What is philosophy? How should we do it? Why should we bother to? These are the kinds of questions addressed by metaphilosophy - the philosophical study of the nature of philosophy itself. Students of philosophy today are faced with a confusing and daunting array of philosophical methods, approaches and styles and also deep divisions such as the notorious rift between analytic and Continental philosophy. This book takes readers through a full range of approaches - analytic versus Continental, scientistic versus humanistic, (...) 'pure' versus applied - enabling them to locate and understand these different ways of doing philosophy. Clearly and accessibly written, it will stimulate reflection on philosophical practice and will be invaluable for students of philosophy and other philosophically inclined readers. (shrink)

The concept, benefits and recommendations for the cultivation of compassion have been recognized in the contemplative traditions for thousands of years. In the last 30 years or so, the study of compassion has revealed it to have major physiological and psychological effects influencing well-being, addressing mental health difficulties, and promoting prosocial behavior. This paper outlines an evolution informed biopsychosocial, multicomponent model to caring behavior and its derivative “compassion” that underpins newer approaches to psychotherapy. The paper explores the origins of caring (...) motives and the nature and biopsychosocial functions of caring-attachment behavior. These include providing a secure base (sources of protection, validation, encouragement and guidance) and safe haven (source of soothing and comfort) for offspring along with physiological regulating functions, which are also central for compassion focused therapy. Second, it suggests that it is the way recent human cognitive competencies give rise to different types of “mind awareness” and “knowing intentionality” that transform basic caring motives into potentials for compassion. While we can care for our gardens and treasured objects, the concept of compassion is only used for sentient beings who can “suffer.” As psychotherapy addresses mental suffering, cultivating the motives and competencies of compassion to self and others can be a central focus for psychotherapy. (shrink)

.Evolutionary analysis focuses on how genes build organisms with different strategies for engaging and solving life’s challenges of survival and reproduction. One of those challenges is competing with conspecifics for limited resources including reproductive opportunities. This article will suggest that there is now good evidence for considering two dimensions of social competition. First, we will label antisocial strategies, to the extent that they tend to be self-focused, threat sensitive and aggressive, as well as using tactics of bulling, threatening, intimidating or (...) even injuring/killing competitors. Their strategic goal is to stimulate fear-inhibition, flight or submissive compliance in subordinates. Such strategies turn off and inhibit care and affiliative social interactions and motivation and they can be enacted by parents, teachers and leaders. The social signals emitted stimulate various aspects of threat processing in recipients, create stressful and highly stratified groups with a range of detrimental psychological and physiological effects. Second, in contrast, prosocial strategies seek to create relaxed and secure social interactions that enable sharing, cooperative and mutually supportive and beneficial relationships. The friendly and low/no threat social signals emitted in friendly cooperative and affiliative relationships stimulate physiological systems (e.g., oxytocin, the vagus parasympathetic system) that down regulates threat processing, enhances the immune system, facilitates frontal cortical processes and general wellbeing. This article reviews the literature pertaining to the evidence for these two dimensions of social engagement. (shrink)

Emotions evolved to guide animals in pursuing specific motives and goals. They function as short-term alertors and regulators of behaviour and can be grouped into their evolved functions. Emotions can coregulate/influence each other, where one emotion can activate or suppress another. Importantly, affiliative emotions, that arise from experiencing validation, care and support from others, have major impacts on how people process and respond to threats and emotions associated with threats. Hence, exploring how affiliative emotional experiences change and transform the capacity (...) to cope with threat and pursue life goals, are salient research issues. (shrink)

For thousands of years, various spiritual traditions and social activists have appealed to humans to adopt compassionate ways of living to address the suffering of life. Yet, along with our potential for compassion and self-sacrifice, the last few thousand years of wars, slavery, tortures, and holocausts have shown humans can be extraordinarily selfish, callous, vicious, and cruel. While there has been considerable engagement with these issues, particularly in the area of moral psychology and ethics, this paper explores an evolutionary analysis (...) relating to evolved resource-regulation strategies that can be called “care and share” versus “control and hold.” Control and hold are typical of primates that operate through intimidatory social hierarchies. Care and share are less common in non-human primates, but evolved radically in humans during our hunter-gatherer stage when our ancestors lived in relatively interdependent, small, mobile groups. In these groups, individualistic, self-focus, and self-promoting control and hold strategies (trying to secure and accumulate more than others) were shunned and shamed. These caring and sharing hunter-gatherer lifestyles also created the social contexts for the evolution of new forms of childcare and complex human competencies for language, reasoning, planning, empathy, and self-awareness. As a result of our new ‘intelligence’, our ancestors developed agriculture that reduced mobility, increased group size, resource availability and storage, and resource competition. These re-introduced competing for, rather than sharing of, resources and advantaged those who now pursue (often aggressively) control and hold strategies. Many of our most typical forms of oppressive and anti-compassionate behavior are the result of these strategies. Rather than (just) thinking aboutindividualscompeting with one another, we can also consider these different resource regulation strategies ascompeting within populationsshaping psychophysiological patterns; both wealth and poverty change the brain. One of the challenges to creating a more compassionate society is to find ways to create the social and economic conditions that regulate control and hold strategies and promote care and share. No easy task. (shrink)

In this, the first truly philosophical study of nationalism, Paul Gilbert attempts to make sense of the fact that there are different sorts of nationalism—for example, political and cultural—and that each concept functions with a different understanding of what a nation is. He sets out to explore whether there are any common ideas about what constitutes nationhood and whether these “nations” have particular rights due to them. By treating nationalism as a coherent body of ideas, the text permits a rational (...) reconstruction of the origins of nationalist movements. The book also examines the work of many key theorists, including Mill, Hume, Gramsci, and Gellner, in its coverage of secession, immigration, cultural rights and multiculturalism, and the aesthetics of nationalism. (shrink)

One of the traditional requirements of jus in bello is that military action should be proportionate in the loss and injury caused to troops to the military objectives it secures. However, the ?overwhelming force? applied in two Gulf Wars has been criticised as disproportionate. This article suggests a criterion for judging whether force is proportionate by considering what those who enter the profession of arms might be expected to tolerate or to undertake. A tacit agreement between troops on each side (...) is postulated, breaches of which count as unfair conduct, including cases of the disproportionate use of force. (shrink)

Paul Gilbert; XI*—Immediate Experience, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 92, Issue 1, 1 June 1992, Pages 233–250, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristot.

Paul Gilbert; XI*—Immediate Experience, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 92, Issue 1, 1 June 1992, Pages 233–250, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristot.

This chapter directs attention to calls to integrate compassion training in curricula throughout the education system. Following a review of current Higher Education aims and objectives, and the potential psychological impacts that these can have on staff and students, we outline a case for compassion based initiatives in education. We discuss the nature and functions of compassion, as well as how compassion can heighten prosocial competencies. We then consider how compassion based approaches can be - and have been - implemented (...) in education settings, including HE, to promote the health and well-being of staff and students, as well as academic performance. We argue that elements of compassion should underpin the training of lecturers, as well as students, if UK institutes of learning truly embrace the various core values they advertise. (shrink)

If morality concerns the question how to live then can it be a science? Can there be a science of how to live? Hilary Putnam who poses this question answers it thus:1 logically impossible. But, he reassures us, . In the meantime moral reasoning must engage . This is developed through in literature. If the computer takes over, of course, then . So too, he says, may science, not because redundant but because complete in its explanatory and predictive power.

A welcome introduction to one of the most intellectually demanding areas of the undergraduate philosophy curriculum. The authors provide a clear framework within which students can fit contemporary developments in the Anglo-American tradition which provide the core themes of philosophy of mind and which connect to their other work in epistemology and philosophy of language.

The last 20 years have seen the development of a new form of therapy, compassion focused therapy. Although CFT has a growing evidence base, there have been few studies of CFT outside of an Anglo-European cultural context. In this paper, we ask: Might a CFT-based approach be of value for Indigenous Australians? If so, what kind of cultural adaptations might be needed? We report the findings from a pilot study of an arts-based compassion skills training group, in which usual CFT (...) group processes were significantly adapted to meet the needs of Indigenous Australians. At face value, CFT appeared to be a promising approach to enhancing the social and emotional wellbeing of Australia’s Indigenous peoples. However, despite initial consultations with Indigenous health professionals, the first attempts to offer a more conventional group-based CFT to Indigenous clients were largely unsuccessful. Following a review and advice from two Indigenous clients, we combined elements of CFT with visual arts to develop a new approach, “arts-based compassion skills training”. This paper reports an evaluation of this pilot ABCST group. The group had 6 × 4 h sessions of ABCST, facilitated by two psychologists and two artists. There were 10 participants, who attended between 2 and 6 sessions: five were clients, five were health professionals. Between 1 and 3 months later, six of the participants were interviewed. Qualitative analysis of interview data identified that two key processes—creating a positive group atmosphere and channeling compassion skills training through the medium of visual arts—led to four positive outcomes for participants: planting the seeds of new understandings, embodying the skills of compassion, strengthening relationships with others, and evolving a more self-compassionate relationship. We suggest that the preliminary results are sufficiently encouraging to warrant further development of ABCST in Indigenous communities. (shrink)

AimThis study aims to translate the Compassionate Engagement and Action Scales into Turkish and to test their subsequent validity, reliability, and psychometric properties. Turkey is one of the blended cultures with eastern and western elements under the influence of traditional religion. This cultural diversity brings about a rich context to study compassion and its relationship to mental health. The scales assess the ability to be sensitive to suffering and engage and then take helpful actions in compassion. The motivation for compassionate (...) engagement and action is measured at three ‘flows’ as follows: compassion for others; compassion from others; and compassion for self.MethodsThe sample consists of 525 college students aged 18 years or older. The participants completed the CEAS Turkish Form for Others, Self and from Others, Self-Compassion Scale Short Form, Compassionate Love Scale, and Self-Criticism Scale.ResultsThe confirmatory factor analyses were conducted using AMOS version 27 to examine the validity of the three scales with two different factor structures each. All the three models show good fits to the data. The Cronbach’s alpha coefficient for the CEAS for Others and for Self and from Others are good to excellent. Compassion for self, compassion for others, and compassion from others correlated modestly.ConclusionIt can be concluded that the Turkish version of the Compassionate Engagement and Action Scales for Others and Self and from Others has sufficient psychometric properties and can be used as a reliable and valid measure to assess compassionate engagement and action. (shrink)

This engaging and thought-provoking introduction to philosophy of mind covers all the central questions regarding the mind. Taking a novel approach for an introductory text, authors Paul Gilbert, Kathleen Lennon, and Steve Burwood argue that the dominant theories are based on flawed Cartesian assumptions and presuppositions about the nature of mind and body. Beginning with an examination of the Cartesian roots of contemporary philosophy of mind and rationality, the authors show that, despite rejecting mind-body dualism in favour of materialism, most (...) recent philosophies of mind are still Cartesian -- they share a Cartesian conception of the body while adopting a reductionist approach to the mind. Providing a welcome alternative to texts such as Churchland's Matter and Consciousness, the authors develop an alternative position called "perspectivalism," which is based on a metaphysics of the body characterized intentionally and combines elements of both Anglo-American and Continental traditions. (shrink)

Pensar na graça de Deus e na liberdade do homem, ao mesmo tempo, tem sido sempre essencial, embora difícil para a reflexão cristã. Anselmo considerou com frequência essa dificuldade, que é semelhante à que nasce do uso da sola ragione numa postura de oração. Na sua obra De Concordia, terceira parte, cap. 11, o Doutor Magnígico constrói uma representação da vontade que assume as exigências máximas da reflexão cristã. Este capítulo distingue três aspectos na vontade: instumentum, aptitudo e usus; a (...) aptitudo é chamada de affectio. No seu De libero arbitrio, Anselmo distinguia, em vez, o instrumento e o uso, sem considerar a affectio. Com um atenção especial à fenomenologia contemporânea, o presente artigo destaca tanto por que o tema da afeição deve ser introduzido quanto o signifcado desta introdução tardia na obra de Anselmo. (shrink)

(1992). Defense, safe(ty) and biosocial goals in relation to the agonic and hedonic social modes. World Futures: Vol. 35, Socio-Mental Bimodality, pp. 31-70.