Hypocrites invite moral opprobrium, and charges of hypocrisy are a significant and widespread feature of our moral lives. Yet it remains unclear what hypocrites have in common, or what is distinctively bad about them. We propose that hypocrites are persons who have undermined their claim to moral authority. Since this self-undermining can occur in a number of ways, our account construes hypocrisy as multiply realizable. As we explain, a person’s moral authority refers to a kind of standing that they occupy (...) within a particular moral community. This status is both socially important and normatively precarious. Hence, moral agents are right to be vigilant when it comes to hypocrisy, and are often justified in their outrage when they detect it. We further argue that our view can preserve what is attractive in rival accounts, while avoiding their associated problems. (shrink)

Memory of past episodes provides a sense of personal identity — the sense that I am the same person as someone in the past. We present a neurological case study of a patient who has accurate memories of scenes from his past, but for whom the memories lack the sense of mineness. On the basis of this case study, we propose that the sense of identity derives from two components, one delivering the content of the memory and the other generating (...) the sense of mineness. We argue that this new model of the sense of identity has implications for debates about quasi-memory. In addition, articulating the components of the sense of identity promises to bear on the extent to which this sense of identity provides evidence of personal identity. (shrink)

Explores the place of intellectual virtues and vices in a social world. Chapters are divided into four sections: Foundational Issues; Individual Virtues; Collective Virtues; and Methods and Measurements.

Culturally different connotations of basic concepts challenge the comparative study of religion. Do persons in Germany or in the United States refer to the same concepts when talking about ‘spirituality’ and ‘religion’? Does it make a difference how they identify themselves? The Bielefeld-Chattanooga Cross-Cultural Study on ‘Spirituality’ includes a semantic differential approach for the comparison of self-identified “neither religious nor spiritual”, “religious”, and “spiritual” persons regarding semantic attributes attached to the concepts ‘religion’ and ‘spirituality’ in each research context. Results show (...) that ‘spirituality’ is used as a broader concept than ‘religion’. Regarding religion, semantics attributed by self-identified religious persons differ significantly from those of the spiritual persons. The ‘spiritual’ and the ‘religious’ groups agree on semantics attributed to spirituality but differ from the ‘neither spiritual nor religious’ group. Qualifications of differences and agreements become visible from the comparison between the United States and Germany. It is argued for the semantically sensitive study of culturally situated ‘spiritualities’. (shrink)

Protests and counter-protests seek to draw and direct attention and concern with confronting images and slogans. In recent years, as protests and counter-protests have partially migrated to the digital space, such images and slogans have also gone online. Two main ways in which these images and slogans are translated to the online space is through the use of emoji and hashtags. Despite sustained academic interest in online protests, hashtag activism and the use of emoji across social media platforms, little is (...) known about the specific functional role that emoji and hashtags play in online social movements. In an effort to fill this gap, the current paper studies both hashtags and emoji in the context of the Twitter discourse around the Black Lives Matter movement. (shrink)

Research on future-oriented mental time travel (FMTT) is highly active yet somewhat unruly. I believe this is due, in large part, to the complexity of both the tasks used to test FMTT and the concepts involved. Extraordinary care is a necessity when grappling with such complex and perplexing metaphysical constructs as self and time and their co-instantiation in memory. In this review, I first discuss the relation between future mental time travel and types of memory (episodic and semantic). I then (...) examine the nature of both the types of self-knowledge assumed to be projected into the future and the types of temporalities that constitute projective temporal experience. Finally, I argue that a person lacking episodic memory should nonetheless be able to imagine a personal future by virtue of (a) the fact that semantic, as well as episodic, memory can be self-referential, (b) autonoetic awareness is not a prerequisite for FMTT, and (c) semantic memory does, in fact, enable certain forms of personally-oriented FMTT. (shrink)

Computers are used to make decisions in an increasing number of domains. There is widespread agreement that some of these uses are ethically problematic. Far less clear is where ethical problems arise, and what might be done about them. This paper expands and defends the Ethical Gravity Thesis: ethical problems that arise at higher levels of analysis of an automated decision-making system are inherited by lower levels of analysis. Particular instantiations of systems can add new problems, but not ameliorate more (...) general ones. We defend this thesis by adapting Marr’s famous 1982 framework for understanding information-processing systems. We show how this framework allows one to situate ethical problems at the appropriate level of abstraction, which in turn can be used to target appropriate interventions. (shrink)

Multiply realizable properties are those whose realizers are physically diverse. It is often argued that theories which contain them are ipso facto irreducible. These arguments assume that physical explanations are restricted to the most specific descriptions possible of physical entities. This assumption is descriptively false, and philosophically unmotivated. I argue that it is a holdover from the late positivist axiomatic view of theories. A semantic view of theories, by contrast, correctly allows scientific explanations to be couched in the most perspicuous, (...) powerful language available. On a semantic view, traditional notions of multiple realizability are thus very hard to motivate. At best, one must abandon either the idea that multiple realizability is an interesting scientific notion, or else admit that multiply realizable properties do not automatically block scientific reductions. (shrink)

Distinguishing mechanistic components from mere causally relevant background conditions remains a difficulty for mechanistic accounts of explanation. By distinguishing resources from mechanical parts, I argue that we can more effectively draw this boundary. Further, the distinction makes obvious that there are distinctive resource explanations which are not captured by a traditional part-based mechanistic account. While this suggests a straightforward extension of the mechanistic model, I argue that incorporating resources and resource explanations requires moving beyond the purely local account of levels (...) that some mechanists advocate. (shrink)

The present moment in human history is marked by the ever-accelerating movement across the world of materials, peoples and information, creating various problems and, of course, opportunities as well--especially, the movement of the people, which makes multiculturalism a major issue. Differences between the immigrants and the receiving society create conflict. One solution would be found in the legal provision for the equality of rights for all the members of society, including cultural minorities, but if the legal solution alone is considered (...) effective, there would be waste of resources accumulated in cultures as enabling agents of amenable human life. But multiple cultures in a single society easily become a source of conflict, as another culture encroaching upon one’s own culture is often felt as a threatening challenge to one’s identity, as identity is constructed in the subjective process of culture. It implies the master-and-slave struggle between two subjectivities. Cultural subjectivities, personal or collective, could be induced to constitute a complex system of federated subjectivities. Even such a system would not, however, completely eliminate tension and conflict. Intervention by an ethic universally conceived on the minimal basis would meet the urgent need to prevent escalation of conflict, but it would ultimately prepare a common ground for the development of a global culture incorporating multiple cultures as historically inherited resources for enrichment of human life. Ethical awareness is what reveals the otherness of the other and also the ontological ground of human life on earth ; as ethics and epistemology coincide, a human reason would emerge as the ground of a new global culture, and the world would hopefully become a single Lebensraum for entire humanity. (shrink)

The present moment in human history is marked by the ever-accelerating movement across the world of materials, peoples and information, creating various problems and, of course, opportunities as well--especially, the movement of the people, which makes multiculturalism a major issue. Differences between the immigrants and the receiving society create conflict. One solution would be found in the legal provision for the equality of rights for all the members of society, including cultural minorities, but if the legal solution alone is considered (...) effective, there would be waste of resources accumulated in cultures as enabling agents of amenable human life. But multiple cultures in a single society easily become a source of conflict, as another culture encroaching upon one’s own culture is often felt as a threatening challenge to one’s identity, as identity is constructed in the subjective process of culture. It implies the master-and-slave struggle between two subjectivities. Cultural subjectivities, personal or collective, could be induced to constitute a complex system of federated subjectivities. Even such a system would not, however, completely eliminate tension and conflict. Intervention by an ethic universally conceived on the minimal basis would meet the urgent need to prevent escalation of conflict, but it would ultimately prepare a common ground for the development of a global culture incorporating multiple cultures as historically inherited resources for enrichment of human life. Ethical awareness is what reveals the otherness of the other and also the ontological ground of human life on earth ; as ethics and epistemology coincide, a human reason would emerge as the ground of a new global culture, and the world would hopefully become a single Lebensraum for entire humanity. (shrink)

Hommel et al. emphasize that the Theory of Event Coding (TEC)'s utility is not its ability to be a new theory of cognition, but its ability to engender new thinking about new and old problems. In this commentary we use the TEC to re-examine a long-standing discrepancy in the attention literature.

Cet article présente le concept de transversalité comme une possible clé d’interprétation des phénomènes culturels et sociaux de la postmodernité.

Cet article présente le concept de transversalité comme une possible clé d’interprétation des phénomènes culturels et sociaux de la postmodernité.

In part 1 of the paper, I develop a Platonic business ethic, emphasizing Plato’s Republic. I approach business ethics from a virtue ethics position, and I attempt to show that a Platonic craftsmanship model infuses a corporation with a type of managerial wisdom and justice, molds temperate and courageous corporate characters, and entails a morally fine type of self-interest. I also show that it is basic to two influential management theories.In part 2, I use Amartya Sen’s Development as Freedom to (...) show that the craftsmanship model is central to the concept of development. This concept is important in ethical discussions of both globalization and transnational corporations. Thus, I attempt to globalize Platonic business ethics using a craftsmanship model.In my concluding remarks, I attempt to show that the Plato/Sen position on development can be illustrated by both American and non-American capitalist firms functioning in our globalized world. (shrink)

I argue that computationalism is compatible with a plausible supervenience thesis about conscious states. The most plausible way of making it compatible, however, involves abandoning counterfactual conditions on implementation.

This issue is dedicated to consciousness in medieval and early modern philosophy of mind. It aims to shed new light on the continuities and innovations during the transition from medieval to early modern philosophy of mind. The four papers, by Sonja Schierbaum, Daniel Schmal, Oliver Istvan Toth, and Philipp N. Müller, focus on consciousness and, more specifically, on one of its less frequently considered aspects: memory.

The paper introduces a broad family of metrics applicable to finite and countably infinite strings, or, by extension, to formal structures serving as semantics for countable languages. The main focus is on applications to sets of pointed Kripke models, a semantics for modal logics. For the resulting metric spaces, the paper classifies topological properties including which metrics are topologically equivalent, providing sufficient conditions for compactness, characterizing clopen sets and isolated points, and characterizing the metrical topologies by a concept of logical (...) convergence. We then apply the approach to maps from dynamic epistemic logic, showing that product updates with action models yield continuous maps, hence allowing for an interpretation of the iterated updates as discrete time dynamical systems. (shrink)

This process is the transformation of the self, even to the extent that we no longer recognize ourselves although, oddly, something in us will then recognize our ‘new’ self as being what we really are, or at least what we started out to be. Then, in a way, we are like the seedling of some wonderful tree which has been overtaken by a parasitic plant until very little of the original tree is recognizable – it may have become dwarfed, hollowed (...) out or even killed by the parasite, which is our egoic mask. With meticulous pruning and therapy, the tree can be uncovered and possibly healed, but then it will be a test of the tree’s original nature and soil to see whether it will endure and grow straight and tall, with roots that will hold against adversity. For this purpose, I have assembled twelve steps to describe the transformational process (consider it coincidental that the alcoholic recovery program also has twelve steps but there is, inevitably, some correspondence between the two systems). Although I describe these steps here as if they were a progression, you’ll find that they really work in parallel or in stages wherein first one line will seem emphasized, and then another at a different point in your evolution. These steps induce a gradual change in our psychic shape (the way that we fit with each other and with our circumstances), and also they are an alchemic progression, in that each prepares our neurochemical apparatus to attune to the next stage more readily. (shrink)

I. Les facultés qui se rapportent à l'image des objets en nous, — l'imagination au sens large, — constituent, selon une tradition qui vient d'Aristote, l'intermédiaire entre la sensibilité et l'intellect. Le moyen âge les désigna par le nom de sens intérieurs ; leur liste fut reprise et modifiée par Ficin (dont la source directe n'est pas Avicenne, mais Albert le Grand) et par Bruno. Dans l'interprétation des néoplatoniciens, la série des facultés connaissantes représente le chemin de l'âme dans la (...) conversion ; la phantasia y joue un rôle eminent (Plotin, Hugues de Saint-Victor, Ficin, Bruno) ; d'autre part, on fait correspondre à la faculté intermédiaire une âme intermédiaire qui lui sert de substrat (Lulle), et un « premier corps » ou « véhicule » de l'âme (le spiritus phantasticus ou őχημα-πνεῦμα de Synesius). L'idée reparaît, modifiée, chez Hugues de Saint-Victor, Ficin, Bruno. Ce dernier met le spiritus phantasticus en relation avec l'âme du monde, qui lui est consubstantielle, la « lumière précédant toute Création » qui nous fait voir les images de nos rêves. Sources : Porphyre, Cusanus repris par Ficin, le panthéisme médiéval. Le lien entre le spiritus phantasticus et le destin de l'âme, esquissé chez Plotin, Porphyre, le Pseudo-Jamblique, Synesius, est affirmé sous différentes formes par Hugues, Ficin et Bruno : le sujet des peines infernales, qui sont d'ailleurs chez Ficin et Bruno de nature imaginaire, est un corps subtil. Ces peines correspondent exactement à ce que nos appétits et notre imagination ont fait de la substance de notre âme. Le spiritus phantasticus se rapproche, notamment chez Ficin, d'une sorte de karma. II. Dans la branche descendante de la connaissance, l'application de l'universel au particulier est forcément liée au sens intérieur et on l'attribue à une faculté spéciale, la Urteilskraft au sens kantien. Bruno en fait une fonction de l'imagination. D'autre part, les arts universels ou lulliens ont pris de plus en plus, durant la Renaissance, l'aspect de topiques généralisées ; le nerf de la méthode y était donc toujours cette Urteilskraft. Il s'en suit, chez Bruno, que le sujet de l'art universel est l'imagination, qui devient ainsi la source première de tout acte de l'intellect, principe de la fécondité infinie de la pensée. (Pratiquement, d'ailleurs, les artes de Bruno sont des ensembles d'images). III. Aux théories de l'imagination répondent les théories de l'image, « vêtement » et « premier corps » de la pensée. On vérifie cette correspondance, d'une part, dans la théorie du symbole, — avec ses variantes métaphysiques, pansymbolisme, magie, — et, d'autre part, dans celle du concetto (rapport entre la pensée et l'expression), où l'on va jusqu'à l'idée d'un universel de l'imagination, et du dessin comme concept. — Une importante différence entre la nature du symbolisme selon Pic et l'idée que s'en fait Bruno s'explique par leurs conceptions différentes de l'imagination. La théorie de l'art et l'évolution du goût artistique sont, dans leurs grandes lignes, en concordance avec ce qu'impliquent ou suggèrent à ce sujet les théories de l'imagination et de l'image. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that radiological attempts to elucidate the properties of self -- an endeavor currently popular in the social neurosciences -- are fraught with conceptual difficulties. I first discuss several philosophical criteria that increase the chances we are posing the “right” questions to nature. I then discuss whether these criteria are met when empirical efforts are directed at one of the central constructs in the social sciences – the human self. In particular, I consider whether recent attempts (...) to map the neural correlates of self and its assumed properties using brain scanning technology satisfy the conceptual conditions minimally required to ask well-formed, theoretically satisfying questions of nature. I conclude that much theoretical work remains to be done. (shrink)