The separation thesis states that business and moral decision making should and can be differentiated clearly. This study provides empirical support for the competing view that the separation thesis is impossible through a case study of the Rotary Club, which fosters an ethical orientation among its global business and professional membership. The study focuses attention on the Club in the early to middle 20th century. Based on a reading of their service doctrine, the four objects of Rotary and (...) the Four Way Test, the author argues that the example of the Rotary Club undermines the separation thesis. The Rotary message was conceptually ambiguous: it did not clearly differentiate business roles from social activities; rather both fed into each other, with the business tools developed by members and disseminated by Rotary, utilized in nonbusiness contexts with a view to enhancing societal well-being. (shrink)

Vacuolar ATPases (V‐ATPases, V1Vo‐ATPases) are rotary motor proton pumps that acidify intracellular compartments, and, when localized to the plasma membrane, the extracellular space. V‐ATPase is regulated by a unique process referred to as reversible disassembly, wherein V1‐ATPase disengages from Vo proton channel in response to diverse environmental signals. Whereas the disassembly step of this process is ATP dependent, the (re)assembly step is not, but requires the action of a heterotrimeric chaperone referred to as the RAVE complex. Recently, an alternative (...) pathway of holoenzyme disassembly was discovered that involves binding of Oxidation Resistance 1 (Oxr1p), a poorly characterized protein implicated in oxidative stress response. Unlike conventional reversible disassembly, which depends on enzyme activity, Oxr1p induced dissociation can occur in absence of ATP. Yeast Oxr1p belongs to the family of TLDc domain containing proteins that are conserved from yeast to mammals, and have been implicated in V‐ATPase function in a variety of tissues. This brief perspective summarizes what we know about the molecular mechanisms governing both reversible (ATP dependent) and Oxr1p driven (ATP independent) V‐ATPase dissociation into autoinhibited V1 and Vo subcomplexes. (shrink)

This paper propounds a new reading of Berkeley's account of the activity of finite spirits. Against existing interpretations, the paper argues that Berkeley does not hold that we causally contribute to the movement of our bodies. In contrast, our volitions to move our bodies are but occasions for God to cause their movement. In answer to the question of wherein then consists our activity, the paper proposes that our activity consists in the dual powers to produce (1) (...) our volitions ? the acts of willing ? and (2) our ideas of imagination. (shrink)

Internalist approaches to epistemic justification are, though controversial, considered a live option in contemporary epistemology. Accordingly, if ‘active’ externalist approaches in the philosophy of mind—e.g. the extended cognition and extended mind theses—are _in principle_ incompatible with internalist approaches to justification in epistemology, then this will be an epistemological strike against, at least the _prima facie_ appeal of, active externalism. It is shown here however that, contrary to pretheoretical intuitions, neither the extended cognition _nor_ the extended mind theses are in principle (...) incompatible with two prominent versions of epistemic internalism—viz., accessibilism and mentalism. In fact, one possible diagnosis is that pretheoretical intuitions regarding the incompatibility of active externalism with epistemic internalism are symptomatic of a tacit yet incorrect identification of epistemic internalism with epistemic individualism. Thus, active externalism is not in principle incompatible with epistemic internalism per se and does not significantly restrict one’s options in epistemology. (shrink)

Watching, looking at, and listening to, are all things that perceiving agents actively do. Though the occurrence of these activities appears to entail perception of elements of the agent's environment, perception is not something that can be actively done by agents. This raises the question how perceptual activity and perception are related to one another. This chapter, through reflecting on a discussion of listening offered by Brian O'Shaughnessy, argues that listening to material particulars ought to be understood as the (...) agential maintenance of aural awareness of those particulars, with the aim of knowing what sounds they are making. He goes on to explore some of the consequences of these claims about listening for exercises of perceptual agency involving the other sensory modalities. (shrink)

Unless one embraces activities as foundational, understanding activities in mechanisms requires an account of the means by which entities in biological mechanisms engage in their activities—an account that does not merely explain activities in terms of more basic entities and activities. Recent biological research on molecular motors exemplifies such an account, one that explains activities in terms of free energy and constraints. After describing the characteristic “stepping” activities of these molecules and mapping the stages of those steps onto the stages (...) of the motors’ hydrolytic cycles, researchers pieced together from images of the molecules in different hydrolyzation states accounts of how the chemical energy in ATP is transformed in the constrained environments of the motors into the characteristic activities of the motors. We argue that New Mechanism’s standard set of analytic categories—entities, activities, and organization—should be expanded to include constraints and energetics. Not only is such an expansion required descriptively to capture research on molecular motors but, more importantly from a philosophical point of view, it enables a non-regressive account of activities in mechanisms. In other words, this expansion enables a philosophical account of mechanistic explanation that avoids a regress of entities and activities “all the way down.” Rather, mechanistic explanation bottoms out in constraints and energetics. (shrink)

Cognitive niche construction is the process whereby organisms create and maintain cause–effect models of their niche as guides for fitness influencing behavior. Extended mind theory claims that cognitive processes extend beyond the brain to include predictable states of the world. Active inference and predictive processing in cognitive science assume that organisms embody predictive (i.e., generative) models of the world optimized by standard cognitive functions (e.g., perception, action, learning). This paper presents an active inference formulation that views cognitive niche construction as (...) a cognitive function aimed at optimizing organisms' generative models. We call that process of optimization extended active inference. (shrink)

This paper deals with the question of agency and intentionality in the context of the free-energy principle. The free-energy principle is a system-theoretic framework for understanding living self-organizing systems and how they relate to their environments. I will first sketch the main philosophical positions in the literature: a rationalist Helmholtzian interpretation (Hohwy 2013; Clark 2013), a cybernetic interpretation (Seth 2015b) and the enactive affordance-based interpretation (Bruineberg and Rietveld 2014; Bruineberg et al. 2016) and will then show how agency and intentionality (...) are construed differently on these different philosophical interpretations. I will then argue that a purely Helmholtzian is limited, in that it can account only account for agency in the context of perceptual inference. The cybernetic account cannot give a full account of action, since purposiveness is accounted for only to the extent that it pertains to the control of homeostatic essential variables. I will then argue that the enactive affordance-based account attempts to provide broader account of purposive action without presupposing goals and intentions coming from outside of the theory. In the second part of the paper, I will discuss how each of these three interpretations conceives of the sense agency and intentionality in different ways. (shrink)

Manifest Activity presents and critically examines the model of human power, the will, our capacities for purposeful conduct, and the place of our agency in the natural world of one of the most important and traditionally under-appreciated philosophers of the 18th century: Thomas Reid. For Reid, contrary to the view of many of his predecessors, it is simply manifest that we are active with respect to our behaviours; it is manifest, he thinks, that our actions are not merely remote (...) products of forces that lie outside of our control. Reid holds, instead, that actions are all and only those events that spring from active power and he produces insightful and imaginative arguments for the claim that only a creature with a mind is capable of having active power. He believes that only human beings, and creatures 'above us', are capable of directing events towards ends, of endowing them with purpose or direction, the distinctive feature of action. However, he also holds that all events, and not merely human actions, are products of active power, power possessed either by human beings or by God. This collection of theses leads Reid to the view that human behaviour and the progress of nature are both essentially teleological. Patterns in nature are the products of laws of which God is the author; patterns in human conduct are the products of character and the laws that individuals set for themselves. Manifest Activity examines Reid's arguments for this view and the view's implications for the nature of character, motivation and the special kind of causation involved in the production of human behavior. (shrink)

Combining active externalism in the form of the extended and distributed cognition hypotheses with virtue reliabilism can provide the long sought after link between mainstream epistemology and philosophy of science. Specifically, by reading virtue reliabilism along the lines suggested by the hypothesis of extended cognition, we can account for scientific knowledge produced on the basis of both hardware and software scientific artifacts. Additionally, by bringing the distributed cognition hypothesis within the picture, we can introduce the notion of epistemic group agents, (...) in order to further account for collective knowledge produced on the basis of scientific research teams. (shrink)

People display recognizably characteristic behavioral patterns across time and situations, with a given degree of regularity. These patterns may justify the attribution of personality traits. It is arguably the commonsense view that the proper explanation of these behavioral regularities is given by intrinsic properties of the agent’s psychology. In this paper, I argue for an externalistic view of the causal basis of personality-characteristic behaviors. According to the externalistic view, the relevant behavioral regularities are better understood as the result of a (...) systematic interaction between features internal to the agent and environmental-situational factors. Moreover, if the premise is granted that people are typically able to exercise a certain degree of control over the environmental-situational conditions they find themselves in, the resulting picture is of active sort of externalism, as people may at times engage in selection and manipulation of environmental-situational conditions as a way of managing their own behavioral tendencies. (shrink)

Active, constructive, and interactive are terms that are commonly used in the cognitive and learning sciences. They describe activities that can be undertaken by learners. However, the literature is actually not explicit about how these terms can be defined; whether they are distinct; and whether they refer to overt manifestations, learning processes, or learning outcomes. Thus, a framework is provided here that offers a way to differentiate active, constructive, and interactive in terms of observable overt activities and underlying learning processes. (...) The framework generates a testable hypothesis for learning: that interactive activities are most likely to be better than constructive activities, which in turn might be better than active activities, which are better than being passive. Studies from the literature are cited to provide evidence in support of this hypothesis. Moreover, postulating underlying learning processes allows us to interpret evidence in the literature more accurately. Specifying distinct overt activities for active, constructive, and interactive also offers suggestions for how learning activities can be coded and how each kind of activity might be elicited. (shrink)

Active externalism (also known as the extended mind hypothesis) says that we use objects and situations in the world as external memory stores that we consult as needs dictate. This gives us economies of storage: We do not need to remember that Bill has blue eyes and wavy hair if we can acquire this information by looking at Bill. I argue for a corollary to this position, which I call ‘internalism.’ Internalism says we can acquire knowledge on a need‐to‐know basis (...) by consulting portable, inner analogues of the world. This, however, leads to a dilemma. If the knowledge was stored in memory, it is difficult to see how we could have acquired it by consulting inner analogues, for it would seem that we knew it already. Moreover, if it was stored in memory, we lose the economies of storage that provide much of the rationale for external memory stores and hence for their inner analogues. If, on the other hand, the knowledge was not stored in memory, it is difficult to see how we could have acquired it by consulting inner analogues, for it was not there to be acquired. I propose a solution to this problem that turns on the concept of nonconceptual content, and I relate the solution to Stephen Kosslyn's (1994) architecture of perception and visual mental imagery. Viewed in a broader context, the solution shows that the world leaks into the mind, as well as mind leaking into the world. (shrink)

Introduction Adolescents’ physical activity (PA) behavior can be driven by several psychosocial determinants at the same time. Most analyses use a variable-based approach that examines relations between PA-related determinants and PA behavior on the between-person level. Using this approach, possible coexistences of different psychosocial determinants within one person cannot be examined. Therefore, by applying a person-oriented approach, this study examined a) which profiles regarding PA-related psychosocial variables typically occur in female sixth-graders, b) if these profiles deliver a self-consistent picture (...) according to theoretical assumptions, and c) if the profiles contribute to the explanation of PA. Materials and Methods The sample comprised 475 female sixth-graders. Seventeen PA-related variables were assessed: support for autonomy, competence and relatedness in PE as well as their satisfaction in PE and leisure-time; behavioral regulation of exercise (five subscales); self-efficacy and social support from friends and family (two subscales). Moderate-to-vigorous PA was measured using accelerometers. Data were analyzed using the self-organizing maps (SOM) analysis, a cluster analysis including an unsupervised algorithm for non-linear models. Results According to the respective level of psychosocial resources, a positive, a medium and a negative cluster were identified. This superordinate cluster solution represented a self-consistent picture that was in line with theoretical assumptions. The three-cluster solution contributed to the explanation of PA behavior, with the positive cluster accumulating an average of six minutes more moderate-to-vigorous PA per day than the medium cluster and ten minutes more than the negative cluster. Additionally, SOM detected a subgroup within the positive cluster that benefited from a specific combination of intrinsic and external regulations with regard to PA. Discussion The results underline the relevance of the assessed psychosocial determinants of PA behavior in female sixth-graders. The results further indicate that the different psychosocial resources within a given person do not develop independently of one another, which supports the use of a person-oriented approach. In addition, the SOM analysis identified subgroups with specific characteristics, which would have remained undetected using variable-based approaches. Thus, this approach offers the possibility to reduce data complexity without overlooking subgroups with special demands that go beyond the superordinate cluster solution. (shrink)

When the stored representation of the meaning of a stimulus is accessed through the processing of a sensory input it is maintained in an activated state for a certain amount of time that allows for further processing. This semantic activation is generally accompanied by conscious identification, which can be demonstrated by the ability of a person to perform discriminations on the basis of the meaning of the stimulus. The idea that a sensory input can give rise to semantic activation without (...) concomitant conscious identification was the central thesis of the controversial research in subliminal perception. Recently, new claims for the existence of such phenomena have arisen from studies in dichotic listening, parafoveal vision, and visual pattern masking. Because of the fundamental role played by these types of experiments in cognitive psychology, the new assertions have raised widespread interest. (shrink)

Understanding “what something is” has long occupied philosophers, and no Western thinker has had more influence on the nature of being than Aristotle. Focusing on a reinterpretation of the concept of energeia as “activity,” Aryeh Kosman reexamines Aristotle’s ontology and some of our most basic assumptions about the great philosopher’s thought.

Descriptions of how people use time can tell us much about quality of life, social and economic well-being, and patterns of leisure, work, travel, and communication. Self-administered activity diaries are one of the main methods available for capturing data on time use. This paper discusses some of the methodological issues surrounding the use of self-administered activity diaries as a tool for capturing data on communication and travel activities. Its main concern is to highlight the lessons learnt from the (...) use of self-administered activity diaries as a supplementary method of data collection in a recent study. This study assessed whether different levels of access to, and use of, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) enable different paces of life in different communities, and how this process might be contributing to social and spatial polarisation. The insights gained into how activity dairies can be successfully applied are relevant to research within any discipline where this method of data collection is being considered. (shrink)

Beginning in earnest in the late 1990s, educational researchers devoted increasing attention to the study of “active learning,” leading to a robust literature on the topic in the scholarship of teaching and learning. Meanwhile, during largely the same period, political theorists discovered the radical philosophy of Giorgio Agamben, which soon after began to ripple through more radical forms of philosophy of education. While both the SoTL works on active learning and writings of “Agambenian” philosophers of education have offered new insights (...) into their respective fields, active learning has not yet received a systematic philosophical reflection and the community of Agambenian philosophy of education has not yet been systematized. This article addresses both gaps, first through an outline of existing Agambenian approaches to the philosophy of education and second by theorizing active learning as a form of “destituent potential.” The systematic reflection on the three threads of Agambenian philosophy of education—whatever, potentiality, and study—offers an introduction to less familiar readers, and the second section offers a model for how philosophical concepts can become theoretical tools for SoTL analysis. (shrink)

How is it that someone is an agent, an active being? According to a common and dominant opinion, it is in virtue of performing actions. Within this dominant trend, some claim that actions are acts of will while others claim that actions are identical with certain basic bodily movements. First I make an assessment of these traditional accounts of action and argue that neither of them can make sense of how is it that someone is an agent. Then I offer (...) some supplementation and argue for a better alternative. (shrink)

According to Leontiev’s “activity approach,” the external world is not something available to be “worked over” according to a subject’s inner or “ideal” representations; at stake instead is the emergence of an “idealized” objective world that relates to a subject’s activity both internally and externally construed. In keeping with a Marxian account of anthropogenesis, Leontiev links the emergence of “ideality” with social activity itself, incorporating it within the general movement between the poles of ‘inner’ cognition and ‘external’ (...) action. In this manner, Leontiev both parallels and goes beyond Hutto and Myin’s recent “enactivist” account of “content-involving” cognition, where representational thought depends on socio-cultural scaffolding and, as such, is uniquely human. What traditionally comes to be called representational content is for Leontiev the result of the transition from a primitive cognitive apparatus of “image-consciousness” to a one which is mediated by social activity. For the being endowed with “activity-consciousness,” mental content is something apprehended by assimilating “the objective world in its ideal form” [Leontiev, 1977, p. 189]. And the precondition for such assimilation is the apprehension of meanings from their origin in the social-material system of activity. The genesis of content-involving cognition is thus coeval with the development of socializing activity systems, replete with the external representations of values and norms as described in enactivist literature as publicly scaffolded symbol systems. Leontiev thus offers an anti-internalist account of cognition commensurate with Hutto and Myin but with the added dimension of a developmental scale of analysis with which to explain the origin of human-specific cognition. (shrink)

This essay traces the development of the philosophical debates concerning active powers and human agency in eighteenth-century Scotland. I examine how and why Scottish philosophers such as Francis Hutcheson, George Turnbull, David Hume, and Henry Home, Lord Kames, depart from John Locke’s and other traditional conceptions of the will and how Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart reinstate Locke’s distinction between volition and desire. Moreover, I examine what role desires, passions, and motives play in the writings of these and other Scottish (...) Enlightenment philosophers on human agency and draw attention to their underlying disputes concerning liberty and necessity. I end by reflecting on how classifications of principles of actions changed in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Scottish philosophy. (shrink)

I argue that cognitively mature human beings have an important sort of control or discretion over their own beliefs, but that to make good sense of this control, we must reject the common idea that it consists in a capacity to act on our belief-state by forming new beliefs or modifying ones we already hold. I propose that we exercise agential control over our beliefs, not primarily in doing things to alter our belief-state, but in holding whatever beliefs we hold. (...) Our beliefs are thus not normally things on which we act; they are themselves our acts, in a sense I seek to explicate. (shrink)