Lindquist et al. provide a compelling summary of the brain bases of the onset of emotion. Their conclusions, however, are constrained by typical fMRI techniques that do not assess a key ingredient in emotional experience – timing. We discuss the importance of timing in theories of emotion as well as the implications of neural temporal dynamics for psychological constructionism.

This article explores the idea that Core Affect provides the emotional quality to any conscious state. Core Affect is the neurophysiological state always accessible as simply feeling good or bad, energized or enervated, even if it is not always the focus of attention. Core Affect, alone or more typically combined with other psychological processes, is found in the experiences of feeling, mood and emotion, including the subjective experiences of fear, anger and other so-called basic emotions which are commonly thought to (...) be raw, primitive, and universal. (shrink)

This article addresses the issue of moral compunction among a sample of senior managers set against the background of their routine organizational participation. In considering what factors influence their moral sensibilities these managers were interviewed using an approach designed to elicit their perceptions concerning both the ethical and commercially imperative dimensions of their working lives. The qualitative data resulting from this inquiry, while tentative, indicates the primacy of the normative appeal of shareholder value, conditioned by the exigencies of engagement in (...) corporate bureaucracies, including the maintenance of career and livelihood responsibilities. These conclusions indicate the magnitude of the obstacle that the normative business ethics project requires to overcome in order to fulfil its promise. (shrink)

This article addresses the issue of moral compunction among a sample of senior managers set against the background of their routine organizational participation. In considering what factors influence their moral sensibilities these managers were interviewed using an approach designed to elicit their perceptions concerning both the ethical and commercially imperative dimensions of their working lives. The qualitative data resulting from this inquiry, while tentative, indicates the primacy of the normative appeal of shareholder value, conditioned by the exigencies of engagement in (...) corporate bureaucracies, including the maintenance of career and livelihood responsibilities. These conclusions indicate the magnitude of the obstacle that the normative business ethics project requires to overcome in order to fulfil its promise. (shrink)

(2001). Commerce, Character and Civil Society: Critiques of Capitalism during the Early Industrial Period. The European Legacy: Vol. 6, No. 2, pp. 251-264.

While the literature in business ethics abounds with philosophical analyses, perspectives from religious thinkers are curiously underrepresented. What religious analysis has occured has often been moralistic in tone, more fit to the pulpit than the classroom or the boardroom. In the three essays that follow, presented originally at a panel at the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion in 1989, ethicists from the Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Jewish traditions analyze a case study familiar to many who teach and (...) research in business ethics — the Consolidated Foods Case. Each author shows how a particular religious tradition might react to the case. The authors show how insights from their traditions would affect corporation's moral deliberations about policy. Specific policy recommendations are offered to CEO John Bryan. (shrink)

For John Skorupski, as of course for many historians of Western thought, the end of the eighteenth century was a moment of radical transformation. European cult.

Abstract:In conversation with Kiarina Kordela's Epistemontology, this essay considers how biopolitical capitalism relies upon the structural exclusion of experiences of dying and loss, while valorizing semblances of immortal transcendence. Following Kordela's argument that biopower attempts to "eternalize" the capitalist equation of being and value as coterminous with life through the production of experiences of false transcendence, this essay adds that the Hegelian critique of finitude clarifies the stakes of biopower's foreclosures of the death-event. With Lacan's account of foreclosure in mourning (...) in Seminar VI, the essay concludes with how the potentiality of loss can reinscribe the subject's (non)rapport with eternity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Picturing Hegel: An Illustrated Guide to Hegel’s Encyclopaedia LogicJames A. Dunson IIIJulie E. Maybee. Picturing Hegel: An Illustrated Guide to Hegel’s Encyclopaedia Logic. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009. Pp. xxvii + 639. Paper, $56.95.If Hegel were alive to read an illustrated guide to his Encyclopaedia Logic, he might not immediately appreciate the project. Not only did he consider “picture-thinking” deficient in comparison to conceptual thinking, but he regarded (...) the Encyclopaedia Logic as a text suitable for German students. In her recent book, Picturing Hegel, Julie Maybee acknowledges these ironies and proceeds to guide those of us who need a little extra help in understanding Hegel’s speculative logic.What results is a significant contribution to the literature, a step-by-step commentary [End Page 536] through one of Hegel’s most underappreciated works. Using diagrams to cut through the often-difficult prose proves to be an excellent strategy. Maybee’s exquisitely detailed and admirably clear exposition makes her a suitable Virgil to guide us through the Inferno of Hegel’s logic.Maybee’s task is to show how Hegel’s logic is, actually, logical, and not, as she puts it, “A jumble of random moves from one step to the next” (xiii). She distinguishes Hegel’s speculative logic from the logic we teach nowadays by emphasizing Hegel’s concern to generate and develop the concepts he employs. That is, he is concerned not merely with the rules connecting the logical terms (i.e. syntax), but also the meanings of the terms themselves (i.e. semantics).As one might expect, these concepts are developed dialectically: two elements that are ordinarily opposed to one another are revealed to be mutually defining and interdependent. Readers already familiar with Hegel’s work will appreciate the way in which Maybee explains complicated ideas like “Actuality” and “spurious infinity.” Maybee has a talent for inventive examples, some of which she carefully carries through the entire work. Also, she has an eye for Hegel’s own examples (see, for instance, the comparison of the Absolute Idea and an old man on 580–82).One of the chief merits of her detailed account is its balanced approach. Instead of perpetuating prevalent but superficial interpretations, she explains the different senses in which something is true. For instance, she distinguishes the different meanings of idealism and shows how Hegel retains some materialist elements in his logic (302). Her knowledge of the history of philosophy helps her to put Hegel’s logic in its proper context. The asides to the Pre-Socratic philosophers and the repeated references to Kant are especially useful.Maybee’s approach to the logic, especially the way in which she frames Hegel’s project, raises interesting philosophical questions. She portrays Hegel as attempting to overcome Kant’s skepticism regarding the unity of thought and being. The question is whether reality is fundamentally accessible to reason, or whether the categories we employ to understand the world are limited to our phenomenal experience.But if Hegel’s logic is supposed to refute the Kantian “thing-in-itself,” we can ask whether this is an intelligible philosophical goal. First, Maybee points out that critics like Nietzsche would ask whether we have to be “committed to logical or conceptual necessity” (130). Perhaps Hegel exhibits a rather typical philosophical bias toward conceptual stability and even necessity. Second, any investigation into logical semantics that is biased in this way inevitably opens Pandora’s Box. Determining the meaning of logical terms is a messy business, and Hegel sometimes seems to stipulate meanings instead of genuinely deriving them. For instance, as Maybee writes, a crucial part of Hegel’s definition of existence is that something is “capable of being experienced” (204). But this simply begs the question against Kant’s “thing-in-itself,” since clearly Kant does not think it exists in this way.Third, given that Maybee points out Hegel’s anthropocentric language, we can ask whether his casual and frequent references to human experience are innocent or self-undermining. For instance, what are we to make of Hegel’s use of ethical examples to explain logical concepts like actuality, necessity, and possibility? A Kantian might... (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: The New Health Care For Profit: Doctors and Hospitals in a Competitive Environment. Edited by Bradford H. Gray The Healing Mission and the Business Ethic. By Robert M. Cunningham The Medical Industrial Complex. By Stanley Wohl.

It is thought that a valid inference to a logically necessary conclusion must proceed from entirely necessary premises. Counter-examples show this is false. Perhaps while the truth of a necessary proposition may follow from non-necessary premises, its necessity cannot so follow. Counter-examples show this to be mistaken. Must anyone who comes to know the non-necessary premises employed in the various counter-examples have prior knowledge of the necessity of the conclusions of the counter-examples? I argue against this. It is true that, (...) for any necessary proposition, there must be necessary premises from which it may validly be inferred; but no one need use these, or know these, or know how to use them, in order to know the necessity of any proposition. (shrink)

Both religion and science provide powerful images of human origins and human nature. Often these images are seen as incompatible or irreconcilable, with the religious image generally marginalized vis-à-vis the scientific image. Recent genetic studies into human origins, especially in terms of common cellular features like the mitochondrion from females and the Y-chromosome from males, provide evidence for common ancestors called mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam. The aim of this paper is to expound upon the Judeo-Christian and western scientific images (...) of humanity with respect to human origins and human nature, especially in terms of possible reconciliation of the two images. (shrink)

The inherence heuristic is too broad as a theoretical notion. The authors are at risk of applying their own heuristic in supporting itself. Nonetheless the article provides useful insight into the ways in which people overestimate the coherence and completeness of their understanding of the world.

After briefly arguing that neither (Kantian or utilitarian) rule-based ethics nor virtue ethics offers promise as a moral theory, I state that argument by analogy (i.e., deliberation within coherence constraints) is a satisfactory form of moral deliberation. I show that what is right must be whatever corresponds to the largest and most coherent set of a society’s moral values. Since we would not know how to interpret the claim that what is right might be repugnant to all our shared moral (...) values, I argue that a definitional naturalist position passes Moore’s open question test. “X is right” just means “performing X satisfies the largest and most coherent set of our altruistic and self-interested desires.” On this view, moral properties are real relational properties. I raise and respond to several objections. (shrink)

I show that Susan Haack's foundherentist theory of justification accounts for the role of experience in the creation of justification (a role which has seemed mysterious since experience is not a proposition and therefore cannot, seemingly, support any propos/non). Experience causes one to be justified in believing by causing certain beliefs — the truth of which is necessary to one's being justified — to be true This is revealed when we notice that, as foundherentism holds, no belief is basic in (...) the foundationalist sense, while all beliefs derive their justification from experience, contrary to coherentism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish EnlightenmentJames A. HarrisAlexander Broadie, editor. The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xvi + 366. Cloth, $65.00.A Cambridge Companion can be expected to attempt to do two different things at the same time: to provide a clear and concise introduction to the existing scholarly literature on all the principal topics discussed by the philosopher or (...) school of philosophy to which the Companion is devoted; and to advance the discussion in ways that will be of interest to those already working in the field. Alexander Broadie's Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment succeeds admirably at both tasks. Excellent introductions are provided to eighteenth-century Scottish writing on religion, the philosophy of mind and its engagement with scepticism, the history of the human species and the basis of human sociability, mathematics and natural science, moral philosophy, political philosophy and theories of justice, economic theory, legal theory, historiography, and aesthetics. In the process, familiar figures such as Hutcheson, Hume, Smith, Robertson and Reid are placed amid a huge range of writers no longer very often taught at the undergraduate level, and the result provides a rich resource for those who want to begin to broaden and deepen textbook accounts of what was achieved in Scotland during le Siècle des lumières. In fact, as a single-volume introduction to the wealth of ideas bestowed to posterity by the Scottish Enlightenment, this book has no serious competition. It is almost entirely free of the overblown rhetoric and blatant chauvinism characteristic of some recently published accounts of what the Scots contributed to the modern world.In addition, many of the chapters contain information and arguments that will stimulate and sometimes provoke those who need no introduction to the Scottish Enlightenment. M. A. Stewart, for example, reminds us how easy it is to exaggerate the damage Hume did to religious belief in his own time. His Scottish contemporaries did their best to minimize Hume's impact and to downplay his significance; and, Stewart shows, for the most part they succeeded. Aaron Garrett describes the various ways, some rather less-than-enlightened, in which historians used animals, women, and racial difference in order "to get at the original of man." The editor of the volume takes important steps toward placing Scottish writing on the arts and aesthetic judgment in the context of what he terms "the general [End Page 479] programme of improvement that characterised the Scottish Enlightenment from its earliest days" (295).In his Preface, Alexander Broadie sets out three rival large-scale interpretations of the Scottish Enlightenment considered as a whole: one that gives priority to political economy and the disciplines which form its intellectual foundation (moral philosophy, jurisprudence, and the historical study of social institutions); another which sees the cultivation of mathematics and the natural sciences as central to the process of enlightenment in Scotland; and a third which portrays the Scottish Enlightenment as being a cultural phenomenon as much as a purely intellectual one, using just enough of both the "political economic" interpretation and the "natural scientific" interpretations as is necessary to understand how the Scottish "literati" worked within and transformed the institutions that shaped the Scotland of their day: the law, the Kirk, and the universities. My judgment is that the reader of this volume will find himself leaning toward the first of these three approaches. This is partly because the chapters both on the disciplines on which political economy was built and on economics itself are the strongest in the book: Fania Oz-Salzberger on political theory, Knud Haakonnsen on natural jurisprudence, Andrew Skinner on economics, John Cairns on legal theory, and Christopher Berry on "sociality and socialisation". Ironically, perhaps, these chapters work so well because they build on a brilliant account of "The Contexts of the Scottish Enlightenment" provided by one of the chief exponents of the "natural scientific" approach, Roger Emerson.Broadie claims that it is "arguable that science is crucially important to the Scottish Enlightenment, perhaps more important than were moral philosophy, historiography and political economy" (4). It is to be regretted, then, that so little space... (shrink)

In 1975 the Clarendon Press at Oxford published Peter Nidditch's edition of John Locke's An Essay concerning Human Understanding. In his Introduction Nidditch says that his edition “offers a text that is directly derived, without modernization, from the early published versions; it notes the provenance of all its adopted readings ; and it aims at recording all relevant differences between these versions”. As Nidditch goes on to acknowledge, the “relevant differences” were many, “requiring several thousand registrations both in the case (...) of material variants and in the case of formal variants ”. The textual history of Locke's Essay is extremely complicated. While there is no manuscript of the first edition of the book, there were four editions in Locke's lifetime, each new one containing extensive and significant revisions, as well as a posthumous edition published shortly after the author's death. There was a translation into French made with Locke's cooperation and published in 1700, and a Latin translation came out a year later. Nevertheless, Nidditch managed to record all the material variants in footnotes to the text, in a way that makes it fairly easy to track the changes that Locke made to successive editions of the book, and to locate points at which judgements had to be made as a critical text was established on the basis of the chosen copy text. Sometimes a critical edition succeeds in completely changing the way that a text is read. Peter Laslett's 1960 edition of Locke's Two Treatises of Government is a good example. Nidditch's edition of the Essay did not have that kind of very dramatic effect on Locke scholarship. Rather, it made it possible for those without direct access to all the early editions to engage in careful, historically sensitive studies of Locke's account of human understanding. The result was a slow revolution in Locke studies that continues to shed new light on even the most familiar aspects of the Lockean philosophy. (shrink)

The lack of concrete guidance provided by managerial moral standards and the ambiguity of the expectations they create are discussed in terms of the moral stress experienced by many managers. It is argued that requisite clarity and feelings of obligation with respect to moral standards derive ultimately from public discussion of moral issues within organizations and from shared public agreement about appropriate behavior. Suggestions are made about ways in which the moral dimension of an organization's culture can be more effectively (...) managed. This is the third in a research series of three papers. (shrink)

This is the first book to provide a comprehensive overview of the entire career of one of Britain's greatest men of letters. It sets in biographical and historical context all of Hume's works, from A Treatise of Human Nature to The History of England, bringing to light the major influences on the course of Hume's intellectual development, and paying careful attention to the differences between the wide variety of literary genres with which Hume experimented. The major events in Hume's life (...) are fully described, but the main focus is on Hume's intentions as a philosophical analyst of human nature, politics, commerce, English history, and religion. Careful attention is paid to Hume's intellectual relations with his contemporaries. The goal is to reveal Hume as a man intensely concerned with the realization of an ideal of open-minded, objective, rigorous, dispassionate dialogue about all the principal questions faced by his age. (shrink)

Competing perspectives on the nature of emotion are illustrated with latent and emergent variable models. Latent variable models draw from classical test theory, assuming that the measured indicators of emotion covary by virtue of some common executive, organizing neural circuit or network in the brain. By contrast, emergent variable models draw from a theory-driven, operational definition tradition, positing that emotions do not cause, but rather are caused by, the measured indicators of emotion, assuming no executive neural circuit or network, and (...) requiring no covariation among indicators. I suggest that the emergent variable model may be more compatible with the extant literature on the nature of emotion, especially in the age of affective neuroscience. (shrink)