Elizabeth Schechter explores the implications of the experience of people who have had the pathway between the two hemispheres of their brain severed, and argues that there are in fact two minds, subjects of experience, and intentional agents inside each split-brain human being: right and left. But each split-brain subject is still one of us.

To assess the ability of the disconnected cerebral hemispheres to recognize images of the self, a split-brain patient was tested using morphed self-face images presented to one visual hemifield at a time while making “self/other” judgments. The performance of the right and left hemispheres of this patient as assessed by a signal detection method was not significantly different, though a measure of bias did reveal hemispheric differences. The right and left hemispheres of this patient independently and (...) equally possessed the ability to self-recognize, but only the right hemisphere could successfully recognize familiar others. This supports a modular concept of self-recognition and other-recognition, separately present in each cerebral hemisphere. (shrink)

I problematize the notion of self-legislation. I follow in Elizabeth Anscombe’s footsteps and suggest that on a plausible reading of Kant, he does not so much misidentify the sources of moral normativity, as fail to identify any such sources in the first place: The set of terms with which the Kantian is attempting to do so is confused. Interpreters today take Kant’s legal language to be merely metaphorical. The language of ‘self-legislation,’ in particular, is replaced by such interpreters (...) with a language of ‘self-constitution.’ I challenge that, and claim that the language of legislation and judgment was, for Kant, more than a metaphor: The recognition of the moral law, he says, motivates us as if it were “the bidding of another person.” Legislation is typically remote in this way. It typically requires a distance between lawgiver and law-receiver—a distance that allows, for instance, for self-inspection and judgment. For Kant, these are the terms in which to explain the forms of the moral judgment and the sources of moral normativity. It is questionable, however, whether we can be remote from our own actions in the way required—whether we can observe our own actions. We cannot, for example, raise our hand and wonder how far it will go up. I develop this claim into an Anscombean challenge to Kant, and I call upon Kantians to take it seriously. (shrink)

In this commentary I use recent empirical evidence and theoretical analyses concerning the importance of language and the meaning of self-recognition to reevaluate the claim that the right mute hemisphere in commissurotomized patients possesses a full consciousness. Preliminary data indicate that inner speech is deeply linked to self-awareness; also, four hypotheses concerning the crucial role inner speech plays in self-focus are presented. The legitimacy of self-recognition as a strong operationalization of self-awareness in the right hemisphere (...) is also questioned on the basis that it might rather tap a preexisting body awareness having little to do with an access to mental events. I conclude with the formulation of an alternative interpretation of commissurotomy according to self-awareness — a “complete” one in the left hemisphere and a “primitive” one in the right hemisphere. (shrink)

The attentive pupil who wishes to be attentive, his eyes riveted on the teacher, his ears open wide, so exhausts himself in playing the attentive role that he ends up by no longer hearing anything....

Curanderismo is an Indigenous healing tradition in Chicane communities and throughout Mexico. Using such a lens, this paper analyzes the metaphysical nature of trauma as a splitting (susto) of the self and community. First, this paper explores the Indigenous philosophical principles that form the metaphysics of curanderismo. Second, three reactions to susto will be explored including what Gloria Anzaldua calls the Coyolxauhqui imperative, a re-membering of a split self towards healing. Through the second aim, the third aim (...) of this paper is to lay out a road map of the Coyolxauhqui imperative in hopes that it will save more communities from total annihilation. That road involves integrating traumatic memory and history into a sense of self/community, weaving new relationships, and orienting a new self with a decolonized spirit. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Endnotes.

In this paper, I contend that there are at least two essential traits that commonly define being an I: self-identity and self-consciousness. I argue that they bear quite an odd relation to each other in the sense that self-consciousness seems to jeopardize self-identity. My main concern is to elucidate this issue within the range of the transcendental philosophies of Immanuel Kant and Edmund Husserl. In the first section, I shall briefly consider Kant’s own rendition of the (...) problem of the Egosplitting. My reading of the Kantian texts reveals that Kant himself was aware of this phenomenon but eventually deems it an unexplainable fact. The second part of the paper tackles the same problematic from the standpoint of Husserlian phenomenology. What Husserl’s extensive analyses on this topic bring to light is that the phenomenon of the Ego-splitting constitutes the bedrock not only of his thought but also of every philosophy that works within the framework of transcendental thinking. (shrink)

After the first callosotomy surgeries were performed, the general consensus among the medical community was that severing the corpus callosum had relatively little, if any, effect on an individual's behavior. Nearly twenty years later, researchers discovered that, under experimental conditions, the two hemispheres could simultaneously maintain very different interpretations of the same stimulus. These findings immediately called into question the unity of subjective experience, a fundamental characteristic of human consciousness. How could the split‐brain patient not experience any disruption in (...) his experience as a unified self when the two hemispheres are physically and functionally disconnected? In this chapter, we review the research that has led to a conceptualization of the split brain as two minds within one body and the implications of this research for the scientific study of consciousness. We argue that consciousness is a neural function that emerges from the integration of information across available functional modules. (shrink)

In this paper, I contend that there are at least two essential traits that commonly define being an I: self-identity and self-consciousness. I argue that they bear quite an odd relation to each other in the sense that self-consciousness seems to jeopardize self-identity. My main concern is to elucidate this issue within the range of the transcendental philosophies of Immanuel Kant and Edmund Husserl. In the first section, I shall briefly consider Kant’s own rendition of the (...) problem of the Ego-splitting. My reading of the Kantian texts reveals that Kant himself was aware of this phenomenon but eventually deems it an unexplainable fact. The second part of the paper tackles the same problematic from the standpoint of Husserlian phenomenology. What Husserl’s extensive analyses on this topic bring to light is that the phenomenon of the Ego-splitting constitutes the bedrock not only of his thought but also of every philosophy that works within the framework of transcendental thinking. (shrink)

Instagram serves as a powerful instrument for youth socialization, self-expression, and self-performance in visual online spaces. Using social semiotics and multimodal discourse analysis, this study examines the potential ideological meanings and implications of selfie-shooting and sharing on Instagram on young adults’ self-concept. A corpus of 110 questionnaires, including almost 85 captioned selfies, was surveyed as multimodal utterances. In doing so, this study argues that selfies can create young adults’ split-selves while constructing their multiple personas in visual (...) online spaces. This marks the significance of viewing selfie-creators not only as authors of their selfies, but rather as viewers of a three-fold self: an ideal-self, a projected-self, and an internal-self, to negotiate social and power relationships, while (re)positioning observer-observed roles. This study claims originality in unraveling how young adults use visual and textual mediated communication to represent and perform their split-selves. It suggests that selfie-shooting-sharing has become a key self-performance tactic and behavior in online cultures. Therefore, young adults deploy selfies and captions to posit a redefinition of certain social values, such as aesthetics and freedom, while deploying their selfies and captions. Challenging certain orthodox social allegiances, they conceive wildness, messiness, and exuberance as emerging neo-aesthetics components of appeal. This study contributes to the literature on personal visual communication with insights on how Egyptian young adults perform their self-concept via the semiotic practice of selfie-shooting-sharing. (shrink)

It is a common assumption in contemporary cognitive neuroscience that discovering a putative realized kind to be dissociably realized (i.e., to be realized in each instance by two or more distinct realizers) mandates splitting that kind. Here I explore some limits on this inference using two deceptively similar examples: the dissociation of declarative and procedural memory and Ramachandran's argument that the self is an illusion.

I problematize the notion of self-legislation. I follow in Elizabeth Anscombe’s footsteps and suggest that on a plausible reading of Kant, he does not so much misidentify the sources of moral normativity, as fail to identify any such sources in the first place: The set of terms with which the Kantian is attempting to do so is confused. Interpreters today take Kant’s legal language to be merely metaphorical. The language of ‘self-legislation,’ in particular, is replaced by such interpreters (...) with a language of ‘self-constitution.’ I challenge that, and claim that the language of legislation and judgment was, for Kant, more than a metaphor: The recognition of the moral law, he says, motivates us as if it were “the bidding of another person.” Legislation is typically remote in this way. It typically requires a distance between lawgiver and law-receiver—a distance that allows, for instance, for self-inspection and judgment. For Kant, these are the terms in which to explain the forms of the moral judgment and the sources of moral normativity. It is questionable, however, whether we can be remote from our own actions in the way required—whether we can observe our own actions. We cannot, for example, raise our hand and wonder how far it will go up. I develop this claim into an Anscombean challenge to Kant, and I call upon Kantians to take it seriously. (shrink)

We investigate the relationship between subgroup splits, subjectively perceived subgroups, and team identification and emotional exhaustion. Based on the job demands-resources model and on self-categorization theory, we propose that faultline strength and perceived subgroups negatively affect emotional exhaustion, mediated by team identification. We further propose that subgroup identification moderates the mediation such that subgroup identification compensates low levels of team identification. We tested our hypotheses with a two-wave questionnaire study in a sample of 105 participants from 48 teams from (...) various contexts. We found an effect of perceived subgroups on emotional exhaustion mediated by team identification, but no direct or indirect effect of faultline strength on emotional exhaustion. We also could not find that subgroup identification moderates the effect of team identification on emotional exhaustion. We discuss the need for further research on the link of subgroup splits in work teams and the rise of psychological health issues and derive that measures to prevent burnout should primarily focus on avoiding or reducing subgroup perception whereas affecting the actual demographic composition of work team should be of lower priority. (shrink)

. Cognitive science challenges our understandings of self and freedom. In this article, adapted from a chapter in Minding God: Theology and the Cognitive Sciences , I review some of the scientific literature with regard to issues of self and freedom. I argue that our sense of self is a construct and heavily dependent on the kind of brain that we have. Furthermore, understanding the issue of freedom requires an understanding of the findings of cognitive science. Human (...) beings are constrained to be free; our biology in no small way determines the kinds of freedom that we are able to have. (shrink)

Husserl’s phenomenology of imagination embraces a cluster of different theories and approaches regarding the multi-faced phenomenon of imaginative experience. In this paper I consider one aspect that seems to be crucial to the understanding of a particular form of imagination that Husserl names pure phantasy. I argue that the phenomenon of Ego-splitting discloses the best way to elucidate the peculiarity of pure phantasy with respect to other forms of representative acts and to any simple form of act modification. First, I (...) unravel the phenomenological distinctions which, respectively, oppose phantasy to perception, on the one hand, and phantasy to other forms of the so-called “intuitive re-presentations”. Second, I introduce the difference between presentative and representative acts, arguing that this cannot help us to single out the defining feature of phantasy experiences. The third section draws again an important distinction between pure phantasy and neutrality modification, which allows me to finally determine an internal trait of phantasy experiences, which Husserl refers to as the “Ego-splitting”. In this way, I hope to contribute to a refined characterization of Husserl’s phenomenology of imagination. (shrink)

Survivors of trauma commonly report feeling as though a part of themselves has died. This article provides a theoretical interpretation of this phenomenon, drawing on Waldenfels' notion of the split self. We argue that trauma gives rise to an explicit tension between the lived and corporeal body which is so profoundly distressing that it can be experienced by survivors as the death of part of oneself. We explore the ways in which this is manifest in the posttraumatic phenomena (...) of dissociation; indescribability; and the fragmentation and repetition of time. Acknowledging that the traumatic loss of part of oneself involves significant grief, we then consider whether the bereavement literature might be helpfully applied. We focus specifically upon the continuing bonds model, which emphasizes an ongoing and meaningful relationship with the deceased through an active process of memorializing. In considering how this might be appropriated to the death of the self in trauma, we suggest that the development of an intrapersonal relationship between parts lost and living might, over time, offer a unique way in which to adapt to loss and approach the future. (shrink)

A recent article in the March 2009 edition of Clinical Ethics stated that, ‘In the Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas discusses how murder may be justified in self defence’, provided that killing is not intended. This statement is open to challenge on historical and semantic grounds, with respect to the writings of the 13th Century Roman Catholic philosopher Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274). A better appreciation of Aquinas' writings on this topic could inform the debate relating to medical end-of-life decisions. The normatively (...) loaded word ‘murder’ is not applicable to Aquinas' conclusion on unintended homicide, nor is it applicable to unintended homicide in current law, which is by definition not murder. (shrink)

We are dealing with the Dirac Hamiltonian H = H0 + V with no magnetic field and radially symmetric electrostatic potential V = V(r), preferably the Coulomb potential. While the observable H is precisely predictable, its components H0 (relativistic mass) and V (potential energy) are not. However they both possess precisely predictable approximations H0 ∼ and V∼ which approximate accurately if the particle is not near its nucleus. On the other hand, near 0, H0 and V are practically unpredictable, perhaps (...) in agreement with the fact, that a neutrino also should be in the game. [We have not yet studied the corresponding observables for the (≥ 12-dimensional) problem of electro-weak interaction.] Mathematically we are focusing on the spectral theory of the unbounded self-adjoint operators H0 ∼ and V ∼. We can prove that V ∼ is unitarily equivalent to V(r) again, by a unitary map given as Wiener-Hopf-type singular integral operator in the standard separation of variables for radially symmetric Dirac Hamiltonians. [This is, as far as the continuous spectrum is concerned.] Very similar unitary equivalence holds for H 0 ∼ and H 0. We are tempted to regard this as a form of “renormalization”. (shrink)

A longstanding issue in attempts to understand the Everett (Many-Worlds) approach to quantum mechanics is the origin of the Born rule: why is the probability given by the square of the amplitude? Following Vaidman, we note that observers are in a position of self-locating uncertainty during the period between the branches of the wave function splitting via decoherence and the observer registering the outcome of the measurement. In this period it is tempting to regard each branch as equiprobable, but (...) we argue that the temptation should be resisted. Applying lessons from this analysis, we demonstrate (using methods similar to those of Zurek's envariance-based derivation) that the Born rule is the uniquely rational way of apportioning credence in Everettian quantum mechanics. In doing so, we rely on a single key principle: changes purely to the environment do not affect the probabilities one ought to assign to measurement outcomes in a local subsystem. We arrive at a method for assigning probabilities in cases that involve both classical and quantum self-locating uncertainty. This method provides unique answers to quantum Sleeping Beauty problems, as well as a well-defined procedure for calculating probabilities in quantum cosmological multiverses with multiple similar observers. (shrink)

The majority of those who comment upon the theories of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe - both supporters and critics - treat the work of the two authors as a coherent unity. I see acute differences that demarcate the ideas of Laclau and Mouffe: differences that impede any straightforward delimitation of the authorial identity `Laclau and Mouffe'. The purpose of this paper is to bring to the fore the incommensurate political differences that separate the work of the two authors, and (...) to establish the superiority of Mouffe's position. At its most basic both authors view politics as described in their co-authored Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: i.e. `as a practice of creation, reproduction and transformation of social relations' (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 153). This agreement, however, conceals the fact that the authors describe the political articulation of social relations in distinct ways, and that those descriptions are implicated in, and reinforce, contrasting ethico-political commitments and prescriptions. These differences reflect the differences between the politics of the Marxist tradition retained by Laclau - albeit understood as a negative apparition of its former (ultimately) fully positive self - and Mouffe's radical democratic pluralism. This latter perspective - in its more recent formulations - represents a political compound of civic-republicanism with a defense of liberalism; this is a political imaginary that retains little if anything from the Marxist tradition. (shrink)

Recent philosophical discussions of self-knowledge have focused on basic cases: our knowledge of our own thoughts, beliefs, sensations, experiences, preferences, and intentions. Empiricists argue that we acquire this sort of self-knowledge through inner perception; rationalists assign basic self-knowledge an even more secure source in reason and conceptual understanding. I try to split the difference. Although our knowledge of our own beliefs and thoughts is conceptually insured, our knowledge of our experiences is relevantly like our perceptual knowledge (...) of the external world. (shrink)

The Theory of Planned Behavior predicts that a combination of attitudes, perceived norms, and perceived behavioral control predict intentions, and that intentions ultimately predict behavior. Previous studies have found that the TPB can predict students’ engagement in plagiarism. Furthermore, the General Theory of Crime suggests that self-control is particularly important in predicting engagement in unethical behavior such as plagiarism. In Study 1, we incorporated self-control in a TPB model and tested whether norms, attitudes, and self-control predicted intention (...) to plagiarize and plagiarism behavior. The best statistical fit for the path-analytic model was achieved when a direct path from self-control to plagiarism engagement was specified. In Study 2, we added a measure of perceived behavioral control and split the measurement of norms into descriptive and injunctive components. This study found that both self-control and perceived-behavioral control additively contributed to the prediction of plagiarism and the path-analytic model achieved its best fit when direct paths from perceived norms to plagiarism behavior were specified. These studies suggest that setting strong anti-plagiarism norms, such as by the use of honor codes, and seeking to enhance students’ self-control may reduce engagement in plagiarism. (shrink)

The first aim of the study was to identify when deliberate self-harm behavior ceased in patients with borderline symptoms undergoing dialectical behavioral treatment. The second aim was to compare patients who ceased their self-harm behavior early or late in the course of treatment, with regard to demographics, comorbidity, and symptom severity. The study used a naturalistic design and included 75 treatment completers at an outpatient DBT clinic. Of these 75 patients, 46 presented with self-harming behavior at pre-treatment. (...) These 46 participants where split into two groups, based on median amount of time before ceasing self-harm behavior, termed early and late responders. Treatment duration varied from 16 to 160 weeks. Patients were assessed pre- and post-treatment using measures of depression, hopelessness, personality traits, quality of life, and global assessment of symptoms and functioning. The majority ceased their self-harming within the first year, and the average number of weeks was 15.5. Twenty-five percent of patients ceased their DSH behavior during the first week of treatment. For the remaining patients, the cessation of DSH continued gradually across a 1 year period. We found no differences between early and late responders with respect to demographics, comorbidity, symptom severity, or treatment outcome. None of the patients committed suicide. The findings indicate that self-harming behavior decreases gradually across the first year after starting DBT. (shrink)

This article presents an introductory overview of the interpretations of schizophrenia offered by three phenomenological psychiatrists: Eugene Minkowski (1885-1972), Wolfgang Blankenburg (b. 1928), and Kimura Bin (b. 1931). Minkowski views schizophrenia as characterized by a diminished sense of dynamic and vital connection to the world ("loss of vital contact"), often accompanied by a hypertrophy of intellectual and static tendencies ("morbid rationalism," "morbid geometrism"). Blankenburg emphasizes the patient's loss of the normal sense of obviousness or "natural self-evidence"—a loss of the (...) usual common-sense background that enables normal persons to cope easily with the social and practical world. Kimura focuses on certain distortions of self-experience: a distinctive splitting of the subjective self, alienated awareness of one's own ongoing consciousness, and profound uncertainty about the "I-ness" of the self. In addition to a summary, this article offers a comparison and critique of these three approaches. The three approaches are also considered in light of a more recent, phenomenological formulation of schizophrenia as a disorder of self-experience (an ipseity disturbance) involving hyperreflexivity and diminished self-affection (i.e., heightened awareness of aspects of experience that would normally remain tacit or presupposed and decline in the feeling of existing as a subject of awareness). (shrink)

Postmodernism, in spite of its exaggerations and myopias, has left us with many gifts, including two strains of the critical tradition that struggle to reconcile with each other. Those strains grow from two undeniable truths: that the self can never occupy the space of the other, nor can the self extricate the other from its nature. Given the conflict between these truths, the postmodern resistance to metaphysics can never be quite as rigorous as it imagines, since the (...) class='Hi'>self, as inextricable from what it can never be, must be an object of faith, its origin and agency rooted in an eclipsed otherness beyond our capacity to witness or understand. A sense of this eclipse, acknowledged or not, haunts the contradictions... (shrink)

Abstract:In the Chinese cultural imaginary, the road (Dao, “way”), especially trade routes, has always been an important metaphor for changing circumstances including shifting ideological grounds. Its own life trajectory is both classical and contemporary, and its emergence predates the trains, nation-states, sovereign powers, and so on, all such signs of techno-political modernity at work. Also in that regard, spiritually inflected images of the “West Heaven,” also an old name for India, where Buddhism originated, have always been present in East Asian (...) cultural spheres, which, in turn, points to the presence of a deeper Eurasian world connected through the Middle East as well. Now, however, quite strikingly, such global conceptual structures, long part of the evolving Chinese cultural tradition too, are being rapidly localized and recast into something else. For example, in China, Buddhism, a religion fundamentally critical of idol worshipping, has become pantheistic, and the political ideas that originally promoted equality newly patriarchal. For those living along the China Eastern Railway tracks in the twenty-first century, all such ideologies have become part of a tensional fight of gods in which they, too, are caught: on one hand they long for a linear progression of society that would never turn back, but on the other hand they are reluctant to abandon the self-comforting theory of reincarnation. This is also how they come to praise the imported concept of the motherland while worshipping figures of traditional patriarchal power. (shrink)

The idea that the self is in need of rethinking, as the title to this collection of essays suggests, presupposes that the self has already been “thought.” And indeed it has—both explicitly, by philosophers, and implicitly, in the practices of everyday life. For philosophers, this thinking about the self has taken place largely in abstract terms; persons have been treated as metaphysical-cum-moral subjects, disembodied minds that could plausibly be split from or melded with other such minds, (...) or as rational agents, capable of choosing a plan in terms of which to live their lives. In everyday life, in contrast, we “think” one another as selves by making assumptions about how the people we encounter fit into the social landscape and about how we ourselves have a place in the world. As the essays in this collection demonstrate, feminists have challenged both ways of thinking of selfhood in various, sometimes contradictory, ways. (shrink)

The Higher Self is a concept introduced by Roberto Assagioli, the founder of psychosynthesis, into transpersonal psychology. This notion is explained and linked up with the Western mystical tradition. Here, coming from antiquity and specifically from the neo-Platonic tradition, a similiar concept has been developed which became known as the spark of the soul, or summit of the mind. This history is sketched and the meaning of the term illustrated. During the middle ages it was developed into a psychology (...) of mysticism by Thomas Gallus, popularized by Bonaventure, and radicalized by the Carthusian writer Hugh of Balma. Spark of the soul signifies an "organ of the mystical experience." It is argued that the split introduced into history between outer and inner experience has lain dormant ever since the 13th century, with inner experience relegated to the private and mystical realm. By introducing this concept, transpersonal psychology reconnects with this tradition and has to be aware of the legacy: to achieve the theoretical, and if possible scientific, integration of both types of experience by drawing on the experiential nature of this concept and fostering good research. (shrink)

Plagiarism is one of the most severe academic integrity issues. This study examined students’ knowledge of and attitudes towards plagiarism, tested their ability to recognize plagiarism, and explored the association of study levels and attendance in courses dealing with referencing rules and plagiarism with students’ attitudes and knowledge. A cross-sectional online survey was conducted at the University of Split, comprising the students of all schools and study levels. Overall, results indicate the students were not very familiar with referencing rules (...) and did not perform well on either theoretical questions or practical examples. However, they demonstrated positive attitudes towards plagiarism avoidance as well as towards compliance with academic integrity with respect to the correct use of research publications. Students’ self-reported attendance in courses dealing with referencing rules and plagiarism avoidance was not associated with their knowledge of and attitudes toward plagiarism. These findings are important for a general understanding of students’ attitudes, and the relation of practical and theoretical knowledge of plagiarism. Furthermore, the academic community addresses plagiarism not only as an ethical and regulatory violation but also as a direct consequence of a lack of knowledge, and of academic illiteracy. Study programs should be adjusted and long-term policies developed at all academic levels to promote a positive climate among students towards responsible academic writing. (shrink)

The article discusses issues related to overcoming the crisis situation of non-Western countries, including Russia, caused by the uncritical acceptance of the neoliberal universalistic paradigm of development at the turn of the century. The intellectual response to the crisis led the initiative of civilizational self-identification of these countries based on the formation of a new principle of supranational organization in the form of a “civilizationstate,” which is perceived by Western analysts as a fundamental global challenge of modernity requiring a (...) comprehensive theoretical understanding. As of the present time, in their opinion, China, India, and Russia can be classified as “civilization states.” It is asserted that the civilizational turn emerged as a result of the opposition of the “core” states (in the terminology of S. Huntington) of unipolar hegemony, which initiates the conflict potential for the development of the world community, threatening the integrity of the existing Euro-American order. Russian researchers, for their part, note the negative consequences of the universalistic aspiration to spread the model of the “nation-state” to the whole world, which occurs within the logic of limited sovereignty and is destructive for Russia. Actions to overcome the internal crisis discussed in the article include a transition to a national-civilizational form of identity and the implementation of the idea of a “Russian-centric world.” This corresponds to the global trend of forming macro-regional “civilization-worlds” based on common cultural and social values developed during a long period of coexistence. The article demonstrates that the revival of “civilizationalism” is taking place against the background of the worldwide trend of the split of modernity. There is an actualization of the project of the “East-Westphalian system,” called the “Eastphalian” world order, which rejects European universalism and opens the way to a new multipolar world order. (shrink)

By embodying the hopes of a set of qualitative liberals who believed that postwar economic abundance opened up opportunities for self-development, David Riesman's bestselling The Lonely Crowd influenced the New Left. Yet Riesman's assessment of radical youth protest shifted over the course of the 1960s. As an antinuclear activist he worked closely with New Left leaders during the early 1960s. By the end of the decade, he became a sharp critic of radical protest. However, other leading members of Riesman's (...) circle, such as Kenneth Keniston, author of the influential Young Radicals, applied Riesman's ideas to create more sympathetic understandings of the New Left. Examining reactions to the New Left by Riesman and his associates allows historians to go beyond the common understanding of the key ideological divisions of the 1960s as existing between liberalism and radicalism or between liberalism and conservatism to better appreciate the significance of splits among liberals themselves. (shrink)

In this paper I examine Robert Kane’s account of a self-forming action (SFA), in which an agent makes dual efforts of will to form two incompatible intentions. In addition to the frequently raised objection to this account, that such dual efforts would be irrational, I discuss a further conceptual problem, that it does not make sense to speak of efforts to form particular intentions. I then propose an alternative model of an SFA, in which an agent deliberates and selects (...) between two possible but incompatible intentions. Finally, I discuss some research on “conflicts of intention” in split-brain patients which suggests that in normal cases, SFAs do indeed involve such a selection between competing intention-possibilities, and that it is only in abnormal cases, when such selection is inhibited, that agents are led to make dual efforts of will. (shrink)