The contributors to this volume have approached the problem of characterizing and classifying emotions from the perspectives of neurophysiology, psychology, and ...

Lively current debates about narratives of historical progress, the conditions for international justice, and the implications of globalisation have prompted a renewed interest in Kant's Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim. The essays in this volume, written by distinguished contributors, discuss the questions that are at the core of Kant's investigations. Does the study of history convey any philosophical insight? Can it provide political guidance? How are we to understand the destructive and bloody upheavals that constitute so (...) much of human experience? What connections, if any, can be traced between politics, economics, and morality? What is the relation between the rule of law in the nation state and the advancement of a cosmopolitan political order? These questions and others are examined and discussed in a book that will be of interest to philosophers, social and political theorists, and intellectual and cultural historians. (shrink)

I take up three puzzles about our emotional and evaluative responses to fiction. First, how can we even have emotional responses to characters and events that we know not to exist, if emotions are as intimately connected to belief and action as they seem to be? One solution to this puzzle claims that we merely imagine having such emotional responses. But this raises the puzzle of why we would ever refuse to follow an author’s instructions to imagine such responses, since (...) we happily imagine many other implausible things. A natural response to this second puzzle is that our responses to fiction are real, and so can’t just be conjured up in response to an author’s demands. However, this simple response is inadequate, because we often respond differently to people and events in fiction than we would if we encountered them in real life. Solving these three puzzles in a consistent way requires the notion of a “perspective” on a fictional world. I sketch an account of this intuitive but frustratingly amorphous notion: perspectives are tools for organizing our thinking, which can in turn alter our emotional and evaluative responses. Cultivating a perspective can be illuminating, entertaining, or corrupting — or all three at once. (shrink)

While this treatment of modalities captures some of the characteristics of our use of "necessary" and "possible," there are important features that are not captured unless we complicate the analysis, and expand the notation. My remarks are not made as a criticism of the possible worlds gambit, but rather as a challenge to formulate a finer network of distinctions to capture notions that now elude us. And there is precedent for this: Plantinga's attempt to distinguish modalities de dicto and de (...) re, Kaplan's attempt to provide a notation for specifying the contexts for demonstrative terms, Marcus' and Bennett's attempts to provide a notation for non-trivial essential properties. And of course there are by now a set of systems that are alternatives to S5, limiting accessibility to possible worlds by a variety of restrictions. (shrink)

Traditional theories of sarcasm treat it as a case of a speaker's meaning the opposite of what she says. Recently, 'expressivists' have argued that sarcasm is not a type of speaker meaning at all, but merely the expression of a dissociative attitude toward an evoked thought or perspective. I argue that we should analyze sarcasm in terms of meaning inversion, as the traditional theory does; but that we need to construe 'meaning' more broadly, to include illocutionary force and evaluative attitudes (...) as well as propositional content. I distinguish four subclasses of sarcasm, individuated in terms of the target of inversion. Three of these classes raise serious challenges for a standard implicature analysis. (shrink)

This article interrogates the extent to which institutional discourses on the governance of religious minorities are useful to think about the complexity of how religion gets negotiated in the quotidian. It takes as its starting point the exploration of the discourse on religious governance in the province of Quebec organized around the notion of request for accommodations. Through an analysis of public policy documents, it examines facets of this discourse of request, including the role it plays in delimiting what we (...) imagine the religious to be and how we imagine it to work. Second, drawing on interviews with self-identified Muslims in Montreal, the article explores how piety gets negotiated in their everyday. These narratives are approached as fertile sites to think differently about the recognition of difference. This two-pronged perspective acts as an invitation to think more broadly about not only what institutional discourses “produce” but also what they “obscure.”. (shrink)

Background The often poor prognosis associated with cancer necessitates empowering patients to express their care preferences. Yet, the prevalence of Advance Directives (AD) among oncology patients remains low. This study investigated oncologists' perspectives on the interests and challenges associated with implementing AD. Methods A French national online survey targeting hospital-based oncologists explored five areas: AD information, writing support, AD usage, personal perceptions of AD's importance, and respondent's profile. The primary outcome was to assess how frequently oncologists provide patients with information (...) about AD in daily clinical practice. Additionally, we examined factors related to delivering information on AD. Results Of the 410 oncologists (50%) who responded to the survey, 75% (n = 308) deemed AD relevant. While 36% (n = 149) regularly inform patients about AD, 25% (n = 102) remain skeptical about AD. Among the respondents who do not consistently discuss AD, the most common reason given is the belief that AD may induce anxiety (n = 211/353; 60%). Of all respondents, 90% (n = 367) believe patients require specific information to draft relevant AD. Physicians with experience in palliative care were more likely to discuss AD (43% vs 32.3%, p = 0.027). Previous experience in critical care was associated with higher levels of distrust towards AD (31.5% vs 18.8%, p = 0.003), and 68.5% (n = 281) of the respondents expressed that designating a “person of trust” would be more appropriate than utilizing AD. Conclusion Despite the perceived relevance of AD, only a third of oncologists regularly apprise their patients about them. Significant uncertainty persists about the safety and relevance of AD. (shrink)

Since many varieties of self-deception are ineradicable and useful, it would be wise to be ambivalent about at least some of its forms.1 It is open-eyed ambivalence that acknowledges its own dualities rather than ordinary shifty vacillation that we need. To be sure, self-deception remains dangerous: sensible ambivalence should not relax vigilance against pretence and falsity, combating irrationality and obfuscation wherever they occur.

Philosophers have traditionally inclined toward one of two opposite extremes when it comes to metaphor. On the one hand, partisans of metaphor have tended to believe that metaphors do something different in kind from literal utterances; it is a ‘heresy’, they think, either to deny that what metaphors do is genuinely cognitive, or to assume that it can be translated into literal terms. On the other hand, analytic philosophers have typically denied just this: they tend to assume that if metaphors (...) express any genuine content at all, then that content can in principle be paraphrased into literal terms. They often conclude on this basis that metaphor is theoretically dispensable, and so that it poses no special challenges and affords no distinctive insights for the philosophy of language and mind. (shrink)

Theorists often associate certain “poetic” qualities with metaphor – most especially, producing an open-ended, holistic perspective which is evocative, imagistic and affectively-laden. I argue that, on the one hand, non-cognitivists are wrong to claim that metaphors only produce such perspectives: like ordinary literal speech, they also serve to undertake claims and other speech acts with propositional content. On the other hand, contextualists are wrong to assimilate metaphor to literal loose talk: metaphors depend on using one thing as a perspective for (...) thinking about something else. I bring out the distinctive way that metaphor works by contrasting it with two other poetic uses of language, juxtapositions and “telling details,” that do fit the accounts of metaphor offered by non-cognitivists and contextualists, respectively. (shrink)

Most of us create and use a panoply of non-sentential representations throughout our ordinary lives: we regularly use maps to navigate, charts to keep track of complex patterns of data, and diagrams to visualize logical and causal relations among states of affairs. But philosophers typically pay little attention to such representations, focusing almost exclusively on language instead. In particular, when theorizing about the mind, many philosophers assume that there is a very tight mapping between language and thought. Some analyze utterances (...) as the outer vocalizations of inner thoughts (e.g. Grice 1957, Devitt 2005), while others treat thought as a form of inner speech (e.g. Sellars 1956/1997, Carruthers 2002). But even philosophers who take no stand on the relative priority of language and thought still tend to individuate mental states in terms of the sentences we use to ascribe them. Indeed, Dummett (1993) claims that it is constitutive of analytic philosophy that it approaches the mind by way of language. In many ways, this linguistic model is salutary. Our thoughts are often intimately intertwined with their linguistic expression, and public language does provide a comparatively tractable proxy for, and a window into, the messier realm of thought. However, an exclusive focus on thought as it is expressed in language threatens to leave other sorts of thought unexplained, or even to blind us to their possibility. In particular, many cognitive ethologists and psychologists find it useful to talk about humans, chimpanzees, birds, rats, and even bees as employing cognitive maps. We need to make sense of this way of talking about minds as well as more familiar sentential descriptions. In what follows, I investigate the theoretical and practical possibility of non-sentential thought. Ultimately, I am most interested in the contours of distinctively human thought: what forms does human thought take, and how do those different forms interact? How does human thought compare with that of other animals? In this essay, however, I focus on a narrower and more basic theoretical question: could thought occur in maps? Many philosophers are convinced that in some important sense, thought per se must be language-like.. (shrink)

Does thought precede language, or the other way around? How does having a language affect our thoughts? Who has a language, and who can think? These questions have traditionally been addressed by philosophers, especially by rationalists concerned to identify the essential difference between humans and other animals. More recently, theorists in cognitive science, evolutionary biology, and developmental psychology have been asking these questions in more empirically grounded ways. At its best, this confluence of philosophy and science promises to blend the (...) respective strengths of each discipline, bringing abstract theory to bear on reality in a principled and focused way. At its worst, it risks degenerating into a war of words, with each side employing key expressions in its own idiosyncratic way – or worse, contaminating empirical research with a priori dogmas inherited from outmoded philosophical worldviews. In Baboon Metaphysics (2007), Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth offer an analysis of baboon cognition that promises to exemplify the very best interaction of philosophical theory and empirical research. They argue that baboons have a language of thought: a language-like representational medium, which supports the sophisticated cognitive abilities required to negotiate their complex social environment. This claim is intended to be surprising in its own right, and also to shed light on the evolution of spoken language. Because our own ancestors likely lived in a similarly complex social environment, Cheney and Seyfarth propose that the earliest humans also developed language first as a cognitive medium, and that spoken language evolved as a means to express those thoughts. There are two potential difficulties here. First, ‘Language of Thought’ (LOT) is a term of art, with much associated theoretical baggage and often comparatively little careful exposition. Thus, evaluating the claim requires getting clearer about just what LOT implies in this context.. (shrink)

Courage is dangerous. If it is defined in traditional ways, as a set of dispositions to overcome fear, to oppose obstacles, to perform difficult or dangerous actions, its claim to be a virtue is questionable. Unlike the virtue of justice, or a sense of proportion, traditional courage does not itself determine what is to be done, let alone assure that it is worth doing. If we retain the traditional conception of courage and its military connotations–overcoming and combat–we should be suspicious (...) of it. Instead of automatically classifying it as a virtue, attempting to develop and exercise it, we should become alert to its dangers. And yet and yet. There is an aspect of traditional courage that serves us: we require the capacities and traits that enable us to persist in acting well under stress, to endure hardships when following our judgments about what is best is difficult or dangerous. If courage is checked, redefined as the virtue that enables virtue–the various sets of dispositions, whatever they may be, that make us resolute in worthy, difficult action–then we need not fear the dangers of courage. We need rather to reform it by diversifying it, as a heterogeneous variety of traits that enable us to act well under stress, against the natural movements of self-protection. (shrink)

During the period from Descartes to Rousseau, the mind changed. Its domain was redefined; its activities were redescribed; and its various powers were redistributed. Once a part of cosmic Nous, its various functions delimited by its embodied condition, the individual mind now becomes a field of forces with desires impinging on one another, their forces resolved according to their strengths and directions. Of course since there is no such thing as The Mind Itself, it was not the mind that changed. (...) Conceptions of the mind changed. Yet even to say this is misleading, because it suggests that somewhere out there in nowhere there is Nous, Psyche, Soul or Mind, the true but opaque object of all these conceptions. But of course there is no Mind in the realm of things in themselves, waiting for us to see it truly, like a China of the noumenal world, amused that our various conceptions reveal as much about ourselves as about it. (shrink)

Gerechtigkeit ist ein ebenso bedeutsames wie umstrittenes Ideal menschlichen Umgangs.

Many have said, and I think some have shown, that it is irrational to fear death. The extinction of what is essential to the self—whether it be biological death or the permanent cessation of consciousness—cannot by definition be experienced by oneself as a loss or as a harm.

PERRON A and HOLMES D. Nursing Inquiry 2011; 18: 191–204Constructing mentally ill inmates: nurses’ discursive practices in correctionsThe concepts of discourse, subjectivity and power allow for innovative explorations in nursing research. Discourse take many different forms and may be maintained, transmitted, even imposed, in various ways. Nursing practice makes possible many discursive spaces where discourses intersect. Using a Foucauldian perspective, were explored the ways in which forensic psychiatric nurses construct the subjectivity of mentally ill inmates. Progress notes and individual interviews (...) constitute discursive spaces within which nurses construct patients’ subjectivities. Progress notes provide a written (and permanent) form of discourse, while interviews set the space for a more fluid and contextual form of discourse. We identified five types of subjectivities – the (in)visible patient, the patient as risk, the deviant patient, the disturbed patient and the disciplined patient. These subjectivities were rooted in various types of discourses circulating in the selected setting. Despite the multiple discursive dimensions of forensic psychiatric nursing, progress notes remain the main formal source of information regarding nursing care even though it is not representative of the care provided nor is it representative of nurses’ complex discursive practices in corrections. (shrink)

There is more akrasia than meets the eye: it can occur in speech and perception, cognitively and emotionally as well as between decision and action. The lures of akrasia are the same as those that are exercised in ordinary psychological and cognitive inferential contexts. But because it is over-determined and because it occurs in opaque intentional contexts, its attribution remains highly fallible.

Keine ausführliche Beschreibung für "Friedrich Nietzsches Philosophie des europäischen Nihilismus" verfügbar.

Metaphors are powerful communicative tools because they produce ”framing effects’. These effects are especially palpable when the metaphor is an insult that denigrates the hearer or someone he cares about. In such cases, just comprehending the metaphor produces a kind of ”complicity’ that cannot easily be undone by denying the speaker’s claim. Several theorists have taken this to show that metaphors are engaged in a different line of work from ordinary communication. Against this, I argue that metaphorical insults are rhetorically (...) powerful because they combine perspectives, presupposition, and pragmatics in the service of speech acts with assertoric force. (shrink)

Recently, philosophers have discovered that they have a lot to learn from, or at least to ponder about, fiction. Many metaphysicians are attracted to fiction as a model for our talk about purported objects and properties, such as numbers, morality, and possible worlds, without embracing a robust Platonist ontology. In addition, a growing group of philosophers of mind are interested in the implications of our engagement with fiction for our understanding of the mind and emotions: If I don’t believe that (...) Anna Karenina exists, can I really pity her, or hope or desire that she extricate herself from her tragic situation? And why is there no “morality fiction,” analogous to science fiction? I suspect that philosophers have been especially comfortable thinking about fiction because it seems, at least prima facie, to employ the imagination in a way that conforms to a standard model of the mind. Specifically, contemporary philosophers tend to think of imagination as a form of mental pretense. Mental pretense can take two main forms: a cognitive attitude of supposing a set of propositions to be true (make-believe) or else an experiential state of imaging a scenario as if it were before one (imaging). Much of our pretense intertwines the cognitive and experiential modalities, of course. But both share a crucial common feature: all of one’s imaginative effort is invested in pretending that certain contents obtain. In this sense, we can understand imagination as the “offline” simulation of actual beliefs and perceptions (and perhaps other attitudes as well), where we analyze these in the normal way, as states individuated by their attitude and representational content. While I share the burgeoning interest in fiction, I want to suggest that we also have a lot to learn from poetry, and in particular from poetic metaphor. I will argue.. (shrink)

Although nursing has a unique contribution to advancing social justice in health care practices and education, and although social justice has been claimed as a core value of nursing, there is little guidance regarding how to enact social justice in nursing practice and education. In this paper, we propose a critical antidiscriminatory pedagogy (CADP) for nursing as a promising path in this direction. We argue that because discrimination is inherent to the production and maintenance of inequities and injustices, adopting a (...) CADP offers opportunities for students and practicing nurses to develop their capacity to counteract racism and other forms of individual and systemic discrimination in health care, and thus promote social justice. The CADP we propose has the following features: it is grounded in a critical intersectional perspective of discrimination, it aims at fostering transformative learning, and it involves a praxis‐oriented critical consciousness. A CADP challenges the liberal individualist paradigm that dominates much of western‐based health care, and the culturalist and racializing processes prevalent in nursing education. It also situates nursing practice as responsive to health inequities. Thus, a CADP is a promising way to translate social justice into nursing practice and education through transformative learning. (shrink)

Flow describes a state of intense experiential involvement in an activity that is defined in terms of nine dimensions. Despite increased interest in understanding the flow experience of musicians in recent years, knowledge of how characteristics of the musician and of the music performance context affect the flow experience at the dimension level is lacking. In this study, we aimed to investigate how musicians’ general music performance anxiety level and the presence of an audience influence the nine flow dimensions. The (...) participants were 121 university music students who performed solo a music piece once by themselves and once in front of an audience. Their general MPA level was measured with an adapted version of the STAI and ranged from 27 to 76. The level of the nine flow dimensions was assessed with the Flow State Scale-2 after each performance. The levels of “concentration on task at hand,” “sense of control,” and “autotelic experience” decreased significantly with increasing general MPA level. The levels of “unambiguous feedback” and “loss of self-consciousness” decreased significantly with increasing general MPA level during the public performance only. The level of “sense of control” was significantly lower during the public performance than the private performance across participants. The level of “unambiguous feedback” was significantly lower during the public performance than the private performance for participants with a general MPA level higher than 47. The level of “loss of self-consciousness” was significantly lower during the public performance than the private performance for participants with a general MPA level higher than 32. In contrast, the general MPA level and the audience did not significantly affect the levels of “challenge-skill balance,” “clear goals,” and “action-awareness merging.” These results show that the effects of general MPA level and audience vary greatly across flow state dimensions. We conclude that musicians’ flow state should be analyzed at the dimension level rather than as a global score. We discuss how our findings could inform the development and implementation of interventions. (shrink)

We should not admit categorial restrictions on the significance of syntactically well formed strings. Syntactically well formed but semantically absurd strings, such as ‘Life’s but a walking shadow’ and ‘Caesar is a prime number’, can express thoughts; and competent thinkers both are able to grasp these and ought to be able to. Gareth Evans’ generality constraint, though Evans himself restricted it, should be viewed as a fully general constraint on concept possession and propositional thought. For (a) even well formed but (...) semantically cross-categorial strings often do possess substantive inferential roles; (b) hearers exploit these inferential roles in interpreting such strings metaphorically; (c) there is no good reason to deny truth-conditions to strings with inferential roles. (shrink)

Mobsters and others engaged in risky forms of social coordination and coercion often communicate by saying something that is overtly innocuous but transmits another message ‘off record’. In both ordinary conversation and political discourse, insinuation and other forms of indirection, like joking, offer significant protection from liability. However, they do not confer blanket immunity: speakers can be held to account for an ‘off record’ message, if the only reasonable interpreta- tions of their utterance involve a commitment to it. Legal liability (...) for speech in the service of criminal behavior displays a similar profile of significant protection from indirection along with potential liability for reasonable interpretations. Specifically, in both ordinary and legal contexts, liability depends on how a reasonable speaker would expect a reasonable hearer to interpret their utterance in the context of utter- ance, rather than on the actual speaker’s claimed communicative intentions. (shrink)

La pensée de la différence de Luisa Muraro - philosophe italienne, membre de la librairie des femmes de Milan - déjà présentée dans un précédent numéro de CLIO (n° 12) mérite ici d’être redécouverte à travers cette oeuvre singulière qu’est L’ordre symbolique de la mère. Traduit de l’italien, cet ouvrage est original d’un double point de vue. Sa structure, tout d’abord. En effet, aux six chapitres répondent six contre-chants par lesquels l’auteure dévoile ses inspirations, précise ses concepts...

A decision under ‘complete uncertainty’ is one where the decision maker knows the set of possible outcomes for each decision, but cannot assign probabilities to those outcomes. This way, the problem of ranking decisions is reduced to a problem of ranking sets of outcomes. All rankings that have emerged in the literature in this domain imply transitivity. In the current study, transitivity is subjected to an empirical evaluation in two experiments, where subjects are asked to choose between sets of monetary (...) consequences. After analysis with a Bayes Factor, very few violations of transitivity were found. It can be concluded that transitivity seems a plausible condition for the ranking of sets of monetary consequences. (shrink)

Metaphor is a pervasive and significant feature of language. We use metaphor to talk about the world in familiar and innovative ways, and in contexts ranging from everyday conversation to literature and scientific theorizing. However, metaphor poses serious challenges for standard philosophical theories of meaning, because it straddles so many important boundaries: between language and thought, between semantics and pragmatics, between rational communication and mere causal association. ;In this dissertation, I develop a pragmatic theory of metaphorical utterances which reconciles two (...) apparently incompatible intuitions. The first is that metaphors are vehicles for undertaking speech acts with a propositional content distinct from their conventional sentence meaning. The second is that metaphors are tools for inducing the essentially non-propositional effect of 'seeing things in a new light' or under a new aspect. These intuitions seem to be incompatible because it is assumed that only one can capture the essential function of metaphor. I propose instead that non-propositional 'seeing-as' or aspectual thought serves as the means by which speakers intend to accomplish their end of communicating content. This does not imply that speakers are not interested in and even committed to the effects of aspectual thought as well, only that it is not their sole, ultimate intention. ;In order to substantiate this proposal about how metaphor works, I develop an account of the psychological structures on which aspectual thought operates and the changes it engenders; I then show how the content of the speaker's intended speech act is determined by the aspect the sentence generates. By bringing propositional content and non-propositional aspectual thought together in this way, my account can treat the full range of metaphors, from 'ordinary' to 'poetic', within a unified theory. Armed with this account, we have the explanatory resources necessary to acknowledge both that ordinary conversational metaphors are efficient and sometimes essential vehicles for communicating determinate propositional contents, and also that rich, poetic metaphors are invitations to an open-ended contemplation of the subject under discussion. These apparently very different effects turn out to be manifestations of the same basic process of comprehension. (shrink)

On a familiar and prima facie plausible view of metaphor, speakers who speak metaphorically say one thing in order to mean another. A variety of theorists have recently challenged this view; they offer criteria for distinguishing what is said from what is merely meant, and argue that these support classifying metaphor within 'what is said'. I consider four such criteria, and argue that when properly understood, they support the traditional classification instead. I conclude by sketching how we might extract a (...) workable notion of 'what is said' from ordinary intuitions about saying. (shrink)