To what extent do moral judgments depend on conscious reasoning from explicitly understood principles? We address this question by investigating one particular moral principle, the principle of the double effect. Using web-based technology, we collected a large data set on individuals' responses to a series of moral dilemmas, asking when harm to innocent others is permissible. Each moral dilemma presented a choice between action and inaction, both resulting in lives saved and lives lost. Results showed that: (1) patterns of moral (...) judgments were consistent with the principle of double effect and showed little variation across differences in gender, age, educational level, ethnicity, religion or national affiliation (within the limited range of our sample population) and (2) a majority of subjects failed to provide justifications that could account for their judgments. These results indicate that the principle of the double effect may be operative in our moral judgments but not open to conscious introspection. We discuss these results in light of current psychological theories of moral cognition, emphasizing the need to consider the unconscious appraisal system that mentally represents the causal and intentional properties of human action. (shrink)

: To what extent do moral judgments depend on conscious reasoning from explicitly understood principles? We address this question by investigating one particular moral principle, the principle of the double effect. Using web-based technology, we collected a large data set on individuals’ responses to a series of moral dilemmas, asking when harm to innocent others is permissible. Each moral dilemma presented a choice between action and inaction, both resulting in lives saved and lives lost. Results showed that: patterns of moral (...) judgments were consistent with the principle of double effect and showed little variation across differences in gender, age, educational level, ethnicity, religion or national affiliation and a majority of subjects failed to provide justifications that could account for their judgments. These results indicate that the principle of the double effect may be operative in our moral judgments but not open to conscious introspection. We discuss these results in light of current psychological theories of moral cognition, emphasizing the need to consider the unconscious appraisal system that mentally represents the causal and intentional properties of human action. (shrink)

Ouija board sessions are illustrious examples of how subjective feelings of control – the Sense of Agency - can be manipulated in real life settings. We present findings from a field experiment at a paranormal conference, where Ouija enthusiasts were equipped with eye trackers while using the Ouija board. Our results show that participants have a significantly lower probability at visually predicting letters in a Ouija board session compared to a condition in which they are instructed to deliberately spell out (...) words with the Ouija board planchette. Our results also show that Ouija board believers report lower SoA compared to sceptic participants. These results support previous research which claim that low sense of agency is caused by a combination of retrospective inference and an inhibition of predictive processes. Our results show that users in Ouija board sessions become increasingly better at predicting letters as responses unfold over time, and that meaningful responses from the Ouija board can only be accounted for when considering interactions that goes on at the participant pair level. These results suggest that meaningful responses from the Ouija board may be an emergent property of interacting and predicting minds that increasingly impose structure on initially random events in Ouija sessions. (shrink)

The thesis we develop in this essay is that all humans are endowed with a moral faculty. The moral faculty enables us to produce moral judgments on the basis of the causes and consequences of actions. As an empirical research program, we follow the framework of modern linguistics.1 The spirit of the argument dates back at least to the economist Adam Smith (1759/1976) who argued for something akin to a moral grammar, and more recently, to the political philosopher John Rawls (...) (1971). The logic of the argument, however, comes from Noam Chomsky’s thinking on language specifically and the nature of knowledge more generally (Chomsky, 1986, 1988, 2000; Saporta, 1978). If the nature of moral knowledge is comparable in some way to the nature of linguistic knowledge, as defended recently by Harman (1977), Dwyer (1999, 2004), and Mikhail (2000; in press), then what should we expect to find when we look at the anatomy of our moral faculty? Is there a grammar, and if so, how can the moral grammarian uncover its structure? Are we aware of our moral grammar, its method of operation, and its moment-to-moment functioning in our judgments? Is there a universal moral grammar that allows each child to build a particular moral grammar? Once acquired, are different moral grammars mutually incomprehensible in the same way that a native Chinese speaker finds a native Italian speaker incomprehensible? How does the child acquire a particular moral grammar, especially if her experiences are impoverished relative to the moral judgments she makes? Are there certain forms of brain damage that disrupt moral competence but leave other forms of reasoning intact? And how did this machinery evolve, and for what particular adaptive function? We will have more to say about many of these questions later on, and Hauser (2006) develops others. However, in order to flesh out the key ideas and particular empirical research paths, let us turn to some of the central questions in the study of our language faculty.. (shrink)

What are the brain and cognitive systems that allow humans to play baseball, compute square roots, cook soufflés, or navigate the Tokyo subways? It may seem that studies of human infants and of non-human animals will tell us little about these abilities, because only educated, enculturated human adults engage in organized games, formal mathematics, gourmet cooking, or map-reading. In this chapter, we argue against this seemingly sensible conclusion. When human adults exhibit complex, uniquely human, culture-specific skills, they draw on a (...) set of psychological and neural mechanisms with two distinctive properties: they evolved before humanity and thus are shared with other animals, and they emerge early in human development and thus are common to infants, children, and adults. These core knowledge systems form the building blocks for uniquely human skills. Without them we wouldn’t be able to learn about different kinds of games, mathematics, cooking, or maps. To understand what is special about human intelligence, therefore, we must study both the core knowledge systems on which it rests and the mechanisms by which these systems are orchestrated to permit new kinds of concepts and cognitive processes. What is core knowledge? A wealth of research on non-human primates and on human infants suggests that a system of core knowledge is characterized by four properties (Hauser, 2000; Spelke, 2000). First, it is domain-specific: each system functions to represent particular kinds of entities such as conspecific agents, manipulable objects, places in the environmental layout, and numerosities. Second, it is task-specific: each system uses its representations to address specific questions about the world, such as “who is this?” [face recognition], “what does this do?” [categorization of artifacts], “where am I?” [spatial orientation], and “how many are here?” [enumeration]. Third, it is relatively encapsulated: each uses only a subset of the information delivered by an animal’s input systems and sends information only to a subset of the animal’s output systems. (shrink)

In the seventeenth century, when the modern Self emerged in the shape of a self-assured Cartesian cogito, a radically opposite movement of ‘emptying’ or ‘deconstructing’ that Self took place. The religious subject, having become modern, understood its ultimate aim as becoming selfless. The battlefield on which the new subject fought the fight with its own modern condition was the issue of ‘love’. ‘What is the status of his Self when it is involved in the act of love?’ was the central (...) question in seventeenth century religiosity. This essay examines the early modern idea of pur amour and focuses only on two voices in the Querelle Du Quiétisme, François de Fénelon (1651–1715) and Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715). Fénelon vehemently defended the pur amour, a concept he adopted from a century-long tradition of spirituality in France and which he tried to explain and legitimize in a systematic and theoretical way. Malebranche was highly critical of that tradition, but refused neither to use the term nor to refer to the ideal of pur amour. His interpretation of the Self, however, forced him to draw different conclusions on the nature of pure love. (shrink)

Decoding the function and meaning of a foreign culture's sounds and gestures is a notoriously difficult problem. It is even more challenging when we think about the sounds and gestures of nonhuman animals. This essay provides a review of what is currently known about the informational content and function of primate vocalizations, emphasizing the problems underlying the construction of a primate “dictionary.” In contrast to the Oxford English Dictionary, this dictionary provides entries to emotional expressions as well as potentially referential (...) expressions. It therefore represents a guide to what animals do with their vocalizations, as well as how they are represented by signalers and perceivers. I begin by a discussion of the unit problem, of how an acoustic space is carved up into functionally significant components leading to a species‐specific repertoire or lexicon of sorts. This section shows how little we know about the units of organization within animal vocal repertoires, and how such lack of information constrains our ability to tackle the problem of syntactic structure. In Section III, I review research on the production and perception of vocal signals that appear to be functionally referential. This work shows that several nonhuman primates produce vocalizations that share some of the key properties of reference, but certainly not all; the components that are missing raises questions about their role as precursors to human words. In Section IV, I explore the social uses of vocalizations, assessing whether the signal contains sufficient information for listeners to judge a caller's credibility; ultimately, caller credibility determines how receivers select an appropriate response. Results show that individuals can use calls to assess whether someone is reliable or unreliable, and that such attributes are associated with individuals and particular contexts. I conclude by synthesizing the issues presented and then raise some directions for future conceptual and methodological progress. (shrink)

Dans divers textes autobiographiques, Paul Tillich (1886-1965) évoque laconiquement ses années de formation comme placées sous le signe d'une renaissance de l'idéalisme allemand. En quoi cette renaissance consiste-t-clic et quel est son impact sur l'oeuvre d'un des théologiens protestants les plus lus et les plus commentés de sa génération? C'est l'enquête que mène Marc Boss dans ce livre qui fera date. Il y montre comment Tillich combine les positions systématiques de Fichte et de Schelling en une " ellipse à (...) double foyer" pour accomplir l'une des intentions fondamentales du criticisme kantien : concevoir une philosophie de la religion qui ne ferait qu'un avec le système de la liberté. Cette enquête sur les sources de la pensée de Tillich est par conséquent aussi une contribution importante à l'interprétation de ces figures majeures de la philosophie que sont Fichte et Schelling. Elle met enfin en évidence un pan encore peu connu de la réception de la philosophie allemande classique dans les premières décennies du XXe siècle. (shrink)

How eukaryotic genomes are packaged into compact cylindrical chromosomes in preparation for cell divisions has remained one of the major unsolved questions of cell biology. Novel approaches to study the topology of DNA helices inside the nuclei of intact cells, paired with computational modeling and precise biomechanical measurements of isolated chromosomes, have advanced our understanding of mitotic chromosome architecture. In this Review Essay, we discuss – in light of these recent insights – the role of chromatin architecture and the functions (...) and possible mechanisms of SMC protein complexes and other molecular machines in the formation of mitotic chromosomes. Based on the information available, we propose a stepwise model of mitotic chromosome condensation that envisions the sequential generation of intra‐chromosomal linkages by condensin complexes in the context of cohesin‐mediated inter‐chromosomal linkages, assisted by topoisomerase II. The described scenario results in rod‐shaped metaphase chromosomes ready for their segregation to the cell poles. (shrink)

This article explores a training need common to every stage of a teacher’s career : the need to be accompanied. It takes an integrative perspective on the process of the situated learning of teaching, throughout the career, from the pre-service practicums to the period of entrance in the profession then to the in-service training. Providing a reflexive accompaniment of the teachers’ practical experiences is here presented as a central factor for linking the training and the work environments. The first part (...) of the article exposes our conception of a reflexive accompaniment and justifies its importance for the evolution of the teaching practices. Then, we describe how we were convinced of that importance through our role as directors of two teacher training devices, one in Switzerland, one in Quebec. Finally, the third part of the article is devoted to the training of the persons that practice such an accompaniment. (shrink)

Marc Richir est l'un des phénoménologues les plus importants de sa génération. Ces conversations avec Sacha Carlson sont d'abord l'occasion de revenir sur son itinéraire philosophique et intellectuel. Il s'y explique pour la première fois sur sa formation et sur les sources initiales de sa pensée, de celles qui ont éveillé son mouvement. Au fil de la discussion, il reprend en outre les thèmes principaux de son oeuvre, à savoir le phénomène comme rien que phénomène, le simulacre, l'épochè phénoménologique (...) hyperbolique, le sublime, l'affectivité, l'architectonique, l'institution symbolique, etc. Sans sacrifier à la vulgarisation, mais en restant fidèle à l'exigence du dialogue philosophique qui invite à étayer le propos sur des exemples concrets, ces conversations ouvrent non seulement sur une retraversée de l'oeuvre et de ses moments fondamentaux, mais aussi sur une méditation, dans le présent de la parole échangée, où le phénoménologue s'explique sur son rapport avec d'autres champs de recherche, comme l'anthropologie, la psychanalyse, les mathématiques, la physique, l'art, le politique et l'histoire. (shrink)

Les réflexions présentées dans cet article portent sur la nature du rituel et de la symbolique politique dans nos sociétés. On se propose de confronter différentes approches de ces phénomènes : d'un côté un point de vue qui met en évidence les déterminants sociologiques des rituels politiques. Cette approche prend appui sur une conception où la représentation politique apparaît comme une forme aliénante et mystifiante. Un autre point de vue consiste à prendre comme objet le travail symbolique du rituel : (...) cette perspective anthropologique met Paccent sur Pefficacité des rites et des symboles et leur imbrication dans l'action politique. (shrink)

Contra Wilkins & Wakefield, we argue that an evolutionarily inspired approach to language must consider different facets of language (i.e., more than syntax and semantics), and must explore the possibility of nonhuman precursors. Several examples are discussed, illustrating the power of the comparative approach in illuminating our understanding of language evolution.

This article argues that David Hume's essay 'Of the Liberty of the Press' points to significant elements of his conception of the public realm and, in particular, his thoughts on the nature and importance of political discourse. Hume saw the opposition of interests as both a key constitutional support and a potential source of faction and fanaticism. His account of politeness suggests an important means through which a free press might improve the quality of public discourse such that the educative (...) facet of discourse and, what I have termed, its messy facet, could be united towards maintaining the constitutional balance, the latter by providing a forum for the opposition of interests and the former by deflating factional bigotry. (shrink)

L'article est une introduction à la pensée politique /catholique de James V. Schall, S.J. Deux oeuvres majeures de Schall sur la théorie politique, Reason, Revelation and the Foundations of Political Philosophy et At the Limits of Political Philosophy: From « Brillant Errors » to Things of Uncommon Importance, présentent un exposé thomiste des origines et des fins de la philosophie politique. Pour Schall, la philosophie politique trouve son origine dans la reconnaissance de questions éternelles de base, telles la nature de (...) la justice et la question de savoir qui doit détenir le pouvoir, - questions qui se posent naturellement dans la vie politique. Mais, comme Schall le montre, les problèmes que ces questions soulèvent conduisent de façon ultime à un horizon qui dépasse le domaine du politique. En fait, pour Schall, les questions humaines importantes que la philosophie politique pose reçoivent finalement leurs réponses les plus intelligibles dans les doctrines révélées du Christianisme. (shrink)

This book is intended to serve as an introduction to the thought of James V. Schall, arguably one of the best, perhaps even the only, authentically Thomistic political scientist writing today. In contrast to main currents in contemporary Thomism, Schall remains conversant with the great tradition of political philosophy and therefore appreciates the complex and relatively imprecise nature of political reflection. In this book, the distinguished theorist addresses a wide range of subjects, including the question of overpopulation, the thought of (...) Charles McCoy and Leo Strauss, the role of Christianity in political philosophy, and the challenges that the democratic project pose to human beings' perception of the truth. As a meditation on practical and theoretical political questions, self-consciously proceeding from the perspectives of both nature and grace, the book provides a unique picture of what a genuine Thomistic political science might look like. (shrink)