their localization in the body, their co-occurrence with other signals and above all their specific qualitative sensations. Emotions are addressed in the second part of the chapter. We suggest that there is a continuity between bodily experiences and emotions. In particular, we argue for a perceptual theory of emotions in line with that proposed by James and Lange at the end of the 19th century and developed more recently by authors such as Damasio (see also chap. 2§5, §6). The hypothesis we put forward is that the referential information that supports the categorization of emotions and therefore also our mastery of terms referring to emotions consists in the perception (i.e. the ‘proprioception’) of those bodily states and changes in bodily states which constitute our emotional experience. In the context of this discussion we examine some objections to this line of reasoning that arise from a cognitivist perspective and following authors such as Oatley, Johnson-Laird and Frijda, we distinguish between basic emotions that can be identified and classified solely on the basis on how they feel and complex emotions whose identification and classification additionally depends on cognitive factors. To describe how emotions are identified and classified on the basis of how they feel, we rely on Marcel and Lambie’s distinction between an ‘emotion state’ and an ‘emotion experience’. Both notions indicate kinds of feelings that we consciously experience. However, they describe first-order and second order emotion awareness respectively. The emotion state is the feeling we have of the bodily states and changes that occur when we are experiencing an emotion, while the emotion experience is the fully developed and integrated emotion we both experience and are, with reflection, aware of experiencing. On the basis of this differentiation, we also show that the same characteristics that aid in the identification and classification of bodily experiences (specific qualitative sensations; somatic localization; specific intensity; presence/absence of specific concomitant sensations) can also be used for the identification and classification of emotions – at least basic emotions. In the last two sections of the chapter we present some clinical evidence on the semantic competence of people who suffer from Alexithymia and Autism Spectrum Disorder which supports the conclusions of our preceding analyses. -/- Chapter 6 The ‘Proprioceptive’ Component of Abstract Concepts -/- Abstract. In this chapter, we address the issue of whether the mastery of abstract words requires only inferential knowledge and thus, if the concepts that support the mastery of abstract words include only linguistic information. We start by differentiating the notions of ‘abstract’ and ‘general’ which are often erroneously confused. We then identify a strict definition of abstract, as contrasted with ‘concrete’, that applies to words or concepts whose referent cannot be experienced by the senses. We argue that abstract words/concepts would be better described as theoretical, because they are usually conceived as structured sets of inferential knowledge expressed linguistically; that is, as small theories. Pointing out parallels with Carnap’s analysis of this issue in philosophy of science, we hypothesize that words/concepts denoting non-observable entities are not all ‘equally theoretical’, because their link to sensory experience can be stronger or weaker. We revive the distinction, inspired by Quine, between theoretical and intertheoretical concepts/words. This distinction relies on the fact that the former – unlike the latter – retains a strong, although indirect, connection with perception. In Quine’s discussion, perception is understood uniquely in terms of observability, i.e. of external sensory experience. Here we argue, however, that bodily, ‘proprioceptive’ (i.e. propriosensitive) experience can also serve to referentially ground theoretical (i.e. abstract) concepts/words. We frame this issue using the example of the theoretical concept ‘freedom’ and Lakoff’s hypothesis that this concept is developed on the basis of bodily information. We contrast this with the example of ‘democracy’ which more closely resembles an intertheoretical concept/word. Furthermore, we show that one of the classical views put forward in psycholinguistic research to explain how abstract concepts are mentally represented – i.e. Paivio’s Dual Coding Theory – points in the same direction as our analysis. The same is true of Barsalou’s work suggesting that we use internal information to understand at least some abstract words. To sustain this position, we put forward two lines of evidence: the first comes from psycholinguistic studies while the second examines deficits of semantic competence exhibited by people with Autism Spectrum Disorder. On the basis of our analysis, we put forward a classification that distinguishes between different kinds of concreteness and different degrees of abstraction: concepts/words referring to body experiences and basic emotions are described as analogous to concrete concepts/words because they are grounded in perceptual (i.e. propriosensitive) experience, while abstract concepts/words are considered more or less abstract depending on whether they are intratheoretical (and rely entirely on inferential information) or theoretical (and are partially grounded in perceptual – or more often in propriosensitive perceptual – information). In the last section of the chapter we consider two scales that have been used in psycholinguistic research to measure the degree of concreteness vs. abstractness of words and we show that – used conjointly – they can provide a measure of the internal vs. external grounding of specific words. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Buddhist Literature as Philosophy and Buddhist Philosophy as Literature ed. by Rafael K. StepienVesna A. Wallace (bio)Buddhist Literature as Philosophy and Buddhist Philosophy as Literature. Edited by Rafael K. Stepien. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2020. Pp. xi + 381. Paperback $26.95, isbn 978-1-4383-8070-1.The editor of the Buddhist Literature as Philosophy and Buddhist Philosophy as Literature should be commended for bringing together an excellent collection (...) of essays and producing the first comprehensive volume that offers a coherent study of the relationship between Buddhist literature and philosophy. This book is an ambitious and praiseworthy project, which covers a wide range of Buddhist literary genres produced in India, Tibet, and East Asia over two millennia. As a whole, the volume invites the reader to reexamine a centuries-long binary division between the categories of literature and philosophy, which have been often approached in academic studies as mutually exclusive. It does so by demonstrating that in the context of Buddhism, philosophy and literature continuously converge, diminishing the overarching binary and broadening their scopes. Most contributions to this volume demonstrate that Buddhist philosophy as presented and enacted in Buddhist literature is not limited to what some would consider a "pure philosophy." The volume is divided into the two, mutually mirroring sections, with each section containing six chapters. Chapters forming the section one, "Buddhist Literature as Philosophy," aim at broadening our perspective about literary forms, such as tales, novels, hymns, and court poetry, which have not been usually explored as the means of articulating Buddhist philosophical views. Chapters grouped in the section "Buddhist Philosophy as Literature" focus on Buddhist literary theories as philosophy of language and introduce the Buddhist biographical and autobiographical genres characterized by practical philosophy to further challenge our preconceptions of what it is that constitutes literature and philosophy. While some contributors endeavor to demonstrate the presence of rational, analytical reasoning in unexpected literary forms, other contributors problematize a strict distinction between literature and philosophy as inapplicable to Buddhism, which is undeniably cross-disciplinary.The first two chapters in section one, authored by Amber Carpenter and Sarah Shaw respectively, draw examples from jātaka stories to show us how Buddhist ethical lessons work in the narrative tales of the Buddha's former births. These two chapters also draw our attention to an accessible and engaging, [End Page 1] narrative manner that presents the Bodhisattva's philosophical exercises to the audience, a manner that stands in contrast to the a priori reasoning characteristic of philosophical treatises. In the first chapter, titled "Transformative Vision: Coming to See the Buddha's Reality," Carpenter analyzes two jātaka stories--"Bodhi the Wandering Ascetic" and "The Man Without an Heir"--taken from Āryaśūra's Jātakamālā. In the first story, a renunciant Bodhi, while repudiating the king's ministers who are intent on disqualifying him as a king's advisor on morality, makes metaphysical claims regarding the nature of reality, causation, and the universe, and provides the reasons and arguments. According to Shaw, by offering an insight into the Buddhist worldview and morality, jātaka tales have a transformative power not only with regard to ethics but also in transforming the reader's vision of reality. In the chapter "Jātakas and the Abhidhamma: Practical Compassion and Kusala Citta," Shaw suggests that a reason why jātaka stories are rarely discussed seriously in the way that they were intended is their literary format based in narrative and mundane situations. Analyzing the concepts of momentariness and kusala citta ("virtuous consciousness") in these stories, Shaw shows that by communicating the technical and insight-based Buddhist doctrinal elements, jātaka tales significantly contribute to Buddhist practical ethics. The Pāli Javanahaṃsa-jātaka, a tale about the friendship between a goose and a king, introduces the reader to some of the most complex Buddhist ideas such as impermanence, momentariness, and mental states, expounded in the Abhidhamma in extraction. Through her analysis of the Kurudhamma-jātaka and Mahosaddha-jātaka, Shaw further shows the integration of narrative literature and Buddhist philosophical tenets, of Buddhist tales and the Abhidhamma, of the relationship between the intention and consciousness... (shrink)

In romantic relationships, individual differences are determinant factors for relational quality. Specifically, romantic attachment and difficulties in emotional regulation influence each other and may have predictive potential for the perceived dyadic adjustment level. This paper aims to identify the developmental parallel between behavioral patterns built since childhood and the construction of the emotional regulation skills that characterize them. Our analysis was based on the attachment theory and the concepts of romantic relationship and DA. In (...) this way, we sought to further the understanding of relationship dynamics, beyond the usual focus on a single element and on associative relationships, and by exploring other effects among the different dimensions of relational functioning. In particular, we explored the predictive ability of emotional regulation patterns in discriminating between RA styles, and their impact on the quality of romantic relationships, in the anticipation of dyadic adjustment variations. (shrink)

Everyone loves something or somebody, and most people are concerned with loving another person like themselves, all equal. This book is based on the belief that getting clear about the concept and meaning of love between equals is essential for success in our practical lives. For how can we love properly unless we have a fairly clear idea of what love is? The book is written in ordinary language and for the ordinary person, without jargon or philosophical technicalities. (...) It aims to show that love between equals involves a single basic disposition, though that disposition expresses itself in various ways. Thus, after an introduction explaining the need for analysis and clarification, the author then deals in order with love as desire or need; with intrinsic friendship and sharing the self; with basic difficulties concerning power, dependence, altruism and paranoia; with sex and erotic love; and finally with the value in human life of love between equals. The work as a whole gives clear, coherent and practical guidance for all who wish to grasp what such love is really like. (shrink)

What is the role of intimacy in sex? The two culturally dominant views on this matter both share the implicit assumption that sex is genuinely intimate only when connected to romance, and hence that sex and intimacy stand in a contingent relationship: it is possible to have good sex without it. Liberals embrace this possibility and affirm the value of casual sex, while conservatives attempt to safeguard intimacy by insisting on romantic exclusivity. I reject their shared assumption and (...) argue for a necessary connection between intimacy and sex, in that sexual activity as such aims at a specific form of intimacy, irrespective of whether it takes place in casual encounters or romantic relationships, and the difference between good and bad sex consists in whether this end is attained. To defend this view, I develop a general account of intimacy, as based on joint action, and apply it to isolate its specifically sexual form. (shrink)

“Artworks are not being but a process of becoming” —Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory In the everyday use of the concept, saying that something is grotesque rarely implies anything other than saying that something is a bit outside of the normal structure of language or meaning – that something is a peculiarity. But in its historical use the concept has often had more far reaching connotations. In different phases of history the grotesque has manifested its forms as a means of (...) subversive resistance against society’s prevailing notions of form and power. What aids this impact and distinguishes two of its basic stylistic features is the grotesque’s dissolution of form and its hyperbole. Such grotesqueries, however, soon solidify into new forms, new structures of meaning, hierarchy and practice, and in this sense the history of the grotesque is, on one hand, a continual opposition and transgression of the prevailing notions of art as well as of God and humanity, while on the other hand it offers continual resistance to its own solidifying process. As such the grotesque will not and cannot be contained in form without it losing the very thing that makes it grotesque. Even though it is somewhat easy to point out certain stylistic features of the grotesque, the sum of those features tell us very little about what is at play within it. Definitions concerned with the grotesque’s content rather than its form faces similar difficulties. Throughout history, expressions relating to the grotesque have been used in defense of a whole host of different social and cultural discourse including, for instance, Catholicism (See Erhard Schön’s Der Teufel mit der Sackpfeife , 1536), Protestantism (See Lucas Cranach’s Der Papstesel , 1523), a material folk culture (see Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and his World , 1984) and an idealistic romantic structure of meaning (see Wolfgang Kayser’s The Grotesque in Art and Literature , 1957). Thus though the grotesque cannot be reduced to the expression of certain forms or meanings, in order to examine what the grotesque is about one has to try to see how it’s relationship to flow and process and how, by maintaining this relationship, it attempts to avoid solidifying into form and meaning. The process of the grotesque alluded to here revolves around a play between periphery and center, the marginalized and the dominant. Most often this is expressed as a direct negation of the center of power. In the medieval grotesque tradition of the carnival, for example, it is expressed by its emphasis on the nether regions of the body as the center of creation of meaning. Spirit does not come from above, but from the belly, buttocks and genitals, and there is, expressed in this manner, a mockery of the predominant Christian notion of truth and meaning. Such inversions of the sites of meaning most often explicitly express an increased interest in materiality instead of ideal content which comes to the fore through the play between periphery and center. Even in early grotesque Renaissance art (for example in the works of Raphael) the depiction of the mythological or ideal reveals an exploration of the possibilities of the material. The works of art thus explore their own boundaries rather than act as vessels of the divine and in this way the grotesque explores the limits of form and materiality. This in turn brings to the fore a metaphysical dimension in the workings of the grotesque: It is an immanent exploration of its own boundaries. Materiality and metaphysics are joined together, because it is through the awareness of itself as a structuring (dis)order that it places itself in opposition to the prevailing notions of form and power. This way the grotesque expresses an awareness of the division of sign and reality and a search for this reality. It implicitly expresses the awareness that meaning is not something God-given and static, but fluctuating and man-made. In modern explorations of the history of the grotesque it is commonly seen as a form of realism that manifests a shift from the ideal towards the material, freeing art from representing some hidden higher order and instead making the work of art the very site of creation and meaning. Going even further, the grotesque actively opposes the notions of the ideal by marking a shift from an ahistorical view of the world towards the historical. However, this also makes clear why the grotesque has a tendency to solidify into new static forms of meaning, for by establishing itself as a subversive counterforce there is an idea of transgression and emancipation. That is why the grotesque often historicizes and relativizes only to repeat the mistakes of that which it negates: putting itself in the king’s chair. The exploration of the material seems to create new forms and notions of the ideal. The representation of an otherness outside the prevailing notions of meaning and truth becomes a positive manifestation of this otherness as truth itself. Thus the historical “truths” of the grotesque are superseded by history itself. When the expressions of the grotesque solidify into static form and meaning, they become mere objects like anything else in the world. Instead of being this elusive thing of process and flow, it becomes tangible to the existing hierarchy of power as well as history itself. In this way the grotesque can be expunged, included or simply revealed as yet another false notion of truth, which is precisely what has happened with the grotesque throughout the course of history. If from the beginning the expression of the grotesque has not already been in the service of some structure of meaning and truth, it has quickly been included or has quickly included itself in such a structure. But by doing so it rejects its own basis: the tension between periphery and center is replaced by the attempt to create a new center, a new structure of meaning and truth. The doubleness, ambiguity and flow of the grotesque are then rejected by the grotesque itself. THE NON-FORM OF FORM In the critical thinking of Theodor W. Adorno (1903-69) the problem of art, caught between a reductive and prevalent notion of truth and meaning and a peripheral and alienated otherness, is reexamined and reformulated. For Adorno, the instrumental rationality of Enlightenment itself reverts into a new form of mythology which is every bit as static and exclusive as the hierarchies of religion it supersedes. All is excluded that is non-identical to the instrumental mastery of the objects of the world, "For the Enlightenment, anything which cannot be resolved into numbers, and ultimately into one, is illusion; modern positivism consigns it to poetry." 1 As such the non-identical has been banished from the realm of thought and action, and banished specifically to the realm of art. But the realm of art is not able to provide a decent home for it because even modern art is not something entirely autonomous. While it is excluded from the notions of truth and meaning provided by instrumental rationality, it still originates from society. Just like instrumental rationality art is about mastery, structuring and exclusion. Therefore, the problem for art is that it cannot directly provide a space for the non-identical because its mode of operation is similar to that of instrumental rationality. Even worse, art has very few possibilities to free itself from this. If it becomes l’art pour l’art it is at the same time reduced to the very thing instrumental rationality claims it to be: a subjective judgment of taste.expressionism also stands as an example of this. Conversely, art cannot work within the framework of the identity-thinking of society, because any notion of freedom or emancipation would reproduce the exclusive practices of instrumental rationality. For example: Explicit socialist literature may establish itself in opposition to instrumental rationality while at the same time reproducing it. Its language may seem different, but in reality it merely provides a different set of reductive schematics for human life and experience. The problem for the art of the grotesque was, as I mentioned earlier, that far too often it was merely a symbolic manifestation of a notion of otherness—not otherness itself. Because of this the subversive character of the grotesque ends up shaping and containing otherness instead of providing a space for it. According to Adorno the only way to avoid this is to radicalize the grotesque. In order to avoid solidifying into form the work of art has to be an object which cannot be contained in thought or form—a non-form of form. The work of art has to work in a way that it strives for autonomy but without entirely leaving a discernible reality. In other words, it has to pull in two directions at once. Thus the work of art is a paradox. It is autonomous in the sense that it closes itself off from everything outside of the work of art, trying to shy away from the contaminating influence of the identity thinking of instrumental rationality. At the same time though the work of art is heteronomous in the sense that it originates from a specific historical context and is bound to be what society is not. Autonomy and heteronomy are inseparably intertwined. Unable to display otherness itself, but still trying to be a refuge for it, there is only one option for art: It has to turn against itself and destroy its own logic of form, thereby demonstrating how any representation of otherness is impossible. Art becomes a lamentation of the victims of the identity thinking of instrumental rationality and shows the traces of the otherness that is unable to appear. Adorno’s pessimistic theory of art and history stages art as a negative dialectical process where the work of art closes itself off and rejects everything outside, while the individual elements in the work of art destroys its very own logic of form from within: Artworks synthetize ununifiable, nonidentical elements that grind away at each other; they truly seek the identity of the identical and nonidentical processually because even their unity is only an element and not the magical formula of the whole […]. The resistance to them of otherness, on which they are nevertheless dependent compels them to articulate their own formal language, to leave not the smallest unformed particle as remnant. This reciprocity constitutes art’s dynamic; it is an irresolvable antithesis that is never brought to rest in the state of being. 2 Relative to a traditional understanding of the grotesque, Adorno radicalizes the tension between center and periphery, autonomy and heteronomy. In the traditional understanding of the grotesque, as we find it for example in the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin, the grotesque establishes the display of otherness as a new center of meaning and truth. However Adorno rejects such notions and argues instead for a modernism of the grotesque in which both center and periphery are included in a negative dialectical process and continually synthesizing and destabilizing each other’s positions. A modernism of the grotesque works on the inside of the sign or the artwork, continually outlining and questioning the boundaries between materiality and form. This moves the focus away from the relation between the sign or work of art as a conceptual manifestation on one side and the object it refers to on the other side. Instead it implicitly points to the amorphous mass from which the signs and thereby meaning have been carved, the remnants that have been left behind. Modernism of the grotesque does not imply that it is emancipatory or that it reconciles man with nature, and does not represent a new position or a new ideology. It merely remembers and insists on the double nature of man and art: to write or paint yourself or an artwork whole by inscribing meaning in life or by applying form on a canvas is at the same time both creation and destruction. The very signs we use to center meaning in our lives carry its own alienation in them. Meaning surfaces only when process and flow comes to a halt—solidifying, but at the same time excluding parts that do not fit into that particular structure of meaning. NOTHING DONE AND NOTHING UNDONE It has always been difficult for art historians to find a suitable category for the works of the Danish artist Leif Lage (b. 1933). In his paintings the sensitive figuration seems so fragile that it is on the verge of turning into abstraction. Or conversely: the figurative emerges cautiously and hesitantly out of abstraction. As an art critic once wrote, he can almost paint things away. 3 Working in some undefinable space between abstraction and figuration, the Lage’s works shy away from the realm of words, and as a result few critics have been able to write anything meaningful about his works. In fact even fewer have been able to write more than one or two pages. The Danish author and art critic Leif Hjernøe is one of those few, but even he starts off by saying how impossible it is to write about Lage, confessing that his works exist both as process and in a field of in-between which words cannot reach. He writes: Always you find yourself in a place where nothing is done and nothing left undone, and where the elements of the work of art rest in a continuous motion. Always there is the open wound, where infection rather than surgical intervention is considered as an opportunity. And the conflict between matter and antimatter makes all diagnoses uncertain and allows conditions of uncertainty to spread in a place of raw presence. 4 The art works against the diagnosis and the certainty. Words are being eaten up by what is outside the realm of words: tension, process and doubleness. An approach to an understanding of the work of Lage could be to follow his connection to Samuel Beckett (1906-89). One can note, therefore, that Lage has illustrated several of the Danish translations of Beckett’s works. Though one is an author and the other a painter both seek a place where figuration, where the word, erodes. For both this entails an attempt to question and examine and so move in behind the façade of the surface in an exploration of that something or nothing that may be behind representation. At the same time even in the vanishing point of figuration or words, the meaningless words or the disjointed lines still stand as signs of human activity—signs of movement in emptiness. With very few exceptions Lage’s artworks revolve around one motif: Man—most often “en face.” But unlike traditional portraitures Lage’s people are found within. The artworks do not sense the reality of appearances, but rather the existential dimensions within man. As a seismograph they are sensitive to the utmost subjectivity in order to display an objective, sensuous depiction of the very problem of subjectivity. Instead of a static façade of a man, Lage’s “en face” shows the process-character of man. The people in Lage’s paintings are always in process—in the midst of becoming or dissolving. I will take a closer look in the following at the ways in which Lage establishes this sense of being in constant process, of being in-between modes or categories. THE DOUBLENESS OF THE STROKE Lage’s etchings attract attention in particular for the tension conveyed there between the material and the form. The material physically opposes the violence of the needle. But instead of embracing the violence of the needle and the victory over matter—instead of making the artistic creation and figuration express a heroic mastery of the background it is made out of—Lage uses the stroke to express the very tension between stroke and material, figuration and background. In the drypoint etching Untitled from 1983, which illustrated the Danish translation of Beckett’s Ill Seen, Ill Said , the needle tears up the material in long rough lines: Together, the primarily horizontal and vertical lines form a face. Thus the force needed to etch a line in the metal-plate draws attention to itself: It is there in the absence of curves and nuances. Man emerges on the metal-plate after great exertion and in a very simplistic form. This way Lage enhances the nature of the material, as the material’s resistance is not something to overcome. On the contrary the figuration is smitten by its very resistance and as such expresses the violence of its own becoming. Even more pronounced is the fact that the lines do not just show the violence of creation—it actively erases figuration in the same process that creates it. For example the mouth consists of 8-10 horizontal strokes, of which some seem to be connected to each other as if the mouth has been quickly scratched out. The mouth speaks of the inability to speak. In the same way, the eyes are black holes due to a large amount of criss-cross cuts, which together form a dark middle. Those lines, at the same time, form the eyes of the figuration and scratch out the eyes of the figuration. The extroverted aspects of the face—connected to speech and sight—are portrayed as introverted as well. Just as the etchings down into the metal-plate makes something appear. Leif Lage, Untitled , 1983 (etching) The figuration of the etching is connected to creation. It expresses that something is wrought into existence out of nothing by sheer artistic force. However, this force is at the same time presented as a violence of creation, which makes it impossible for form to truly emerge. Herein lies one of the basic principles of Lage’s art, namely that art cannot be that nothing or something behind the realm of words or signs. Without form, art would lose its ability to express anything at all. Form is a necessity if art is to avoid becoming as devoid of expression as the reality is that we cannot reach behind the appearance of things. On the other hand, art cannot raise itself above its own material in joyous celebration of the beauty of form. This would use the material in the manner of an instrument and thus would suppress the otherness it attempts to rescue. When art becomes mere form, any traces of otherness will have dissolved. Then art would be a question of technique, in no way different from the instrumental rationality of society. Therefore art works in a particular space between form and non-form. As Hjernøe says of the works of Lage, it is in the center of the event, in the in-between where things neither are nor are not, "And everything takes place just before it changes character. As the blood just before it coagulates, as the milk just before it separates, as fried egg just before it turns white […]." 5 The precise emphasis on the in-between of Lage’s art points in particular to the work of art as both outside of and in time. The work of art is a singular point in time, but at the same time it is continually in process. In the borderland between form and non-form, between creation and destruction, it shimmers like a fata morgana . The work is done but at the same time undone. It is only there as a cry in response to the inability to come into being. Akin to the etching is the drawing, but while both, of course, use the stroke or line as their main instrument, the paper does not resist the line in the same sense as the metal-plate of the etching. As a result in Lage’s drawings the stroke frolics in a space with almost no tension at all. There is nothing there to keep the pencil stroke at bay, but at the same time this means that there is nothing there to keep it together. One of the more expressive examples of this is found in an untitled drawing from Tegninger og Text ( Drawings and Text ) from 1999. The drawing consists of one unbroken pencil stroke. It is as if the stroke is confused—it darts around on the paper making doodles on the way or gathers itself in more straight lines in the center of the paper. It is in this manner that the semblance of a body is established. A couple of small circles serve as eyes and are the reason that the rest can be read as both face and body instead of pure abstraction. In fact the unbroken stroke serves as both abstraction and figuration as on the one hand it is the stroke that seemingly outlines the shape of a figure, while on the other hand the unbroken stroke dissolves any truly recognizable figuration by continuously, without end or aim, overflowing the boundaries of the figure. Seen again here is a doubleness to the stroke and the act of creation. In the etching it was all about the tension between the resistance of the material which created the doubleness. Here it is the opposite. It is the lack of tension. The stroke is free to do anything, but has no aim: without some kind of resistance, there is nothing to hold figuration together. It threatens to dissolve into nothingness. Conversely, the drawing can also be seen as a process of becoming. Like a form of automatic writing, the pencil darts around until it finds a point of densification. But even in such an interpretation of the drawing, the figuration appears artificial—it points to itself as the result of the artistic act of creation. The stroke is primarily stroke and only secondarily figuration. With its wild movement it calls attention to itself as stroke. Thus the figuration never becomes something in its own right. It points to the basic principle of creation: Someone has drawn me, I am the result of artistic endeavors, and therefore I am not for myself but always overflowing the boundaries that contain me. It is the stroke that in the very same movement creates figuration and dissolves it. Leif Lage, Untitled , 1999 (drawing) THE LIGHTNESS OF COLOR, THE DENSITY OF PAPER Often the watercolor is used as a precursor for larger paintings, because it has an immediacy in which one can quickly paint the main lines of a composition. However, Lage’s watercolors are not temporary points in a process leading to another final painting. They are not sketches, later to be filled with details in another material. For him watercolor is an end in itself. This also implies that he doesn’t try to work against the paper’s absorption of the water color and its tendency to absorb detail. On the contrary, he examines the possibilities inherent in this blurring of the line and absorption of color. As in the previous examples, there are of course recognizable shapes in Lage’s water colors. But these shapes are rarely separable from color, line or even paper. In other words: the figurative and the abstract more or less become one. One of the reasons for this is that Lage often works on wetted paper which means that the paper hungrily absorbs color into its fabric instead of it being on top of the paper. The paper becomes line because it is the absorption of the color which, together with the brush stroke itself, separates the colors from each other. The line is also color and the color is also line, because there is no separation between the different colors other than the colors themselves. At times this results in almost complete abstraction. In such cases Lage add lines with a pencil as if he wants to hold some sort of figuration together. At other times it is the other way around: the strokes of the pencil are a being dissolved by the water color blurring out the figuration. Untitled 1 from 1999 displays various tones of green. The contour of the colors appears unusually rough. Most of all it is reminiscent of a shoreline which has found its form through the work of thousands of years between water and land. Pockets of resistance surface as islands not yet drowned in color—as paper or color not yet consumed by the dominant color. The shape of the colors does not seem created by the hand of the artist, but rather by the inner workings of the watercolor: color against color over time has resulted in this very image, as if it is all a part of a natural process of change and decay. Despite the fact that there are no strong differences in color there seems to be a struggle taking place in the watercolor. For example, inexplicable holes in the dark color, which cover most of the right side of the watercolor, appear as if the underlying color is eating away the dark color, or that the dark color is in the process of covering up the underlying color. The small pockets of resistance demonstrate a process and development that, almost as a happy accident, evokes a couple of small eyes and a large mouth. Behind the colors a few slanted lines can be discerned, but the hand of the artist has long ago disappeared behind the life of the colors. Thus the watercolor seems to be held at precisely the point in time where figuration randomly appears. The small eyes and wide mouth seemingly express the realization of the figuration’s temporality. It is just a moment in time, soon to be consumed again in the life of the colors. The nature, the background it stems from and is part of, moves on undeterred, continuing its everlasting process of creation and decay. In this sense, the watercolor provides an experience of how neither artist nor man is able to transcend the materiality they consist of. The colors of man, the materials man consists of are “becoming” and “progress” but also “decay” and “disappearance”. The artist’s pencil strokes have been eaten up long ago, and the figuration is living on borrowed time. Human or artistic activity is about creating form, transcending mere matter by shaping and applying meaning to it. But Untitled 1 shows the doubleness of such creation: the transience and fragility of human life. Should the figuration come into being, should it rise and transcend the material, which binds it to its temporal existence, it would become nothing because its very existence is conditioned by the life and work of the colors. In the same sense man cannot escape his own temporality. He too, for better or worse, must accept a life in the volatility of sensation. Leif Lage, Untitled 1 , 1999 (watercolor) In most of Lage’s watercolors there seem to be a stronger artistic control than in Untitled 1 . Most often both the arrangement of colors and the technique in which they are painted express the hand of the artist. An example of this is Untitled 2 from 1999. While figuration in Untitled 1 seemed to appear as a happy accident, the figuration is much more “created” in Untitled 2 . Here the most important parts of the figuration, the eyes, the mouth and part of the skull, are colored black and painted on top of the background’s play of colors. The background primarily consists of blue and yellow tones. Only parts of the paper are covered in color, however, which yet again stresses the act of painting: There is a surface which is being filled by color by an artist. The blue tones are concentrated in the figuration, while the yellow tones surround it. All this means that the figuration stands out more clearly in this watercolor. This is also underlined by the fact that the blue and dark tones cover part of the yellow tones as spots here and there. Thus it is not a background which is in the process of consuming figuration, but rather the emerging figuration which blots out the background. Such an understanding is even suggested by how the mouth and eyes are placed in the larger blue color field. The eyes and mouth are in the center of the watercolor, while the blue color field is placed from center out towards the left side. This gives the impression of a face turned slightly to the right and slightly upwards, which again makes the mouth appear to emerge from the paper. It also helps that the mouth cuts the center axis of the watercolor. In other words, the arrangement of the blue and black colors create some depth and perspective which gives the illusion of a figuration, seen partially in profile, emerging from the background. Seen in profile, the eyes and mouth seem extroverted—they almost seem as if they are put on top of the face. But at the same time they are painted as black holes, sucking in the gaze of the onlooker. The watercolor is even more challenging if one follows what may be the faint outline of the skull, which, on the right side of the watercolor, no longer works together with the blue color, but rather alone postulates the outline of the skull. If not the blue color field, but this line, is the outline of the skull, then all of a sudden the face is not in profile but “en face”—staring directly towards the onlooker. Outline and color seemingly work against each other and establish two different expressions. Without the slightly upward tilted expression of the profile, the eyes and mouth do not seem to emerge from the paper. On the contrary, seen “en face,” the eyes and mouth are really gaping pits of darkness. In this sense Untitled 2 is at the same time surface and depth of perspective. The line gives form but at the same time it dissolves the form created by the colors, and vice versa. Leif Lage, Untitled 2 , 1999 (watercolor) As the last example of Lage’s artistic method, I have chosen another untitled work (as indeed nearly all of Lage’s artworks are)—this time from 2000. This is perhaps one of the most figurative watercolors Lage has created, though that doesn’t tell us too much. The painting depicts a human face in blue and green tones on a yellow toned background. The colors create a clear demarcation between the figure and the background, which compensate for the watercolor’s lack of outline. Beneath the face darker tones imply the beginning of the torso, and nuances of color even hint at something which could be a collar. The hair is in even darker tones and its structure is emphasized using pencil strokes on top of the water color. One eye is marked by a brown spot with a darker spot in the middle, while the other eye is added by pencil. The mouth is a round, red dot. In Untitled from 2000 the work between abstraction and figuration is much less pronounced than in the previous examples cited here. Nonetheless the watercolor has a delicacy to it which almost makes the figuration disappear, even as it appears. This has something to do with the fact that all the individual brush strokes have dissolved. The only outlines are those created by the clash of colors. Even the red mouth seems to be more paint than mouth—unable to be formed truly as anything other than a speck of color with some small semblance to a mouth. In contrast to the other watercolors, there is no movement, no progress or decay, just a vibrating standstill. The figure is not emerging or disappearing but embedded in and as surface, and as such it makes the figure seem stuck in its condition rather than freed by the act of giving form: mouth open as a wound. Pencil strokes add detail and life to the hair as an attempt to help the figure emerge. But all this does is create two levels in the watercolor: The pencil strokes are put on top of the figuration rather than being part of it. Thus they end up highlighting the endless distance between the movement and form-giving of the pencil strokes and the static and stuck figure behind these strokes. Leif Lage, Untitled , 2000 (watercolor) MAN AND THE VIEW OF THE ONLOOKER Lage’s works seem at the same time to be an examination of tensions between form and material in art and a display of an image of man full of the same tensions. This is because the people who are emerging in Lage’s images are not just in his works, They are his works. This means that man is not something emerging from a background but is part of this background and vice versa. The art of Lage inscribes man in its surroundings and background. Man is not the ruler of nature. Man does not rise above matter; there is no truly transcendent position for man to occupy in the art of Lage. Instead man is a part of the very matter, it, at the same time, tries to distance itself from in order to distinguish itself from its surroundings. Man emerges in an attempt not to be line, stroke, color. In an attempt to free itself of matter. Should it succeed in this, however, it would turn into nothing. On the other hand, if man fully accepted itself as mere matter it would disappear in it—in instincts, urges and lack of reflection. The appearance of man is thus subject to a state of being in-between. Only in the tension between material and its negation can the outlines of man be traced. However this also means that in the art of Lage man is never something in itself but always in process—on the way to its freedom and its loss. However, Lage’s art is not just about showing the tensions inherent in man but also about showing such tension on the verge of breaking point. In the moment before everything is done, or when nothing yet has been done, the delicate tension between form and material has been stretched to its utmost in such a way that man’s character of process emerges and is contained on the paper or canvas. Therefore, Lage’s art contain traces of human life. Not only is it an autonomous unity of tensions where man is stretched out between its singularity and the surroundings it is a part of. It is also this pulsation between figuration and material which brings about the traces of human endeavor and activity. Even when man almost seems to have disappeared into the material, strokes and lines are still there as a reminder of human activity and potential creative power—as a reminder that hope is still possible and that man is still there. The view of the onlooker seeks out forms and meaning. It seeks outlines and edges. But first and foremost it is the eyes in Lage’s works of art that allow the onlooker to decode the figuration at play. This creates a distinctive relationship between the onlooker and the artwork. The onlooker tries to wrest the enigma from the artwork, tries to reduce it to solid, meaningful form. But the very same moment that hints at such a possibility sees the view of the onlooker confronted with a gaze of its own. The eyes of the figure in the work of art are most often dark pits, as if they were an illustration of the violence committed against the eyes of the onlookers and their search for meaning. Or as if they were a dark reflection of the onlooker’s failed attempts to delineate the traces of life in the artwork to a solid meaningful form. Therefore, the gaze of the figuration speaks not only of its own powerlessness but also of the powerlessness of the onlooker. When the view or sight has trouble finding solid meaningful forms, it has something to do with the fact that the precondition for sight, light, no longer stems from something transcendent. In Lage’s art there is nothing outside the works of art, nothing outside of human life, and as such nothing to shed light on the works of art or human life and reveal solid meaningful forms. All light comes from within. In a western context, light as a medium for sight is central to the understanding of meaning. People speak of the clarity of thought, while knowledge is tied together with enlightenment, and so forth. But the light no longer originates from a divine point of view. It originates from man, who has created himself in the image of God. The problem with this is that light always covers up its own base. Light illuminates something but at the same time it hides itself. 6 While it was previously God who was unknowable, now it is man. It is also problematic that sight and the medium of sight stem from the same place. Following this thought one can posit two final problems. Firstly, the immediacy and presence established by light by making forms and objects accessible to sight is fake. Light is not some independent entity which present things in a neutral manner for the onlooker. It is inextricably tied together with the gaze’s desire after meaning. In other words: Light perverts the appearance of things because it doesn’t originate from some objective entity which allows them to appear as they are. Instead light is based upon and originates from the subject and its conquering gaze, seeking out meaning and form constantly. Secondly, the joining of sight and light makes introspection within human life impossible. Everything can be illuminated by its use value for the subject but only as long as it is separated from the subject, as long as it is an object. But the subject itself cannot be illuminated. Lage’s art tears down such a dividing line between subject and matter, but it does so without reestablishing a divine position from where the light emanates. Therefore, the light in Lage’s art may not illuminate very well. It may not have the certainty presented by modern science or the religions of yesterday. But it does show what such light tries to hide, namely, the subject as it is in its material reality—inscribed in time and death, which are the basic conditions of materiality, but at the same time also full of life in its joy and will to create. For the onlooker the meeting of the gaze in Lage’s works of art is thus also a destruction of the view of the onlooker. The ability to see is challenged in a radical way. Those outlines will not solidify into static form, as if the light was too dim to see. Just as in Lage’s figurations, the view of the onlooker turns to black: turns towards the onlooker in recognition and becoming—or disappearance. NOTES Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment . (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2002): 4-5. Theodor W. Adorno. Aesthetic Theory . (London & New York, 2002): 176. Carsten Bach-Nielsen. “Mere glæde end gru.” Kristeligt Dagblad . September 24, 2002. Leif Hjernøe. “Den yderliggående inderlighed.” LEIF LAGE—Retrospektiv udstilling 1983 . (Copenhagen: Brøndum, 1983): 18. Ibid. Maurice Blanchot. The Infinite Conversation . (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993): 162-163. (shrink)

In my thesis, I examine the role of character friendship for the agent’s moral development in Aristotle’s ethics. I contend that we should divide character friendship in two categories: a) character friendship between completely virtuous agents, and, b) character friendship between unequally developed, or, equally developed, yet not completely virtuous agents. Regarding the first category, I argue that this highest form of friendship provides the opportunity for the agent to advance his understanding of (...) certain virtues through the help of his virtuous friend. This process can be expressed in two ways. In the first way, I take character friendship in (a) as a relationship that is based on mutual relinquishing of opportunities for action or giving up external goods based on each agent’s needs. This process helps the agents develop their character in certain virtues which have remained slightly underdeveloped than others due to nature (NE 1144b4-7), or development (Politics 1329a9ff). This means, for instance, that if agent A is wealthy and his friend B is a middle class worker and they win the lottery together, A will relinquish his share of money to his friend so that he will be able to practice the virtue of magnificence; a virtue that his previous financial condition prevented him from developing appropriately. The second process is rather different and new in scholarly debate concerning Aristotle’s theory of moral development. I suggest that the completely virtuous agent is able to further develop his character through a process I will describe as interpretative mimesis. In this process, the agent receives the form of his friend’s action and is able to apply this pattern of behavior in a situation that he thinks is appropriate. I have to highlight though the fact that he does not just ape his friend’s action. Instead, he interprets the action based on his skills and abilities and the demands of the situations he faces. Thus, this pattern works as an extra epistemological tool in the agent’s hand in new and challenging moral situations. Now, case (b) comes on the opposite side of the majority of scholars’ view on character friendship. They think that Aristotle reserves character friendship only for completely virtuous agents. I argue that this is not the correct approach, and that less than completely virtuous agents can take part in character friendships as well. This view has the advantage of making character friendship in (b) a tool in Aristotle’s hands for his agents of lower moral level to develop their understanding of virtue and its applications. I propose that the route of moral development in case (b) resembles the one in the second process of case (a). Namely, the agent receives the form of his friend’s action and uses it as a pattern in some new situation he has to face. I will not name the process though as “interpretative” or any kind of mimesis. The reason for this is that Aristotle gives us textual evidence (NE 1172a9-14) for an imitative method of moral development only for the second process of case (a). I will take case (b) then as a pattern guide application of my friend’s action which we could call pre-interpretative mimesis period of the agent’s moral development. If my arguments are correct then character friendship is much more valuable than scholars thought. Our friends turn out to be examples of good action who guide us through the sweaty and painful path that is called virtue. And this path never stops; even if we have become “moral heroes”; or, put it differently, “masters” of practical wisdom. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the nature of medical interventions like neuromodulation on the complex human experience of love. Love is built upon two fundamental natures, viz: the biological and the psychosocial. As a result of this distinction, scientists, and bioethicists have been exploring the possible ways this complex human experience can be biologically tampered with to produce some supposed higher-order ends like well-being and human flourishing. At the forefront in this quest are Earp, Sandberg and Savulescu whose research (...) works over ten years has focused on the good that could stem from the medicalization of love. I acknowledge the various criticisms that have been made against this stance. However, most of these criticisms have been directed towards the mere side effects and sociocultural disservices that could result from the process of using drugs to influence human romantic relationships and in the end, critiques endorse the medicalization of love on the basis that its benefits outweigh the disadvantages. Consequently, I advance two strands of arguments against “medically-assisted love,” the ontological and the socio-ethical arguments. The former presupposes that beyond the possible side effects of medicalizing love there is something inherently mistaken about this effort and there is something intrinsically different about love that distinguishes it from its medically-engineered alternative. In the latter argument, I claim that drug interventions in romantic love contravene the very nature of medicine. Overall, I believe that critiques were still able to endorse medicalizing love despite their objections because they were only looking at one direction, the physical/cultural complications. (shrink)

Love is a universal experience that most people desire. A serious, long-term, and stigmatized illness makes entering and maintaining close relationships difficult, however. Ten persons, who have been diagnosed with schizophrenia, and lived with their illness for between years and decades of their lifetimes, shared their stories. They reported how the illness has influenced their emotional experiences regarding love and their intimate relationship experiences. We present here a qualitative Interpretative Phenomenological analysis (IPA) of their narratives. This analysis has (...) been done with an explicit intention to give voice to the patient’s perspective. The results highlight how illness adjustment and hospitalizations have an alienating effect on relationships through stigmatization and self-stigmatization; how illness creates psychological obstacles to love, such as diminished trust toward oneself and others; and how long-term patients experience practical difficulties in creating and sustaining relationships, such as poverty. Moreover, we show how patients experience changes in sexuality and the risks involved in it, and discuss possible coping strategies from their perspectives. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 21.1 (2001) 95-99 [Access article in PDF] The Distinction between ego (e) and ego-Self (e/S): Notes on Religious Practice Based upon Buddhist-Christian Dialogue Yagi Seiichi Toin University The Goal of Religious Practice We cannot see the transcendent as an object. Nor is it the case that the transcendent and the human are two separated realities that are united afterwards. When the Self (Christ in (...) me--Gal. 2:19-20) reveals itself to and in the ego (Gal. 1:16), the ego becomes aware of the Self, which is divine--human or transcendent--immanent. This is called enlightenment.In enlightenment, the ego (hereafter: e) does not vanish.When the Self (hereafter: S) appears to and in the ego, the ego (now a relatively independent part of S) becomes the function of S. The ego, understanding itself as the knot of inner and outer reality, plays the role of the reason of the whole body, the center of which is S. In this case we represent such a person as e/S. e/S is the subjectivity of the religious life. D.T.Suzuki and one of his disciples, Ryomin Akizuki called e/S the "individual qua trans-individual." 1 In enlightenment, e/S as the authentic subject, which remains potential before enlightenment, is actualized or realized so that it understands itself as e/S, no more as the mere ego. In order for e/S to be realized and understand itself as e/S, egocentricity, egoism and the confusion of the verbalized reality with "reality as it is" must be overcome. This is the goal of religious practice. e/S From the point of view of interreligious dialogue,"Christ who lives in me" corresponds to "actualized Buddha-nature" or "the Formless Self" in Buddhist language, that is, the Self as we call it. 2 In the case of Paul,"Christ who lives in me" is the ultimate subject of him on the one hand, and "Christ the Son of God" is the object of his faith on the other (Gal. 2:19-20). That means: the ego of Paul that believes in the Son of God is borne by "Christ in me"; as Paul says, "Christ was revealed to and [End Page 95] in me" (Gal. 1:16). In this way, the subjectivity of Paul consists of e/S. Of S, namely, Paul is aware as e/S--neither as e, which is ignorant of S, nor as S. It is impossible for S to exist alone. Egocentricity and Egoism The distinction between e and e/S is of fundamental importance to our theme. e means in this essay the mere ego that is ignorant of S.When it becomes aware of S we represent it as the ego of e/S. e is egocentric and egoistic. It goes without saying that the ego-centered "I" driven by desires produces immorality and social anomies. The biblical word for this is sin, the transgression of the Law.But there is another problematic concerning e, namely egoism, which can be at work even in the effort to attain a high level of morality. We understand the egoistic ego as follows: the ego is to itself the only reality that concerns and moves it. It posits itself solely on itself apart from the relation to others and to S. By itself it projects itself and strives to realize itself. It can, among others, set up its own ideals and pursue their realization. It can, for example, conceive the moralistic ideal that seems to be the reverse of immorality and social anomie. Indeed, it can succeed in controlling egocentricity so that it seems to have attained perfect morality. In reality, it is interested only in its own moral perfection, not in the person encountered (moralistic egoism). Such e is illustrated in Luke 18:9-14 and described in Romans 7:7-24. Egoistic ego must die to itself and must be freed from egoism. (In Romans 6, for example, Paul does... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Moral Traditions: An Introduction to World Religious Ethics, and: Understanding Religious Ethics, and: Moral Struggle and Religious Ethics: On the Person as Classic in Comparative Theological ContextsBrian D. BerryMoral Traditions: An Introduction to World Religious Ethics Mari Rapela Heidt Winona, Minn.: Anselm Academic, 2010. 138 pp. $22.95.Understanding Religious Ethics Charles Mathewes Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. 277 pp. $41.95.Moral Struggle and Religious Ethics: On the Person as Classic in (...) Comparative Theological Contexts David A. Clairmont Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. 245 pp. $99.95These three texts each make significant contributions to comparative religious ethics, a relatively recent discipline that reflects the rise of religious pluralism and globalization. Taken together, these books raise questions about what comparative religious ethics is, how it should be done, and why it should be done. What makes comparative religious ethics “comparative” and to what extent can comparative religious ethics be made genuinely “theological”?Mari Rapela Heidt, who holds a PhD in theological ethics from Marquette University and currently lectures in the religious studies department at the University of Dayton, has written a well-organized and highly accessible introduction to the ethics of the world religions for beginning undergraduate students. Each of the main chapters in her book surveys a major world religion (Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and the Chinese moral tradition) through four lenses: a brief review of the tradition; the moral world of the religion; values, principles, or virtues in the tradition; and the religious tradition on a particular moral issue (e.g., Hinduism on abortion, Buddhism on wealth and poverty, Judaism on the environment, Christianity on war and peace, Islam on men and women, and China’s one-child [End Page 202] policy). The book also includes opening chapters that introduce students to the study of ethics and religious ethics; a final chapter on additional religious moral traditions (Sikhism, Jainism, Bahá’í, and Shinto); sidebars highlighting major religious figures, texts, or events (e.g., Gandhi, Thich Nhat Hanh, Elie Wiesel, the Charter of Medina, and the Cultural Revolution); and discussion questions, bibliography (including visual media), footnotes, a glossary, and an index.Although this book briefly discusses the discipline of comparative religious ethics and some of its descriptive and conceptual methods in its opening chapters, its broad scope and concise treatment mean that the actual task of comparing the similarities and differences in the ethics of the world religions is kept to a minimum. The few detailed comparisons that are made focus largely on Hindu, Buddhist, and Christian understandings of the concepts of reincarnation (29, 34, 64), dharma (18–19, 23–24, 34–35, 64), karma (18–19, 21–23, 35–36, 64), and ahimsa (25–27, 38, 70–71). While the main chapters are organized in a way that facilitates comparison, and discussion questions are included that invite students to observe similarities and differences, the book would be strengthened by giving greater attention to comparison throughout and adding a concluding chapter that summarizes its comparative content. It ends somewhat abruptly with a discussion of the Shinto moral tradition.Charles Mathewes, associate professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia, has written a book that, while limited to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, achieves much greater comparative sophistication. The text is based on a course he has taught for more than ten years called “Religious Ethics and Moral Problems,” and it bears the marks of a seasoned teacher whose primary audience is advanced undergraduate students, both religious and secular. Mathewes writes from a Protestant Christian perspective “having a strong apocalyptic dimension which is focused on the next life,” acknowledging that Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox may find his views “odd or confused” (53). Part 1 discusses the relationship between God and morality and provides an overview of the ethics of each of the three Abrahamic religions. Parts 2 and 3 then examine not only the moral positions but “the arguments animating the traditions” (3) on a wide range of personal and social matters (e.g., friendship, sexuality, marriage and family, lying, forgiveness, capital punishment, war, and the environment). Part 4 turns to the even more ordinary topics of labor, leisure, and life and the more... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 41, no. 3. © 2015 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 623 Jaye Cee Whitehead, Kath Bassett, Leia Franchini, and Michael Iacolucci “The Proof Is in the Pudding”: How Mental Health Practitioners View the Power of “Sex Hormones” in the Process of Transition In the United States today, popular discourse touts the power of “sex hormones” and hormone receptors in the brain to chemically produce gender expressions (manifested in (...) physical sex traits, behaviors, and attitudes) and identities (a sense of self as feminine or masculine). These accounts range from common assumptions that Western ideals of femininity (such as empathy understanding, cooperative orientation, nurturing behavior) and masculinity (rational/spatial understanding, competitive orientation, violent behavior) are produced by corresponding sex hormones, to studies that reduce complex gender identities and macrosocial economic phenomena to presocial, binary, hormonal processes.1 For sociologists, accounts that reduce complex identities to internal hormonal reactions are problematic for two primary reasons: first, they are inaccurate because they fail to examine how hormonal reactions are embedded in a complex cultural process of meaning and interpretation; second, they operate as bioreductive ideologies that obscure the social power inherent to the process of gender identity construction. In what follows, we extend both of these insights by examining mental health 1. For an example of a hybrid popular-scientific account of the power of sex hormones to destabilize economic structures, see Jon Coates and Joe Herbert, “Endogenous Steroids and Financial Risk Taking on a London Trading Floor,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105, no. 16 (April 2008): 6167–72. 624 Whitehead, Bassett, Franchini, and Iacolucci practitioners’ divergent interpretations of the power of sex hormones in the process of gender transition.2 In doing so, we examine the cultural power of sex hormones in crafting gender identities without reproducing reductionist interpretations of trans embodiment. Perhaps what is most perplexing about the way we speak of sex hormones is that we know it is inaccurate to describe these hormones as sexed; scientists have acknowledged since the 1930s that they are neither sex specific in their function, nor in terms of their location in male or female bodies.3 In her extensive historicization of sex hormones, Anne Fausto-Sterling concludes that it is more accurate to call androgen- and estrogen-based hormones, “steroid hormones” as they have functions that are not confined to corresponding sexed bodies. In fact she urges scientists to “break out of the sex hormone straightjacket” and to look at steroids as just one of a number of components that are important to the creation of sex and gender, including environment and experience.4 Scholars also point to an inextricable link between the chemical operation of hormones and the social process of constructing meaning, both at the level of social interaction and macrocultural constructions of sex categories and gender ideologies.5 While brain organization/activation theory attributes sex and gender differences to hormonal interactions within the developing brain, Fausto-Sterling questions the distinction between activation and organization by pointing out how “the brain can respond to hormonal stimuli with anatomical changes…hormonal systems, after all, respond exquisitely to experience, be it in the form of nutrition, stress, or sexual activity (to name but a few possibilities ).”6 Drawing from Elizabeth Grosz, Fausto-Sterling argues that the power of hormones is best understood according to the model of the 2. “Gender transition” is a controversial phrase, as it implies that transgendered individuals who receive hormone therapy are changing identities. We are only using it for lack of clear alternative phrasing, not because we believe body modifications change gender identities. 3. See Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (New York: Basic Books, 2000); Rebecca Jordan-Young, Brainstorm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); and Nelly Oudshoorn, Beyond the Natural Body: An Archeology of Sex Hormones (New York: Routledge, 1994). 4. Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body, 193–94. 5. Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body. 6. Ibid., 232. Whitehead, Bassett, Franchini, and Iacolucci 625 Möbius strip, wherein internal components of the self are always connected to and continuous with outer components such as culture and environment.7 In other... (shrink)

This study investigated the association between Big Five Personality Traits and nutrition-related variables. We used secondary data from the Indonesia Family Life Survey wave 5 involving a total of 14,473 men and 16,467 women aged 15−101 years in Indonesia that was selected by stratified random sampling conducted in the period 2014 to 2015. Data were collected through interviews with the Big Five Index 15 and a questionnaire similar to the Global Physical Activity Questionnaire which was translated into the Indonesian (...) language, and based on measurements of height and weight. Analyses used binary logistic regression test controlled by socio-demographic factors to determine the association between Big Five Personality Traits and eating habits, physical activity, and obesity. Results showed that openness and extraversion were positively associated with recommended and non-recommended foods, conscientiousness was positively associated with only recommended foods, agreeableness was positively associated with recommended foods, and negatively associated with only one non-recommended food. Whereas, neuroticism was positively associated with non-recommended foods and negatively associated with recommended foods. Openness and conscientiousness were associated with physical activity. Conscientiousness, extraversion, and neuroticism were associated with obesity. Although some results were different from previous studies, these associations can be used as strategies of behavioral change due to the adaptation of personality characteristics, which can be modified even though the personality tends to be persistent. Further studies are needed to understand other mechanisms that might underlie this association. (shrink)

A defense of the modern family, in historical perspective, this book reconstructs political theory with the family in an important and honorable place. By reviewing critically both traditional and contemporary thought on the most special relationships—as well as current public policy issues relating to them—the author addresses concerns shared by professional and lay constituencies. Noting Tocqueville's observation of the American obsession with reevaluating and remodeling the family, Professor Abbott pleads for a balanced view. The development of liberal ambivalence toward (...) the family, along with radical hostility toward it, is clearly traced. For the most part the family was safely incorporated into political theory from Aristotle to Cicero and onward to Augustine and Aquinas until modern times. Then came the challenges of the rational individualists and the romantic individualists, followed by the attacks of social and psychological radicals. Some traditional criticisms of the family are shown to be soundly based, albeit less devastating than the critics supposed. As expanded in contemporary life, however, the great critics' revisionist models take on a fantastic quality. Here we are introduced to pleas for the "eroticization of children" and for freedom from "tyranny of reproductive biology." Proposals for new bureaucratic support structures appear with great frequency: professional guardians, children's camps, cloning hospitals. And people try to act out the roles prescribed for them by theorists who attempted "to set the solitary in new and different units." Liberals and radicals, the author argues, are infatuated with a "rights model," which "takes as its basis self-sufficient rational human beings"—at the expense of "solidarity among human beings." A tradition exists, Professor Abbott holds, that facilitates reconciliation between the modern family and the political order: pluralism. Pluralism is an attempt to balance individual autonomy and mutuality, decentralization and stratification, reform and tradition, reason and sentiment. Public policy in respect to schools, housing, health care, working conditions, and recreation should be designed to foster a pluralistic family-centered society. In line with this thesis the author offers a fresh perspective on such burning issues as abortion, sexual preference, alternative lifestyles, child abuse, and children's rights. _The Family on Trial _therefore is relevant to the concerns of social and behavioral scientists, the helping professions and the clergy, teachers and parents. (shrink)

The endogenous opioid system has received attention and extensive research for its effects on reward, pleasure, and pain. However, relative to other neurochemicals, such as oxytocin, vasopressin and dopamine, the function of opioids in regulating human attachment, sociosexuality, and other aspects of human sociality has not received much consideration. For example, nonapeptides have been extensively studied in animals and humans for their possible roles in mother-offspring attachment, romantic attachment, fatherhood, and social cognition. Likewise, others have proposed models wherein oxytocin (...) and vasopressin are moderators of the relationship between steroid hormones and human social behaviors. Recently, opioids have generated renewed interest in relation to social pain, and importantly, the brain opioid hypothesis of social attachment, which suggests that endogenous opioids are a key implementer in primate and human bonding, has received some support. Here we focus on romantic bonds by proposing that endogenous opioids are an important mechanism mediating reproductive trade-offs through their inhibitory effects on testosterone production. (shrink)

One major assumption in the climate change debate is that because respondents report positive attitudes to the environment and to low carbon lifestyles they will subsequently engage in environmentally friendly/low carbon behaviors when given the right guidance or information. Many governmental agencies have based their climate change strategy on this basic assumption, despite some anxiety about the value-action gap in psychology more generally. Here we test this assumption. We investigated the relationship between explicit and implicit attitudes to (...) carbon footprint, and both self-reports of environmental behavior and low carbon behavioral choices. We found that self-reported attitudes to carbon footprint were significantly associated only with self-reported environmental and self-reported low-carbon behaviors. They were not significantly associated with the choice of low carbon alternatives in a simulated shopping task. Given that the vast majority of studies on attitudes and behavior in the environmental domain use self-report measures of behavior, this may mean that we are generating research findings that could be making policy makers overly complacent about our readiness for actual behavior change. Implicit attitudes were not significantly associated with either measure in terms of group comparisons, but those with a strong positive implicit attitude towards low carbon did choose more low carbon items, but only under time pressure. The opposite trend was found for explicit attitudes – this increased only when participants were not under time pressure. These results suggest that Kahneman’s hypothesis about contrasting systems of human cognition might be highly relevant to the domain of climate change and behavioral adaptation. (shrink)

Research suggests that contact with nature can be beneficial, for example leading to improvements in mood, cognition, and health. A distinct but related idea is the personality construct of subjective nature connectedness, a stable individual difference in cognitive, affective, and experiential connection with the natural environment. Subjective nature connectedness is a strong predictor of pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors that may also be positively associated with subjective well-being. This meta-analysis was conducted to examine the relationship between nature connectedness and (...) happiness. Based on 30 samples ( n = 8523), a fixed-effect meta-analysis found a small but significant effect size ( r = 0.19). Those who are more connected to nature tended to experience more positive affect, vitality, and life satisfaction compared to those less connected to nature. Publication status, year, average age, and percentage of females in the sample were not significant moderators. Vitality had the strongest relationship with nature connectedness ( r = 0.24), followed by positive affect ( r = 0.22) and life satisfaction ( r = 0.17). In terms of specific nature connectedness measures, associations were the strongest between happiness and inclusion of nature in self ( r = 0.27), compared to nature relatedness ( r = 0.18) and connectedness to nature ( r = 0.18). This research highlights the importance of considering personality when examining the psychological benefits of nature. The results suggest that closer human-nature relationships do not have to come at the expense of happiness. Rather, this meta-analysis shows that being connected to nature and feeling happy are, in fact, connected. (shrink)

We welcome the critical appraisal of the database used by the behavioral sciences, but we suggest that the authors' differentiation between variable and universal features is ill conceived and that their categorization of non-WEIRD populations is misleading. We propose a different approach to comparative research, which takes population variability seriously and recognizes the methodological difficulties it engenders.

Previous research has demonstrated that trait self-control is related to a range of positive romantic relationship processes, suggesting that trait self-control should be positively and robustly linked to relationship satisfaction in both partners in a romantic relationship. However, the existing empirical evidence is limited and mixed, especially regarding partner effects. With three datasets of heterosexual couples, the present pre-registered studies examined: the dyadic associations between trait self-control and relationship satisfaction both cross-sectionally and longitudinally, and whether these effects (...) hold when controlling for both partners’ relationship commitment. The results indicated a cross-sectional positive actor effect, some support for a positive cross-sectional partner effect, and only little support for a longitudinal actor effect. After controlling for relationship commitment, all effects of trait self-control on satisfaction diminished except for a longitudinal actor effect among women in Study 2. Potential explanations for the current results, and implications for theory and practice, are discussed. (shrink)

Temporal discounting is the tendency to devalue temporally distant rewards. Past studies have examined the k-value, the indifference point, and the area under the curve as dependent measures on this task. The current study included these three measures and a fourth measure, called the interest rate total score. The interest rate total score was based on scoring only those items in which the delayed choice should be preferred given the expected return based on simple interest rates. In (...) addition, associations with several individual difference measures were examined including intelligence, executive functions (inhibition, working memory, and set-shifting), thinking dispositions (Need for Cognition and Consideration of Future Consequences) and engagement in substance use and gambling behavior. A staircase temporal discounting task was examined in a sample of 99 university students. Replicating previous studies, temporal discounting increased with longer delays to reward and decreased with higher reward magnitudes. A hyperbolic function accounted for variance in temporal discounting better than an exponential function. Reaction time at the indifference point was significantly longer than at the other choice points. The four dependent measures of temporal discounting were all significantly correlated and were also significantly associated with our individual difference measures. That is, the tendency to wait for a larger delayed reward on all of the temporal discounting measures was associated with higher intelligence, higher executive functions and more consideration of future consequences. Associations between our measures of temporal discounting and outcomes related to substance use and gambling behavior were modest in our university sample. (shrink)

This article aims at contributing to the discussion about the relationships between ICT, computer science and policy-making by focusing on agent-based social simulation. Enabled, from a technical point of view, by the developments of Distributed Artificial Intelligence in the 1990s and by the features of the object-oriented programming paradigm, agent-based social simulations are a tool for the analysis of social dynamics that can be used also to support the design and the evaluation of public policies. After (...) a brief description of social simulation paradigm and of its impact on social sciences, the paper presents a simple agent-based model devised to analyze, even if in a very abstract way, a phenomenon that can rouse the interest of legal scientists: the interplay between damaging behaviors, punishment and social mechanisms of learning and imitation. Our goal is to show how agent-based simulation can be used not only to illuminate basic mechanisms underlying social phenomena but also to reflect, in an innovative way, on how society can deal with them. (shrink)

While both intuitive knowledge and reason are adequate ways of knowing for Spinoza, they are not equal. Intuitive knowledge, which Spinoza describes as the ‘greatest virtue of mind’, is superior to reason. The nature of this superiority has been the subject of some controversy due to Spinoza's notoriously parsimonious treatment of the distinction between reason and intuitive knowledge in the Ethics. In this paper, I argue that intuitive knowledge differs from reason not only in terms of its (...) method of cognition—but also in terms of its content. More specifically, I maintain that there is something that is known by intuition, namely the unique essences of things, that is not known by reason. My argument is supported by an examination of Spinoza's account of essences in the Ethics, which reveals that he is committed to both unique and shared essences. Based on this dual commitment, I argue that whereas for Spinoza both reason and intuition can be said to reach adequate knowledge of the shared essence of a thing, the unique essence of a singular thing, which is nothing but its actual essence, can only be known through intuitive knowledge. (shrink)

Some delusional patients exhibit only a single delusional belief (or several delusional beliefs concerning a single theme): this is monothematic delusion. It contrasts with polythematic delusion, where the patient exhibits a variety of delusions concerning a variety of different themes. The neuropsychological bases of various monothematic delusions are rather well understood, and there is a well-worked-out general neuropsychological theory of monothematic delusion, the two-factor theory. Whether polythematic delusion might be explained in a similar way is an open question: I (...) sketch some possible ways in which a comparable two-factor account might be developed for polythematic (‘psychiatric’) delusional conditions such as delusions of reference. (shrink)

This article complicates the idea that lesbian and gay kinship is based primarily on friendship, voluntarism and being free from duty and obligation. It also offers a more nuanced understanding of wills as a rich source of evidence for making claims about kinship, family and relationships. It analyses conversations about will-writing with fifteen older lesbians and gay men, taken from interviews which formed part of a wider socio-legal study on the intersection of ageing, gender and sexuality. The (...) analysis identifies a wide range of kinship formations and composition going beyond “family of choice” narratives, and also both connections and disconnections between ties of love and affection and disposal of assets in wills. Participants’ will-writing reflected four types of prioritisation: prioritising children; prioritising friends; prioritising siblings; mixed priorities. In contrast with accounts of “families of choice” as being duty-free, a sense of duty, especially towards biological family members, was evident in a number of interviews. I suggest that wills can sometimes be a rich source of evidence about kinship, but only when analysis takes into account the complexities and contingencies which can be involved. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kinship:The Relationship Between Johnstone's Ideas about Philosophical Argument and the Pragma-Dialectical Theory of ArgumentationFrans H. van Eemeren and Peter Houtlosser1. Johnstone on the Nature of Philosophical ArgumentAs he himself declared in Validity and Rhetoric in Philosophical Argument (1978, 1), the late philosopher Henry W. Johnstone Jr. devoted a long period of his professional life to clarifying the nature of philosophical argument. His well-known view was that philosophical arguments (...) are sui generis, i.e., not to be judged by the standards of argumentation in science or everyday discourse. Philosophical arguments are not ad rem, but are based on premises that are expressed or implied commitments of a party in dialogue. This is why philosophical argumentation is, according to Johnstone, always ad hominem. In philosophical argumentation, every ad rem argument begs the question.Usually, ad hominem argumentation is dismissed as invalid. Johnstone, however, maintains that making use of argumentum ad hominem is the only way to establish a philosophical conclusion. In an argumentum ad hominem, inferences are drawn from propositions stated or implied by the other party and critical questions are raised about the conclusions that were drawn, so that it can be used to refute a philosophical position by showing that this position is inconsistent. As Walton (2001) rightly observes, this type of ad hominem argumentation boils down to arguing from commitments of the other party, i.e., ex concessis.The use of ad hominem argumentation as the criticism of a position in terms of its own presuppositions is, in Johnstone's view, the only valid argument in philosophy, if any philosophical argument is indeed valid. All philosophical polemic is in this perspective in fact addressed ad hominem. This applies not only to philosophical argumentation that concerns self-referential refutation but also to other ad hominem types of philosophical argumentation, including the tu quoque argument (1978, 11–12).According to Johnstone, there is no objective criterion for determining the validity of ad hominem argumentation. Validity must, says Johnstone in the [End Page 51] epilogue of his collected essays on philosophical argument, be viewed as "a regulative ideal" (135). Much earlier, Johnstone had already come to the conclusion that "the valid argument is the one that maintains philosophical discussion" (38). It is this self-perpetuating feature that is the distinctive rationality of philosophy. By forcing the interlocutor to elaborate his philosophical position rather than just repeat it, the gap between the interlocutors is bridged.In order to distinguish between constructive persuasive argumentation and mere repetition or other forms of paralyzing the discourse, the line must be drawn between responsible and irresponsible persuasion. This is a problem for Johnstone. Where the Ancients solved the problem by insisting that the persuader be virtuous, Johnstone proposed to base the distinction between responsible and irresponsible persuasion on the attitude of the philosopher and his interest in maintaining the philosophical enterprise. The philosopher is a critic who criticizes con amore. His intention to do so, however, is revealed "only in the way he goes about his work" (84).A more down to earth criterion for responsible persuasion that Johnstone proposed is that the discourse should not tend to degenerate. Logic, as the discipline concerned with reason, serves to prevent the discussion from degenerating, but it can do so only if the parties concerned have jointly committed themselves to certain logical principles. If in philosophical argument a defendant is under no obligation to acknowledge an inconsistency when the other party points out an inconsistency in his position, then the other party's criticism cannot count as valid. According to Johnstone, however, it will depend on the parties' presuppositions whether or not they consider two statements as being inconsistent. In other words, what is inconsistent for the one party may not be inconsistent for the other party.Few obligations are imposed on everyone; most obligations arise from commitments made by specific individuals or groups of individuals. As Johnstone says, "Even the cogent philosophical argument is not, of course, absolutely cogent; it is cogent only relatively to interlocutors who maintain the premises on which it depends" (27). Once we abandon the search for objective conditions under which philosophical arguments can be valid, according... (shrink)

Within modern liberal political philosophy, discussions on justice have been centered upon an individualism-based distributive justice and the ‘fair share’ due to each person. According to the liberal theory of justice, the individual is an entity of rational reason and moral autonomy and considers the interests of others and of the community from a viewpoint that is focused on one’s own interests. As practical principles of justice, the principle of desert has attempted to separate the individual’s natural and inherent (...) abilities (merit) from the individual’s intentional efforts (desert); while the principle of needs has transmuted into a set of minimum exclusivity rights to protect the individual’s autonomy from serious harm and injury. Procedural justice theorists such as Rawls have attempted to invalidate the merit of the individual in an attempt to establish the identity of individuals whom are independent of the community, in the effort to promote their ideas on how to mitigate the social inequality that results from natural arbitrariness. The requirement to finalize this logical process is astrong moral reason equipped individual with the capacity of rational action. However, paradoxically, the logic of excessive reason has created an individual who isexclusive-rights-empowered but becomes ‘isolated and selfish’. The issues resulting from this situation are, first, the rational individual who is equipped with moral autonomynow becomes hidden behind a system-guaranteed set of exclusive rights; and second, the individual who should have been a rational actor and actively participating in cooperation and reciprocal relationships, does not find it easy to overcome the temptations of becoming a strategically located but passive and selfish actor within the mass market order. The result is that individuals easily relinquish their moral autonomy and exhibit a tendency to focus on personal gain. This has resulted in an increase in the polarization of society, and an increase of conflict between classes; and has engendered a crisis in the common good of the family and the political community. The true ‘good life’ and the ‘well-ordered community’ cannot be obtained by individuals who are only interested in their ‘share’, but requires ‘good citizens’ who are concerned about the happiness of others and of the society. When we are able to understand that the rational and selfish individual is necessarily non-self-sufficient; and acknowledge that there is a need for mutual philia with others, we will then be able to overcome rational reason and embrace civic friendship. The good citizen of a healthy community that is based on civic friendship, is an individual who has assimilated the virtue of justice, and will be able to aid inovercoming the limitations of modern liberalism, assist in the resolution of the pressing societal and individualistic crises and contribute to theestablishment of a ‘well-ordered community’. (shrink)

The standard methodology of comparative psychology has long relied upon a distinction between cognition and ‘mere association’; cognitive explanations of nonhuman animals behaviors are only regarded as legitimate if associative explanations for these behaviors have been painstakingly ruled out. Over the last ten years, however, a crisis has broken out over the distinction, with researchers increasingly unsure how to apply it in practice. In particular, a recent generation of psychological models appear to satisfy existing (...) criteria for both cognition and association. Salvaging the standard methodology of comparative psychology will thus require significant conceptual redeployment. In this article, I trace the historical development of the distinction in comparative psychology, distinguishing two styles of approach. The first style tries to make out the distinction in terms of the properties of psychological models, for example by focusing on criteria like the presence of rules & propositions vs. links & nodes. The second style of approach attempts to operationalize the distinction by use of specific experimental tests for cognition performed on actual animals. I argue that neither style of criteria is self-sufficient, and both must cooperate in an iterative empirical investigation into the nature of animal minds if the distinction is to be reformed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kinship:The Relationship Between Johnstone's Ideas about Philosophical Argument and the Pragma-Dialectical Theory of ArgumentationFrans H. van Eemeren and Peter Houtlosser1. Johnstone on the Nature of Philosophical ArgumentAs he himself declared in Validity and Rhetoric in Philosophical Argument (1978, 1), the late philosopher Henry W. Johnstone Jr. devoted a long period of his professional life to clarifying the nature of philosophical argument. His well-known view was that philosophical arguments (...) are sui generis, i.e., not to be judged by the standards of argumentation in science or everyday discourse. Philosophical arguments are not ad rem, but are based on premises that are expressed or implied commitments of a party in dialogue. This is why philosophical argumentation is, according to Johnstone, always ad hominem. In philosophical argumentation, every ad rem argument begs the question.Usually, ad hominem argumentation is dismissed as invalid. Johnstone, however, maintains that making use of argumentum ad hominem is the only way to establish a philosophical conclusion. In an argumentum ad hominem, inferences are drawn from propositions stated or implied by the other party and critical questions are raised about the conclusions that were drawn, so that it can be used to refute a philosophical position by showing that this position is inconsistent. As Walton (2001) rightly observes, this type of ad hominem argumentation boils down to arguing from commitments of the other party, i.e., ex concessis.The use of ad hominem argumentation as the criticism of a position in terms of its own presuppositions is, in Johnstone's view, the only valid argument in philosophy, if any philosophical argument is indeed valid. All philosophical polemic is in this perspective in fact addressed ad hominem. This applies not only to philosophical argumentation that concerns self-referential refutation but also to other ad hominem types of philosophical argumentation, including the tu quoque argument (1978, 11–12).According to Johnstone, there is no objective criterion for determining the validity of ad hominem argumentation. Validity must, says Johnstone in the [End Page 51] epilogue of his collected essays on philosophical argument, be viewed as "a regulative ideal" (135). Much earlier, Johnstone had already come to the conclusion that "the valid argument is the one that maintains philosophical discussion" (38). It is this self-perpetuating feature that is the distinctive rationality of philosophy. By forcing the interlocutor to elaborate his philosophical position rather than just repeat it, the gap between the interlocutors is bridged.In order to distinguish between constructive persuasive argumentation and mere repetition or other forms of paralyzing the discourse, the line must be drawn between responsible and irresponsible persuasion. This is a problem for Johnstone. Where the Ancients solved the problem by insisting that the persuader be virtuous, Johnstone proposed to base the distinction between responsible and irresponsible persuasion on the attitude of the philosopher and his interest in maintaining the philosophical enterprise. The philosopher is a critic who criticizes con amore. His intention to do so, however, is revealed "only in the way he goes about his work" (84).A more down to earth criterion for responsible persuasion that Johnstone proposed is that the discourse should not tend to degenerate. Logic, as the discipline concerned with reason, serves to prevent the discussion from degenerating, but it can do so only if the parties concerned have jointly committed themselves to certain logical principles. If in philosophical argument a defendant is under no obligation to acknowledge an inconsistency when the other party points out an inconsistency in his position, then the other party's criticism cannot count as valid. According to Johnstone, however, it will depend on the parties' presuppositions whether or not they consider two statements as being inconsistent. In other words, what is inconsistent for the one party may not be inconsistent for the other party.Few obligations are imposed on everyone; most obligations arise from commitments made by specific individuals or groups of individuals. As Johnstone says, "Even the cogent philosophical argument is not, of course, absolutely cogent; it is cogent only relatively to interlocutors who maintain the premises on which it depends" (27). Once we abandon the search for objective conditions under which philosophical arguments can be valid, according... (shrink)

Negative attitudes and stigmatization can originate from the perception of a disease-related threat. Following the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is often suggested that incidents of discriminatory behavior are the result of defense mechanisms aimed at avoiding pathogens. According to the behavioral immune system theory, people are motivated to distance themselves from individuals who show signs of infection, or who are only heuristically associated with a disease, primarily because of the disgust they evoke. In this paper we focus (...) on negative attitudes toward gay men and lesbians who are among social groups that have been persistently framed as “unclean.” In our correlational study (N= 500 heterosexual participants; Polish sample data collected during the first COVID-19 lockdown in Poland, in March/April 2020) we tested moderation models derived from the behavioral immune system theory. Specifically, we investigated whether perceived vulnerability to disease and perceived threat of contracting COVID-19 moderate the relation between disgust and homonegativity. We found that sexual disgust (but not pathogen nor moral disgust) predicted homonegative attitudes. This effect was stronger for participants expressing higher levels of perceived vulnerability to disease but was not dependent on the perception of the COVID-19 threat. The results reaffirm previous evidence indicating a pivotal role of disgust in disease-avoidance mechanisms. They also point to functional flexibility of the behavioral immune system by demonstrating the moderating role of perceived vulnerability to disease in shaping homonegative attitudes. Finally, they show that the threat of COVID-19 does not strengthen the relationship between disgust and homonegativity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kinship:The Relationship Between Johnstone's Ideas about Philosophical Argument and the Pragma-Dialectical Theory of ArgumentationFrans H. van Eemeren and Peter Houtlosser1. Johnstone on the Nature of Philosophical ArgumentAs he himself declared in Validity and Rhetoric in Philosophical Argument (1978, 1), the late philosopher Henry W. Johnstone Jr. devoted a long period of his professional life to clarifying the nature of philosophical argument. His well-known view was that philosophical arguments (...) are sui generis, i.e., not to be judged by the standards of argumentation in science or everyday discourse. Philosophical arguments are not ad rem, but are based on premises that are expressed or implied commitments of a party in dialogue. This is why philosophical argumentation is, according to Johnstone, always ad hominem. In philosophical argumentation, every ad rem argument begs the question.Usually, ad hominem argumentation is dismissed as invalid. Johnstone, however, maintains that making use of argumentum ad hominem is the only way to establish a philosophical conclusion. In an argumentum ad hominem, inferences are drawn from propositions stated or implied by the other party and critical questions are raised about the conclusions that were drawn, so that it can be used to refute a philosophical position by showing that this position is inconsistent. As Walton (2001) rightly observes, this type of ad hominem argumentation boils down to arguing from commitments of the other party, i.e., ex concessis.The use of ad hominem argumentation as the criticism of a position in terms of its own presuppositions is, in Johnstone's view, the only valid argument in philosophy, if any philosophical argument is indeed valid. All philosophical polemic is in this perspective in fact addressed ad hominem. This applies not only to philosophical argumentation that concerns self-referential refutation but also to other ad hominem types of philosophical argumentation, including the tu quoque argument (1978, 11–12).According to Johnstone, there is no objective criterion for determining the validity of ad hominem argumentation. Validity must, says Johnstone in the [End Page 51] epilogue of his collected essays on philosophical argument, be viewed as "a regulative ideal" (135). Much earlier, Johnstone had already come to the conclusion that "the valid argument is the one that maintains philosophical discussion" (38). It is this self-perpetuating feature that is the distinctive rationality of philosophy. By forcing the interlocutor to elaborate his philosophical position rather than just repeat it, the gap between the interlocutors is bridged.In order to distinguish between constructive persuasive argumentation and mere repetition or other forms of paralyzing the discourse, the line must be drawn between responsible and irresponsible persuasion. This is a problem for Johnstone. Where the Ancients solved the problem by insisting that the persuader be virtuous, Johnstone proposed to base the distinction between responsible and irresponsible persuasion on the attitude of the philosopher and his interest in maintaining the philosophical enterprise. The philosopher is a critic who criticizes con amore. His intention to do so, however, is revealed "only in the way he goes about his work" (84).A more down to earth criterion for responsible persuasion that Johnstone proposed is that the discourse should not tend to degenerate. Logic, as the discipline concerned with reason, serves to prevent the discussion from degenerating, but it can do so only if the parties concerned have jointly committed themselves to certain logical principles. If in philosophical argument a defendant is under no obligation to acknowledge an inconsistency when the other party points out an inconsistency in his position, then the other party's criticism cannot count as valid. According to Johnstone, however, it will depend on the parties' presuppositions whether or not they consider two statements as being inconsistent. In other words, what is inconsistent for the one party may not be inconsistent for the other party.Few obligations are imposed on everyone; most obligations arise from commitments made by specific individuals or groups of individuals. As Johnstone says, "Even the cogent philosophical argument is not, of course, absolutely cogent; it is cogent only relatively to interlocutors who maintain the premises on which it depends" (27). Once we abandon the search for objective conditions under which philosophical arguments can be valid, according... (shrink)

Numerous studies had found that creativity is not only associated with low effort and flexible processes, but also associated with high effort and persistent processes especially when defensive behavior being induced negative emotions. The important role of self-esteem is to buffer the negative emotions and low self-esteem are prone to instigate various forms of defensive behaviors. Thus, we thought that the relationships between trait creativity and executive control brain networks might be modulated by self-esteem. The resting-state (...) electroencephalogram (RS-EEG) microstates can divided into four classical types (MS1, MS2, MS3 and MS4) which can reflect the brain networks as well as the dynamic characteristic of them. Thus, Williams creative tendency scale (WCTS) and Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (RSES) were used to investigate the modulating role of self-esteem on the relationships between trait creativity and the RS-EEG microstates. As our results showed, self-esteem consistently modulated the relationships between creativity and the duration and contribution of MS2 related to visual or imagery processing, the occurrence of MS3 related to cingulo-opercular networks, as well as transitions between MS2 and MS4 which was related to frontoparietal control networks. Based on these results, we thought that Moreover, individuals with low self-esteem might be more prone to influenced by negative emotions and develop low trait creativity; bottom-up information from vision or visual imagery might be beneficial to develop trait creativity for individuals with high self-esteem to improve trait creativity, while inhibition of irrelevant information could facilitate trait creativity for individuals with low self-esteem. (shrink)

Existing explanations of political intolerance and partisanship highlight how individuals’ ideological commitments and the homogeneity of their political environments foster intolerance toward other political groups. This article argues that cultural, interactional conditions play a crucial role in how personal and environmental factors work – or do not work – in local groups. Based on a four-year ethnographic study and 12 focus group discussions with two culturally distinct civic associations of American libertarians, I show how groups’ varying patterns of interaction, (...) or “styles,” establish distinct cultural settings, in which different attitudes and behaviors seem sensible and appropriate, particularly regarding other political groups. Thus, when libertarian groups established a “community style” of interaction, viewing the relationship among members in terms of friendship and community bonds, they also opened their social activities to non-libertarians, collaborated with them in political projects, and viewed politics as a matter of advancing shared interests with people from other political groups. Comparisons across and within field sites show how this relationship between style and political tolerance works in different libertarian groups and different social environments. These findings highlight the role of local factors in explaining variations in groups’ levels of political tolerance and present a key mechanism—centered on interaction patterns—to supplement existing analyses of the relationship between political intolerance and changing forms of civic organizing in the US. (shrink)

The cognitive model for social anxiety disorder highlights the role of safety behaviors and post-event processing. We identify the serial mediating effect of state and trait PEP between three types of safety behaviors and social anxiety. Given that the associations between the three subtypes of safety behaviors and two perspectives of PEP have not yet been examined, we aimed to investigate these relationships according to the level of social anxiety. A total of 487 participants (...) participated in an online survey. Participants were classified into two groups, high and low, based on their social anxiety scores. We used Social Behavior Questionnaire to distinguish three types of safety behaviors and the State and Trait versions of the Post-Event Processing Inventory to identify two perspectives of PEP. We used descriptive statistics and an independent t-test to compare the high and low social anxiety groups. Mediation effects were examined using mediation analysis and bootstrapping with 5,000 replications. The results showed that the three safety behaviors had different effects on social anxiety via PEP. In the high social anxiety group, avoidance behavior and anxiety-symptom control predicted social anxiety positively, whereas impression management did not. However, with state PEP and trait PEP as mediators, impression management and avoidance behavior positively predicted social anxiety but not anxiety-symptom control. In the low social anxiety group, only avoidance behavior was significantly related to social anxiety, but when the state and trait PEP were mediated, the effect disappeared. These results indicated that impression management could affect social anxiety only when mediated by PEP in people with high social anxiety. A better understanding of the content and processes underpinning safety behavior and PEPs might have important implications for the prevention and treatment of social anxiety disorder. (shrink)

Although this appeared after the debate between Victor and Zelm, logically it is prior, for Robinson's critique of conventional marriage sets the stage for the other two to consider the anarchist alternatives. Actually, Robinson does offer a vague alternative, on which most anarchists could agree, sexual relationships based on consent rather than compulsion. However, he also argues that this ideal was not designed to break up marriages nor to increase promiscuity, for relationships already based (...) on consent and friendship could only be strengthened by removing the aspect of compulsion. In this sense, Robinson's critique of existing marriage strongly parallels the critique of economic monopoly, and his ideal seems to be "free competition" for love and companionship. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Aristotle on the Concept of Shared Life by Sara BrillZoli FilotasSara Brill. Aristotle on the Concept of Shared Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. 304. Hardback, $100.00.This book is a sweeping survey of Aristotle's approach to human life. It covers what might seem to be an idiosyncratic set of topics: friendship, animal behavior, commerce, tyranny, and motherhood are among the more prominent. But Sara Brill pulls (...) them together into a cohesive and illuminating picture, showing how each reflects Aristotle's conception of the concept "life" and the two Greek words, zôê and bios, that he uses to discuss it.The book rebukes thinkers who draw too sharp a contrast between animal life, on the one hand, and human politics, on the other. Until recently, Brill writes, that has been the dominant trend, uniting thinkers otherwise as different as Giorgio Agamben and David Keyt. For writers like them, human beings must overcome and sublimate their base, animal instincts (zôê, "mere life") in order to develop rational, uniquely human "ways of life" (bioi) like the lives of the citizen and the philosopher.For Brill, by contrast, the relationship between a person and the polis in Aristotle is "an intensified form of the relations between any animal and its proper habitat" (29). Indeed, every animal species has a distinctive way of life, a bios. The lavish discussion of animal "personality" or "character" (ethos) in the History of Animals suggests their range: lions are brave, cattle are stupid, dolphins are gentle, and so on. A personality not only helps an animal flourish in some habitat (topos) but also defines its relationships with other members of its species. So although Aristotle only classifies a few animal species as "political," Brill reminds us that there is a clear sense in which all are social.Aristotle famously claims that we humans are the "most political" of all animals, but Brill shows that this claim is both incomplete and misleading. For although Aristotle thinks that we outdo even bees in organized cooperation, he also stresses that we outdo even "warlike" eagles in our capacity for violence and solitude. Confronted with the opposition between solitary and gregarious ways of life, human beings "dualize" or "play a double game" (epamphoterizei) (HA I.1, 488a7). That is, much as frogs have water-dwelling and land-dwelling inclinations, humans are socially amphibious. Indeed, every human behavior—communal, solitary, and contentious alike—turns out to be an expression of animal nature. Brill points out that much of the Politics emphasizes the negative, the way that human beings make their own and each other's lives unlivable. Thus, although Aristotle embraces the sweetness of life, which has a distinct and intrinsic pleasure, his political project anticipates Nietzsche in squarely and unflinchingly studying its "horrors" (254).For Brill, the apex of human sociality in Aristotle is not politics but the so-called "perfect" friendship that Aristotle describes in Nicomachean Ethics VIII–IX and Eudemian Ethics VII. Perfect friends, Aristotle says repeatedly, "share a life" (suzên, cognate with zôê rather than bios). Friends grieve and rejoice together, perceive together, and philosophize together too. Brill emphasizes that this list includes the full range of psychic functions, from appetite all the way up to the highest forms of abstract thought. As they live together, friends build up a "nexus of meaning and value," a "world as it is created through the sharing of pleasure, judgment, and action" in which there "emerges a subjectivity which cannot be easily or simply conceived as 'mine'" (43, emphasis in original). In the best kinds of friendship, we realize that human life is lived by the partnership itself, not just the friends individually. [End Page 149]But Brill stresses that Aristotle thinks few people will ever find "perfect friendship." It is completely out of reach for most citizens of any real-world city. Yet for Aristotle, the flawed and diverse citizens of every polis nevertheless engage in a form of shared life: shared perception of the just and unjust. How is that possible? Through fragile institutions and customs, what Aristotle calls an "adornment of habits and an arrangement of correct laws" (Politics II.5... (shrink)

The concept of political difference concerns the distinction between politics and the political. The political refers to the ontological making possible of the different domains of society, including the domain of politics in the narrow sense. Political difference was introduced as a reaction to the theoretical controversy between foundationalism and anti-foundationalism. This reaction took the form of post-foundationalism. According to Marchart, post-foundationalism does not entirely deny the possibility of grounding. It denies only the possibility of an (...) ultimate transcendent foundation insofar as this ontological impossibility makes possible the historical and contingent grounds in plural.The Heideggerian concept of ontological difference also undermines the possibility of an ultimate ontical ground which establishes the presence of all the other beings. If one wants to think beyond the concept of ground, one should obtain a clear understanding of Being as Being, namely one should grasp the Being in its difference from beings. All the same, Heidegger tends to replace the ontical grounds of metaphysics with Being itself as a new kind of ultimate ontological foundation.On the other hand, one can detect in many points of Heideggerian argumentation traces of a second alternative understanding of ontological difference which does not belong in Heidegger’s intentions and which undermines the primordiality of Being. This alternative understanding establishes a reciprocity between Being and beings. In our view, political difference not only is based in this second way of understanding but, at the same time, develops more decisively the mutual interdependence between Being and beings.In political difference the grounding part, namely the political, possesses both a grounding character and a derivative one. Politics and political both grounds and dislocate each other in an incessant and oscillating, historical procedure which undermines any form of completion of the social. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Ideal of Shared Decision Making Between Physicians and PatientsDan W. Brock (bio)IntroductionShared treatment decision making, with its division of labor between physician and patient, is a common ideal in medical ethics for the physician-patient relationship.1 Most simply put, the physician's role is to use his or her training, knowledge, and experience to provide the patient with facts about the diagnosis and about the prognoses without treatment (...) and with alternative treatments. The patient's role in this division of labor is to provide the values—his or her own conception of the good—with which to evaluate these alternatives, and to select the one that is best for himself or herself. As a rough guide to practice, this is a reasonable conception; most of the time it is likely to produce sound treatment decisions. However, as an ideal it is too simplistic, and is subject to several challenges that I will explore in this paper.Some challenges relate to the physician's role. This facts/values division of labor seems to assume that the physician can and should provide the facts about treatment alternatives in a value-neutral form. But some have questioned whether the sciences on which medicine is based are, or can be, value free. Moreover, the concepts of health and disease, and of the normal and pathological, are held by many to be value laden. And even if it is possible for physicians to provide only value-neutral facts to the patient, should the physicians' role be restricted in this way?Other challenges that I will present in the paper are to the patient's role [End Page 28] as provider of the values for the evaluation of the different treatment alternatives. One defense of this role is based on the claim that physicians are not in a position to know reliably what is in a patient's best interests (Buchanan, forthcoming). I believe at least as influential—even if often not explicitly stated—is an extreme subjectivism about values that assumes that the patient's own ultimate values, which define his or her own conception of the good, are incorrigible. By incorrigible, I mean they cannot be mistaken. In the standard case in which treatment is pursued for the patient's benefit, this extreme subjectivism is thought to support the patient's values guiding treatment decision making and treatment. I will explore this incorrigibility claim and will argue that on each of the main philosophical conceptions of the good for persons it is indefensible and should not be the basis for shared treatment decision making.Underlying this view of the physician-patient division of labor are assumptions and beliefs about the nature and relation of facts and values, and science and ethics, that are largely the legacy of a logical positivism that has long since been rejected by most philosophers. It is time that these unstable foundations for our normative ideal of the physician-patient relation were finally removed and replaced with more defensible underpinnings.Two Models of the Physician-Patient RelationshipPositivists insisted on a relatively sharp distinction between descriptive or empirical claims and science, on the one hand, and evaluative claims and ethics, on the other.2 Descriptive statements and the claims of science were to be true or false according to whether they in fact correctly described and explained the world. By remaining properly descriptive or empirical, science could, at least in principle, be entirely value neutral or value free.In its more extreme versions, positivism held that ethical judgments lacked cognitive content, but were instead expressions of emotions or attitudes, and as such could be neither true nor false, correct or mistaken. Because no evaluative statements were held to be logically entailed by any descriptive or empirical statements, moral reasoning was thought to be properly understood not as reasoning but as attempts at nonrational persuasion.3 Many drew from this an extreme subjectivism in ethics along the lines of what I have called above the incorrigibility thesis—there is no meaningful sense in which an individual's ultimate values defining his or her own conception of the good life could be mistaken, false, or unfounded.These... (shrink)

Ex interiore ipso exeas. Preface. This book reconstructs the history of a still open dialectics between several ethoi, that is, shared codes of unwritten rules, moral traditions, or self-aware attempts at reforming such codes, and ethical theories discussing the nature and justification of such codes and doctrines. Its main claim is that this history neither amounts to a triumphal march of reason dispelling the mist of myth and bigotry nor to some other one-way process heading to some pre-established goal, (...) but instead to a chain of controversies where the partners’ will to win unintentionally yields a wealth of insights on human existence that has still something to teach us. -/- 1. The Hellenic moral tradition. -/- Two different traditions of morality in vi-v century Greece are described. The birth of philosophical questioning of traditional morality and temporal and spatial variation of custom is described within the context of the v century crisis, the demise of traditional aristocratic and tyrannical rule and the birth of democracy. Two conflicting answers to the challenge are reconstructed, namely conventionalist or immoralist theories formulated by the Sophists and the eudemonist and intellectualist Socratic theory. -/- 2. Plato and the Good. -/- Plato’s own reformulation of Socrates rejoinder to the Sophists is reconstructed. His psychological views, his classification of the four cardinal virtues and his political theory are described as parts of a unitary system, culminating in an extremely realist moral ontology identifying the idea of the good with the essence of the (moral and extra-moral) world itself. -/- 3. Aristotle and practical philosophy. -/- Aristotle’s invention of practical philosophy as a field separated from first philosophy is shown to be an implication of his break with Plato moral ultra-realism. Aristotle’s agenda in his moral works is arguably dependent on a polemical intention, namely dismantling Socratic intellectualism. The semi-inductive or virtuously circular method of practical philosophy is illustrated, starting with the received opinions of the better and wiser individuals and trying dialectically to sift what is left of mistake and inconsistency in such opinions, finally trying to correct mistakes and make the overall practical science more consistent. The relationship of individual ethics, or ‘monastics’, with the art and the science of the pater families, or ‘economics’, and the science of the ruler and citizen, or politics, is illustrated. The nature of virtues, or better, excellences of character, is discussed, highlighting the basic role of hexes, or ‘dispositions’. Prudence, or better, practical wisdom, is the focus of the chapter. Its relationship with boùleusis or deliberation is discussed, and its autonomous status vis-à-vis theoretical knowledge is stressed. -/- 4. Cynics and Stoics: ethics as therapy. -/- The chapter provides an overview of Hellenistic ethics, which almost amounts to Hellenistic schools of philosophy, in so far as ‘philosophy’ became in these centuries primarily the name for a way of life. The typical character of the Cynical movement is highlighted, that of a school of life, not a school aimed at providing any kind of intellectual training was to be provided. The various phases of Stoicism are described, and the shifting place that was given to ethics in the Stoic system of idea, culminating in the paradoxical view of ethics, its impossibility in principle notwithstanding, as the only truly significant and necessary part of philosophy. The peculiar character of the Epicurean school is described, a combination of the science of well-being aiming, more than pleasure understood as in the popular view, the reduction of useless suffering, of unnecessary needs, and at a balanced selection of pleasures of the best and most durable kind. -/- 5. Roman and Imperial Moralists. -/- The chapter is dedicated to the reconstruction of a particular kind of literature, whose specific features have long been under-stressed, namely the Roman and Imperial moral literature. Cicero is treated at some length, showing how his own synthesis of various Hellenistic trends is as a truly philosophical enterprise, deserving serious consideration after one or two centuries when he was confined to the role of literate. Epictetus is given pride of place, stressing the novelty of his approach to ethics as cognitive therapy, in this case just following an already existing new wave of interest after nineteenth-century oblivion justified by alleged lack of authentic ‘philosophical’ character. -/- 6. The Hebrew moral tradition. -/- A reconstruction of basic ideas from a few books of the Hebrew Bible is provided, starting with the Prophetic tradition and the focus on God’s mercy as the source of motivation and standard for human behaviour. Then a comparative analysis is undertaken of a parallel tradition, namely the three codifications of the Torah (Law or, better, Instruction), highlighting how a core of moral ideas may be recognized as a basis and preamble of codification of civil law, cultural practice, and regulation of ritual purity. The importance of Levitic is stressed as the turning point when the stress on mercy, typical of the Prophetic tradition, starts being combined with legal tradition yielding the change in the sensibility of the Second Temple time. -/- 7. Second Temple Judaism. -/- This chapter describes the Long March leading from the post-exile Zadokite restoration to the first-century aevi vulgaris. The first topic reconstructed is the Zadokite theology of the double retribution. The second is the alternative Enochic tradition consistently rejecting the central role of the Temple, the Priesthood and worship as atonement for sins and offering as an alternative God’s unlimited mercy and preaching mercy, not sacrifice as the way of behaving requested by God. Wisdom literature, the third subject discusses, is a kind of third way, on the one hand increasingly critical towards the double retribution and ruling theology’s optimism facing the world as it is and on the other mocking at the Enochic current as a band of dreamers and visionaries. The third way consists in disenchantment facing the word as it is combined with a refusal of vain and childish hope of prizes for the righteous, suggesting instead the leading idea of right deeds for righteousness’s sake. Rabbi Hillel, Rabbi Yeshua and Philo of Alexandria are described as the three leading figures at the culminating point of such process of emergence of a new sensibility, gradually including mercy as an essential part of justice and establishing the starting point of both the Rabbinic and the Christian tradition. This starting point consists precisely in the precept of one’s neighbour’s love or of the golden rule, whose meaning is, arguably, more consistent than a long-lasting Christian tradition deriving from John and Augustine made us believe. And Christian morality, vis-à-vis allegedly legalist ‘Ancient Testament’ teachings, is less of a novelty than most early Christian writers announced. -/- 8. Talmudic moral doctrines and proto-Christian paraenesis. -/- The first three sections examine the moral doctrines of so-called 'ethical Treaties' from the Talmud, a group of treaties, among which the best known is Pirke Avot, that were left out of the six "orders" of the canon as they did not fit in any of the six groups of issues ritual or legal on which the division was based. According to Maimonides, their peculiar theme is provided by the Deot, 'opinions', i.e., mental dispositions, that is, the translation of the Greek term hexes and Arab akhlak (in turn providing in this language the name for ethics as such). The three topics I reconstruct are: i) the notion of Torah: The Torah is understood as the world order itself, or as the ‘Wisdom’ that existed even before creation and was "the tool by which the world was built"; however, the Torah is an earthly and human entity, as it was "received" by humans, and from that very moment belongs to them; ii) the relationship between love of God and love of neighbour; the treaties require us to study and practice the Torah ‘for its own sake’, that is, require us to act out of love, not out of fear or hope of reward; iii) the idea of sanctification of daily life: having disappeared with the destruction of the Temple the possibility of any conflict between liturgical service and everyday life, the latter is assumed to be in itself divine service: to give food to the poor has the same value as sacrifices in the Temple, and as an implication, the insistence become recurrent on the goodness of created things in themselves along with a polemic against ascetic currents. The conclusions drawn are: i) the moral teachings of the Talmud and those of Yeshua are, rather than similar, virtually identical; one may safely say that the precept of love and the golden rule are central ones for all Talmudic rabbis, that mercy plays an indispensable role alongside with justice, and the latter is not a different thing from one’s neighbour’s love; ii) a peculiarity of Talmud rabbis facing Yeshua is the idea of study as worship, and knowledge as a source of justice; but this is an idea of Judaism after the Temple's destruction that cannot be attributed to the Pharisees of Yeshua’s time; iii) the relation of study and practice in the Talmud parallels that between faith and deeds in Paul's epistles, that is, respectively faith or learning are a necessary and sufficient condition to be recognized as righteous, but deeds are the inevitable effect of either faith or learning. The last two sections examine first the various Christian currents and then Gnostic para-Christian or non-Christian currents as well as Manicheism. The sayings ascribed to Yeshua are examined first, yielding the conclusion that a close equivalent may be found for every saying in Talmudic literature and yet the whole is ascribed to one rabbi, with rather consistent stress on God’s mercy and unconditional forgiving as the mark of true imitation of God. Thus, Yeshua’s teaching is pure, purest Judaism. The last section describes briefly the galaxy of Gnostic currents and Manicheism, trying to sketch the profile of moral teachings resulting from an encounter of Asian spiritual traditions, Hellenistic lore and sparks of teachings from apocalyptic Jewish currents. -/- 9. Christianity as “philosophy”. -/- The chapter reconstructs the stormy story of several encounters between Christian currents and Hellenistic philosophical schools. The first one was with late Cynicism. Recent, rather controversial, literature discovered the jargon and several rhetorical topics from the Stoic and Cynical popular philosophy in a few books from the New Testament itself. This, far from proving that Rabbi Yeshua himself had been influenced by cynical preachers, is a proof of the necessity to translate the original Christian message in a Greek lexicon deeply impregnated with cynic terminology. The second was with Platonism, yielding the mild and temperate moral teaching of Clemens of Alexandria, teaching the sanctity of nature and the human body, the joy of moderate fruition of ‘natural’ kinds of pleasures, and the beauty of the marital life – in short, the opposite of the standard picture of Medieval Christianity. Ambrose of Milan brings about a different kind of synthesis, namely with Middle Platonism, where Stoic themes prevail. The most shocking case is Augustine, where early Manichean education is overcome in a former phase by a synthesis of Plotinian Neo-Platonism and Christian preaching, yielding a sustained polemic with the Manicheans and rather optimistic views on life and Creation, the body and sexuality, and Hebrew-Judaic tradition not far from Clemens of Alexandria. In a later phase, occasioned by controversy on the opposite front, with such Christian currents as the Pelagians and Donatists, Augustine comes back to heavily anti-Judaic and world-denying ascetic attitudes where is earlier Manichean upbringing seems to emerge again. The tragedy of medieval Christianity will be the later Augustine’s overwhelming influence. A final section is dedicated to the monastic tradition where a curious mixture of world-denying asceticism with an astonishingly penetrating ‘science’ of introspection emerges. -/- 10. Ethics in the Arabic-Islamic Philosophy. -/- The Qurān and the qadit, that is, collections of sayings ascribed to the prophet Muhammad contain a wealth of precepts and catalogues of virtues mirroring moral contents from the Jewish and the Christian traditions, among them the basic notion of imitation of the Deity, where mercy is assumed to be its basic trait. An important tradition within Islam, namely Sufism, stressed to the utmost degree the role of mercy, turning Islam into a mystic doctrine centred on the retreat from the world, abandonment to God’s will, and a peaceful and fraternal attitude to our fellow-beings. A secular literary tradition originating in the Sassanid Empire, the literature of advice to the Prince, had for a time a widespread influence in the newly constituted Arabic-Islamic commonwealth. In a later phase, the legacy of Hellenic philosophy made its way into the intellectual elite of the Islamic world. The first important legacy was Platonic, and the Republic became the main text for Islamic Platonism. In a second phase also Aristotelian and Stoic influence were assimilated. Miskawayh’s treatise was the masterwork at the time Arabic philosophy reached its Zenith. It is a treatment of the soul’s diseases and their remedies, combining the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean with the Stoic doctrine of the passions and elements of Galenic medicine. Towards the eleventh-twelve centuries, a war raged among theologians and philosophers, finally won by the former with the disappearance of philosophy as such. The newly established mainstream, yet, was no kind of intolerant fanaticism. It drew from the work of mystic theologian Al-Ghazālī, the best heir of Sufism, teaching a tolerant and peaceful attitude to our fellow-beings and a passive attitude to destiny as an expression of the Divine will. -/- 11. Ethics in the Jewish philosophy. -/- The encounter between the Talmudic tradition and Hellenic philosophy had taken place for the first time in Alexandria at the time of Philo but the two traditions had parted way again. In fact, the kind of Platonic Judaism founded by Philo survived only within Christianity, in the fourth Gospel and then in writings by Clemens of Alexandria. The Talmudic literature had absorbed too a few traits from the Hellenic Philosophy, namely an idea of ethics as care of the self and a role for the education of character as propaedeutic to theoretical knowledge. In the Arabic-Islamic world, a second round started when Jewish authors writing in Arabic undertook the task to prove the full compatibility of the tradition deriving from Tora and Platonic philosophy. The culmination of this attempt is provided by Moshe ben Maimon who tried to use Aristotelian ethics as a language into which the teaching from the Pirke Avot could be translated. -/- 12. The practical philosophy revival in Latin Europe. -/- A reconstruction is carried out of a fresh start of philosophical ethics in Latin Europe at the turn of the Millennium rescuing a Platonic and Augustinian legacy, with Anselm and Peter Abelard. In this phase remarkable innovations are introduced, including Abelard’s claim of the obliging character of erring consciousness. In a second phase, the rediscovery of Nicomachean Ethics thanks to Latin translation of Arabic versions, gives birth to a new wave of ethical studies, recovering the very idea of Aristotelian practical philosophy, with the potential implication of a full legitimization of natural morality, i.e. ethics without Revelation. -/- 13. Scholastic practical philosophy: Thomas Aquinas. -/- Aquinas’s ethics is theological ethics out of which it would be vain to try to extract self-contained philosophical ethics. His treatment of topics in philosophical ethics, yet, does not boil down to the repetition of Aristotelian arguments but is rather a creative reshaping of such arguments. For example, he introduces also in the practical philosophy a first principle parallel to the principle of non-contradiction; and he also carries out a synthesis of Aristotelianism, Stoicism, neo-Platonism. Even though it is essentially moral theology, Aquinas’s doctrine - unlike Augustine – grants full citizenship to "natural" morality, firstly by rejecting the claim that the corruption of human nature due to the original sin is so radical as to leave pure nature incapable of moral goodness. The doctrine is presented in a more sophisticated formulation in a few of the Quaestiones such as De Malo and De Veritate, in the Summa contra Gentes and in the commentaries to Aristotle than in the famous Summa Theologica, but the latter work includes the only or the largest exposition of some decisive part of the theory. Thus, the Summa Theologica should be read for what it is more than criticized for not being what it was not meant to be. It was not meant to be the brilliant synthesis of all that Reason he had been able to produce with what Revelation had added about which the Neo-Thomists used to dream, but rather a manual for the training of preachers and confessors, where theoretical claims are not too ambitious, and a few serious tensions are left. Besides a jump between the Prima Secundae and the Secunda Secundae, being the former an essay in virtue theory and the latter a handbook for confessors, the most serious tension is perhaps the one between the ethics of right reason presented in most of Prima Secundae and the eudemonistic ethics developed in quaestiones 1-5 of the same part; the alternative ethical theory which also may be found in Augustine, the Stoic view of a cosmic reason eventually coincident with the moral law, was believed by Anselm (followed by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham) to be incompatible with eudemonism. It is questionable whether Thomas was able to solve the tension proving that it is just an apparent tension, in so far as the right reason and bliss derived from the knowledge of God tend to coincide, but this is just a conjecture. Thomas’s ethics is a virtue ethics, not a law-based one, and moral judgment focuses on the virtues, particularly charity, not on the commandments and even less on absolute prohibitions; Thomas, however, would not have considered a drastic alternative between law and the virtues such as the one which has been advanced in late twentieth-century philosophy to be justified. Nonetheless, when it discusses ‘special’ virtues, it ceases to be an ethics of virtue and becomes a disappointing and often contradictory discussion of legal and illegal acts. Such a discussion takes most of the time ‘reasonable’ middle positions on controversial issues but not the alternative approach that Aristotelianism would have made possible; even when some occasional Aristotelian claim shows up, such as money’s barrenness as a reason against usury, this seems to be made by an author who apparently ignores the Aristotelian Thomas of the Prima Secundae. It is an ethic of human autonomy which recognizes the binding character of the individual conscience and, potentially, even a duty to disobey unjust laws. It is true that what Thomas writes in his discussion of the death penalty and persecution of heretics is simply disgusting, and yet we should blame Thomas the man, not the Thomist ethical theory. Finally, Thomas’s ethics is no way an ethical ‘absolutism’, as both the traditionalist Catholic theologians and secularists tend to believe, but rather an ethic of prudential judgment on the individual case. Exceptions to this approach – or better the result of logical fallacies – are provided by the thesis of the absolute character of negative precepts and of the existence of so-called intrinsically evil acts, a thesis that would simply cease to make sense in the light of Thomas’s own distinction between human act and natural act, carrying consequences that Thomas did not live long enough to draw. -/- 14. Scholastic practical philosophy: John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham. A reconstruction is carried out of the ethical doctrines by both most authoritative Franciscan doctors. Their continuity with Aquinas is vindicated against prejudice carried by centuries of polemics within the Catholic Church and tendentious disparaging of both as forerunners of execrable Reformation. Besides aspects of continuity, also the important novelties are illustrated, first John’s abandonment of Aquinas’s and Augustine’s eudemonism, asserting righteousness for righteousness’s sake, and then William’s explicit defence of the philosopher’s virtues, that is, natural morality, and his solution to the dilemma of God’s omnipotence and the universal validity of natural law extending to God himself. -/- 15. Aristotelianism interpreted by the Magistri Artium. -/- A reconstruction of the until recently forgotten ethical doctrines by the Parisian Magistri Artium, falsely depicted as ‘Averroists’ and either deprecated as heretics or mistaken for predecessors of modern secularism. In fact, they illustrate a view of ‘natural’ virtue as may be understood by human reason without the assistance by Revelation. -/- Etiamsi daremus Deum non esse. Intermediate considerations. Three considerations may be suggested by the story told in the book. The first one is that intellectual histories have been mounted in the past with the same state of mind as one may mount a war chariot. Such constructions are not very helpful as tools for understanding the past. Wars waged in the past have left the field obstructed by ruins not easy to remove even by those historians who have animated by an impartial academic motivation. They have been influenced too by consequences of past emphasis on some authors and damnatio capitis suffered by others, by stratifications left on sources by secondary literature and translations, by allotment of originally close sources to different literary genres, by the monopolization of religious texts by churches with full cooperation by secular scholars who still fear contamination. The second one is that aware or unaware ethnocentrism has carried various calamities to our comprehension of the past. Their last vestiges have surfaced again in the semi-scholarly discussion on the idea of Europe occasioned by the debate on a project of a European Constitution. Mention of Europe’s Christian roots has been the clumsiest move. Proclamations of such roots were so obvious in what they affirmed as they were totally off-path concerning what they omitted, namely that he modern European moral tradition included legacies from Middle-Eastern wisdom, Hellenic philosophy, Roman Imperial legal literature, and, besides, a Jewish legacy in turn incorporating other more ancient Middle-Eastern legacies and which has been partly conveyed by Christianity. And the Islamic-Arabic philosophy too, in so far it made the Nicomachean Ethics available to Latin Christian scholars, is one more of Europe’s roots. The third is that religious traditionalists and secularist fundamentalists have gone hand in hand for a couple of centuries in either extolling or deprecating the allegedly Modern idea of Ethics without God, first formulated by Hugo Grotius with the claim that natural law would still be valid ‘etiamsi daremus – quod sine summo scelere dari potest – Deum non esse’. The facts are, firstly, that this is not an irreligious claim and Grotius was just a pious and meek Christian and, secondly, that it is not a ‘modern’ claim but rather one more formulation of the claim that there is a natural morality, independent of divine revelation, a claim shared by Moshe ben Maimon, Aquinas and William of Ockham. -/- . (shrink)

While much has been written on love, the question of how romantic love differs from friendship love has only rarely been addressed. This chapter focuses on shedding some light on this question. I begin by considering goal-oriented approaches to love. These approaches, I argue, have the resources needed to account for the differences between friendship love and romantic love. But purely goal-oriented accounts fail on account of their utilitarian gloss of our loved ones. Even (...) when they circumvent this criticism, they make the mistake of conflating the motivational tendencies of love for its constitutive characteristics. I then turn my attention to David Velleman's account of love as a moral emotion but argue that his view lacks the resources to account for the differences between romantic love and friendship love. I then go on to sketch a socially situated account of love that does better in this respect. I conclude by reflecting on the normativity of love. (shrink)

Exercise plays an important role in the process of socialization among young people and children by providing a context in which children can be exposed to the existing rules and values of society. However, the increasing news of unethical behaviors reported in competitive scenarios led the public to suspect the view “sports shape great characters.” To investigate the issue and explore potential influencing factors, the study examined the relationship among athletes’ perfectionism, achievement goals, and sports ethics based on (...) the achievement goal theory. A total of 243 young athletes were recruited. The multidimensional perfectionism, achievement goals, and sports ethics were measured by a battery of questionnaires. A direct effect model that did not include mediation variables and a mediation effect model that included mediation variables were analyzed by structural equation modeling. Results indicated that perfectionistic strivings may positively predict sports ethics, whereas perfectionistic concerns may negatively predict sports ethics. Mastery approach and mastery avoidance may positively predict sports ethics, whereas the performance approach and performance avoidance may negatively predict sports ethics. Achievement goals may partially mediate the relationship between perfectionism and sports ethics. Perfectionistic strivings may negatively predict sports ethics through performance approach and positively predict sports ethics through mastery approach. Perfectionistic concerns may negatively predict sports ethics through performance avoidance and positively predict sports ethics through mastery avoidance. To prevent athletes from using unethical behaviors, strategies should be developed to reduce perfectionistic concerns and increase their perfectionistic strivings. (shrink)