This book engages with what are widely recognized as the two core dimensions of emotion. When we are afraid, glad or disappointed, we feel a certain way; moreover, our emotion is intentional or directed at something: we are afraid of something, glad or disappointed about something. Connecting with a vital strand of recent philosophical thinking, I conceive of these two aspects of emotion as unified. Examining different possible ways of developing the view that the feeling dimension of emotion is itself (...) intentional, I argue against the currently popular view that it is a form of perception-like receptivity to value. I instead propose that emotional feeling is a specific type of response to value, an affective ‘position-taking’. This alternative conceives of emotional feeling as intimately related to our cares and concerns. While situating itself within the analytic-philosophical debate on emotion, the discussion crucially draws on ideas from the early phenomenological tradition in an attempt to think past the theoretical strictures of many contemporary approaches to this subject. The result is a new view of emotional feeling as a thoroughly personal form of engagement with value. (shrink)

The recent progress in the development of autonomous cars has seen ethical questions come to the forefront. In particular, life and death decisions regarding the behavior of self-driving cars in trolley dilemma situations are attracting widespread interest in the recent debate. In this essay we want to ask whether we should implement a mandatory ethics setting for the whole of society or, whether every driver should have the choice to select his own personal ethics setting. While the consensus view seems (...) to be that people would not be willing to use an automated car that might sacrifice themselves in a dilemma situation, we will defend the somewhat contra-intuitive claim that this would be nevertheless in their best interest. The reason is, simply put, that a PES regime would most likely result in a prisoner’s dilemma. (shrink)

It is popular to hold that emotions are evaluative. On the standard account, the evaluative character of emotion is understood in epistemic terms: emotions apprehend or make us aware of value properties. As this account is commonly elaborated, emotions are experiences with evaluative intentional content. In this paper, I am concerned with a recent alternative proposal on how emotions afford awareness of value. This proposal does not ascribe evaluative content to emotions, but instead conceives of them as evaluative at the (...) level of intentional mode or attitude. I first argue that this proposal fails to make emotions intelligible as value apprehensions. There are reasons to suppose that emotions do not apprehend value to begin with, but are related to values in a different, non-epistemic sense. I then go on to show that the notion of an evaluative intentional mode can still help elucidate the evaluative character of emotion. I argue that there is a plausible non-epistemic understanding of the view that emotions are evaluative modes. On this account, emotions are not ways of apprehending values, but ways of acknowledging values. (shrink)

It is a commonplace that emotions are characteristically passive. As we ordinarily think of them, emotions are ways in which we are acted upon, that is, moved or affected by aspects of our environment. Moreover, we have no voluntary control over whether we feel them. In this paper, I call attention to a much-neglected respect in which emotions are active, which is no less central to our pretheoretical concept of them. That is, in having emotions, we are engaged with the (...) world insofar as we respond to aspects of our environment. In this context, to say that an emotion is a response to x is tantamount to saying that x is a reason for which we have it. Elaborating this claim in light of a historically prominent conception of the active/passive distinction, I will argue that emotions are a form of spontaneity in virtue of their responsive character and contrast in this respect with perceptions, which are fundamentally receptive. While this proposal is prima facie opposed to the ordinary image of emotions as passive, I will show that it actually allows us to make proper sense of it. (shrink)

I argue that on Aristotle’s account practical thinking is thinking whose origin (archē) is a desire that has as its object the very thing that one reasons about how to promote. This feature distinguishes practical from productive reasoning since in the latter the desire that initiates it is not (unless incidentally) a desire for the object that one productively reasons about. The feature has several interesting consequences: (a) there is only a contingent relationship between the desire that one practically reasons (...) about how to satisfy and the action one decides on; (b) practical thinking and action cannot be separated from the agent, whereas productive thinking and production can be outsourced to someone else. The view has consequences also for the distinction between action and production. Finally, I illustrate the usefulness and correctness of my account of practical thinking by using it to shed new light on Aristotle’s claim that the virtuous agent must decide on her virtuous actions ‘for themselves’. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the widely held view that Aristotle's vicious agent is a principled follower of a wrong conception of the good whose soul, just like the soul of the virtuous agent, is marked by harmony between his reason and non-rational desires is an exegetical mistake. Rather, Aristotle holds – consistently and throughout the Nicomachean Ethics – that the vicious agent lacks any real principles of action and that his soul lacks unity and harmony even more than (...) the soul of the uncontrolled agent. (shrink)

At a time when the label "conservative" is indiscriminately applied to fundamentalists, populists, libertarians, fascists, and the advocates of one or another orthodoxy, this volume offers a nuanced and historically informed presentation of ...

It is widely assumed that emotions are evaluative. Moreover, many authors suppose that emotions are important or valuable as evaluations. According to the currently dominant version of cognitivism, emotions are evaluative insofar as they make us aware of value properties of their intentional objects. In attributing to emotions an epistemic role, this view conceives of them as epistemically valuable. In this paper, I argue that proponents of this account mischaracterize the evaluative character of emotions and, a fortiori, their value. Moreover, (...) I propose an alternative view of emotional evaluation, according to which emotions are practically rather than epistemically important. As I argue, emotions are ways of acknowledging their intentional objects as (dis)valuable. As such, they do not apprehend values but make them count. I elaborate this idea by drawing an analogy with legal and political sanctions. The resulting view has it that emotions are practically important in that they affirm the cares and concerns which serve as standards of emotional evaluation. (shrink)

Emotion Review, Volume 14, Issue 4, Page 244-253, October 2022. This article is a précis of my 2019 monograph The World-Directedness of Emotional Feeling: On Affect and Intentionality. The book engages with a growing trend of philosophical thinking according to which the felt dimension and the intentionality of emotion are unified. While sympathetic to the general approach, I argue for a reconceptualization of the form of intentionality that emotional feelings are widely thought to possess and, accordingly, of the kind of (...) role they play in our mental lives. More specifically, I argue that the way we feel in having an emotion is not a perception-like awareness of evaluative properties of its object, but instead constitutes the taking of a stand or position on this object in light of its evaluative properties. (shrink)

Counter to the popular impression that Adam Smith was a champion of selfishness and greed, Jerry Muller shows that the Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations maintained that markets served to promote the well-being of ...

It is popular to hold that our primary epistemic access to specific response-dependent properties like the fearsome or admirable (or so-called ‘affective properties’) is constituted by the corresponding emotion. I argue that this view is incompatible with a widely held meta-ethical view, according to which affective properties have deontic force. More specifically, I argue that this view cannot accommodate for the requirement that deontic entities provide guidance. If affective properties are to guide the formation of the corresponding emotion, our primary (...) access to them cannot be provided by that same emotion. (shrink)

The paper defends three claims about Aristotle’s theory of uncontrolled actions (akrasia) in NE 7.3. First, I argue that the first part of NE 7.3 contains the description of the overall state of mind of the agent while she acts without control. Aristotle’s solution to the problem of uncontrolled action lies in the analogy between the uncontrolled agent and people who are drunk, mad, or asleep. This analogy is interpreted as meaning that the uncontrolled agent, while acting without control, is (...) still in possession of her knowledge but she is unable to use it as knowledge due to the temporary disablement of her reason by appetite. Due to this disablement, the uncontrolled agent is temporarily unable to be motivated to act by her knowledge and acts merely on her appetite. Second, I argue that the second part of NE 7.3 provides an analysis of the particular mental state from which the uncontrolled action issues. Its central passage is a description of the uncontrolled agent’s state of mind before the uncontrolled action and not, as it has been traditionally understood, a description of her state of mind during the uncontrolled action. Third, I argue that, on Aristotle’s view, the transition from the state before the uncontrolled action to the state in which the agent already acts without control does not involve any psychological state that would constitute the agent’s choice to abandon her decision and give in to her desires but proceeds on a purely physiological level. (shrink)

I defend two main theses. First, I argue that Aristotle’s account of voluntary action focuses on the conditions under which one is the cause of one’s actions in virtue of being (qua) the individual one is. Aristotle contrasts voluntary action not only with involuntary action but also with cases in which one acts (or does something) due to one’s nature (for example, in virtue of being a member of a certain species) rather than due to one’s own desires (i.e. qua (...) individual). An action can be attributed to one qua individual in two distinct ways depending on whether one is a rational or a non-rational animal. One is responsible for one’s action in both cases, but only in the former case is one also responsible for being the sort of individual that performs it. Aristotle also distinguishes two ways in which an action can be compelled while still being an action of the agent. In the first case, one is compelled by (physically) external forces or circumstances to act against one’s internal impulse. In the second case, one is compelled to act on (internal) impulses that are fixed by one’s nature against one’s own individual impulse. This latter kind of compelled action is only possible in the case of rational agents. Secondly, I argue that Aristotle’s conception of what it is to be a cause of an action inevitably brings in certain normative features which support evaluative judgments and the practice of praise and blame. On Aristotle’s view, any goal-directed behavior that is properly attributable to an individual is (normally) subject to standards that pertain to behavior of that sort. At the most basic level, these standards establish what counts as a successful realization of the goal that one aims at. Thus even in the case of non-rational animals (or children), one can judge the success of what they are doing and encourage (or discourage) similar behavior by praise or blame. These standards are applicable to one’s conduct simply insofar as one is the controlling origin (or efficient cause) of one’s action qua individual. In the case of rational agents the practice of praise and blame can involve a further normative layer since they can be praised or blamed not only for acting in a certain way so as to encourage or discourage them with a view to the future, but also for being – and having become – individuals of a certain sort. Nevertheless, the applicability of such evaluative judgments and of praise and blame is still warranted by one’s being the controlling origin of one’s actions qua the individual one is (in this case, qua rational individual). (shrink)

Ever since the 19th century, political parties and free media were widely deemed indispensable for the proper functioning of representative democracy. They constituted what one might call the criti...

Contract-based approaches have been a focus of attention in business ethics. As one of the grand traditions in political philosophy, contractarianism is founded on the notion that we will never resolve deep moral disagreement. Classical philosophers like Hobbes and Locke, or recent ones like Rawls and Gaus, seek to solve ethical conflicts on the level of social rules and procedures. Recent authors in business ethics have sought to utilize contract-based approaches for their field and to apply it to concrete business (...) dilemmas. However, the application of contractarianism to management contexts can cause difficulties. Our article discusses this conceptual problem of contractarian business ethics and presents the idea of order ethics as an alternative. Order ethics, as we argue, can make a difference by conceptually bridging the gap between contractarianism and business ethics. (shrink)

This book is the first major account of political thought in twentieth-century Europe, both West and East, to appear since the end of the Cold War. Skillfully blending intellectual, political, and cultural history, Jan-Werner Müller elucidates the ideas that shaped the period of ideological extremes before 1945 and the liberalization of West European politics after the Second World War. He also offers vivid portraits of famous as well as unjustly forgotten political thinkers and the movements and institutions they inspired. Müller (...) pays particular attention to ideas advanced to justify fascism and how they relate to the special kind of liberal democracy that was created in postwar Western Europe. He also explains the impact of the 1960s and neoliberalism, ending with a critical assessment of today's self-consciously post-ideological age. (shrink)

I argue that, for Aristotle, virtue of character is a state of the non-rational part of the soul that makes one prone to making and acting on decisions in virtue of that part’s standing in the right relation to (correct) reason, namely, a relation that qualifies the agent as a true self-lover. In effect, this central feature of virtue of character is nothing else than love of practical wisdom. As I argue, it not only explains how reason can hold direct (...) authority over non-rational desires but also why Aristotle defines virtue of character as hexis prohairetikē. (shrink)

The paper addresses the following question: why do human beings, on Aristotle’s view, have an innate tendency to badness, that is, to developing desires that go beyond, and often against, their natural needs? Given Aristotle’s teleological assumptions (including the thesis that nature does nothing in vain), such tendency should not be present. I argue that the culprit is to be found in the workings of rationality. In particular, it is the presence of theoretical reason that necessitates the limitless nature of (...) human non-rational desires. (shrink)

This essay criticizes the current approach to epistemic democracy. Epistemic democrats are preoccupied with the question of how a society can best exploit a given stock of knowledge. This article argues that the problem-solving capability of a society depends on two factors rather than one. The quality of decision-making depends both on how a democracy is able to make use of its stock of knowledge and on the size of the knowledge stock. Society’s problem-solving capability over time is therefore a (...) function of its ability to develop its knowledge exploitation mechanisms and the growth rate of its knowledge stock. Based on this enhanced model of social problem-solving, this essay compares two different political ideal types: experimental democracy, as commonly defended by epistemic democrats; and polycentric democracy, a model defended most commonly by political economists. (shrink)

In recent years, tech evangelists have made headlines predicting that in the future manual driving will be outlawed. This essay will investigate the question whether a ban of human driven cars can be defended on moral grounds in a future scenario in which autonomous cars are going to be significantly safer than manually driven cars. This article will argue that in such a future scenario manually driven cars, for moral reasons, indeed should be banned from participating in regular traffic. Since (...) the moral argument for outlawing manually driven cars will likely be met by resistance by car-aficionados, in the final part of the paper, we are devising a proposal for reconciling the strong moral case for a ban of manually driven cars with the widespread fondness of manual driving. (shrink)

According to a well-known view in the philosophy of mind, intentional attitudes by their very nature satisfy requirements of rationality (e.g. Davidson 1980; Dennett 1987; Millar 2004). This view (which I shall call Constitutivism) features prominently as the ‘principle of minimal rationality’ in de Sousa’s monograph The Rationality of Emotion (1987). By explicating this principle in terms of the notion of the formal object of an attitude, de Sousa articulates an interesting and original version of Constitutivism, which differs in important (...) respects from other extant versions. In this paper, I explore this version of Constitutivism against the background of recent developments in the theory of rationality and make explicit its ramifications for the long-standing dispute over whether the mind is essentially normative. My focus will be on how to conceive of the form of the rationality requirements that attitudes as such must satisfy according to this principle. I argue that, although de Sousa seems officially to endorse a structuralist conception of rationality, according to which these requirements are requirements of coherence, his considerations on formal objects suggest that they are more aptly conceived in terms of a reasons-responsive conception of rationality. I further argue that which of these two readings we choose makes a significant difference to the prospect of vindicating the essential normativity of mind by invoking the principle of minimal rationality. (shrink)

Even though human smuggling is one of the central topics of contention in the political discourse about immigration, it has received virtually no attention from moral philosophy. This article aims...

What, if anything, is the import of Hayek to epistemic democracy? Although Hayek is revered by epistemic democrats for his insights into the epistemic aspects of the market sphere, it is generally believed that his theory is moot with respect to democratic reason. This paper aims to challenge this verdict. I argue that a Hayekian analysis of inclusive public deliberation contributes at least three valuable lessons: (1) Hayek makes the case that under certain conditions even unbiased deliberators are permanently unable (...) to converge on the best available policy option. Call this the problem of ‘persistent hidden policy champions’. (2) He demonstrates that to unlock hidden policy champions, reasonable minority factions need the opportunity to act on their own evidential standards. (3) He challenges epistemic democrats to think more carefully about how to design the “epistemic basic structure” (Kurtulmus and Irzik 2017) of society in order to account for persistent hidden policy champions. (shrink)

It is sometimes alleged that the study of emotion and the study of value are currently pursued as relatively autonomous disciplines. As Kevin Mulligan notes, “the philosophy and psychology of emotions pays little attention to the philosophy of value and the latter pays only a little more attention to the former.” (2010b, 475). Arguably, the last decade has seen more of a rapprochement between these two domains than used to be the norm (cf. e.g. Roeser & Todd 2014). But there (...) still seems to be considerable potential for exchange and dialogue if the situation is compared with their intimate relationship in central strands of early realist phenomenology. The philosopher perhaps most representative of this ecumenical approach is Husserl’s early student Dietrich von Hildebrand (1889-1977). From the very early stages of his philosophical career, Hildebrand has developed one of the most original, comprehensive and nuanced accounts of emotions at whose core is a detailed examination of their connection to value. While his central concern with the ethical significance of our affective life is in many ways continuous with Scheler’s work and draws crucially on Reinach’s philosophy of mind, Hildebrand’s own reflections considerably expand on and substantially modify the picture of the ontology and normative role of emotions defended by these authors. In this article, I reconstruct Hildebrand’s view of emotions with a particular focus on those aspects which represent his most distinctive contribution to this subject. (shrink)

I argue that Aristotelian decisions (προαιρέσεις) cannot be conceived of as based solely on wish (βούλησις) and deliberation (βούλευσις), as the standard picture (most influentially argued for in Anscombe's "Thought and Action in Aristotle", in R. Bambrough ed. New Essays on Plato and Aristotle. London: Routledge, 1965) suggests. Although some features of the standard view are correct (such as that decisions have essential connection to deliberation and that wish always plays a crucial role in the formation of a decision), Aristotelian (...) decisions sometimes must include non-rational desires such as appetite. Consequently, any exegetical account of Aristotle’s notion of decision must be able to accommodate this feature. (shrink)

This article identifies a distinct strand of 20th-century liberal thought that was exemplified by Isaiah Berlin, Raymond Aron and, to a lesser extent, Karl Popper. I offer a stylized account of their common ideas and shared political sensibility, and argue that their primarily negative liberalism was a variety of what Judith Shklar called the `liberalism of fear' — which put the imperative to avoid cruelty and atrocity first. All three founded their liberalism on a `politics of knowledge' that was directed (...) primarily against Marxist philosophies of history and less against the idea of bureaucratic planning, as, in contrast, was the case with Friedrich von Hayek's thought. Moreover, all three subscribed to more or less explicit versions of value pluralism, and claimed that, in the circumstances of modernity, Weber's `clash of values' was exacerbated and required a particularly prudential approach to politics; this prudential management of value conflicts in turn was best entrusted to cultivated bureaucratic elites. All shared an image of a tolerant and humane society — essentially an idealized version of Britain — but said perhaps too little on the question how societies without the appropriate traditions of moderation and compromise were to be liberalized. (shrink)

The essay takes the widespread complaint that societies today are deeply divided and polarized as a starting point. Affirming that there is no democracy without division, it asks what it means for conflict and disagreement to be dealt with in a respectful and civil manner. As an illustration of the main argument, the way that liberals have engaged with populist leaders is criticized on both a strategic and normative level. An alternative to existing strategies of dealing with the conflict between (...) liberals and populist is then proposed. Finally, the article also asks under what conditions civil disobedience might be an appropriate response to authoritarian populism. (shrink)

This book is the first major account of political thought in twentieth-century Europe, both West and East, to appear since the end of the Cold War. Skillfully blending intellectual, political, and cultural history, Jan-Werner Müller elucidates the ideas that shaped the period of ideological extremes before 1945 and the liberalization of West European politics after the Second World War. He also offers vivid portraits of famous as well as unjustly forgotten political thinkers and the movements and institutions they inspired. Müller (...) pays particular attention to ideas advanced to justify fascism and how they relate to the special kind of liberal democracy that was created in postwar Western Europe. He also explains the impact of the 1960s and neoliberalism, ending with a critical assessment of today's self-consciously post-ideological age. (shrink)

This article identifies a distinct strand of 20th-century liberal thought that was exemplified by Isaiah Berlin, Raymond Aron and, to a lesser extent, Karl Popper. I offer a stylized account of their common ideas and shared political sensibility, and argue that their primarily negative liberalism was a variety of what Judith Shklar called the `liberalism of fear' — which put the imperative to avoid cruelty and atrocity first. All three founded their liberalism on a `politics of knowledge' that was directed (...) primarily against Marxist philosophies of history and less against the idea of bureaucratic planning, as, in contrast, was the case with Friedrich von Hayek's thought. Moreover, all three subscribed to more or less explicit versions of value pluralism, and claimed that, in the circumstances of modernity, Weber's `clash of values' was exacerbated and required a particularly prudential approach to politics; this prudential management of value conflicts in turn was best entrusted to cultivated bureaucratic elites. All shared an image of a tolerant and humane society — essentially an idealized version of Britain — but said perhaps too little on the question how societies without the appropriate traditions of moderation and compromise were to be liberalized. (shrink)

By pushing Descartes to more clearly explain the union of body and soul beyond the functioning of a ‘strong’ passion, namely sadness, Elisabeth wants Descartes to review his idea of the passions, and his understanding of the ‘theory of the four humors’. This chapter aims at showing that Descartes turns away from Galen’s theory of the humors, which he globally adopts in the 1633 Treatise of Man. With the shift in his conceptualization of the humors between this Treatise and the (...) Treatise of the Passions (1649), Descartes analyzed more specifically the inner feelings, consciousness, and the passions, by considering that a man is not simply a body, but a psychophysical being, with a body and a soul. (shrink)

According to much recent work in metaethics, we have a perceptual access to normative properties and relations. On a common approach, this access has a presentational character. Here, ‘presentational’ specifies a characteristic feature of the way aspects of the environment are apprehended in sensory experience. While many authors have argued that we enjoy presentations of value properties, thus far comparatively less effort has been invested into developing a presentational view of the apprehension of normative reasons. Since it appears that this (...) view would offer much the same theoretical benefits as presentational views of the apprehension of value, it seems worthwhile redressing this imbalance. My paper aims at doing so, focusing on concern-dependent practical reasons. After clarifying the central commitment of this view, I assess a recent proposal by Dancy :787-812, 2014) which provides a detailed characterization of the relevant type of cognition. I argue that Dancy ignores one of the central features of a presentational access to normative reasons and therefore misidentifies which actual psychological phenomena are apt to play this role. In this context, I also assess and reject further candidates that might seem fitting for this purpose. In the remainder of the paper, I then offer a more adequate account which specifies an actual form of presentational access to concern-dependent practical reasons and provide the contours of a more substantive account of its nature. (shrink)

In 1956 Jacques Lacan proposed as interpretation of Edgar Allan Poe's "Purloined Letter" that at once challenged literary theorists and revealed a radically new conception of psychoanalysis. Lacan's far-reaching claims about language and truth provoked a vigorous critique by Jacques Derrida, whose essay in turn has spawned further responses from Barbara Johnson, Jane Gallop, Irene Harvey, Norman Holland, and others. The Purloined Poe brings Poe's story together with these readings to provide, in the words of the editors, "a structured exercuse (...) in the elaboration of textual interpretation. The Purloined Poe reprints the full text of Poe's story, followed by Lacan's "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter,'" along with extensive commentary by the editors. Marie Bonaparte's and Shoshana Felman's discussions of traditional and contemporary approaches to "psychoanalysing" texts precede Alan Bass's new translation of Derrida's "Purveyor of Truth." The subsequent essays join the Lacan-Derrida debate and offer alternative readings by literary theorists, philosophers, psychologists, and psychoanalysts. The Purloined Poe convenes much of the most important current scholarship on "The Purloined Letter" and presents a rich sampling of poststructuralist discourse. (shrink)

According to the Spatial Quantity Association of Response Codes (SQUARC), people hold a mental association between horizontal position and quantity (lower quantities left, higher quantities right). While a large body of research has explored this effect for response speed and judgment accuracy, the affective downstream consequences of the SQUARC remain unexplored. Aiming to address this gap, the present two experiments (pre-registered, total N = 521) investigated whether stimulus arrangements that are compatible with the SQUARC for luminance are affectively preferred to (...) stimulus arrangements that are incompatible. SQUARC-compatible square arrangements (dark-left, bright-right) were preferred over SQUARC-incompatible square arrangements (dark-right, bright-left). The preference for SQUARC compatibility was not moderated by the horizontal orientation of the response scale. Our results confirm the direction of the spatial-luminance association and provide initial support that the cognitive processing of SQUARC compatibility is hedonically marked and appears sufficient to impact affective evaluations. (shrink)

Political theorists tend to dismiss the concept of constitutional patriotism for two main reasons. On the one hand, constitutional patriotism — understood as a post-national, universalist form of democratic political allegiance — is rejected on account of its abstract quality. On the otherhand, it is argued that constitutional patriotism, while apprearing universalist, is in fact particular through and through. According to this genealogical critique, it is held that constitutional patriotism might have been appropriate in the context when it originated — (...) namely West Germany, a half-nation with a deeply compromised sense of nationality on account of the Nazi past — but it is not universally applicable. This article reconstructs the origins of constitutional patriotism arguing that both the ‘protective’ and state-centred patriotism of Dolf Sternberger, and the ‘purifying’ patriotism of Jurgen Habermas — focused mainly on the public sphere — can indeed be understood as relying on ‘supplements of particularily’. However, there are also normative connections between universalist constitutional morality and militant democracy on the one hand, and universalist constitutionalist morality and an imperative to remember on the other. Thus, the genealogical critique by itself is insufficient to invalidate the idea of constitutional patriotism. (shrink)

According to a popular thought, sympathy is an epistemic phenomenon: in sympathizing with others we come to be aware of them as fellow sentient beings. This view–which I call the Epistemic View–effectively characterizes sympathy as a form of social cognition. In this paper, I will argue against the Epistemic View. As far as I can see, this view radically misconstrues the way sympathy is directed at others. I will at the same time provide some material for, and motivate, an alternative (...) proposal according to which the primary significance of sympathy is practical rather than epistemic. On this account, sympathy is a form of interpersonal acknowledgment rather than interpersonal awareness. (shrink)

At the University of Pretoria the author, a practical theologian, experiences a fruitful soil for the development of an interdisciplinary process. He referred to concrete examples of cooperation, but used the article to reflect on best practices for the interdisciplinary dialogue. He came to the conclusion that it probably made more sense to talk of Practical-theological alternatives rather than to describe the subject in a single fixed manner of understanding and action. Our goal should rather be to open up the (...) boundaries between Practical Theology, Human, Social and Natural Sciences. (shrink)

Summary This article examines the complex nature of post-war Italian political thought, stressing the importance of Italy's unusual institutional and historical political arrangements, but also the vibrancy of its political ideologies in this period. In the past it has often been argued that the dysfunctional nature of post-war Italian democracy with its rapidly changing governments, and widespread corruption—which nonetheless coexisted with the one party, the Christian Democrats, being constantly in power—led to the atrophying of political theory in general, and political (...) ideologies in particular. But this picture is strongly disputed here—on the contrary it is argued that Christian Democratic, Left and liberal political ideologies were all complex and interesting. Thus if Christian democracy should ultimately be seen as an ‘ideology of transition’ which existed to help Catholicism adapt to the parameters of modern mass democracy, and which lacked a thinker of the calibre of Jacques Maritain, it nevertheless contained within it important debates on the role of the state, between such interesting thinkers as Giuseppe Dossetti and Alcide De Gasperi. And if anything, political thinking on the Left in the post-war period was even more complex, with visceral debates within the (large) Communist Party (PCI) over whether to work within the law—between such thinkers as Palmiro Togliatti and the Il Manifesto group. Equally on the more revolutionary Left, there were important debates about how quickly capitalism could be made to collapse through revolutionary action between thinkers such as Raniero Panzieri and his more radical disciples, Mario Tronti and Antonio Negri, while later, due to the general failure of these revolutionary efforts, post-modern thinkers such as Gianni Vattimo sought to abandon grand metaphysical narratives, whilst retaining a commitment to Left of centre political commitments. Finally, although not part of a widespread mass movement, the liberal thought of Norberto Bobbio was also highly interesting and sophisticated—borrowing from Hobbes and Kelsen, he sought to advocate a modest form of liberal democracy which allowed for civilised forms of conflict, and the protection of minorities, and which rejected the contention of Marxists that civil rights could not be distinguished from economic ones. Overall, if normative aspirations in post-war Italian politics were often frustrated in practice, this was certainly not due to any lack of theoretical vibrancy. (shrink)

It is well known that there has been a steady and significant underrepresentation of women in philosophy on different professional levels. Numerous hypotheses explaining this underrepresentation have been suggested, but empirical analyses are not yet extensive. In particular, studies of the phenomenon in different countries are nonexistent. In this paper, we present findings from an exploratory study in which we analyze the interests, abilities, beliefs, attitudes, perceptions, and goals of bachelor’s students in a semester-long philosophy of science course at a (...) major German university. We furthermore make the first attempt to compare women-only learning environments with mixed-gender learning environments. Our results suggest that while there are generally some gender differences regarding interests, abilities, beliefs, attitudes, perceptions, and goals of students in the classroom, most of the hypotheses we explore to explain dropout rates by gender differences cannot be supported. We conclude that possible factors leading to the underrepresentation of women in philosophy in Germany might be found in the social and institutional environment within which philosophy is taught. (shrink)

There is a wide range of things we do out of emotion. For example, we smile with pleasure, our voices drop when we are sad, we recoil in shock or jump for joy, we apologize to others out of remorse. It is uncontroversial that some of these behaviors are actions. Clearly, apologizing is an action if anything is. Things seem less clear in the case of other emotional behaviors. Intuitively, the drop in a sad person’s voice is something that happens (...) to her, rather than something she actively performs. Perhaps more interestingly, even jumping for joy can seem a problematic case: although its execution involves the active performance of certain movements, it has been argued to contrast, e.g., with an act of apology, in that it is not performed in order to achieve some end, such as repairing a relationship. This can make this behavior seem considerably different from paradigm actions. Our central concern in this paper is with which emotional behaviors should be classed as actions and why... (shrink)

Homeotic genes are subject to transcriptional silencing, which prevents their expression in inappropriate body regions. Here, we shall focus on Drosophila, as little is known about this process in other organisms. Evidence is accumulating that silencing of Drosophila homeotic genes is conferred by two types of cis‐regulatory sequences: initiation (SIL‐I) and maintenance (SIL‐M) elements. The former contain target sites for transient repressors with a highly localised distribution in the early embryo and the latter for constitutive repressors that are likely to (...) be present in all cells. We discuss how SIL‐I elements may cooperate with SIL‐M elements to promote formation of a silencing complex. We propose that this complex consists of specific non‐histone proteins, the so‐called Polycomb group proteins, and that it is anchored at SIL‐M elements and at the promoter. (shrink)

Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is the text which had the single greatest influence on Aquinas's ethical writings, and the historical and philosophical value of Aquinas's appropriation of this text provokes lively debate. In this volume of new essays, thirteen distinguished scholars explore how Aquinas receives, expands on and transforms Aristotle's insights about the attainability of happiness, the scope of moral virtue, the foundation of morality and the nature of pleasure. They examine Aquinas's commentary on the Ethics and his theological writings, above (...) all the Summa theologiae. Their essays show Aquinas to be a highly perceptive interpreter, but one who also brings certain presuppositions to the Ethics and alters key Aristotelian notions for his own purposes. The result is a rich and nuanced picture of Aquinas's relation to Aristotle that will be of interest to readers in moral philosophy, Aquinas studies, the history of theology and the history of philosophy. (shrink)

Many metaethicists endorse a cognitive constraint which links the reasons for which we act or hold attitudes (motivating reasons) to normative reasons (reasons that speak in favour of an action or attitude). As traditionally formulated, this constraint (known as the Taking Condition) requires that an agent’s motivating reasons are mentally represented by her as corresponding normative reasons. In response to the charge that the Taking Condition is overly demanding, Errol Lord and Kurt Sylvan have proposed a reformulation which eschews the (...) need for normative representation (Lord and Sylvan 2019 [“Prime Time (for the Basing Relation).” In Well-Founded Belief, edited by J. Adam Carter, and Patrick Bondy, 141–173. London and New York: Routledge]). As they argue, agents must treat their motivating reasons as normative reasons, where this notion picks out a specific set of dispositions rather than a representational state. I argue that this proposal seriously distorts our understanding of the relation between an action or attitude and the reasons for which we perform or hold it. On the plausible assumption that an account of motivating reasons should not stray too far from this understanding, this response to the over-demandingness charge thus fails. I also provide some directions on how friends of the Taking Condition should instead respond this charge. (shrink)

Recent controversy about the use of the vertebrate fossil record for external calibration of molecular clocks centers on two issues, the number of dates used for calibration and the reliability of the fossil calibration date. Viewing matters from a palaeontological perspective, we propose three qualitative, phylogenetic criteria that can be used within a comparative framework for the selection of well-constrained calibration dates from the vertebrate fossil record. On the basis of these criteria, we identify three highly suitable new fossil calibration (...) dates for molecular clock estimates: the lungfish–tetrapod split (between 419 and 408 Ma), the bird–crocodile split (between 251 and 243 Ma), and the alligator–caiman split (between 71 and 66 Ma). Together with our previously suggested bird–lizard split (between 252 and 257 Ma), these four fossil dates span a range of very different ages. They are, in our opinion, more suitable for molecular clock calibration than the traditionally used mammal–bird split, which is less well constrained. We plea for closer interactions between paleontologists and molecular biologists in studying the timescale of vertebrate evolution. BioEssays 27:1069–1075, 2005. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)