Prior reports suggest that affective effects in visual word processing cannot be fully explained by a dimensional perspective of emotions based on valence and arousal. In the current study, we focused on the contribution of approach and avoidance motivational systems that are related to different action components to the processing of emotional words. To this aim, we compared frontal alpha asymmetries and brain oscillations elicited by anger words associated with approach motivational tendencies, and fear words that may trigger either avoidance, (...) approach or no action tendencies. The participants’ task was to make decisions about approaching or distancing from the concepts represented by words. The results of cluster-based and beamforming analyses revealed increased gamma power band synchronization for fear words relative to anger words between 725 and 750 ms, with an estimated neural origin in the temporal pole. These findings were interpreted to reflect a conflict between different action tendencies underlying the representation of fear words in semantic and emotional memories, when trying to achieve task requirements. These results are in line with the predictions made by the fear-hinders-action hypothesis. Additionally, current data highlights the contribution of motivational features to the representation and processing of emotional words. (shrink)

Although Pierre-Daniel Huet was of the most important and prolific intellectuals of his time, he continues to be relegated to the background of discussions about early modern philosophy. In this er...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.4 (2002) 599-617 [Access article in PDF] Thinking Geometrically in Pierre-Daniel Huet's Demonstratio evangelica (1679) April G. Shelford Sometime after 1679, Pierre-Daniel Huet (1630-1721) indulged an author's vanity by comparing his Demonstratio evangelica with works whose authors are far better known today. He recorded his judgments on a scrap of paper. 1First, he contrasted the Demonstratio to Antoine Arnauld's Les nouveaux (...) élémens de géometrie (1664). While Arnauld had assumed that all the principles of geometry were true and all geometrical demonstrations certain, and had considered religious questions not amenable to methodical demonstration, Huet noted, "I made clear the contrary by proving religion through a methodical sequence of propositions similar to those one finds in geometry." For Arnauld religious belief fell into the class of things better proven through a series of mutually reinforcing propositions than through proofs modeled on geometry; Huet had actually accomplished the latter. Arnauld did not require geometric proofs in religious works; Huet wrote the Demonstratio "to satisfy those who do." Indeed, Arnauld forbade such proofs, "but I permitted them... and I proposed something to satisfy those who do [demand them]."Huet then considered Blaise Pascal's Pensées (1670). Pascal had also rejected demonstration in proving religious truths, Huet noted, opting instead for "moral proofs, which are directed more to the heart than to the mind. In other words he desired to work harder at moving and disposing the heart than at convincing and persuading the intellect." Apparently, "M. Pascal did not believe that one could prove the truth of the Christian religion by geometric proofs; much less that he had any hope of doing so." [End Page 599]Huet's jottings precisely situate the Demonstratio evangelica (1679)between the claims of Cartesian rationalism and Pascal's fideism and religion of the heart, inviting us to take another look at an imperfectly understood work. Scholarly treatment of the Demonstratio has generally been cursory or partial because it has been considered less for its own merits than for how it fits into larger research agendas. 2 Some scholars have offered important insights but either do not develop them or do not consider the Demonstratio in a sufficiently broad context. 3 A consensus on the Demonstratio's general thrust thus masks puzzling questions. Everyone acknowledges, for example, that Huet's apologetic responded to Baruch Spinoza's Tractatus theologico-politicus (1670). Like other Christian apologists, he had to maintain "the Mosaic authorship" that was "the supposed guarantee of the truth of the text," 4 devoting "long chapters to the authenticity of the books of the Old Testament." 5 Yet Huet began the Demonstratio with an assault on geometrical knowledge and an epistemological discussion—an odd place to begin refuting the Tractatus. 6 Why? The question deserves a good answer, as Huet was a scholar of international reputation, and his contemporaries judged the Demonstratio an important work. 7More important for us, the evolution of the Demonstratio superbly reflects a vanished intellectual world and scholarly culture and in fact records change [End Page 600] in that world over four decades. Its genesis was the rash promise of a young man inspired by the possibilities of geometry and aspiring to recognition in the Republic of Letters, but before fulfilling that promise Huet developed a lively interest in such diverse fields as biblical criticism and natural philosophy, and he would apply the insights gained there in his apologetic. 8 A central question confronting Huet and his contemporaries was how to achieve certainty in matters religious, historical, and scientific. 9 The Demonstratio reveals Huet's conclusion that certainty in all three was profoundly interrelated. Finally, he composed the Demonstratio during the 1670s, having grasped with much alarm the consequences of the spread of Cartesianism. Thus, the Demonstratio is an intellectual biography not just of the author but of an era.Of course, Huet had to contend with Spinoza's challenge to Mosaic authorship, which fatally undermined the historical certainty of the Bible, but he also wrote... (shrink)

A multi-faceted study of intellectual transformation in early modern Europe as seen through the eyes of a leading French scholar and cleric, Pierre-Daniel Huet (1630-1721).

Pretende-se apresentar e avaliar o programa inicial de Huet ao publicar a Demonstratio Evangelica (1679), obra de caráter apologético e inclinação cética, frente a seu contexto intelectual, buscando uma melhor compreensão do impacto que tal livro exerceu nas discussões entre grandes intelectuais da República das Letras na Europa do século XVII. Para isso, este artigo contém três momentos: primeiro, procura-se traçar os objetivos da obra e os meios utilizados por Huet para alcançá-los. Posteriormente é exposta uma série de (...) acusações e críticas à Demonstratio Evangelica e, por fim, é feito um balanço a respeito dessas críticas em relação às intenções iniciais de Huet e argumenta-se que esta obra tem certo valor apologético, mas, mais do que isso, exerceu um papel notável no que diz respeito às discussões sobre a história, religião e filosofia no século XVII. (shrink)

Pierre-Daniel Huet is one of the most important skeptics from the end of the 17th/begining of the 18th centuries. In this article, I show that Descartes is the main source of Huet’s skepticism by means of six remarks, each developed in a section of the article. 1) Huet discovered Cartesian doubt before he discovered ancient skeptical doubt ; 2) the skepticism exhibited in the Traité Philosophique de la Faiblesse de l’Esprit Humain and the anti-cartesianism exhibited in the (...) Censura Philosophiae Cartesianae were originally parts of the same work ; 3) there is a skeptical Descartes in the Censura ; 4) the intellectual biography of the Provençal in the Traité Philosophique updates and pyrrhonizes Descartes’s intellectual biography in the Discours de la Méthode ; 5) four skeptical arguments in the Traité — including the most important one in the book — are Cartesian ; 6) Huet’s skepticism was perceived as partially Cartesian by the first readers of the manuscript. (shrink)

São examinadas as relações pessoais e filosóficas do cético francês da segunda metade do século XVII, Pierre-Daniel Huet, com os principais filósofos seus contemporâneos que apresentaram perspectivas céticas: François de La Mothe le Vayer, Blaise Pascal, Simon Foucher e Pierre Bayle. A longa trajetória intelectual de Huet, aqui resumida do ponto de vista de sua relação com estes filósofos, ilumina a origem da configuração do que é hoje conhecido como ceticismo moderno ou cartesiano. AbstractThe paper is about the (...) personal and philosophical connections between the French skeptic of the second half of the 17th century Pierre-Daniel Huet and the main philosophers who held skeptical views at his time: François de la Mothe Le Vayer, Blaise Pascal, Simon Foucher and Pierre Bayle. Huet’s long intellectual life, abridged in the paper from the point of view of his relationship with these philosophers, sheds light on the origin of the epistemological position known today as modern or Cartesian skepticism. (shrink)

This article explores the relations between Leibniz and the French erudite Pierre-Daniel Huet in the context of their shared anti-Cartesianism. After an introductory survey of the available commentaries and primary texts, I focus on a publication by Leibniz in the Journal des sçavans from 1693, where he fully endorses the critique of Descartes developed by Huet in his 1689 Censura philosophiae cartesianae. Next, I provide some indications as to Leibniz’s motivations behind this public approval of Huet. First, (...) I show how Leibniz throughout the 1690s was attempting to have his 1692 Animadversiones in partem generalem Principiorum Cartesianorum and other anti-Cartesian items annexed to a reedition of Huet’s Censura. I finally show how these attempts to team up with Huet were prompted by Leibniz’s dislike of certain German Cartesians, in particular J. E. Schweling, and by his fear that orthodox Cartesianism might do irremediable damage to the intellectual ethics of the Republic of Letters. (shrink)

Thomas Lennon’s book is an important contribution to Descartes scholarship in that it systematically challenges the standard interpretation of the Meditations, i.e., that Descartes sought to refute skepticism and failed, arguing instead that a notion of intellectual integrity rests at the root of Descartes’s thought. All the while, these aims are accomplished through an analysis of the Censura philosophiae cartesianae by Pierre-Daniel Huet, a skeptic and fierce critic of Descartes.Beyond introducing Huet and his relationship to Cartesians like Pierre-Sylvain (...) Regis and Nicolas Malebranche, chapter one argues that Descartes’s apparent pride, arrogance, and vanity precipitated Huet’s conversion from supporter to avid critic of Descartes. Chapters two though seven further establish Huet’s concern with Descartes’s pride. But Lennon’s deeper aim, after arguing that the standard interpretation is a relatively late invention solidified by Richard Popkin’s The History of Scepticism, is systematically to unravel the standard interpretation by addressing the cogito, doubt, the criterion of truth, circularity, God, etc. In each. (shrink)

Richard Popkin, no capítulo VII de sua “História do ceticismo de Erasmo a Spinoza”, apresenta uma tendência predominante na filosofia moderna de rejeitar o ceticismo pirrônico, por ser demasiado destrutivo, e o dogmatismo extremo, por ser questionável. A solução para esses partidários foi a de adotar um ceticismo que Popkin denomina mitigado ou construtivo, isto é, uma teoria que reconheça a impossibilidade de alcançarmos as verdades absolutas acerca da natureza e realidade, mas que admita a possibilidade de um certo conhecimento, (...) que possa ser convincente e provável, embora não metafisicamente inquestionável. Esta espécie de dúvida filosófica ganhou força com o advento da filosofia cartesiana, mas só tornou-se definitivamente respeitável com a sua formulação por David Hume, sustenta ainda Popkin. Neste trabalho mostraremos que os filósofos Pierre-Daniel Huet e Simon Foucher, além de Hume, poderiam entrar nesta categoria, que também pode ser definida de ceticismo acadêmico. (shrink)

The attack of Pierre-Daniel Huet on Cartesianism at the end of the seventeenth century was one of the most significant events in the history of skepticism in the early modern period. It capitalized on the building momentum generated by the use of skeptical arguments throughout the century, and it opened the way to the anti-metaphysical stance of the Enlightenment, beginning with Bayle and passing to the philosophes, including Hume. The inevitable Cartesian response to Huet came from Pierre-Sylvain Regis, (...) to whom Huet then responded in various ways. Although Huet’s attack had taken aim at all the themes with which Cartesianism has come to be associated (the method of doubt, the cogito, clarity and distinctness of perception, etc.), and although Regis replied on all these topics, the debate between them concentrated on Cartesian doubt, here closely examined in light of their debate. (shrink)

It is common to hear talk of the aim of belief and to find philosophers appealing to that aim for numerous explanatory purposes. What belief 's aim explains depends, of course, on what that aim is. Many hold that it is somehow related to truth, but there are various ways in which one might specify belief 's aim using the notion of truth. In this article, by considering whether they can account for belief 's standard of correctness and the epistemic (...) norms governing belief, I argue against certain prominent specifications of belief 's aim given in terms of truth, and advance a neglected alternative. (shrink)

The _Physics_ is a foundational work of western philosophy, and the crucial one for understanding Aristotle's views on matter, form, essence, causation, movement, space, and time. This richly annotated, scrupulously accurate, and consistent translation makes it available to a contemporary English reader as no other does—in part because it fits together seamlessly with other closely associated works in the New Hackett Aristotle series, such as the _Metaphysics_, _De Anima_, and forthcoming _De Caelo_ and _On Coming to Be and Passing Away_. (...) Eventually the series will include all of Aristotle's works. Sequentially numbered endnotes provide the information most needed at each juncture, while a detailed Index of Terms indicates places where focused discussion of key notions occurs. An illuminating general Introduction describes the book that lies ahead, explaining what sort of work it is and what sorts of evidence it relies on. (shrink)

In the international bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, the renowned psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. The impact of overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the profound effect of cognitive (...) biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning our next vacation—each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems shape our judgments and decisions. -/- Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives—and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble. Winner of the National Academy of Sciences Best Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and selected by The New York Times Book Review as one of the ten best books of 2011, Thinking, Fast and Slow is destined to be a classic. (shrink)

Sometimes, learning about the origins of a belief can make it irrational to continue to hold that belief—a phenomenon we call ‘genealogical defeat’. According to explanationist accounts, genealogical defeat occurs when one learns that there is no appropriate explanatory connection between one’s belief and the truth. Flatfooted versions of explanationism have been widely and rightly rejected on the grounds that they would disallow beliefs about the future and other inductively-formed beliefs. After motivating the need for some explanationist account, we raise (...) some problems for recent versions of explanationism. Learning from their failures, we then produce and defend a more resilient explanationism. (shrink)

Examines the lived experience of social encounters drawing on phenomenological insights.

Infallibilism is the view that a belief cannot be at once warranted and false. In this essay we assess three nonpartisan arguments for infallibilism, arguments that do not depend on a prior commitment to some substantive theory of warrant. Three premises, one from each argument, are most significant: if a belief can be at once warranted and false, then the Gettier Problem cannot be solved; if a belief can be at once warranted and false, then its warrant can be transferred (...) to an accidentally true belief; if a belief can be at once warranted and false, then it can be warranted and accidentally true. We argue that each of these is either false or no more plausible than its denial. Along the way, we offer a solution to the Gettier Problem that is compatible with fallibilism. (shrink)

Supererogatory acts—good deeds “beyond the call of duty”—are a part of moral common sense, but conceptually puzzling. I propose a unified solution to three of the most infamous puzzles: the classic Paradox of Supererogation (if it’s so good, why isn’t it just obligatory?), Horton’s All or Nothing Problem, and Kamm’s Intransitivity Paradox. I conclude that supererogation makes sense if, and only if, the grounds of rightness are multi-dimensional and comparative.

In Lukács: Praxis and the Absolute, Daniel Andrés López reassembles Lukács’s philosophy of praxis on a Hegelian basis, as a conceptual-historical totality, both defending him and proposing an unprecedented, immanent critique that raises problems for Marxian philosophy as a whole.

" Qualia " is an unfamiliar term for something that could not be more familiar to each of us: the ways things seem to us. As is so often the case with philosophical jargon, it is easier to give examples than to give a definition of the term. Look at a glass of milk at sunset; the way it looks to you--the particular, personal, subjective visual quality of the glass of milk is the quale of your visual experience at the (...) moment. The way the milk tastes to you then is another, gustatory quale, and how it sounds to you as you swallow is an auditory quale; These various "properties of conscious experience" are prime examples of qualia. Nothing, it seems, could you know more intimately than your own qualia ; let the entire universe be some vast illusion, some mere figment of Descartes' evil demon, and yet what the figment is made of will be the qualia of your hallucinatory experiences. Descartes claimed to doubt everything that could be doubted, but he never doubted that his conscious experiences had qualia, the properties by which he knew or apprehended them. (shrink)

The social sciences playa variety of multifaceted roles in the policymaking process. So varied are these roles, indeed, that it is futile to talk in the singular about the use of social science in policymaking, as if there were one constant relationship between two fixed and stable entities. Instead, to address this issue sensibly one must talk in the plural about uses of dif ferent modes of social scientific inquiry for different kinds of policies under various circumstances. In some cases, (...) the influence of social scientific research is direct and tangible, and the connection between the find ings and the policy is easy to see. In other cases, perhaps most, its influence is indirect-one small piece in a larger mosaic of politics, bargaining, and compromise. Occasionally the findings of social scientific studies are explicitly drawn upon by policymakers in the formation, implementation, or evaluation of particular policies. More often, the categories and theoretical models of social science provide a general background orientation within which policymakers concep tualize problems and frame policy options. At times, the in fluence of social scientific work is cognitive and informational in nature; in other instances, policymakers use social science primarily for symbolic and political purposes in order to le gitimate preestablished goals and strategies. Nonetheless, amid this diversity and variety, troubling general questions persistently arise. (shrink)

Supererogatory acts are those that lie “beyond the call of duty.” There are two standard ways to define this idea more precisely. Although the definitions are often seen as equivalent, I argue that they can diverge when options are infinite, or when there are cycles of better options; moreover, each definition is acceptable in only one case. I consider two ways out of this dilemma.

The potential to collect brain data more directly, with higher resolution, and in greater amounts has heightened worries about mental and brain privacy. In order to manage the risks to individuals posed by these privacy challenges, some have suggested codifying new privacy rights, including a right to “mental privacy.” In this paper, we consider these arguments and conclude that while neurotechnologies do raise significant privacy concerns, such concerns are—at least for now—no different from those raised by other well-understood data collection (...) technologies, such as gene sequencing tools and online surveillance. To better understand the privacy stakes of brain data, we suggest the use of a conceptual framework from information ethics, Helen Nissenbaum’s “contextual integrity” theory. To illustrate the importance of context, we examine neurotechnologies and the information flows they produce in three familiar contexts—healthcare and medical research, criminal justice, and consumer marketing. We argue that by emphasizing what is distinct about brain privacy issues, rather than what they share with other data privacy concerns, risks weakening broader efforts to enact more robust privacy law and policy. (shrink)

1. Happiness, then and now -- Happiness, eudaimonia, and practical reasoning -- Happiness as eudaimonia -- Happiness and virtuous activity -- New directions from old debates -- 2. Happiness then: the sufficiency debate -- Aristotle's case against the sufficiency thesis -- 3. Happiness now: rethinking the self -- Socrates' case for the sufficiency thesis -- Epictetus and the stoic self -- The Stoics' case for the sufficiency thesis -- The embodied conception of the self -- The embodied conception and psychological (...) well-being -- The Stoics' case against the embodied conception. (shrink)