Most moral theorists agree that it is one thing to believe that someone has slighted you and another to resent her for the insult; one thing to believe that someone did you a favor and another to feel gratitude toward her for her kindness. While all of these ways of responding to another's conduct are forms of moral appraisal, the reactive attitudes are said to 'go beyond' beliefs in some way. We think this claim is adequately explained only when we (...) take seriously the fact that reactive attitudes are emotions. In this paper, we appeal to insights of the emotions literature to highlight one key way in which reactive attitudes go beyond beliefs: beliefs about a person and her morally significant conduct merely ascribe to the person the property of having performed a morally significant action, while reactive attitudes are ways of experiencing that person as having performed a morally significant action. We then suggest that appreciating this is a crucial first step toward understanding why reactive emotions play roles in our practices around responsibility that beliefs do not. (shrink)

Este texto é a primeira parte do terceiro capítulo de minha tese de doutoramento - MÁRIO DE ANDRADE, PLURAL . Aí, tenta-se a produção de um biografema à maneira de Roland Barthes, de quem é a epígrafe do capítulo. O biografema é uma livre-produção textual na medida em que não deriva de significado , mas, enfatizando imagens, cenas, gestos, fragmentos textuais, pulsões, opera significancias. O biografema não dispensa a biografia - usa-a, desmembra-a, desgasta-a. Disseminação, o biografema não hesita em lançar (...) mão de todos os operadores de linguagem à disposição. Se a biografia opera com dados, instituindo a verossimilhança no biografado, o biografema retém o arbitrário na produção do ser-de-tinta que imprime no papel.Ce texte est une partie du troisième chapitre de mon Doctorat de 3 ème Cycle - Mário de Andrade: Pluriel . Il s'agit d'un essai de production d'un biographème, à la façon de Roland Barthes. Le biographème c'est de la production textuelle à la dérive des signifiants. Ne s'inquiétant point de la vérité, le biographème joue à la vraisemblance tout en la déjouant. Dissémination, un biographème n'hesite pas à mètre en oeuvre tous les opérateurs de langage a sa portée. Agissant de la sorte, il fait usage de la biographie, Técartelle en la rendant autre à l'écart Si la biographie travaille avec des faits en vue de l'établissement du vraisemblable du biographe, le biographème retient l'arbitraire de la production de cet "être-en-encre" qu'il imprime sur le papier. Son enjeu c'est donc le jeu des images, des scènes, des gestes, des fragments textuels, des pulsions, c'est-à-dire, des signifiances. (shrink)

This paper aims to investigate the significance of mood for a philosophical approach to emotion. Are moods problematic because they constrain us in an affective cage? Or do they rather give us access to the world? The starting point for this investigation is the work of Martin Heidegger: I analyze what he defines as vorweltlich arguing that this term refers to the emotional dimension of human existence, in particular, to mood, or, in Heideggerian terms, Stimmung. Human existence is not just (...) a neutral being-there but a being-affected, a being-in-a-mood. I then move on to consider the role of mood in relation to the concept of transcendence, providing an analysis of two main source of inspiration in Heidegger’s thought: Augustine and Aristotle. This allows us to distinguish three aspects of Stimmung : Stimmung as openness to the world, Stimmung as teleological movement, and Stimmung as event of ontological difference. In the final section, I discuss the contribution of these aspects of Heidegger’s thought to the contemporary debate on emotions. (shrink)

The aim of this study was to investigate the consequences of the use of text-matching software on teachers’ and students’ conceptions of plagiarism and problems in academic writing. An electronic questionnaire included scale items, structured questions, and open-ended questions. The respondents were 85 teachers and 506 students in a large Finnish university. Methods of analysis included exploratory factor analysis, t-test, and inductive content analysis. Both teachers and students reported increased awareness of plagiarism and improvements in writing habits, as well as (...) concerns and limitations related to the system. The results suggest that teachers are inclined to think of plagiarism as part of a learning process rather an issue of morality, which may have consequences for how they understand the role of text matching. The introduction of text-matching software has supported teachers’ work, but at the same time teachers emphasized their own responsibility in detecting problems in student writing. The survey provides a limited sample of “Case Finland,” where implementation of text-matching software nationwide has been remarkably rapid; it offers a glimpse into one institution’s implementation of a newly introduced policy for mandatory plagiarism detection. (shrink)

The critical examination of current hypotheses is one of the key ways in which scientific fields develop and grow. Therefore, any critique, including Haidle and Schlaudt’s article, “Where Does Cumulative Culture Begin? A Plea for a Sociologically Informed Perspective,” represents a welcome addition to the literature. However, critiques must also be evaluated. In their article, Haidle and Schlaudt review some approaches to culture and cumulative culture in both human and nonhuman primates. H&S discuss the “zone of latent solutions” hypothesis as (...) applied to nonhuman primates and stone-toolmaking premodern hominins. Here, we will evaluate whether H&S’s critique addresses its target. (shrink)

In this paper, I wish to explore the contribution of the phenomenological reduction to a distinct form of empathy, which has been identified and called by Ratcliffe :473–495, 2012) radical empathy. This form of empathy brings to light the sense of reality experienced by the subject rather than a mere mental state. However, I shall consider whether and how the phenomenological reduction allows different interpretations of the same experience, thereby impacting on our understanding of another’s sense of reality. Far from (...) dismissing the role of the reduction, I propose a reconsideration of its relevance for radical empathy. In order to spell out my argument, I propose a case ex negativo that looks at Sartre’s and Merleau-Ponty’s different analyses of the sense of reality experienced by obsessive patients. I argue that this interpretative difference ultimately depends on two opposite uses of the reduction itself, and that Merleau-Ponty’s account offers a promising perspective to reintegrate and contextualize the phenomenological reduction into radical empathy. (shrink)

El concepto de gobierno es inseparable del de opinión pública en la medida en que la supervivencia de todos los gobiernos depende críticamente de la conformidad de la opinión pública. Pero las democracias protegen mejor a sus gobernantes de la amenaza que encierra la opinión pública que las dictaduras. Por una parte, las elecciones confieren a los gobernantes democráticos una legitimidad de origen de la que carecen muchos dictadores por haber alcanzado el poder a través de métodos considerados ilegítimos. Por (...) otra parte, mientras la receptividad ante las demandas de la opinión pública suele reforzar la legitimidad de ejercicio de los gobiernos democráticos, se interpreta generalmente como signo de debilidad de las dictaduras. La vulnerabilidad de las dictaduras ante la opinión pública les lleva a adoptar inmediatamente medidas para defenderse de ella, combinando actuaciones represivas que inhiben a la población de expresar sus preferencias auténticas con otras que controlan los flujos de información que circulan en la sociedad. En un régimen de opinión pública cerrada no puede emerger una sociedad civil capaz de desafiar seriamente al poder. Pero si repentinamente la población comienza a acceder a información innegable que pone en evidencia la mendacidad de los gobernantes, la opinión pública cerrada puede derrumbarse rápidamente y precipitar la caída del gobierno. (shrink)

To date, 1.7 million US military service personnel have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. Of those, one in five are suffering from diagnosable combat-stress related psychological injuries including Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). All indications are that the mental health toll of the current conflicts on US troops and the medical systems that care for them will only increase. Against this backdrop, research suggesting that the common class of drugs known as beta-blockers might prevent the onset of PTSD is drawing (...) much interest. I urge caution against accepting too quickly the use of beta-blockers for dealing with the psychological injuries that combat experiences can wreak. Beta-blockers are thought to work by disrupting the formation of emotionally disturbing memories that typically occur in the wake of traumatic events and that in some people manifest as PTSD. Focusing on a single dimension of soldiers' experience in combat, namely, their perpetration of other-directed violence, I argue that some of the emotional memories blunted by beta-blockers play important roles in the recovery of moral aspects of soldiers' selves damaged by experiences of combat violence — specifically, in the achievement of a state of grace— and, therefore, that the use of beta-blockers may come with distinct moral costs. (shrink)

This article deals with various responses to the phenomenon of Orientalism. Since the publication of Edward Said s book _Orientalism_, there has been an ongoing discussion about the influence of Orientalism on contemporary social sciences in the East. In the West, Orientalism was an original theory, but in the East its acceptance was tantamount to an assimilation of foreign point of view on social reality. I argue that it is a symptom of provincialism among scientists from the East. Even though (...) most of them tried to overcome Orientalism, they used the same categories and methodology. In this sense they repeated its mistakes and misunderstandings. This article analyzes different attempts of overcoming Orientalism and shows why they are provincial. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Visual Aesthetic ExperienceElisa Steenberg, Independent ScholarMan can shift his attitude to the surrounding world into an experience of its visual appearance. He perceives colors, lines, shapes, etc.—at times denoted as form. Furthermore, these phenomena may be experienced as having various properties. A color may be experienced as warm or cold, as cheerful or somber; a line as soft or hard, as merry or aggressive; a shape as light or (...) heavy. Moreover, such experiences may include pleasure or displeasure, implying that what is experienced is liked or disliked. The individual has a preference value experience. This should not be confounded with an evaluation, a value judgment, which requires cognitive activity and a comparison. The experience described I designate a visual aesthetic experience.Research into processes in the brain may offer explanations of the neurological antecedents to the visual aesthetic experience. To see a color as cold or warm may depend on sense-interrelating processes. To experience a color or line as cheerful, somber, etc., might be explained as due to simultaneous processes in the regions of the brain that are the mainsprings of emotions. The preference valuations might be due to processes in the brain's so-called primary reward-aversion center. It seems most likely that future brain research, with the help of such techniques as PET scanning (Positron Emission Tomography) or MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging)—what has been called "windows into the human brain"—may offer explanations regarding the physiological and biochemical processes that happen when our attitude to the world around us is shifted into what is here designated a visual aesthetic experience.1When did man first evince visual aesthetic experiences and when do they first occur in an individual's life? Certain anthropologists assert that positive visual aesthetic experiences first occurred when man was able to experience form as symmetrical and balanced, colors as bright and possibly shiny. This they claim is due to balance and order being a fundamental condition in man's life, and preferences for bright colors they consider due to man being a daylight creature who feels insecure in darkness.2 We know that so-called primitive people and young children like symmetric patterns and bright colors. The child reaches out for light red and yellow objects rather than for dark and black ones. With increasing age, though, the child's [End Page 89] visual preferences usually change, and this occurs mainly within the framework of his or her manmade surroundings. The child becomes accustomed to seeing certain objects while feeling pleasure and thus comes to appreciate their appearance. However, such experiences are rather vague before the child reaches the age when its personality is formed. Then especially girls often develop a keen interest in the appearance of objects around them.A general survey among adults shows that there are considerable varieties in individuals' inclinations for visual aesthetic experiences. There are those who have them rather seldom. Their attitudes to the surrounding world are primarily cognitive. Their attentions are focused on meanings, the "what" not the "how," in order to understand and to cope with what they see. On the other hand, there are individuals who most frequently hold an aesthetic attitude to their surroundings. They pay attention to shapes, colors, and color combinations of all kinds of objects, natural or manmade. They choose their clothes and their home furnishings under careful aesthetic considerations. This inclination may possibly be claimed to be due to an innate disposition for holding visual aesthetic attitudes, to be compared with, for example, an individual's innate musicality. However, it is undoubtedly also due to certain social circumstances.Visual aesthetic experiences are denoted taste manifestations. As such they may be investigated not only as to their occurrences and changes in an individual's life but also as a changing sociocultural phenomenon.3Verbalizing the Visual Aesthetic ExperienceThe psychic content of a visual aesthetic experience may be revealed to other individuals by application of aesthetic property terms to the appearance of objects. The terms are either what is here called descriptive or they are value terms. Examples of descriptive aesthetic terms are graceful, garish, gaudy, clumsy, elegant, dainty, vivid, flamboyant, etc. These terms may... (shrink)

The subjective feeling of free choice is an important feature of human experience. Experimental tasks have typically studied free choice by contrasting free and instructed selection of response alternatives. These tasks have been criticised, and it remains unclear how they relate to the subjective feeling of freely choosing. We replicated previous findings of the fMRI correlates of free choice, defined objectively. We introduced a novel task in which participants could experience and report a graded sense of free choice. BOLD responses (...) for conditions subjectively experienced as free identified a postcentral area distinct from the areas typically considered to be involved in free action. Thus, the brain correlates of subjective feeling of free action were not directly related to any established brain correlates of objectively-defined free action. Our results call into question traditional assumptions about the relation between subjective experience of choosing and activity in the brain’s so-called voluntary motor areas. (shrink)

New genetic technologies promise to generate valuable insights into the aetiology of several psychiatric conditions, as well as a wider range of human and animal behaviours. Advances in the neurosciences and the application of new brain imaging techniques offer a way of integrating DNA analysis with studies that are looking at other biological markers of behaviour. While candidate 'genes for' certain conditions, including schizophrenia and bipolar disorders, are said to be 'un-discovered' at a faster rate than they are discovered, many (...) studies are being conducted on personality traits such as aggressiveness and anti-social traits. The clinical applicability and implications of these studies are often discussed within the scientific community. However, little attention has so far been paid to their possible policy implications in relation to criminality management and to Criminal Law itself. Similarly, the related ethical issues arising in the field of crime control, and the tensions between enhancing security for society and protecting civil liberties, are currently under-explored. This paper investigates these ethical issues by focusing on the views of those professionals – including judges, lawyers, probation officers and social workers – who work with individuals 'deemed at risk' of violent and aggressive behaviours. It also discusses and problematizes mainstream rhetoric and arguments around the notion of 'risky individuals'. (shrink)

Emotional information captures attention due to privileged processing. Consequently, performance in cognitive tasks declines. Therefore, shielding current goals fro...

The author presents a critical edition of the Latin treatise De mineralibus, which was generally attributed to Aristotle in the Middle Ages, but is in fact an abridgement of two chapters from Avicenna’s Kitāb al-Šifā’ compiled and translated from Arabic by Alfred of Sareshill, who put them at the end of the Liber metheororum, the first Latin version of Aristotle’s Meteorology. De mineralibus is transmitted by more than a hundred manuscripts. The edition is based on the complete collation of ten (...) witnesses of the text, selected according the stemma codicum proposed in vol. X.1 of Aristoteles Latinus, in which part IV of the Liber metheororum has been published. In addition to the editorial criteria, the author presents and discusses some peculiarities of Alfred’s Arabic-Latin translation. The edition is accompanied by Latin-Arabic and Arabic-Latin glossaries. (shrink)

The coronavirus disease pandemic fundamentally disrupted humans’ social life and behavior. Public health measures may have inadvertently impacted how people care for each other. This study investigated prosocial behavior, its association well-being, and predictors of prosocial behavior during the first COVID-19 pandemic lockdown and sought to understand whether region-specific differences exist. Participants from eight regions clustering multiple countries around the world responded to a cross-sectional online-survey investigating the psychological consequences of the first upsurge of lockdowns in spring 2020. Prosocial behavior (...) was reported to occur frequently. Multiple regression analyses showed that prosocial behavior was associated with better well-being consistently across regions. With regard to predictors of prosocial behavior, high levels of perceived social support were most strongly associated with prosocial behavior, followed by high levels of perceived stress, positive affect and psychological flexibility. Sociodemographic and psychosocial predictors of prosocial behavior were similar across regions. (shrink)

It is now a commonplace that emotions are not mere sensations but, rather, conceptually contentful states. In trying to expand on this insight, however, most theoretical approaches to emotions neglect central intuitions about what emotions are like. We therefore need a methodological shift in our thinking about emotions away from the standard accounts' attempts to reduce them to other mental states and toward an exploration of the distinctive work emotions do. I show that emotions' distinctive function is to engage us (...) with both objective and personal values. Attention to emotions' work reveals that it is precisely their “unruliness” that allows them to play meaningful roles in our lives. (shrink)

Before 1800 nothing was irrelevant. So argues Elisa Tamarkin's sweeping cultural history of a key shift in consciousness: the arrival, around 1800, of "relevance" as the means to grasp how something previously disregarded becomes important and interesting. At a time when so much makes claims to attention every day, how does one decide what is most valuable right now? This is not only a contemporary problem. For Ralph Waldo Emerson, the question for the nineteenth century was how, in the (...) immensity and "succession" of objects, anything becomes a proper object of experience. How that question was finally defined as one of relevance is the story of Apropos of Nothing. Relevance, Tamarkin shows, was primarily an Anglo-American concept. It engaged major intellectual figures, centrally the pragmatists-William James, Alain Locke, and John Dewey-and before them thinkers including Emerson and Alfred North Whitehead. Most of all, relevance was a problem for the worlds of art, literature, education, and criticism. These were fascinated by how old, boring, distant, or unfamiliar things get taken in; how they are admitted as meaningful; how they come home to us like the ludicrous raven comes to Edgar Allan Poe's student in the middle of the night in some obscure connection with himself. Many nineteenth-century American artists saw their paintings as pragmatic works that make relevance-that suggest versions of events that feel apropos of our world the moment we see them. (Tamarkin's book is richly illustrated, in color, with works by Winslow Homer, Abbott Handerson Thayer, Edgar Degas, and others.) Relevance remains a conundrum, especially for the humanities. It obliges us to say why we admit Poe's poem-or, say, a line of Emerson's-is interesting enough to study it, to dedicate ourselves to understanding it, to affirming that this effort is, in Emerson's words, "relevant to me and mine, to nature, and the hour that now passes.". (shrink)

Social sensitivity is a crucial aspect of interpersonal relationships, as it is intrinsic to the understanding of other selves as subjects situated in a social world. In revitalizing such a concept in the philosophical literature, this article examines the relation between habit, attention, and critical self‐awareness that lies at the core of social sensitivity. On the one hand, I reconsider the so‐called “passivity” of habit and tackle the role of attention as the power of varying point of view. On the (...) other hand, I contrast Husserl's view of attentiveness with Murdoch's account of loving attention, arguing that social sensitivity centers on a type of striving that is closer to Husserl's methodology than Murdoch's approach to moral perfectionism. (shrink)

Empathy has become a common point of debate in moral psychology. Recent developments in psychiatry, neurosciences and social psychology have led to the revival of sentimentalism, and the ‘empathy thesis’ has suggested that affective empathy, in particular, is a necessary criterion of moral agency. The case of psychopaths – individuals incapable of affective empathy and moral agency, yet capable of rationality – has been utilised in support of this case. Critics, however, have been vocal. They have asserted that the case (...) of autism proves the empathy thesis wrong; that psychopathy centres on rational rather than empathic limitations; that empathy is not relevant to many common normative behaviours; and that rationality is required when empathy fails. The present paper analyses these four criticisms. It will be claimed that they each face severe difficulties, and that moral agency ought to be approached via a multi-tier model, with affective empathy as a baseline. (shrink)

In the context of agricultural activity intensification and rural abandonment, neo-rurality has emerged as a back-to-the-land migratory movement led by urban populations seeking alternative ways of life close to nature. Although the initiatives of the new peasantry are diverse, most are land related, such as agriculture and livestock farming. A priori, neorural people undertake agri-food system activities in ways that differ from the conventional model, following the principles of environmental and social sustainability. We conducted a systematic review of the literature (...) on the neo-rural phenomenon with the main objective of examining how neo-rurality has been found to support agroecological transitions. The corpus of neo-rural studies was analyzed from a social-ecological perspective, and a Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) was conducted to determine whether neo-rural agri-food system activities follow agroecological principles. The results indicate that neo-rural studies is an emerging research field that has received considerable attention in western countries. Diverse conceptualizations and terms have been used to address the phenomenon, but the literature agrees on political and environmental motivations and several barriers faced by neo-rural people. This population and in particular new peasants, are employing a wide variety of agroecological practices and strategies throughout the agri-food system. Overall, neo-rural people have been reported to contribute significantly to agroecological transition. (shrink)

This article engages with Michel Foucault’s idea of confession as the central Christian strategy of subjection or subjectivation and the link he proposes between confession and obedience. The article also wishes to show how confession can become counter-conduct. I apply Foucault’s conceptions to early modern Lutheran confessionalism, elucidating how the confessional apparatus of the orthodox Lutheranism of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Sweden strived to mold obedient subjects who are able to conduct themselves. I also examine the transformation and overthrow of these (...) subjectivation techniques in Radical Pietism, analyzing a dissident confession of faith by the Radical Pietist Peter Schaefer, who exemplifies perfect subjection, constituting himself as a perfectly obedient subject, and yet a failure of subjectivation in the sense of submission, insofar as for him, obedience becomes a strategy of empowerment. (shrink)