Previous work suggests that relative increases in socially evaluative threat modulate the psychobiological stress response. However, few studies have compared stressors which manipulate the level of socially evaluative threat to which the participant is exposed. Here we present two studies. In the first, we assessed the integrity of an ecologically valid, laboratory stressor and its effects on acute psychobiological reactivity and ability to evoke an anticipatory response prior to participation. Specifically, we assessed whether the expectation and experience of direct social (...) evaluation evokes greater reactivity than indirect evaluation. In the second study, we sought to replicate the findings regarding acute stress reactivity whilst extending the assessment window to assess the extent to which the stressor evokes anticipatory responses. As hypothesized, greater reactivity was observed following direct social evaluation compared with indirect observation. Increases in anxiety, heart rate and blood pressure were demonstrated across both studies and the paradigm therefore provides an ecologically valid technique for the activation of psychological and cardiovascular stress responding. Additionally, anticipation of experiencing socially evaluated multitasking led to increases in anxiety, tension, and worry prior to the event itself, supporting previous suggestions that threat anticipation may prolong the activation of stress mechanisms. In the present studies we assessed whether the expectation and experience of direct social evaluation evokes greater reactivity than indirect evaluation. The findings have demonstrated that direct social evaluation of multitasking is a more potent stressor than multitasking with indirect evaluation. Furthermore, our findings indicate that the period of anticipation of stressful events may be critical to understanding the process of stress regulation, and as such we recommend extending the sampling window to allow for the investigation of these processes. (shrink)

Resumos -/- The view of historical writing as a mere objective and dispassionate recording of the past is already passé. From the outset of postmodernity, historiography was already seen as a tool either for oppression or empowerment. Integral to the role of historiography in this oppression or empowerment tendency is the construction of identity. In earlier stages of Southeast Asian scholarship, the common pattern among the historiographical materials produced (often by the intelligentsia of the colonial establishment) is the depiction of (...) Southeast Asia as an artificial buffer region that serves as a watershed of "Sinicization" from the East and "Indianization" from the West, and even "Islamization" later on. Very illustrative in this regard is George Coedes seminal work, "The Indianized States of Southeast Asia" (1968). This will in turn act as an intellectual conditioning to prepare others to passively recognize the legitimacy of Westernization and Modernization as the rightful heirs of Sinicization and Indianization. The period of decolonization will change the landscape of historiography, specifically in insular Southeast Asia, or what Zeus Salazar would call "Dunia Melayu" (1998). Post-coloniality would give birth to the indigenization of historical discourse in the region and, as a corollary, to a reactive movement that would challenge colonial identity politics. The Austronesian complex would serve as a major hermeneutical tool in asserting the nationalist agenda towards the collective Malayan past of the Maphilindian countries. This paper would attempt to survey major historical works, from colonial historiography to national historiography, with an emphasis on their roles in the identity politics of the region. (shrink)

We propose that human self-domestication favored the emergence of a less aggressive phenotype in our species, more precisely phenotype prone to replace (reactive) physical aggression with verbal aggression. In turn, the (gradual) transition to verbal aggression and to more sophisticated forms of verbal behavior favored self-domestication, with the two processes engaged in a reinforcing feedback loop, considering that verbal behavior entails not only less violence and better survival, but also more opportunities to interact longer and socialize with more conspecifics, (...) ultimately enabling the emergence of more complex forms of language. Whereas in the case of self-domestication sexual selection has been proposed to work against physical aggression traits, in the case of verbal insult the selection has been proposed to work in favor of verbal aggression. The tension between these two seemingly opposing forces gets resolved/alleviated by a tendency to replace physical aggression with verbal aggression, and with verbal behavior more generally. This also helps solve the paradox of the Self Domestication Hypothesis regarding aggression, more precisely why aggression in humans has been reduced only when it comes to reactive aggression, but not when it comes to proactive aggression, the latter exhibiting an increase with the advent of modern language. We postulate that this feedback loop was particularly important during the time period before 50 kya, arguably between 200 kya and 50 kya, when humans were not fully modern, neither in terms of their skull/brain morphology and their behavior/culture, nor in terms of their self-domestication. The novelty of our approach lies (i) in giving an active role to early forms of language in interacting with self-domestication processes; (ii) in providing specific linguistic details and functions of this early stage of grammar (including insult and humor); (iii) in supplying neurobiological, ontogenetic, and clinical evidence of a link between (reactive) aggression and (reactive) verbal behavior; (iv) in identifying a variety of proxies of the earlier stages in evolution among cognitive disorders; and (v) in identifying specific points of contact and mutual reinforcement between these two processes (self-domestication and early language evolution), including reduction in physical aggression and stress/tension, as well as sexual selection. (shrink)

Bernard Matolino has recently argued that African communitarianism is an ethics grounded in emotion aligned with reason. If he is correct, questions arise about what emotions have value within African communitarianism, especially as emotions like anger or resentment could stand in tension with important communitarian values, such as social harmony. While little critical attention has so far been paid to such emotions within an African communitarian framework, a wider philosophical literature examining the moral value of disruptive emotions could be (...) drawn on to develop analyses of emotion within African communitarianism. In this paper, I explore how such an analysis could proceed. I argue that drawing on the wider emotion literature, and especially the concept of reactive attitudes introduced by P. F. Strawson, provides an initial case for even disruptive emotions to have value. Even so, we must question whether an analysis of emotion plausibly based on individualistic commitments is compatible with relational communitarian commitments. I nevertheless defend the compatibility and argue that, not only can disruptive emotions have instrumental value through their epistemic and motivational roles in the promotion of community but, importantly, they are partially constitutive of the interpersonal relationships within which we are embedded and that form community. (shrink)

Marking a ground-breaking moment in the debate surrounding bodies and "body politics," Elizabeth Grosz's Space, Time and Perversion contends that only by resituating and rethinking the body will feminism and cultural analysis effect and unsettle the knowledges, disciplines and institutions which have controlled, regulated and managed the body both ideologically and materially. Exploring the fields of architecture, philosophy, and--in a controversial way--queer theory, Grosz shows how these fields have conceptually stripped bodies of their specificity, their corporeality, and the vestigal traces (...) of their production as bodies. Her tour de corpe investigates the work of Michel Foucault, Teresa de Lauretis, Gilles Deleuze, Judith Butler and Alphonso Lingis. Grosz considers their work by examining the ways in which the functioning of bodies transforms understandings of space and time, knowledge and desire. Begining with an exposition of the epistemological implications of bodily and sexual difference, Grosz examines the effects such knowledge have on the reception of meaning. She looks at the relationship between the knowledge of difference and the way that knowledge validates, affirms, avows and valorizes subjects. Grosz then extends this analysis to an investigation of the relationship between space, time, bodies and the spatial "arts" such as architecuture, urban planning and geography. In the last section, Grosz moves toward a radical consideration of bodies and their relationship to transgression and perversity. Controversially showing the ways in which "queer" theory fails to offer a truly transformative conception of bodies and their politics, Grosz finds "queer" a reactive category "which sees itself in opposition to a straight norm and thus defines itself in terms of this norm." Consequentially, "queer" theory inherits the acceptance of an entire range of sexual practices, without "asking what they share and without taking into account the profound tension that may exist among these practices." Grosz's Space, Time and Perversity is a diverse and incisive collection of essays from a renowned feminist philosopher. (shrink)

Aspects of peroxisome evolution, uncoupling, carnitine shuttles, supercomplex formation, and missing neuronal fatty acid oxidation (FAO) are linked to reactive oxygen species (ROS) formation in respiratory chains. Oxidation of substrates with high FADH2/NADH (F/N) ratios (e.g., FAs) initiate ROS formation in Complex I due to insufficient availability of its electron acceptor (Q) and reverse electron transport from QH2, e.g., during FAO or glycerol‐3‐phosphate shuttle use. Here it is proposed that the Q‐cycle of Complex III contributes to enhanced ROS formation (...) going from low F/N ratio substrates (glucose) to high F/N substrates. This contribution is twofold: 1) Complex III uses Q as substrate, thus also competing with Complex I; 2) Complex III itself will produce more ROS under these conditions. I link this scenario to the universally observed Complex III dimerization. The Q‐cycle of Complex III thus again illustrates the tension between efficient ATP generation and endogenous ROS formation. This model can explain recent findings concerning succinate and ROS‐induced uncoupling. (shrink)

The complex structure of the tragic aspects of globalization has been accounted for in extant literature. What remains unclear is how deglobalization, isolationism and all the radically disruptive movements and politics in-between will shape transnational corporations’ organizational practices. The purpose of this study is to interrogate and problematize the implications of anarchic ‘globalisolationism’ vis-à-vis the atlas of insurrection and the TNCs’ global responsibility towards human-centric management practices. We situate our analysis in the heavily politicized and contested discursive space of emergent (...) global geopolitical and environmental tensions and the global quest to reclaim dignity, freedoms, right to resources and decisions—stakeownership. ‘Globalisolationism’ is conceptualized as a radically non-compromising coexistence of globalization and isolationism by design, aided by new information technologies, reactivated mass consciousness and slack political resources. It is characterized by the radical pursuit of new deals within the global geopolitical and economic order; renegotiation of existing deals for resource appropriation and democratic space for the marginalized; the collapse of the old political order via auto-implosion as a beneficial constraint; and the defence of the status quo in global resource and environmental governance due to ‘translocal’ insurrection. Therefore, the paper suggests how TNCs’ current modus operandi could be transformed into responsible human/environment-centric organisational practices to accommodate emerging sociopolitical and environmental challenges. It further highlights the implications for novel game-changing policies and political action by ‘subaltern’ societies and their metamorphosis from victims of planetary vandalism to stakeowners with sovereignty over their resources. (shrink)

William James (1842-1910) appartient à la génération de penseurs qui ont contribué à donner à la pensée nord-américaine sa tonalité propre. Philosophe canonique, il est aussi considéré comme l'un des fondateurs de la psychologie. Les Principes de psychologie, publiés en 1890, marquent une date dans l'histoire d'une discipline, alors en voie de constitution, qui mobilisait les résultats de la physiologie nerveuse et cérébrale et tentait de rompre avec la philosophie. Cette " science de la vie mentale ", ce livre la (...) restitue dans ses transformations, ses débats, ses redéfinitions en reconstruisant le point de vue de James et des acteurs de l'époque à rebours de l'histoire jugée. En s'appuyant sur les archives, la correspondance, les notes de lecture inédites de William James conservées à l'université Harvard et données en partie dans l'ample dossier critique, Thibaud Trochu nous introduit dans l'atelier de travail de James. Il réactive aussi ses tensions, ses interrogations sur les zones frontières de l'expérience humaine comme le somnambulisme, la télépathie, les états hypnotiques provoqués. 11 restitue des cas de controverses précis, comme ceux de Georges Albert Smith ou de Miss Piper dont discutait James avec ses interlocuteurs européens et états-uniens. Aux origines composites de la psychologie, une dizaine d'années avant la Science des rêves de Freud. (shrink)

This chapter shows that, when it comes to topics such as realism, naturalism, and philosophy of nature, Hegel’s advances over Schelling are achieved partly in and through his immanent-critical appropriation of and reckoning with (the early) Schelling’s legacy. Hence, likewise, any twenty-first-century reactivation of “The Earliest System-Program of German Idealism” must reckon with the relevance of Schelling, as well as the ambivalences both uniting and dividing him from Hegel. The chapter makes this case by charting a tension in Schelling’s (...) philosophy between its monistic and nature-philosophical tendencies in relation to the problem of error. (shrink)

1. Let me begin by distinguishing two conceptions of guilt. The first conceives of guilt as an experience of reprehensible failure in response to specific actions. I feel guilty if I break a promise for reasons that cannot justify this transgression. This conception of guilt as a responsive attitude, which I call locally- reactive guilt, captures a tension in one’s agency that arises from a local failure. The second conception understands guilt as a condition that shapes one’s whole (...) existence. Guilt, on this view, is a persistent feeling of imperfection. Such guilt, existential guilt, presupposes a reference point vis-à-vis which one’s life is so experienced. This reference is most plausibly a shared understanding of moral perfection within a community that is so demanding as to make it hard or impossible to live up to its standards. While the adoption of the Christian God offers one explanation for the emergence of such a shared understanding, other explanations of existential guilt are possible (see section 5 below). Existential guilt manifests itself especially in locally-reactive guilt, but there can be locallyreactive guilt without existential guilt. I submit that Nietzsche is not particularly interested in locally-reactive guilt, and that his vision of the future of humanity can accommodate such guilt. That conception of guilt, at any rate, is not tied to the Christian sittliche Weltordnung that Nietzsche attacks, or to other thick metaphysical or ethical views. Locallyreactive guilt merely presupposes that some set of expectations is in place and perceived as binding. What Nietzsche is interested in is existential guilt. As far as the Genealogy is concerned, this is to some extent a hermeneutical preconception based on my understanding of the German-speaking or otherwise European culture in which Nietzsche operated—a culture in which religious diversity generally amounted merely to the joint presence of Catholics and Lutherans (or, in some places, other Protestants) in the same area, interspersed with relatively small groups of Jews, and in which the Christian legacy was prevalent across all sections of culture.. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that Nietzsche should be understood as a “thorough-going nihilist”. Rather than broaching two general projects of destroying current values and constructing new ones, I argue that Nietzsche should be understood only as a destroyer of values. I do this by looking at Nietzsche’s views on nihilism and the role played by Nietzsche’s cyclical view of time, or his doctrine of the eternal recurrence of the same. I provide a typology of nihilisms, as they are found (...) in Nietzsche—negative, reactive and radical—through a close reading of an unpublished fragment in his later notebooks, remnants of which are scattered throughout his published work. I show how the progression between the different stages of nihilism are a “necessary consequence of the ideals entertained hitherto” , with the eternal recurrence of the same playing a vital role in this progression. The last stage of nihilism—radical nihilism—is ambiguous between a life-denying, or passive, nihilism and a life-affirming, or active, one; but, I argue, both kinds of nihilism preclude a construction of new values. But there is an inherent tension within Nietzsche’s account of nihilism insofar as it relies on the eternal recurrence of the same. This tension is brought out nicely by Löwith and partially resolved by Klossowski. There are at least two meanings of the eternal recurrence of the same. In one sense, the cosmological reading, it is intended to make sense of the idea that time is infinite and matter is finite by claiming that every possible combination of matter will recur infinite times. In the other sense, the anthropological reading, it is a kind of thought experiment, analogous to Kant’s categorical imperative: “live in every moment so that you could will that moment back again over and over” . There is a tension between these readings insofar as one must will to live in such a way that they will do it again, over and over , but also that what they do will make no difference, for what one decides to do has been done innumerable times. I argue that this tension can only be resolved by considering Nietzsche as aiming at “goal-lessness as such” and placing him as an active nihilist. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.1 (2003) 135-136 [Access article in PDF] Alastair Hannay. Kierkegaard: A Biography. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xvi + 496. Cloth, $39.95. In the opening pages of this carefully crafted biography, Hannay states that he has no intention of making matters easy for his reader. By this, he means that "final judgments" will not be forthcoming on a number of key (...) issues surrounding Kierkegaard and his works: the nature of his relation to Christianity, the motives leading him to collide with The Corsair, and the meaning and wisdom of his final attack on Bishop Jakob Mynster and the established Danish Church. This is not to say that Hannay presents Kierkegaard either through rose-colored lenses or through narrowly intellectualist ones. Indeed, one of the book's central virtues is that it combines a philosopher's long-standing interest in Kierkegaard's writings with other guiding passions: a fascination with the sources of human creativity, the twists and turns of nineteenth-century European intellectual history, and the drama of one man's sustained grappling with the meaning of (his) life and the degree to which this meaning could be forged and sustained in his own writing.Hannay raises the curtain on Kierkegaard's life at the intellectual debut of the latter. In his first public appearance before the Student Union at the University of Copenhagen, Kierkegaard took issue with a student colleague's espousal of liberal reform. Hannay sees in Kierkegaard's performance signs of things to come: (1) the attempt to gain the notice and approval of the leading cultural lights, such as Danish literary icon Johan Ludvig Heiberg, and (2) a habit of seeking unity and definition through opposition and controversy. In his subsequent discussion of Fear and Trembling, Hannay notes the inescapable fact that Kierkegaard's philosophic positions are often tailor-made justifications for his private [End Page 135] behavior. The classic example is de Silentio's celebration of Abraham's teleological suspension of the ethical, a celebration which would, as often noted, vindicate equally Isaac's sacrifice by Abraham and Regine's "sacrifice" by Kierkegaard. Already on the occasion of his address to the Student Union, Kierkegaard's thought lines up nicely with his self-interest. But Hannay's work is hardly a reductive exposé. His ear for the varied leitmotifs of the authorship, their development and integration, is unrivaled. Regarding Kierkegaard's first skirmish in the academic arena, Hannay alerts his reader to emergent themes: (1) the valorization of personal unity, and the assertion that such unity must emerge from a life rather than be imposed upon it, and (2) a corresponding respect for the power of lived experience and a critique of any life or movement which is either primarily reactive or abstracted from individual existence. While personal unity remains a desideratum throughout his life, the integrity of lived experience is ultimately placed in question by Kierkegaard's construal of Christianity, which he comes increasingly to see as opposed to the humanism which underlies both Enlightened and Romantic thought.Hannay's biography focuses primarily on the development of Kierkegaard's thought as expressed in his journals and published writings. As such, his biography tends to emphasize the continuity of the authorship over its internal tensions. Hannay views, for example, thehumanistic stance of Climacus's Religiousness A as propadeutic to the radical transcendenceof the godhead embraced by Religiousness B. This is a topic open to dispute, since Kierkegaard himself went out of his way to record, and perhaps exhibit, the offensiveness of Christian demands to (fallen) human nature. Hannay acknowledges Kierkegaard's lifelong ambivalencetoward Christianity, but he does not show how this ambivalence echoes in the authorship. Ifhis Kierkegaard is a less divided character than the original, Hannay nevertheless challenges those who would minimize either (1) the depth of Kierkegaard's breach with humanistic thought or (2) the degree to which "the religious life-view [is] persistently in the offing" (Hannay, "Something on Hermeneutics and Communication in Kierkegaard After All," forthcoming in Kierkegaard and the Word, Poul Houe and Gordon D. Marino... (shrink)

Early theorists speculated that extremely shy children, or those with anxious temperament, were likely to have anxiety problems as adults. More recent studies demonstrate that these children have heightened responses to potentially threatening situations reacting with intense defensive responses that are characterized by behavioral inhibition and physiological arousal. Confirming the earlier impressions, data now demonstrate that children with this disposition are at increased risk to develop anxiety, depression, and comorbid substance abuse. Additional key features of anxious temperament are that it (...) appears at a young age, it is a stable characteristic of individuals, and even in non-threatening environments it is associated with increased psychic anxiety and somatic tension. To understand the neural underpinnings of anxious temperament, we performed imaging studies with 18- fluoro-deoxyglucose high-resolution Positron Emission Tomography in young rhesus monkeys. Rhesus monkeys were used because they provide a well validated model of anxious temperament for studies that cannot be performed in human children. Imaging the same animal in stressful and secure contexts, we examined the relation between regional metabolic brain activity and a trait-like measure of anxious temperament that encompasses measures of BI and pituitaryadrenal reactivity. Regardless of context, results demonstrated a trait-like pattern of brain activity that is predictive of individual phenotypic differences. Importantly, individuals with extreme anxious temperament also displayed increased activity of this circuit when assessed in the security of their home environment. These findings suggest that increased activity of this circuit early in life mediates the childhood temperamental risk to develop anxiety and depression. (shrink)

In this paper I propose that, since the mid-eighteenth century medical science has simultaneously generated and disavowed ‘undead’ bodies, suspended between life and death. Through close analysis of three examples of ‘undeath’ taken from different moments in medical history, I consider what these bodies can tell us about medicine, its history, cultural meaning, scientific status and its role in shaping ideas of embodiment, identity and death. My first example is Edgar Allan Poe’s story ‘The facts in the case of M. (...) Valdemar’ which imagines the possibility of a man mesmerised at the point of death. I read this story as a response to the rise of professional, scientific medicine in the 1840s. I then look at the recurring issue of brain death in order to consider tensions within twentieth-century medical hegemony. Finally I read the Alder Hey scandal as a reactivation of undead anxiety in response to the emergent culture of medical consumerism at the end of the twentieth century. (shrink)

Despite the entangled universe cannot be considered merely as an enormously complex system, as it is reactive to actions and observations, references on quantum entanglement in living systems may help find ways in which quantum effects can move from the microscopic to the macroscopic, in realms where the mind/brain behave as a quantum object and is sensitive to the dynamic state of the entire universe. Taking up vision from a synaesthetic perspective as a perfusion of senses, and putting together (...) a myriad of references around this perception phenomenon, the idea is to work in the building of artistic experiences where vision takes up a tactile function, emerging from a tension between the movements governed by the interaction of the attractors. (shrink)

This thesis aims to elucidate an apparent paradox about the role of emotion in moral agency. A number of lines of concern suggest emotion may have serious negative impact on moral agency. On the other hand, there are considerations that suggest emotion also plays a crucial role in motivating, informing and even constituting moral agency. Significantly, there is a strong connection between participant reactive attitudes and ascription of moral status as agent or subject. Nonemotional agents could not hold such (...) attitudes. Also, removing participant reactive attitudes imposes a peculiar and incoherent form of solipsism about moral agency. Given this necessary role for emotion, can we give an account of emotion that will also meet the worries? I examine, as crucial examples, three recurrent lines of concern about emotion - that it threatens our capacities for objectivity, rationality, and autonomy - to tease out the descriptive assumptions about emotion, and the normative assumptions about moral agency, that these objections are based on. I then offer three lines of argument towards resolving these worries. The first addresses the worries directly, and the other two shift blame off emotion. First, then, I argue that the normative concerns can largely be met by a descriptive account that views emotion as cognitive. However, “judgementalist” cognitive accounts that assimilate emotion to belief may make emotion metaethically respectable at the cost of making it meta-ethically redundant. Also, such accounts are descriptively less than plausible. A better approach, I argue, is to allow that belief may play a significant role in emotion but to also allow at least a quasicognitive role to the distinctively affective element in emotion: feeling. I also argue for a hrther revision of cognitive accounts to emphasise that emotions reflect features of those who feel them. If we were different, our emotions would be different. So, secondly, I argue that a number of the features that power worries about emotions have their sources in what those who feel them are like, rather than in emotions as such. However, both human nature and emotion are capable of significant plasticity and diversity. We are also capable of a considerable - but not infinite - degree of self-determination both about what we are like and what our emotions are like. Finally, I argue that the normative assumptions that power the objections to emotion are themselves in need of revision - and in some tension with each other. This leads to a McGufin-theory of emotion in moral agency: Problems with emotion’s place in moral agency serve as indicators of unresolved tensions in our thinking about moral agency, rather than just indicators of problems with emotion as such. In view of this, I also argue for caution in any attempts to change emotion to fit particular ideals of moral agency. (shrink)

During the lengthy and complex process of human evolution our ancestors had to adapt to extremely testing situations in which survival depended on making rapid choices that subjected muscles and the body as a whole to extreme tension. In order to seize a prey traveling at speeds that could reach 36 km per hour Homo sapiens had just thousandths of a second in which to anticipate the right moment and position himself before the prey arrived. He also had to (...) prepare the appropriate gesture, tensing his muscles and overcoming the resistance determined by body weight. While we are no longer faced with an environment that is anything so threatening, our brain continues to use these mechanisms day in day out to save time and energy, enabling us to avoid situations of danger, sense in advance the intentions of an interlocutor, and more besides. In this article we set out to show that our brain is not only a reactive mechanism, capable of reacting quickly to the stimuli that arrive from the external environment, but is above all a pro-active mechanism that allows us to make hypotheses, anticipate the consequences of actions, and formulate expectations: in short, to wrong foot an adversary. (shrink)

The Cuyahoga River is a small Ohio river with an outsized influence in U.S. environmental history. The 1969 river fire ignited the public imagination, galvanized the environmental movement, and spurred the creation of the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Clean Water Act. Water quality has since improved markedly, yet several controversial dams continue to obstruct the Cuyahoga’s flow, reducing environmental quality. The U.S. and Ohio EPAs recently announced plans to remove all such dams by 2023. In this paper, I (...) develop a rich environmental case study rooted in philosophy and environmental history about the Cuyahoga’s transition from literally being on fire to a 100-mile long, free flowing river from its headwaters to Lake Erie in less than 100 years. This transition involves dimensions of public policy with slow-moving, often reactive public institutions, corporations operating in bad faith with respect to informed dialogue in the public interest, and spirited environmental activists. I develop an environmental pragmatism to make sense of the negotiated shift in values and attitudes concerning our nation’s waters that emerged through public dialogue between GOs, NGOs, energy providers, activists, and local residents. More specifically, I leverage contemporary environmental pragmatism’s emphasis on value pluralism combined with John Dewey's insights about public reason concerning science policy in democratic polities and the tension between technical expertise and democratic decision-making in particular. (shrink)

This response to Paul Russell looks at how we should understand the moral sentiments and their role in action. I think that there is an important tension in Russell’s interpretation of this role. On the one hand, aspects of Russell’s position commit him to some kind of rationalism about the emotions: for instance, he has argued that P. F. Strawson’s account of the reactive is crudely naturalistic; and he has claimed that emotions are constitutive of our sensitivity to (...) moral reasons. On the other hand, he has explicitly endorsed a Humean view of motivation which, I will argue, is incompatible with these rationalist commitments. As well as pointing out the tension and arguing that it should be resolved in the direction of rationalism, I sketch the kind of rationalism that Russell needs: that reason can, through the autonomous progress of moral inquiry, give rise to new forms of emotion. (shrink)

L’Iran (notamment post-révolutionnaire) souffre deux fois de sa mal-représentation. Non seulement, à l’intérieur des frontières, le décalage entre la diversité sociale et l’État islamique installé depuis la révolution de 79 s’est creusé, mais également, dans sa perception à l’extérieur, cette révolution a réactivé des lectures culturalistes. Nous mobilisons dans cet article le concept de « représentation », qui implique des significations politiques et esthétiques, afin de dessiner un autre tableau des tensions entre la société iranienne et son État. Le blocage (...) de la représentativité démocratique par le gouvernement a conduit la société iranienne, en quête de son image, à se tourner vers des modalités de plus en plus esthétiques. Ces sensibilités influencent le paysage politique, de même que les représentations esthétiques sont toujours susceptibles de prendre un sens politique. C’est à ce conflit des images dans le contexte iranien que nous nous intéressons. (shrink)

Concussions are traumatic brain injuries that can result from a blow to the head or a jolt to the body. Athletes in many sports are exposed to concussion risks. There is a growing concern in sport and society about sport-related concussions (SRC) and an increasing awareness of the importance of proper diagnosis, treatment, and prevention. A traditional, reactive approach emphasizes sound protocols in cases of suspected SRC. A proactive approach involves identifying various causes of SRC and implementing preventive measures. (...) For example, to reduce SRC prevalence in Canadian youth ice hockey, a ban on body checking has been introduced. When a preventive SRC measure implies a change in the main rules of a sport, it impacts its nature and alters how it is played. This can lead to tensions between SRC prevention and sporting concerns. By employing an extended consequentialist framework that includes normative analyses of the values of sport, I will examine the possibilities and limitations of preventive SRC measures in terms of constitutive rule changes. More specifically, I will propose a consequentialist framework to determine the conditions under which athlete exposure to SRC risks in a given sport can be considered unacceptable, acceptable, and even valuable. (shrink)

This response to Paul Russell looks at how we should understand the moral sentiments and their role in action. I think that there is an important tension in Russell’s interpretation of this role. On the one hand, aspects of Russell’s position commit him to some kind of rationalism about the emotions: for instance, he has argued that P. F. Strawson’s account of the reactive is crudely naturalistic; and he has claimed that emotions are constitutive of our sensitivity to (...) moral reasons. On the other hand, he has explicitly endorsed a Humean view of motivation which, I will argue, is incompatible with these rationalist commitments. As well as pointing out the tension and arguing that it should be resolved in the direction of rationalism, I sketch the kind of rationalism that Russell needs: that reason can, through the autonomous progress of moral inquiry, give rise to new forms of emotion. (shrink)

This response to Paul Russell looks at how we should understand the moral sentiments and their role in action. I think that there is an important tension in Russell’s interpretation of this role. On the one hand, aspects of Russell’s position commit him to some kind of rationalism about the emotions: for instance, he has argued that P. F. Strawson’s account of the reactive is crudely naturalistic; and he has claimed that emotions are constitutive of our sensitivity to (...) moral reasons. On the other hand, he has explicitly endorsed a Humean view of motivation which, I will argue, is incompatible with these rationalist commitments. As well as pointing out the tension and arguing that it should be resolved in the direction of rationalism, I sketch the kind of rationalism that Russell needs: that reason can, through the autonomous progress of moral inquiry, give rise to new forms of emotion. (shrink)

This response to Paul Russell looks at how we should understand the moral sentiments and their role in action. I think that there is an important tension in Russell’s interpretation of this role. On the one hand, aspects of Russell’s position commit him to some kind of rationalism about the emotions: for instance, he has argued that P. F. Strawson’s account of the reactive is crudely naturalistic; and he has claimed that emotions are constitutive of our sensitivity to (...) moral reasons. On the other hand, he has explicitly endorsed a Humean view of motivation which, I will argue, is incompatible with these rationalist commitments. As well as pointing out the tension and arguing that it should be resolved in the direction of rationalism, I sketch the kind of rationalism that Russell needs: that reason can, through the autonomous progress of moral inquiry, give rise to new forms of emotion. (shrink)

Inscrites dans la législation sur la nationalité de nombreux États au cours du xixe siècle, les discriminations de sexe concernant la transmission, l’acquisition ou la conservation de la nationalité, en particulier la dépendance de l’épouse à l’égard de la nationalité de son mari, suscitent des protestations de la part de groupes internationaux de femmes dès le début du xxe siècle. Au lendemain de la Première Guerre mondiale, dans un contexte marqué par le nationalisme et l’acquisition du suffrage pour les femmes (...) dans de nombreux pays, le débat s’internationalise. Cet article analyse, à l’échelle internationale, les arguments des différents protagonistes de ce débat qui réactive la ligne de tension entre individualisme et familialisme et constitue l’occasion d’une reformulation des contours de la citoyenneté des femmes. (shrink)

Integrating corporate social responsibility (CSR) into a for-profit organization’s business activities is fraught with tensions. This paper reports a case study of a construction company, exploring how different tensions emerged to challenge company-level aspirations for strategic CSR integration. The study identifies three types of persistent CSR tensions and four management practices, discussing how the management practices led the organization to navigate CSR tensions in both active and defensive ways. Furthermore, the study explicates why the case company succeeded in integrating CSR (...) into formal business strategy and shared attitudes but struggled with CSR integration in the domain of day-to-day operations. The paper contributes to the CSR literature by developing a tension-centric perspective on CSR development. It highlights the necessity of tension navigation at both the organizational and the action levels, the key role of active (as opposed to defensive) navigation of CSR tensions, and the importance of alignment between organizational and action levels in navigating tensions for sustaining strategic focus on CSR over time. (shrink)

Review of T. S. Kuhn's The Essential Tension.

According to virtue epistemology, the main aim of education is the development of the cognitive character of students (Pritchard, 2014, 2016). Given the proliferation of technological tools such as ChatGPT and other LLMs for solving cognitive tasks, how should educational practices incorporate the use of such tools without undermining the cognitive character of students? Pritchard (2014, 2016) argues that it is possible to properly solve this ‘technology-education tension’ (TET) by combining the virtue epistemology framework with the theory of extended (...) cognition (EXT) (Clark and Chalmers, 1998). He argues that EXT enables us to consider tools as constitutive parts of the students’ cognitive system, thus preserving their cognitive character from technologically induced cognitive diminishment. The first aim of this paper is to show that this solution is not sufficient to solve the TET. Second, I aim to offer a complementary and more encompassing framework of tool-use to address the TET. Then, I apply it to the educational uses of ChatGPT as the most notable example of LLM, although my arguments can be extended to other generative AI systems. To do so, in Sect. 1.1, I present Pritchard’s framework of cognitive character and virtue epistemology applied in education, to which I am committed in this treatment. In Sects. 2 and 3, I respectively illustrate Pritchard’s (2014) solution to the TET, and I highlight the general limitations of his proposal. Thus, in Sect. 4.1 I characterize ChatGPT as a computational cognitive artifact using Fasoli’s (2017, 2018) taxonomy of cognitive artifacts. In Sect. 4.2, I introduce my proposal, which combines Pritchard’s account of virtue epistemology with Fasoli’s (2017, 2018) taxonomy of cognitive artifacts to address the TET. Finally, in Sect. 5.1, I present some epistemically virtuous uses of ChatGPT in educational contexts. To conclude, I argue in favor of a multidisciplinary approach for analyzing educational activities involving AI technologies such as ChatGPT. (shrink)

Idealization is a reasoning strategy that biologists use to describe, model and explain that purposefully departs from features known to be present in nature. Similar to other strategies of scientific reasoning, idealization combines distinctive strengths alongside of latent weaknesses. The study of ontogeny in model organisms is usually executed by establishing a set of normal stages for embryonic development, which enables researchers in different laboratory contexts to have standardized comparisons of experimental results. Normal stages are a form of idealization because (...) they intentionally ignore known variation in development, including variation associated with phenotypic plasticity (e.g. via strict control of environmental variables). This is a tension between the phenomenon of plasticity and the practice of staging that has consequences for evolutionary developmental investigation because variation is conceptually removed as a part of rendering model organisms experimentally tractable. Two compensatory tactics for mitigating these consequences are discussed: employing a diversity of model organisms and adopting alternative periodizations. (shrink)

From the first time I encountered the problem of free will in college, it struck me that a clear-eyed view of free will and moral responsibility demanded some form of nihilism. Libertarianism seemed delusional, and compatibilism seemed in bad faith. Hence I threw my lot in with philosophers like Paul d’Holbach, Galen Strawson, and Derk Pereboom who conclude that no one is truly moral responsible. But after two decades of self- identifying as a nihilist, it occurred to me that I (...) had continued to treat my friends. (shrink)

Reactivity, or the phenomenon by which subjects tend to modify their behavior in virtue of their being studied upon, is often cited as one of the most important difficulties involved in social scientific experiments, and yet, there is to date a persistent conceptual muddle when dealing with the many dimensions of reactivity. This paper offers a conceptual framework for reactivity that draws on an interventionist approach to causality. The framework allows us to offer an unambiguous definition of reactivity and distinguishes (...) it from placebo effects. Further, it allows us to distinguish between benign and malignant forms of the phenomenon, depending on whether reactivity constitutes a danger to the validity of the causal inferences drawn from experimental data. (shrink)

Clinical research employing the randomized clinical trial has, traditionally, been understood to pose an ethical dilemma. On the one hand, each patient ought to get the treatment that best meets her needs, as judged by the patient in consultation with her doctor. On the other hand, the method most helpful to advancing our understanding about what treatments are indeed best able to meet patient needs is the randomized trial, which necessitates that each patient's care is decided not by physician judgment (...) or patient choice but instead by random assignment. The tension can be described as a conflict between the interests of individual patients who are sick today, and the interests of the group of people who will become sick in the future and would benefit from advances in medical understanding. How one ought to balance these important and often competing interests is an important ethical question that resists easy resolution. (shrink)

Academic mothers perform intersected roles. They carry out their profession in workplaces, while they take the “second shift” of motherhood back to their families. The contested expectations in family and career built by the heterosexual matrix cause tension to academic mothers. We qualitatively investigate the interview data of six Chinese women academics on how they perform to negotiate their motherhood and academic work in the context of Chinese higher education, driven by the Butlerian theoretical concept of the heterosexual matrix. (...) The findings suggest that Chinese academic mothers play a zero-sum game between being mothers and being academics, deriving from their ontological responsibilities of motherhood. We conclude that in the masculine academia, these women academics help maintain the heterosexual matrix by satisfying the gender normativity when they negotiate their performances in their family and career; meanwhile, most have developed some strategies to achieve their career advancement. (shrink)

Acceding to the demand that public policy should be based on “the best available evidence” can come at significant moral cost. Important policy questions cannot be addressed using “the best available evidence” as defined by the evidence-based policy paradigm; the paradigm can change the meaning of questions so that they can be addressed using the preferred kind of evidence; and important evidence that does not meet the standard defined by the paradigm can get ignored. We illustrate these problems in three (...) contexts of evidence-based policy. (shrink)

The famous French chemist, Marcelin Berthelot, published his first scientific paper in 1850. However, reference to this paper has been largely ignored in the various accounts of his lasting contributions to chemistry. The probable reason for this is that this paper is concerned with a method of subjecting a liquid to tension, and it is more appropriate to regard it as a paper on physics rather than on chemistry. In the work described in this largely-forgotten paper, written whilst he (...) was still a young research student, Berthelot showed that liquids contained in his ‘Berthelot tube’ could withstand a considerable tension; and he is the first person to have observed cavitation, a phenomenon which has been studied so widely this century. The next mention in the literature of the Berthelot tube method is at the turn of the present century, after which it again seems to have been forgotten until the 1940s; since then there has been considerable progress using the Berthelot tube technique. In this paper the work described in Berthelot's original paper is discussed in some detail, and the subsequent fruitful development of the method is also traced and assessed. (shrink)

This article reports the results of an exploratory investigation of a particular area of moral tension experienced by MBA students in a graduate school of business. During the first phase of the study, MBA students'' own perceptions about the moral climate and culture of the business school were examined. The data gathered in this first part of the study indicate that the students recognize that a central part of this culture is constituted by a shared familiarity with a set (...) of institutionally reinforced premises about human behavior and motivation including the ideas that: 1) people are self-interested utility-maximizers, 2) individuals should be unimpeded in their pursuit of their own self-interest through economic transactions, and 3) virtually all human interactionsare economic transactions. The data further indicated that the business students experience a degree of tension between this ethic of self-maximizing and the everyday ethics prevalent in our broader culture, in which altruism and selflessness are central elements. The final section of the study was an effort to see whether and how these institutionally sanctioned premises were integrated into the students'' arguments about the relationship between self-interest and social responsibility. (shrink)

This paper argues for a new understanding of Strawson’s distinction between personal, impersonal, and self-reactive attitudes. Many Strawsonians take these basic reactive attitude types to be distinguished by two factors. Is it the self or another who is treated with good- or ill-will? And is it the self or another who displays good- or ill-will? On this picture, when someone else wrongs me, my reactive attitude is personal; when someone else wrongs someone else, my reactive attitude (...) is impersonal; and when I wrong someone else, my attitude is self-reactive. Against this account, I argue that the basic reactive attitude types are better distinguished according to whether they express partial or impartial concern. This fits Strawson’s discussion in “Freedom and Resentment”, and it allows us to see an important point that the alternative approach obscures. Namely, while attitudes like resentment, gratitude, shame, and pride can arise as responses to our own treatment and behavior, they can also arise as third-party responses to the treatment and behavior of our family members, romantic partners, and close friends. Similarly, attitudes like moral indignation and disapprobation also have a wider scope than is often acknowledged; they can arise as responses to others’ treatment, but they can also arise as responses to our own treatment when we react impartially to circumstances involving ourselves. (shrink)

P. F. Strawson famously gives pride of place to the reactive attitudes in his account of moral responsibility, though he says little about guilt or any other self-reactive attitudes. This inattention is curious, given that on his view lacking capacity for self-reactive attitudes is grounds for exemption from the moral community. Perhaps because of Strawson’s limited remarks regarding them, the self-reactive attitudes have not received much attention in commentaries on his view. In this paper, I will (...) attempt to fill this lacuna by examining the role of the self-reactive attitudes within his approach to moral responsibility. I will focus in particular on reactive guilt to show that it plays a number of roles in our interpersonal lives, from reinforcing our important personal relationships to holding ourselves accountable with respect to our own personal ideals. A better understanding of these roles, I will argue, helps to clarify Strawson’s notion of reactive attitude and to strengthen his overall argument, in addition to revealing some interesting aspects of the way various self-reactive attitudes operate within our lives. (shrink)

Summary With regard to the dynamics of human experience and behavior, Gestalt theoretical psychotherapy (GTP) relies mainly on Kurt Lewin’s dynamic field theory of personality. GTP is carried out by including a re-interpretation of Lewin’s theory in some aspects of psychotherapeutic practice in relation to critical realism. Human experience and behavior are understood to be functions of the person and the environment (including the other individuals therein) in a psychic field (life space), which encompasses both of these mutually dependent factors. (...) The anthropological model of this approach is, therefore, not mono-personal but, a priori, structural and relational in nature. It does not one-sidedly focus on the “inner components” of a person, but on the interrelation of the individual and a given environment, which affects experience and behavior. After a brief introduction of these basic concepts, this lecture will focus especially on Lewin’s concept of tension-systems, which may be considered as the Gestalt theoretical counterpart of Freud’s drive theory. Further, we define the basic assumptions which underlie GTP and explain how the person moves through her/his life experience in terms of Gestalt psychology. (shrink)

There is a fundamental tension in business ethics between the apparent need to ensure ethical conduct through hierarchical control, and the encouragement of individuals' potential for autonomous moral judgement. In philosophical terms, these positions are consequentialist and Kantian, respectively. This paper assumes the former to be the dominant position in practice, and probably in theory also, but regards it as a misplaced extension of the more general managerial tendency to seek and maintain control over employees. While the functions of (...) such control are recognized, the arguments in favour of individuals' moral autonomy are pursued from both a Kantian and a social–theoretic perspective. Reference is made to Kohlberg's research on moral development that provides an insight into how individuals, through participation in debate with colleagues, might become more effective moral agents within organizational settings. This is contrasted with a managerial perspective, which pays lip service to individuals' right to such genuine involvement. The paper considers psychological manipulation and the legitimacy of managerial authority on matters of ethics, as opposed to in the purely technical context. The wider societal significance of such hierarchical power in organizations constitutes an important background to the paper. It is concluded that genuine, non‐manipulative, participation by employees (and others) is the way forward for the ethical management of business ethics. (shrink)

Physical theories continue to be interpreted in terms of particles. The idea of a particle required modification with the advent of quantum theory, but remains central to scientific explanation. Particle ontologies also have the virtue of explaining basic epistemic features of the world, and so remain appealing for the scientific realist. However, particle ontologies are untenable when coupled with the empirically necessary postulate of permutation invariance—the claim that permuting the roles of particles in a representation of a physical state results (...) in a representation of the same physical state. I demonstrate that any theory which is permutation invariant in this sense is incompatible with a particle ontology. (shrink)

The rise of molecular epigenetics over the last few years promises to bring the discourse about the sociality and susceptibility to environmental influences of the brain to an entirely new level. Epigenetics deals with molecular mechanisms such as gene expression, which may embed in the organism “memories” of social experiences and environmental exposures. These changes in gene expression may be transmitted across generations without changes in the DNA sequence. Epigenetics is the most advanced example of the new postgenomic and context-dependent (...) view of the gene that is making its way into contemporary biology. In my article I will use the current emergence of epigenetics and its link with neuroscience research as an example of the new, and in a way unprecedented sociality of contemporary biology. After a review of the most important developments of epigenetic research, and some of its links with neuroscience, in the second part I reflect on the novel challenges that epigenetics presents for the social sciences for a re-conceptualization of the link between the biological and the social in a postgenomic age. Although epigenetics remains a contested, hyped, and often uncritical terrain, I claim that especially when conceptualized in broader non-genecentric frameworks,. (shrink)