This work aims to contribute to reflection on the epistemological elements present in the philosophy of Hans Jonas. The interpretative key provided by the author with the notion of Homo Pictor and the importance of images, symbols, imagination and memory in the evolution of human freedom within the scope of life, which resulted in the current human being, provide a fruitful field for exploration of the attributes of the epistemic subjects pointed out by the philosopher. In this sense, we propose (...) a reading that considers the possible elements of a theory of knowledge by Jonas based on the texts Image Making and the Freedom of Man (1966), with emphasis on the appendix of the essay, entitled On the Origins of the Experience of Truth and from the text Tool, Image, and Grave (1986). (shrink)

O presente artigo tem o objetivo de tratar a questão da imagem na filosofia de Hans Jonas com a finalidade de compreender a função que a capacidade imaginativa exerce na experiência fenomenológica de apreensão da realidade. A investigação da relação entre imagem e percepção humana no pensamento de Jonas se mostra profícua na medida em que o tema da imagem possui um papel muito significativo em sua filosofia, pois, é justamente na capacidade de criar imagens e reconhecê-las como representações do (...) real que reside a diferença antropológica em relação aos outros animais. (shrink)

Partindo das considerações de Hans Jonas sobre a sua biologia filosófica geral, sobrevém a pergunta sobre a diferença ontológica entre os seres vivos nos distintos reinos da vida aos quais temos acesso fenomenológico direto, isto é, a diferença ontológica entre vegetais e animais. Aristóteles já havia respondido a esta pergunta e Hans Jonas vai por caminho semelhante. Seguindo o viés fenomenológico usado como método pelo autor, explicitaremos, também, o que Hans Jonas considera ser a transanimalidade humana, ou seja, a diferença (...) ontológica entre o homem e os demais animais não humanos. (shrink)

O presente trabalho tem como objetivo aprofundar a compreensão sobre a importância da sensibilidade nas ações éticas, segundo a filosofia de Hans Jonas. A sensibilidade possui um lugar de destaque no pensamento de Jonas, já que o autor considera tanto o âmbito racional do ser humano quanto o sensível como essenciais à uma proposta ética que seja efetiva. Assim, para compreendermos de maneira mais apurada a relação da sensibilidade com a ética no pensamento do filósofo, faremos uma análise dos afetos (...) em O Princípio Responsabilidade com a finalidade de mapear as suas potencialidades e as conexões com a ética. (shrink)

A ideia de um novo período geológico expressa pelo conceito de Antropoceno nos dá a dimensão do impacto humano sobre a Terra. Nós, os humanos contemporâneos, somos uma força geológica, ou melhor, o nosso modo de existência se tornou essa força. Relatórios do Painel do Clima da ONU, dados climatológicos, projeções, entre outras fontes científicas, tornaram-se objetos de interesse da reflexão filosófica sobre o futuro em um planeta fortemente impactado pelos excessos da civilização tecnológica. Tal situação impõe à filosofia contemporânea (...) o desafio não apenas de encarar o problema, mas também de pensar em outras possibilidades de existência que fortaleçam o vínculo com a Terra. Neste sentido, o presente artigo tem o intuito de apresentar em linhas gerais a discussão sobre a ideia de Antropoceno e a proposta eudemonológica schopenhaueriana a partir da atualização do pensamento de Schopenhauer, para pensarmos o cenário catastrófico que está se configurando com a constatação da gravidade de nosso tempo. (shrink)

First published: 2010; Previous edition: 2012..

A comprehensive proposal for a conceptual framework for describing conscious experience in dreams, integrating philosophy of mind, sleep and dream research, and interdisciplinary consciousness studies. Dreams, conceived as conscious experience or phenomenal states during sleep, offer an important contrast condition for theories of consciousness and the self. Yet, although there is a wealth of empirical research on sleep and dreaming, its potential contribution to consciousness research and philosophy of mind is largely overlooked. This might be due, in part, to a (...) lack of conceptual clarity and an underlying disagreement about the nature of the phenomenon of dreaming itself. In Dreaming, Jennifer Windt lays the groundwork for solving this problem. She develops a conceptual framework describing not only what it means to say that dreams are conscious experiences but also how to locate dreams relative to such concepts as perception, hallucination, and imagination, as well as thinking, knowledge, belief, deception, and self-consciousness. Arguing that a conceptual framework must be not only conceptually sound but also phenomenologically plausible and carefully informed by neuroscientific research, Windt integrates her review of philosophical work on dreaming, both historical and contemporary, with a survey of the most important empirical findings. This allows her to work toward a systematic and comprehensive new theoretical understanding of dreaming informed by a critical reading of contemporary research findings. Windt's account demonstrates that a philosophical analysis of the concept of dreaming can provide an important enrichment and extension to the conceptual repertoire of discussions of consciousness and the self and raises new questions for future research. (shrink)

The language of “participant-driven research,” “crowdsourcing” and “citizen science” is increasingly being used to encourage the public to become involved in research ventures as both subjects and scientists. Originally, these labels were invoked by volunteer research efforts propelled by amateurs outside of traditional research institutions and aimed at appealing to those looking for more “democratic,” “patient-centric,” or “lay” alternatives to the professional science establishment. As mainstream translational biomedical research requires increasingly larger participant pools, however, corporate, academic and governmental research programs (...) are embracing this populist rhetoric to encourage wider public participation. We examine the ethical and social implications of this recruitment strategy. We begin by surveying examples of “citizen science” outside of biomedicine, as paradigmatic of the aspirations this democratizing rhetoric was originally meant to embody. Next, we discuss the ways these aspirations become articulated in the biomedical context, with a view to drawing out the multiple and potentially conflicting meanings of “public engagement” when citizens are also the subjects of the science. We then illustrate two uses of public engagement rhetoric to gain public support for national biomedical research efforts: its post-hoc use in the “care.data” project of the National Health Service in England, and its proactive uses in the “Precision Medicine Initiative” of the United States White House. These examples will serve as the basis for a normative analysis, discussing the potential ethical and social ramifications of this rhetoric. We pay particular attention to the implications of government strategies that cultivate the idea that members of the public have a civic duty to participate in government-sponsored research initiatives. We argue that such initiatives should draw from policy frameworks that support normative analysis of the role of citizenry. And, we conclude it is imperative to make visible and clear the full spectrum of meanings of “citizen science,” the contexts in which it is used, and its demands with respect to participation, engagement, and governance. (shrink)

What is given to us in conscious experience? The Given is an attempt to answer this question and in this way contribute to a general theory of mental content. The content of conscious experience is understood to be absolutely everything that is given to one, experientially, in the having of an experience. Michelle Montague focuses on the analysis of conscious perception, conscious emotion, and conscious thought, and deploys three fundamental notions in addition to the fundamental notion of content: the (...) notions of intentionality, phenomenology, and consciousness. She argues that all experience essentially involves all four things, and that the key to an adequate general theory of what is given in experience lies in giving a correct specification of the nature of these four things and the relations between them. (shrink)

Building on contemporary research in embodied cognition, enactivism, and the extended mind, this book explores how social institutions in contemporary neoliberal nation-states systematically affect our thoughts, feelings, and agency. Human beings are, necessarily, social animals who create and belong to social institutions. But social institutions take on a life of their own, and literally shape the minds of all those who belong to them, for better or worse, usually without their being self-consciously aware of it. Indeed, in contemporary neoliberal societies, (...) it is generally for the worse. In The Mind-Body Politic, Michelle Maiese and Robert Hanna work out a new critique of contemporary social institutions by deploying the special standpoint of the philosophy of mind—in particular, the special standpoint of the philosophy of what they call essentially embodied minds—and make a set of concrete, positive proposals for radically changing both these social institutions and also our essentially embodied lives for the better. (shrink)

J. G. Fichte held that a form of intersubjectivity—what he called a ‘summons’—is a condition of possibility of self-consciousness. This thesis is widely taken to be one of Fichte’s most influential contributions to the European philosophy of the last two centuries. But what the thesis actually states is far from obvious; and existing interpretations either are poorly supported by the texts or else render the thesis trivial or implausible. I propose a new interpretation, on which Fichte’s claim is that reflective (...) self-consciousness arises in the context of ad hoc efforts to coordinate action. (shrink)

The emergence of environmental governance practices raises a fundamental question as to whether they are substantive or symbolic. Toward that end, we analyze the relationship between a firm’s environmental governance and its environmental management as reflected in its ultimate outcome, environmental performance. We posit that substantive practices would bring changes in organizations, most notably in terms of improved environmental performance, whereas symbolic practices would portray organizations as environmentally committed without making meaningful changes to their operations. Focusing on a sample of (...) environmentally sensitive firms, results are consistent with environmental governance mechanisms being predominantly part of a symbolic approach to manage stakeholder perceptions on environmental management, having little substantial impact on organizations. Statistical analyses show mostly that there is no relation between environmental governance mechanisms and environmental performance, measured in terms of regulatory compliance, pollution prevention, and environmental capital expenditures. However, there is some indication that environmental incentives are associated with pollution prevention. Interviews with corporate directors shed further light on these results by underlining that environmental governance mechanisms are employed at the board level to protect the organization from reputational and/or regulatory harm, but are not necessarily intended to proactively improve environmental performance. (shrink)

This major study of Kant provides a detailed examination of the development and function of the doctrine of transcendental illusion in his theoretical philosophy. The author shows that a theory of 'illusion' plays a central role in Kant's arguments about metaphysical speculation and scientific theory. Indeed, she argues that we cannot understand Kant unless we take seriously his claim that the mind inevitably acts in accordance with ideas and principles that are 'illusory'. Taking this claim seriously, we can make much (...) better sense of Kant's arguments and reach a deeper understanding of the role he allots human reason in science. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper was to determine whether the individual attributes of locus of control, gender, major in college and years of job experience affect the acceptability of certain workplace behaviors. A total of 198 college students of a mid-sized southeastern university formed the sample for this study. Locus of control, gender and years of job experience were found to have some affect on whether an individual considered a certain behavior acceptable or unacceptable.

The human species is more reliant on cultural adaptation than any other species, but it is unclear how observational learning can give rise to the faithful transmission of cultural adaptations. One possibility is that teaching facilitates accurate social transmission by narrowing the range of inferences that learners make. However, there is wide disagreement about how to define teaching, and how to interpret the empirical evidence for teaching across cultures and species. In this article I argue that disputes about the nature (...) and prevalence of teaching across human societies and nonhuman animals are based on a number of deep-rooted theoretical differences between fields, as well as on important differences in how teaching is defined. To reconcile these disparate bodies of research, I review the three major approaches to the study of teaching – mentalistic, culture-based, and functionalist – and outline the research questions about teaching that each addresses. I then argue for a new, integrated framework that differentiates between teaching types according to the specific adaptive problems that each type solves, and apply this framework to restructure current empirical evidence on teaching in humans and nonhuman animals. This integrative framework generates novel insights, with broad implications for the study of the evolution of teaching, including the roles of cognitive constraints and cooperative dilemmas in how and when teaching evolves. Finally, I propose an explanation for why some types of teaching are uniquely human, and discuss new directions for research motivated by this framework. (shrink)

Philosophers disagree about what the folk concept of pain is. This paper criticises existing theories of the folk concept of pain, i.e. the mental view, the bodily view, and the recently proposed polyeidic view. It puts forward an alternative proposal – the polysemy view – according to which pain terms like “sore,” “ache” and “hurt” are polysemous, where one sense refers to a mental state and another a bodily state, and the type of polysemy at issue reflects two distinct but (...) related concepts of pain. Implications with respect to issues in philosophy of pain are also drawn. (shrink)

Much existing literature in anthropology suggests that teaching is rare in non-Western societies, and that cultural transmission is mostly vertical (parent-to-offspring). However, applications of evolutionary theory to humans predict both teaching and non-vertical transmission of culturally learned skills, behaviors, and knowledge should be common cross-culturally. Here, we review this body of theory to derive predictions about when teaching and non-vertical transmission should be adaptive, and thus more likely to be observed empirically. Using three interviews conducted with rural Fijian populations, we (...) find that parents are more likely to teach than are other kin types, high-skill and highly valued domains are more likely to be taught, and oblique transmission is associated with high-skill domains, which are learned later in life. Finally, we conclude that the apparent conflict between theory and empirical evidence is due to a mismatch of theoretical hypotheses and empirical claims across disciplines, and we reconcile theory with the existing literature in light of our results. (shrink)

My concern in this paper is with the intentionality of emotions. Desires and cognitions are the traditional paradigm cases of intentional attitudes, and one very direct approach to the question of the intentionality of emotions is to treat it as sui generis—as on a par with the intentionality of desires and cognitions but in no way reducible to it. A more common approach seeks to reduce the intentionality of emotions to the intentionality of familiar intentional attitudes like desires and cognitions. (...) In this paper, I argue for the sui generis approach. (shrink)

The development of an ethical perspective of HRM that is both employee centered and explicitly normative and, as such, distinct from dominant and criticalperspectives of HRM has progressed in recent years. Reliance on the traditional “threesome” of rights/justice theories, deontology and consequentialism, however, has limited debate to micro-level issues and the search for a “solution.” By understanding the employment relationship as a stakeholder relationship, we open the ethical analysis of HRM to the pluralism and pragmatism that stakeholder theory has to (...) offer. In doing this, we can address both the broader need for HRM to offer a more comprehensive account of our humanity and the specific requisite for HRM to treat employees as moral persons with “names and faces.”. (shrink)

A theoretical physicist and feminist theorist, Karen Barad elaborates her theory of agential realism, a schema that is at once a new epistemology, ontology, and ethics.

There is growing concern that decision-making informed by machine learning (ML) algorithms may unfairly discriminate based on personal demographic attributes, such as race and gender. Scholars have responded by introducing numerous mathematical definitions of fairness to test the algorithm, many of which are in conflict with one another. However, these reductionist representations of fairness often bear little resemblance to real-life fairness considerations, which in practice are highly contextual. Moreover, fairness metrics tend to be implemented in narrow and targeted toolkits that (...) are difficult to integrate into an algorithm’s broader ethical assessment. In this paper, we derive lessons from ethical philosophy and welfare economics as they relate to the contextual factors relevant for fairness. In particular we highlight the debate around acceptability of particular inequalities and the inextricable links between fairness, welfare and autonomy. We propose Key Ethics Indicators (KEIs) as a way towards providing a more holistic understanding of whether or not an algorithm is aligned to the decision-maker’s ethical values. (shrink)

Prenatal genetic testing is becoming available for an increasingly broad set of diseases, and it is only a matter of time before parents can choose to test for hundreds, if not thousands, of genetic conditions in their fetuses. Should access to certain kinds of fetal genetic information be limited, and if so, on what basis? We evaluate a range of considerations including reproductive autonomy, parental rights, disability rights, and the rights and interests of the fetus as a potential future child. (...) We conclude that parents should be able to access information that could be useful during pregnancy, but that testing for non-medical information should be limited. Next, we argue that the government lacks a compelling state interest in regulating prenatal genetic testing and propose that regulation should occur through medical professional organizations. Finally, we present a framework for determining what testing physicians should recommend, offer neutrally, or not offer at all. (shrink)

Despite contemporary moral philosophers' renewed attention to the moral significance of emotions, the attitudinal repertoire with which they equip the mature moral agent remains stunted. One attitude moral philosophers neglect (if not disown) is contempt. While acknowledging the nastiness of contempt, I here correct the neglect by providing an account of the moral psychology of contempt. In the process, I defend the moral propriety of certain tokens of properly person-focused contempt against some prominent objections -- among them, objections stemming from (...) Kantian worries that contempt is incompatible with the respect we owe to persons as such. (shrink)

Recent research in psycholinguistics suggests that language processing frequently involves mental imagery. This paper focuses on visual imagery and discusses two issues regarding the processing of polysemous words (i.e. words with multiple related meanings or senses) – co-predication and sense-relatedness. It aims to show how mental imagery can illuminate these two issues.

'Propositionalism' is the widely held view that all intentional mental relations-all intentional attitudes-are relations to propositions or something proposition-like. Paradigmatically, to think about the mountain is ipso facto to think that it is F, for some predicate 'F'. It seems, however, many intentional attitudes are not relations to propositions at all: Mary contemplates Jonah, adores New York, misses Athens, mourns her brother. I argue, following Brentano, Husserl, Church and Montague among others, that the way things seem is the way they (...) are, and that propositionalism must be abandoned. (shrink)

The surface grammar of reports such as ‘I have a pain in my leg’ suggests that pains are objects which are spatially located in parts of the body. We show that the parallel construction is not available in Mandarin. Further, four philosophically important grammatical features of such reports cannot be reproduced. This suggests that arguments and puzzles surrounding such reports may be tracking artefacts of English, rather than philosophically significant features of the world.

The purpose of this article is to transcend the assumption that stakeholder engagement is necessarily a responsible practice. Stakeholder engagement is traditionally seen as corporate responsibility in action. Indeed, in some literatures there exists an assumption that the more an organisation engages with its stakeholders, the more it is responsible. This simple 'more is better' view of stakeholder engagement belies the true complexity of the relationship between engagement and corporate responsibility. Stakeholder engagement may be understood in a variety of different (...) ways and from a variety of different theoretical perspectives. Stakeholder engagement may or may not involve a moral dimension and, hence, is primarily a morally neutral practice. It is therefore argued that stakeholder engagement must be seen as separate from, but related to, corporate responsibility. A model that reflects the multifaceted relationship between the two constructs is proposed. This model not only allows the coincidence of stakeholder engagement with corporate responsibility, but also allows for the development of the notion of corporate irresponsibility. (shrink)

Embodied Selves and Divided Minds examines how research in embodied cognition and enactivism can contribute to our understanding of the nature of self-consciousness, the metaphysics of personal identity, and the disruptions to self-awareness that occur in case of psychopathology. The book reveals how a critical dialogue between Philosophy and Psychiatry can lead to a better understanding of important issues surrounding self-consciousness, personal identity, and psychopathology.

Beginning with the view that human consciousness is essentially embodied and that the way we consciously experience the world is structured by our bodily dynamics and surroundings, the book argues that emotions are a fundamental manifestation of our embodiment, and play a crucial role in self-consciousness, moral evaluation, and social cognition.

Much human adaptation depends on the gradual accumulation of culturally transmitted knowledge and technology. Recent models of this process predict that large, well-connected populations will have more diverse and complex tool kits than small, isolated populations. While several examples of the loss of technology in small populations are consistent with this prediction, it found no support in two systematic quantitative tests. Both studies were based on data from continental populations in which contact rates were not available, and therefore these studies (...) do not provide a test of the models. Here, we show that in Oceania, around the time of early European contact, islands with small populations had less complicated marine foraging technology. This finding suggests that explanations of existing cultural variation based on optimality models alone are incomplete because demography plays an important role in generating cumulative cultural adaptation. It also indicates that hominin populations with similar cognitive abilities may leave very different archaeological records, a conclusion that has important implications for our understanding of the origin of anatomically modern humans and their evolved psychology. (shrink)

Some critical philosophers of race have argued that whiteness can be understood as a technology of affect and that white supremacy is comprised partly of unconscious habits that result in racialized perception. In an effort to deepen our understanding of the affective and bodily dimensions of white supremacy and the ways in which affective habits are socially produced, I look to insights from situated affectivity. Theorists in this field maintain that affective experience is not simply a matter of felt inner (...) states, but rather socially and environmentally embedded and fundamentally relational. Jan Slaby presents the concept of an ‘affective arrangement’ as a way to approach affectivity in terms of relational dynamics unfolding within a particular setting. Applying this concept to the societal level, Paul Schuetze introduces the notion of ‘affective milieu.’ I argue that these notions of ‘affective arrangement’ and ‘affective milieu,’ together with an organicist account of habit, can help to illuminate the workings of white supremacy in the United States. My proposed account highlights the extent to which white supremacy is an affective, bodily phenomenon and how racist habits are formed over the course of learning and ongoing affective engagement, in the context of various social settings. Crucially, these affective habits are fully bound up with habits of appraisal, interpretation, and judgment, and therefore inseparable from how subjects come to see and understand their world. (shrink)

This is the first full-length biography in more than fifty years of Immanuel Kant, one of the giants amongst the pantheon of Western philosophers as well as the one with the most powerful and broad influence on contemporary philosophy. It is well known that Kant spent his entire life in an isolated part of Prussia living the life of a typical university professor. This has given rise to the view that Kant was a pure thinker with no life of his (...) own, or at least none worth considering seriously. In this biography, Manfred Kuehn debunks that myth once and for all. Taking account of the most recent scholarship Professor Kuehn allows the reader to follow the same journey that Kant himself took in emerging as a central figure in modern philosophy. (shrink)

In this paper I consider what a person who finds herself religiously incapacitated ought to do. More specifically, I address people who have come to God asking for bread, but who seem to have received stones and serpents in its place. This is a manifestation of the phenomenon that I call religious trauma. My goals in this paper are twofold. First, I aim to demonstrate that, because religious trauma can be genuinely religiously incapacitating, (1) it can result in non-culpable failure (...) to worship God, and (2), if ought implies can, a religious trauma survivor may find themself in a position where they ought to deconvert, whether or not the individual’s religion is true. My second goal in this paper is to illustrate that religious trauma deserves serious consideration from philosophers and theologians. (shrink)

This volume is the first to bring together original work by leading philosophers and psychologists in an examination of the moral psychology of contempt.

The concept ‘silence’ has diametrically opposed meanings; it connotes peace and contemplation as well as death and oblivion. Silence can also be considered a practice. There is keeping the rule of silence to still the mind and find inner truth, as well as forcibly silencing in the sense of subjugating another to one's own purposes. The concept of teaching runs the gamut between these extremes, from respectfully leading students to search and discover, to relentlessly bending them to one's own will. (...) This article examines contradictory connotations and practices of silence and teachers’ ambivalent perceptions of it in order to conceptualize a positive practice of silence for teacher education. (shrink)

Stories consist largely of representations of the human social environment. These representations can be used to influence the behavior of others (consider, e.g., rumor, propaganda, public relations, advertising). Storytelling can thus be seen as a transaction in which the benefit to the listener is information about his or her environment, and the benefit to the storyteller is the elicitation of behavior from the listener that serves the former’s interests. However, because no two individuals have exactly the same fitness interests, we (...) would expect different storytellers to have different narrative perspectives and priorities due to differences in sex, age, health, social status, marital status, number of offspring, and so on. Tellingly, the folklore record indicates that different storytellers within the same cultural group tell the same story differently. Furthermore, the historical and ethnographic records provide numerous examples of storytelling deliberately used as a means of political manipulation. This evidence suggests that storyteller bias is rooted in differences in individual fitness interests, and that storytelling may have originated as a means of promoting these interests. (shrink)

There has been little discussion of the compatibility of Theistic Conceptual Realism with the doctrine of divine simplicity. On the one hand, if a plurality of universals is necessary to explain the character of particular things, there is reason to think this commits the proponent of TCR to the existence of a plurality of divine concepts. So the proponent of the DDS has aprima faciereason to reject TCR. On the other hand, many mediaeval philosophers accept both the existence of divine (...) ideas and the DDS. In this article I draw on mediaeval and contemporary accounts of properties and divine simplicity to argue that the two theories are not logically incompatible. (shrink)

We assessed the attitudes, perceptions, and stereotypes toward Latino immigrants among 247 mental health professionals across 32 U.S. states. We also randomly presented two versions of an attitude measure that varied in their references to immigrants. Participants reported that they did not agree with the anti-immigration law Arizona SB 1070 and other similar bills. Also, greater multicultural awareness was related to positive attitudes and fewer stereotypes toward immigrants. Furthermore, participants who were asked to think about “undocumented immigrants” viewed Latino immigrants (...) more positively than those who were asked think about “illegal aliens.” Findings show the continued need for multicultural awareness and competence training for mental health professionals, which align with the American Psychological Association’s Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct. Limitations and future directions for research are discussed. (shrink)

Philosophical suspicions about the place of shame in the psychology of the mature moral agent are in tension with the commonplace assumption that to call a person shameless purports to mark a fault, arguably a moral fault. I shift philosophical suspicions away from shame and toward its absence in the shameless by focusing attention on phenomena of shamelessness. In redirecting our attention, I clarify the nature of the failing to which ascriptions of shamelessness might refer and defend the thought that, (...) as an evasion of moral self-censure, shamelessness can be morally pernicious. Far from foregoing shame, I conclude, we should be mindful of its moral importance and unapologetic in its defense. (shrink)

This is the first collection to bring together well-known scholars writing from feminist perspectives within critical discourse analysis. The theoretical structure of CDA is illustrated with empirical research in Eastern and Western Europe, New Zealand, Asia, South America and the US, demonstrating the complex workings of power and ideology in discourse in sustaining particular gender(ed) orders. These studies deal with texts and talk in domains ranging from parliamentary settings, news and advertising media, the classroom, community literacy programs and the workplace.