This article explores the specific role of courage in the context of the Anthropocene’s moment; it first examines Aristotle’s conception of virtues, focusing on courage, before comparing it to Confucian thought and analyzing the historical dialogue between Western and Chinese traditions on ethics through the works of François Noël (1651–1729). Aristotle views moral cultivation as a social process wherein habits shape inner dispositions; in his view, courage is linked to other virtues, such as temperance and justice. For Aristotle, courage implies (...) the appropriate balance between extremes and must be directed toward a worthy end, such as promoting positive change within a community. This Aristotelian perspective was later incorporated into a biblical framework by Aquinas and Suarez, emphasizing dichotomies between body and soul, as well as between humans and other living beings. These dichotomies must be challenged in the face of the Anthropocene’s emergencies. The second part of this contribution proceeds to a detour examining Confucian ethics, which rests on a different anthropology, emphasizing continuities rather than discontinuities. Like Aristotelian thought, Confucian thought also underscores moral education within a community; it prioritizes humanity, embodied through empathy and loyalty. In the Analects, courage is balanced by a sense of rituals and righteousness. Mencius further distinguishes several types of courage, stressing self-cultivation and the ruler’s responsibility to make empathetic, appropriate decisions for the community’s sake. From this perspective, courage is understood as the continuous perseverance in self-cultivation, coupled with a firm intention oriented toward the good of the community. Zhu Xi’s comments on Zilu’s courage in the Analects extend this Confucian tradition. Finally, this article highlights how a dialogue between Aristotelian and Confucian ethics began four centuries ago, particularly through Noël’s Philosophia Sinica, which combined these traditions. This inter-religious approach to ethics, enriched by figures such as Aquinas, Suarez, Zhu Xi, and neo-Confucian thinkers, requires re-evaluation because the understanding of personal ethics and nature has evolved. The modern naturalistic approach, with its emphasis on dichotomies, has contributed to a mechanistic view of nature, fostering its exploitation, and a devaluation of the body. This contrast highlights the urgent need for renewed dialogue between Western and Chinese ethical traditions to address contemporary challenges, with François Noël serving as a historical witness of these exchanges. (shrink)

Hermann Lotze has truly said that “among all the errors of the human mind” the “strangest” is doubting its “own existence,” or regarding it “at second hand as the product of an external Nature” which can be known only “indirectly” while the mind knows itself directly. Yet this denial is found both in the Occident and in the Orient. Moreover, while in the latter it stems largely from an extreme form of idealism in terms of a reductionistic pantheism, in the (...) former it is almost altogether the result of an analytical, reductive naturalism. More specifically, in the West this impersonalistic tendency has really been the result of two movements which have merged in certain contemporary schools. (shrink)

The point of this paper is to provide a principled framework for a naturalistic, interactivist-constructivist model of rational capacity and a sketch of the model itself, indicating its merits. Being naturalistic, it takes its orientation from scientific understanding. In particular, it adopts the developing interactivist-constructivist understanding of the functional capacities of biological organisms as a useful naturalistic platform for constructing such higher order capacities as reason and cognition. Further, both the framework and model are marked by the finitude and fallibility (...) that science attributes to organisms, with their radical consequences, and also by the individual and collective capacities to improve their performances that learning organisms display. Part A prepares the ground for the exposition through a critique of the dominant Western analytic tradition in rationalising science, followed by a brief exposition of the naturalist framework that will be employed to frame the construction. This results in two sets of guidelines for constructing an alternative. Part B provides the new conception of reason as a rich complex of processes of improvement against epistemic values, and argues its merits. It closes with an account of normativity and our similarly developing rational knowledge of it, including (reflexively) of reason itself. (shrink)

This paper investigates Nietzsche’s assessments of Pascal’s embrace and rejection of various branches of skepticisms that Montaigne embodies or ignores. Nietzsche admires Pascal for intellectual probity and skepticism. Pascal finds fault with Montaigne’s Academic Skepticism, viewing it as insufficiently honest, because it ceases to inquire into Nature, and takes the self as the anchor of psychological tranquility. Inspired by Pascal’s criticism of Montaigne’s Skepticism in his Essais III.13, in D 46, Nietzsche also disapproves of Montaigne’s sluggish tranquility and deems (...) this a symptom of feebleness and nihilism. Some scholars claim that Nietzsche admires Montaigne’s earthly cheerfulness and probity as that of a free spirit regarding Montaigne’s adoption of Pyrrhonian. By contrast, I argue that Nietzsche misinterprets Montaigne’s Academic Skepticism in the Essais III.13.1218 as Pyrrhonian Skepticism, because the Skepticism here is characterized by ignorance and incuriosity instead of probity. Montaigne’s very Academic Skepticism vexes Pascal because of the latter’s complacent lack of curiosity about the supernatural world. Regarding this, Nietzsche inveighs against Pascal’s insufficient honesty as entangled with a dogmatic observance of Christian truthfulness instead of a free-spirited honesty, but advocates Montaigne’s this-worldly naturalism. Nietzsche sees Pascal’s unyielding application of Christian self-examination will finally lead to his skepticism of Christianity. (shrink)

This paper inquires into the necessity and limits of what Edmund Husserl calls a “pure” phenomenological psychology. It argues that there may be merit to this notion as a kind of philosophical psychology, the notion of purity in clinical psychology would unnecessarily limit the kinds of factors that the psychologist must take into account in understanding and treating most of the psychological conditions the therapist faces. The paper suggests that phenomenological psychology nonetheless has value in providing a counter-balance to naturalistically (...) inclined psychology that for its part neglects the meaning of various life events for the agent and can serve as means of critical reflection on the operative concepts guiding psychological practice. It can also help correct a deterministic tendency in modern psychology that does not take seriously enough human beings’ capacity for self-reflection and for self-responsibility that can often serve as key elements in psychological therapy and healing. (shrink)

It has been argued that we cannot trust the agent to be able to give a true account of his own actions. And that, where self?deception is involved, hermeneutics can do little more than participate in it. Only a rigorous science of the mind can take us towards the truth in these matters. The aim of this paper is to sketch a hermeneutics that can deal with self?deception. It examines the relation between what the agent does and his (...) own account of it. and the relation of both to the communal practices wherein they are both situated. The agent's account and the scientist's will both have to be measured against that of the reflective and experienced practitioner. (shrink)

This study aimed to explore the association between self-oriented empathy and compassion fatigue, and examine the potential mediating roles of dispositional mindfulness and the counselor’s self-efficacy. A total of 712 hotline psychological counselors were recruited from the Mental Health Service Platform at Central China Normal University, Ministry of Education during the outbreak of Corona Virus Disease 2019, then were asked to complete the questionnaires measuring self-oriented empathy, compassion fatigue, dispositional mindfulness, and counselor’s self-efficacy. Structural (...) equation modeling was utilized to analyze the possible associations and explore potential mediations. In addition to reporting confidence intervals, we employed a new method named model-based constrained optimization procedure to test hypotheses of indirect effects. Results showed that self-oriented empathy was positively associated with compassion fatigue. Dispositional mindfulness and counselor’s self-efficacy independently and serially mediated the associations between self-oriented empathy and compassion fatigue. The findings of this study confirmed and complemented the etiological and the multi-factor model of compassion fatigue. Moreover, the results indicate that it is useful and necessary to add some training for increasing counselor’s self-efficacy in mindfulness-based interventions in order to decrease compassion fatigue. (shrink)

High moral standards and adherence to a moral code have long been strong tenets of the profession of medicine, even though there have been occasional lapses that have led to renewed calls for a revitalization of moral integrity in medicine. Certainly, a moral component has generally been held to be an important aspect of the concept of a physician.

It is ordinarily thought that in Alzheimer's dementia, memory loss leads to a loss of the self. There is a familiar sense in which this is true given that there is, evidently, a close connection between episodic memory and personal identity. This view goes back to John Locke who argued that remembering our own experiences enabled the continuity of consciousness he thought constitutive of personal identity. Locke was also motivated by the idea—to be applied in "forensic" contexts—that continuity of (...) consciousness was necessary in the appropriation of past actions as one's own. As we will see there is another type of connection between a person's psychology and morality—not involving questions of... (shrink)

In recent years, the theoretical work of Gilligan in women's psychological development has led to the development of the concept of moral orientation or moral voice in contrast to the concept of moral reasoning or moral judgment developed by Kohlberg. These concepts have been of particular interest in gender studies, especially as applied to adolescence. These concepts of moral orientation and moral reasoning are being increasingly employed in healthcare ethics studies in a wide variety of settings. The recent work has (...) included studies of physicians, nurses, dentists, veterinarians, social workers, teachers of medical ethics, and hospital ethics committees. However, the study of moral development in healthcare providers has been hampered because collecting the necessary data from healthcare workers has been labor intensive and extremely time consuming. More efficient methods are needed. (shrink)

Studies on fair-trade consumption have concentrated on economic, demographic, and ethical issues, and research on consumers’ moral emotions and self-orientation is limited. Although consumers’ satisfaction with their consumption has been emphasized in consumer studies and marketing, little substantive empirical research has addressed ethical consumers’ emotional satisfaction and the link between their motivations and happiness. This study focused on ethical consumers who regularly purchase fair-trade coffee to understand their moral emotions and self-orientation as motivations for fair-trade consumption and determine (...) whether empathy and self-oriented motivations led to their happiness. A survey was conducted on 471 regular purchasers of at least one cup of fair-trade coffee weekly or a pack of fair-trade coffee beans monthly. The survey data were analyzed using partial least squares. The results showed that guilt was positively associated with empathy, which positively influenced self-actualization. Contrary to the proposed hypothesis, empathy did not elicit consumers’ happiness. As expected, narcissism affected self-actualization, which in turn elicited happiness. Happiness was positively associated with customers’ repurchase intentions for fair-trade coffee. The results of this study demonstrate the strong associations of the paths from narcissism to self-actualization, self-actualization to happiness, and self-actualization to repurchase intentions compared to the paths from guilt to empathy, empathy to happiness, and empathy to repurchase intentions. Contrary to common expectations, the results indicate that self-oriented motivations focused on self-actualization rather than moral emotions play key roles in ethical consumers’ happiness with fair-trade consumption. (shrink)

The present work constitutes an attempt to make explicit those pragmatic norms successfully operating in empirical science. I will first comment on the initial presuppositions of the discussion, in particular, on those concerning the instrumental character of scientific practice and the nature of scientific goals. Then I will depict the moderately naturalistic frame in which, from this approach, the pragmatic norms make sense. Third, I will focus on the specificity of the pragmatic norms, making special emphasis on what I regard (...) as a key idea underlying them, namely, the view, vigorously advocated by classical pragmatists like C. S. Peirce and G. Vailati, that the best test for objectivity is the test of action. Finally, I am going to put forward a tentative list of pragmatic norms that can be abstracted from a careful observation and analysis of scientific practice as provided by current philosophers of experimentation (A. Franklin and F. Steinle among others). The norms will be divided into four classes corresponding to four aspects of science in which they rule, that is, self-correction, prediction, explanation and both experimentation and computation. In the following account, the formulation of those pragmatic norms successfully governing science will be understood as a contribution that scientifically-oriented pragmatism can make to the normative naturalistic project in epistemology. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the target article “Who Conceives of Society?” by Ernst von Glasersfeld. Excerpt: In the light of the almost brilliant equilibrium of the author, who manages to compose a resourceful explanation, switching between the notional conditionality and the expected contextual understanding, I intend to focus on the interdisciplinary potential of some suggestions that offer new perspectives on conceiving society, which are driven by a non-analytical and holistic vision.

Jonardon Ganeri presents a ground-breaking study of selfhood, drawing on Indian theories of consciousness and mind.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The 2004 Gerald Weisfeld Lectures:Buddhism and Christianity in DialoguePerry Schmidt-LeukelIn May 2004 the Centre for Inter-Faith Studies (University of Glasgow) sponsored the second series of Gerald Weisfeld Lectures, titled "Buddhism and Christianity in Dialogue." The lectures were part of the events leading up to the Dalai Lama's visit to Scotland at the end of May 2004. Over four weeks there were two lectures each week, one read by a (...) Christian and one by a Buddhist—both of them speaking on the same topic and both of them speaking comparatively, but from the background of their own tradition.The theme of week 1 was "Human Existence in Buddhism and Christianity"—the Christian speaker being Elizabeth Harris of London; the Buddhist speaker being Kiyoshi Tsuchiya, who teaches at Glasgow University. Harris pointed out that in their analysis of the human condition, Buddhism and Christianity show serious commonalities. For both traditions, human existence is ambivalent: on the one hand deeply permeated by the roots of evil (craving and ignorance according to Buddhism; sin according to Christianity), and on the other hand human (existence also offers a way out: there is the possibility of salvation or liberation). However, said Harris, Buddhism and Christianity "converge and diverge." Human self-centeredness is seen at the root of the problem according to both traditions, and there are convergences of their respective ways of salvation, too. The differences are, said Harris, primarily located in the active function of God for the salvific process within Christianity and in the role of reincarnation within the Buddhist analysis of human existence which is without any parallel in Christianity.Tsuchiya agreed that both traditions understand the self as the major source of the human predicament, but held that they understand this in a different sense. While the self is seen as sinful but nevertheless real in Christianity, Buddhism sees it as an unwholesome illusion. Resulting are two different or even contradictory forms of self-understanding, a "relational," individualistic ego dominant in Christianity, a sort of cosmological ego characteristic for Buddhism, particularly within the Zen-Daoist tradition from which Tsuchiya speaks. He illustrated this point provocatively by a comparative analysis of Kafka's story of Gregor Samsa's metamorphosis into a beetle and Chuang tzu's famous butterfly dream. This difference of self-concepts is, [End Page 157] said Tsuchiya, crucial for the rival Christian and Buddhist understandings of transcendence and cosmos: personal transcendence versus cosmological transcendence, anti-naturalism versus naturalism.In her response Harris raised the question whether Tsuchiya's representation of Christianity is really comprehensive. Are there not dimensions in Christianity supportive of his nondualist approach to nature and human existence? Tsuchiya, in his response, admitted that the ultimate religious goals might converge, but insisted on at least a "possibly contradictory" religious orientation with specific dangers on both sides, so that there is room for mutual constructive challenge.The debate of week 1 continued through week 2, which was dedicated to "Ultimate Reality in Buddhism and Christianity," the Christian speaker being Karl Baier from the University of Vienna; the Buddhist lecturer Minoru Nambara, professor emeritus from the University of Tokyo. Baier presented an admittedly selective view of Christianity following the line of the neoplatonic, mystical tradition. From here he offered a comparative analysis of the deconstructive efforts of Nagarjuna and Nicolas Cusanus, who both employed the fourfold negation in order to introduce their nondual and nonconceptual view of the relation between ultimate and nonultimate reality. For Baier the obvious affinities between these two (sub-)traditions are getting even stronger in the present situation, for "by means of transformative encounter Buddhism and Christianity cease to be independent bodies of thought."Sketching the various transformations of Buddhism on its way from India to China, Nambara held that for Chinese Buddhism "this very world is in and of itself the ultimate subject, the ultimate reality." Zen practice, accordingly, is "a way where no metaphysical flowers blossom." To live by the bottomless ground of everything, which is in itself no-thing, is to live as "neither masters nor slaves of nature." The biblical God—understood as the one who can create and destroy nature—is at deep variance with... (shrink)

John Cottingham focuses on two types of religious experience: general religious experience and specific religious experience. According to him, general experiences do not require special and complex education, scientific research or philosophical theorizing, but are a simple act of accepting a gift. Of course, unlike everyday observations, such experiences are not available to everyone and their realization requires special conditions. Regarding specific religious experiences, he also believes that when dealing with parts of the Bible that contain reports of such experiences, (...) one should neither have a naturalistic or demythologizing approach, nor an appearance-oriented approach; Rather, these verses should be interpreted in such a way that both its amazing content is preserved and this content does not conflict with modern science. Using the basics of Islamic philosophy, this work has a critical review of both parts of his view. The result of these criticisms is that due to the personal nature of evidences from religious experiences, the epistemological guarantee of these experiences is obtained through the rational and revelatory method. And based on this, these experiences cannot be considered as an independent path alongside the rational and revelatory path. Also, the observation of specific religious experiences is not a sensory observation and occurs in the container of human imagination and fantasy, without being a part of these experiences, they have become a characteristic of the self. (shrink)

Drawing on two long-term ethnographic fieldworks with social entrepreneurs, this article starts to uncover the multilayered nature of the motivations underlying the creation of social enterprises. We investigate the following research question: what types of self-oriented motivations might drive social entrepreneurs? Departing from previous research and popular opinion, which foregrounds the primacy of prosocial intentions, we show the critical role played by self-oriented motives. To explain this finding, we advance three analytical categories of self-oriented (...) motives—entrepreneurial lifestyle, repurposing expertise, and solving a social or environmental puzzle. We then illuminate these categories through the illustrative examples of six social entrepreneurs. Based on our findings, we contend that creating a social enterprise can also be the unintended consequence of adopting entrepreneurial behavior, leading to the creation of a venture guided by these three types of self-oriented motivations. Finally, we consider the implications of this study for the field of social entrepreneurship. (shrink)

There is an interesting sense in which philosophical reflection in the transcendental tradition is thought to be unnatural. Kant claims that metaphysical speculation is as natural as breathing and that transcendental critique is necessary to prevent reason from lapsing into a natural dialectic of dogmatism and skepticism. Husserl argues that the critique of theoretical reason is grounded upon a transcending of the natural attitude in which we are at first unjustifiably and naïvely directed toward objects as separate from consciousness. A (...) perfectly sensible question arises: Why do we need to effect a change in our natural cognitive orientation to both ourselves and the world in order to know each respectively? Why does a sort of dialectical self-deception come so naturally to us, and why is an effort so great as to seem unnatural necessary for philosophical self-knowledge? The aim of this paper is threefold: first, to argue that seemingly compulsory philosophical assumptions are inevitably generated from within reason itself and thus remain resistant to a complete therapy; second, to show how Kant diagnoses reason’s dialectical tendencies as inevitable and ever-recurring without transcendental vigilance; finally, to argue that the early Husserl’s appropriation of a transcendental epistemology is influenced decisively by Kant’s transcendental reflection in order to combat the reigning naturalism of his day. My overall claim is that by thematizing the natural dialectic of reason best articulated in the first Critique, we can disclose the Kantian way in which Husserl conceives of the natural temptation to naturalize consciousness. We first turn, however, to an influential contemporary account of a decidedly non-transcendental philosophy, what has come to be known as “therapeutic Wittgensteinianism.”. (shrink)

The idea that science is historical is almost a cliché nowadays. The historical dimensions of science have begun to be appreciated by philosophers of science, for some through the work of Kuhn, and for others through Popper and Lakatos. Does this mean that contemporary philosophy of science understands the historical nature of science? Let me begin with a provocative negative answer. My reason is not the obvious one, namely, that there are several competing models that address the historical development of (...) science. Rather, it's more substantial: philosophers of science have not adequately reflected on the historical nature of science. There are still at least two barriers blocking a meaningful dialogue between the history of science and the philosophy of science: (1) the normative and evaluative orientation of philosophy of science and (2) its universalist stance toward science, a stance somewhat modified in current literature. No wonder Minerva cannot communicate with Clio; not only do they not speak the same language, but their perspectives and aims differ too. Does this mean that Minerva can't be replaced with Calliope, that philosophy of science will go on "its own way, paying little attention to the naturalist stories told by historians and sociologists, and, in turn, being widely ignored by them?". Does this mean that their only possible relation is lack of relation--their "splendid isolation"--entailing abstention from alliances, even from a "marriage of convenience," or, for that matter, from any other sort of interaction? Does this mean that philosophy of science uses historical episodes simply to find its problems, or appeals to those episodes only to illustrate its claims or to falsify the claims of opposing philosophical views? Well, not necessarily. Interactions and cooperation between the two are possible, but depend, first, on their (in particular, philosophy's) self-definitions, and, second, on how they both relate to philosophy, and, in particular, to the philosophy of history. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 40.1 (2006) 104-110 [Access article in PDF] Film Studies, the Moving Image, and Noël Carroll Edward Sankowski Department of Philosophy University of Oklahoma Engaging the Moving Image, by Noël Carroll. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003, 420 pp., $45.00 hardcover. Noël Carroll is the leading writer today about philosophy and film studies among those with an Anglo-American analytic philosophy emphasis. He needs to (...) be read in a larger intellectual context also, as a leading interdisciplinary writer about film. On the positive side, he has expanded the resources of Anglo-American analytic philosophy (and has at the same time contributed work of distinction to scholarship in related areas). He profits from the virtues of analytic philosophy as well as putting to good use his broad acquaintance with other scholarship. He is refreshingly innovative, sometimes operating with valuable results beyond the current conventional borders of the discipline of philosophy in his choice of topics about film (or better, in his view, about the moving image). A collection of his essays written in the second half of the 1990s, Engaging the Moving Image, is thus very welcome. It is fascinating and often persuasive reading.The essays take up a wide range of topics, including (but not limited to) critiques of, and constructive proposals about, film studies. Carroll especially criticizes film studies writing that focuses on "the film medium." "Forget the Medium!" he urges, in the first essay. This is associated for him with attacks on "mediumistic essentialism" (xiii). Indeed, for him the criticism of essentialism is a favorite theme. Many other overlapping topics of great interest are also explored in Carroll's approach. These include the "naturalistic" study of film communication, horror films, film evaluation, the criticism of (Continental) "Big Theory" in film studies, the nature of documentaries, "moving-picture dance," the relationship between TV and film, Siegfried Kracauer on film, Eisenstein on nation building, the political subtext of American Westerns with plots involving Mexican revolutions, and "prospects for film theory," which are discussed in a lengthy concluding piece.While Carroll is characteristically often on the attack, and seems to relish polemics, he is far from predominantly a negative, critical critic. He often formulates fruitful questions for constructive inquiry in a characteristically [End Page 104] clear and reasonable way. He is, however, perhaps not at his strongest in these essays in furthering discussions of what is arguably most moving about "moving images." By this is meant the aesthetic and emotional heights and depths of what films can offer, as art or in other ways. But what he says about movies is sensible, carefully done, and repays repeated study. (One example is Carroll's instructive "cognitively oriented" discussion of emotions in "Film, Emotion, and Genre.")Greatness in film, as in other arts, sometimes makes it more difficult to be reasonable. Carroll's account of evaluation, "Introducing Film Evaluation," notably has a self-avowedly limited scope. That account, as Carroll says, focuses on "evaluating films in terms of whether they are good, bad, better or worse specimens of a kind or category." He writes that "We may also wish to evaluate genres" (162). But beyond genres, the greatness of some films seems well beyond the comparative evaluation of genres. While Carroll writes that his account of evaluation is only introductory and abbreviated, it nonetheless also seems too driven by the desire to emphasize the possibility of agreement about evaluation and to counter radical skeptical worries rather than to understand why evaluation of the very good or great film might matter to us beyond fixing the captured butterfly in its place by assigning a film to a genre.Carroll has seen a lot of movies and read a lot of film theory and other writing about film or the moving image. Some of the theory is awful, in his view, but some of it he considers valuable, and what he claims is plausible on both scores. Carroll thinks and writes incisively about many topics. He is eclectic on principle, but eschews obscurity and pretension. What emerges... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Hegel’s Idea of a “Phenomenology of Spirit” by Michael N. ForsterGünter ZöllerMichael N. Forster. Hegel’s Idea of a “Phenomenology of Spirit.” Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Pp. xi + 661. Paper, $30.00.Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) has remained an enigmatic and controversial work. Typically it has been studied and appropriated selectively, by focusing on a few topics or sections of this immense opus. There are also several (...) commentaries on all or part of the work that immerse the reader in plenty of detail, but often with insufficient attention paid to the work’s overall design. Forster’s book is thematically focused but has sufficient scope to provide the reader with an overall orientation about the Phenomenology. Moreover, it is written in a clear, accessible language, with plenty of genuinely philosophical material to balance the more narrowly exegetical aspects of the study. Forster’s work stands in the tradition of a number of German and French studies that seek to unravel the “genesis and structure” (Hyppolite) of the Phenomenology as a key to understanding and assessing the import of Hegel’s singular work. Forster discusses those earlier readings, subjects them to a thorough critique, and develops original positions on a number of key issues in scholarship on the Phenomenology.The entire first half of the book (Parts One and Two) is concerned with the “official project of the Phenomenology,” which Forster reconstructs as three sets of philosophical tasks. First are the pedagogical tasks designed to introduce the reader to the superior viewpoint of Hegel’s system and its ability to overcome the ills specific to modern culture. In particular, Hegel is shown to further advance Herder’s and Schiller’s philosophical project of replacing the multiple, unreconciled dualisms of the modern intellectual and moral outlook with a unified, monistic account of natural and social reality. In a strong interpretive move, Forster attributes a naturalism of sorts to Hegel’s integrationist account of mind and body or self and world.Second are the epistemological tasks designed to justify the cognitive claims of Hegel’s [End Page 541] system (“science”) against those of all other philosophical and popular viewpoints. In particular, Forster shows Hegel’s indebtedness to the ancient (Pyrronic) skeptical strategy of equipollence, i.e., the method of setting into opposition equally strong arguments on both sides of any issue and thereby producing an equal balance of justification on all sides of the issue. Of all possible viewpoints only Hegel’s own, which is not subject to any external opposition, eludes the scope of the method of equipollence.The third, specifically metaphysical set of tasks of the Phenomenology centers around the work’s social and (on Forster’s reading) naturalist conceptions of God, meaning and truth, in which transcendent warrants are replaced by communal consensus. Forster concludes the first half of his study with a detailed consideration of the relation between the Phenomenology and Hegel’s system proper. He stresses that the work is only the “appearance” (Erscheinung) of the philosophical science itself and that it remains systematically independent of the latter.Part Three examines the role of history and historicism in the Phenomenology. Forster distinguishes between teleological or normative historicism and intellectual or descriptive historicism, and limits his investigation to the latter as the philosophically defensible of the two enterprises. He argues extensively for a one-to-one correlation between the various “shapes of consciousness” to be found in the core of the Phenomenology (from the chapter on Consciousness through the chapter on Reason) and specific periods in human history. This chronological history of consciousness is shown to be supplemented by two further accounts of the history of consciousness (in the chapter on Spirit and in the chapters on Religion and Absolute Knowledge, respectively), in which the first history’s focus on individual consciousness is enlarged to include supra-individual mind (“spirit”).In Part Four Forster explains the tripling of the history of consciousness with a shift in the plan of the Phenomenology, away from the more limited project of the original or “Ur-Phenomenology”—to lead individual consciousness to the viewpoint of (Hegelian) science—to the more ambitious goal... (shrink)

This study investigated gender related moral reasoning in student essays containing arguments on moral issues. Undergraduate students in a medical ethics course viewed two films on morally controversial issues. The students wrote brief essays about the films which were transcribed and numerically coded to conceal the author's gender from the evaluator. Using a coding scheme originated by Lyons, the evaluator classified each essay as a justice/right essay or a care/response essay or an equal response essay. Subsequently, calculations were made to (...) determine the percentage of male authored essays that were justice/rights essays or care/response essays and the percentage of female authored essays that were justice/rights or care/response essays. The males (87.7%) tended to exhibit the justice/rights moral orientation, and the females (69.4%) exhibited the care/response moral orientation. Several different calculations were made to determine various degrees of gender related orientations also. The difference in orientation was highly statistically significant (p≤0.001). These data contribute to understanding moral orientation and development. Interpretations are given to explain some differences between the genders and help explain the traditional roles in society that males and females have played historically. (shrink)

This book presents a philosophical study of the idea of reenchantment and its merits in the interrelated fields of philosophical anthropology, ethics, and ontology. It features chapters from leading contributors to the debate about reenchantment, including Charles Taylor, John Cottingham, Akeel Bilgrami, and Jane Bennett. The chapters examine neglected and contested notions such as enchantment, transcendence, interpretation, attention, resonance, and the sacred or reverence-worthy-notions that are crucial to human self-understanding but have no place in a scientific worldview. They also (...) explore the significance of adopting a reenchanting perspective for debates on major concepts such as nature, naturalism, God, ontology, and disenchantment. Taken together, they demonstrate that there is much to be gained from working with a more substantial and affirmative concept of reenchantment, understood as a fundamental existential orientation towards what is seen as meaningful and of value. The Philosophy of Reenchantment will be of interest to scholars and advanced students in philosophy-especially those working in moral philosophy, metaphysics, philosophy of religion, theology, religious studies, and sociology. (shrink)

The ancient Greeks already used to give ethnic names to their different scales, and observations on differences in music of the various nations always raised the interest of musicians and philosophers. Yet, it was only in the late nineteenth century that “comparative musicology” became an institutional science. An important role in this process was played by Carl Stumpf, a former pupil of Brentano’s who pioneered these researches in Berlin. Stumpf founded the Phonogrammarchiv to collect recordings of folk and extra-European music (...) and a dedicated journal, the Sammelbände für vergleichende Musikwissenschaft. Gifted in the field of science no less than in that of musicology, Stumpf developed an empirically-oriented approach to phenomenology, deeply divergent from Husserl’s and highly influential over the Berlin school of Gestalt psychology. A self-declared “outsider” among armchair philosophers, Stumpf experimentally investigated the perception of sounds and the origins of musical consonance. Developing the physiological studies of Ernst Weber on the sense of touch, Stumpf discovered that two sensations of tone, given at the same time, tend to mix in a certain degree. Musical consonance – he claimed – lays in this level of “tonal fusion”, not in the allegedly “natural” series of the harmonic partials of a vibrating chord, as suggested by the naturalists of all times from Pythagoras to Stumpf’s great contemporary Hermann Helmholtz. Accordingly, no musical system can claim for preponderance over the others: Stumpf’s researches in comparative musicology served to corroborate his theses on “tonal fusion” and the psychological foundations of consonance. Although Stumpf later revised and finally abandoned this theory, its permanent value lays in its opposition to dominant naturalistic approaches. The commitment for comparative musicology at the Berlin School is then no concession to a positivistic fashion for exoticism. The fundamentally Eurocentric stance of naturalistic theories of music is also fiercely contrasted by Stumpf’s pupil Erich Hornbostel, who suggests that music ought to be considered as culture, rather than as nature, and focuses attention on the eventually melting human cultures. The Berlin school flourished until the Nazis forced most of its exponents to emigration and, for tragically obvious reasons, heavily discouraged researches on these topics. (shrink)

In this paper, I criticize naturalized epistemology. To this end, I critically examine several versions of naturalistic epistemology (Quine, Kornblith, and Plantinga). While Quine’s epistemology eschews any kind of normativity not invoked in science, Kornblith’s and Plantinga’s views attempt to explain normativity in the light of descriptivity. I provide an argument against them. The upshot of my argument is that since we are self-conscious beings, we have reflective ability to see what we ought to believe. In other words, the (...) fact that we are self-conscious beings requires us to find reason for our belief. I argue that naturalistic epistemology cannot capture that idea, since it is only concerned with third-person, impersonal approach. It simply shifts our thinking about justification from a subjective or first-person perspective to an objective or third-person perspective. Therefore, naturalistic epistemology, even if it is a weak version, is untenable in that it simply ignores human consciousness and its role in justification of beliefs. (shrink)

In this paper, I shall try to present and defend some arguments against naturalistic evolutionism that are partly inspired by A. Plantinga’s well-known evolutionary argument against naturalism. I give two different characterizations of naturalistic evolutionism: according to the first, it is the view for which, for every human activity, that activity is governed by adaptive functions and nothing else ; according to second, it is the view for which, for most human activities, those activities are governed by adaptive functions (...) and nothing else. Both versions of naturalistic evolutionism fall in trouble when they have to ground the truth of metaphysical beliefs, even including the beliefs that N.E.1, that N.E.2, that N.E.1 is true and that N.E.2 is true. Thus, it seems either that naturalistic evolutionism is false and self-defeating or that its defense is a huge metaphysical task to undertake than one could expect. (shrink)

This paper explores certain facets of Christine Korsgaard’s paper, ‘Prospects for a Naturalistic Explanation of the Good’. Korsgaard’s account requires that an animal be able to experience ‘herself trying to get or avoid something’. The claim that animals possess such self-awareness is regarded by many as problematic and, if this is correct, it would jeopardize Korsgaard’s account. This paper argues that animals can, in fact, be aware of themselves in the way required by Korsgaard’s account.

This chapter explores the ideological dimension of dehumanization in the context of National Socialism, focusing on the connection between concepts of humanity and dehumanizing images. NS regarded itself as a political revolution, realizing a new concept of humanity. Nazi ideologues undergirded the self-understanding of NS by developing racist anthropologies. I examine two major strands of Nazi ideology, focusing on their diverging strategies of dehumanization, and arguing that they were dependent on different anthropological frameworks. Richard Walther Darré held a naturalistic (...) concept of humanity and advanced biologistic forms of dehumanization. Alfred Rosenberg developed a dualistic anthropology that combined metaphysical and natural features. He dehumanized certain groups of people by reducing them to being human in a natural sense only. Moreover, I aim to show that the key motifs of these racist worldviews were prevalent in the scientific and philosophical debates on anthropology in early-twentieth-century Germany. I thus explore the general orientation of both the naturalistic and the anti-naturalistic strand in anthropological thought, unfold the animalizing tendencies of these views, and emphasize their conformity with the key motifs of Nazi ideology. The case of NS should thus exemplify the dehumanizing potential of anthropological theories. (shrink)

Both Martin Heidegger and Harry Frankfurt have argued that the fundamental feature of human identity is care. Both contend that caring is bound up with the fact that we are finite beings related to our own impending death, and both argue that caring has a distinctive, circular and non-instantaneous, temporal structure. In this paper, I explore the way Heidegger and Frankfurt each understand the relations among care, death, and time, and I argue for the superiority of Heideggerian version of this (...) nest of claims. Frankfurt claims that we should conceive of the most basic commitments which practically orient a person in the world and define his identity (“volitional necessities”) as naturalistic facts, foundational for and located completely without the normative space of reasons. In support of this he appeals to the supposedly foundational role played in human life by the instinct for self-preservation, what Frankfurt calls the “love of living.” The claim is that in questions of practical identity there is a definite priority of the factual over the normative. Frankfurt’s naturalistic model of volitional necessity is motivated by a misunderstanding of the temporal structure of care, a misunderstanding that helps lead him to an implausible conception of the basic structures of human identity. Heidegger advances an anti-naturalistic conception of caring, one bound up with his way of understanding how human beings relate to their own future. I argue that the existential, temporal, and normative significance that Frankfurt attributes to the naturalized “love of living” is better captured by the Heideggerian claim that human identity is defined by being “for-the-sake-of” certain projects and commitments, a way of being lived out in the way Heidegger calls “being-towards-death.”. (shrink)

This is a collection of twenty-seven essays written by its author between 1962 and 1989 on topics in the history of science, the philosophy of science, and "the relevance of scientific practice to other parts of philosophy and culture". Twenty-one have been previously published, the remainder hitherto aired only as public presentations. The papers are gathered under six section-headings, including "Explanation," "Hume's Problem," "Logic and Causality," "Machines and Practices," "Scientific Knowledge--Its Scope and Limits," and "Science and Subjectivity"; yet their actual (...) range is both more diverse and less in keeping with prevailing currents in the philosophy of science than these tidily familiar rubrics suggest. "Explanation," for example, flirts with mainstream subject-matter in a much deserved encomium to Hempel's contributions in philosophy of science that reaches beyond the titular subject to the whole of Hempel's work. The section also embraces a discussion of General Systems Theory that distinguishes a doctrinaire, a prioristic approach to the study of science from a pragmatic-pluralistic version, urging the ills of the former and the virtues of the latter. It culminates in two presentations of the view that the theory of evolution rests on "circumstantial evidence" only as it involves the "logical fallacy" of "the inference of causes from effects" : the one is a historical piece on the little-known nineteenth-century naturalist, Phillip Henry Gosse, highlighting his creationistic "Omphalos" theory of the origins of biological species and the fossil record; the other is a short treatment of some conceptual issues involved in the creationist controversy. If the remaining five sections are not so heterogeneous in the scatter of subjects on which their articles touch, they are for the most part more idiosyncratic in the issues they address, the questions they raise, and the answers they suggest. Typical are "On Being in the Same Place at the Same Time," an argument for the ultimacy of subjectivity on the basis of relativity theory, and "Truth and Presence," explicating the attempt of Gaston Bachelard to blend science and poetry as complementary aspects of the human imagination. Sometimes they are also eyebrow-raising. "The Paradox of Induction and the Inductive Wager," would "show the impossibility of... logical proof [of the principle of induction]... by locating it among the paradoxes". Caw's case for paradox is simply that if inductive inference is legitimate then our past inability to justify such inference warrants the inductive conclusion that we shall never be able to justify it. But even if nothing else were suspect in this argument, its force is presumably at most probabilistic, making it hard to see how it could establish the "impossibility" of anything. Another paper, "Three Logics, or the Possibility of the Improbable," concerns "the logic of incredible events", touting the merits of so construing the natural world that events with zero probability occasionally occur and initiate spontaneous causal chains. Yet it is thoroughly unclear what interpretation of probability theory could both license identifying uncaused with impossible events and yet allow that such events may occur. Still another, "Rethinking Intentionality," includes the puzzling contention that "there can't be a science of intention because science presupposes intention". Unlike these last examples, most of the essays in the collection are provocative rather than upsetting, bearing the earmark of the independent, iconoclastic, speculative mind from which they spring, a former physicist not aligned with any of the current schools in philosophy of science, and more influenced by the classic giants of the Western philosophical tradition and by Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre than by empiricist philosophers of science or the recent analytic tradition. Thus, it is no surprise that the issues Caws addresses are nonstandard, and that his manner of addressing them embodies a looser, more broad-stroked, more humanistic, and more metaphysically self-conscious approach than is common in recent mainstream philosophy of science. This orientation doubtless accounts, too, for the somewhat subjective-idealistic stance, the view that one cannot definitively progress beyond one's own sensations and ideas, argued in "Yorick's World or the Universe in a Single Skull," and manifest in the tone, substance, and central thrust of a number of the essays in the collection. It is thus appropriate that Caws should have borrowed from this title to name the anthology itself.-Robert B. Barrett, Washington University in St. Louis. (shrink)

This chapter provides summaries of the chapter of this book and introduces the major themes and debates addressed in the volume. Discussed are Nietzsche’s metaphysics; his philosophy of mind in light of contemporary views; the question of panpsychism of Beyond Good and Evil 36; the rejection of dualism in favour of monism, in particular a monism of value; Nietzsche’s positions on consciousness and embodied cognition in light of recent cognitive science; a conception of freedom and agency based on an intrinsically (...) motivating; embodied sense of self-efficacy; a Nietzschean account of valuing understood as drive-induced affective orientations of which an agent approves; the idea of ressentiment conceived as a process of intentional, not reflectively strategic, self-deception about one’s own conscious mental states; and a defence of a Nietzschean naturalism. (shrink)

In what follows, I offer some friendly amendments to Potter’s psychotherapeutic model—‘the hinge narrative’ (HN)—designed to help bipolar patients cultivate self-trust. My primary contribution is to suggest an alliance between narrative theory and feminist phenomenological theories of embodiment. I argue that these projects are mutually supporting in both the metaphysical and therapeutic project of constituting a rich moral self, that is, a self who has self-trust and thereby satisfying relationships with others. I also register a slight (...) disagreement with Potter concerning the effect that bipolar illness has on agency. Potter claims that with conventional narratives patients have difficulty perceiving .. (shrink)

This article provides an analysis of how the philosophy of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, particularly their treatment of the "Problem of the One and the Many," can help inform Sam Harris's attempt to ground ethics in the empirical sciences in his 2010 book The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values. -/- The paper shows how Aristotle and Aquinas's thought can: • Explaining how the sciences are organized and why they will not produce multiple, competing measures of goodness (...) and well-being; • Resolving the “moral paradoxes” that Harris finds himself unable to find a solution to, by demonstrating how the human good essentially involves a “common good,” and how goodness always relates to the whole; • Providing us with a better explanation for why selfless behavior is good and why it is “good for us” to be virtuous; • Providing Harris with a better definition of freedom as self-determination; and • Showing how neither a recognition that the sciences must play a major role in ethics, nor naturalistic explanations of human behavior, need to preclude our orientation towards a transcendent good. (shrink)

With the aim of studying foundations for self-other relations and understanding, we conducted an experimental investigation of a specific aspect of imitation in children with autism: the propensity to copy self-other orientation. We hypothesised that children with autism would show limitations in identifying with the stance of another person. We tested 16 children with autism and 16 non-autistic children with learning difficulties, matched on both chronological and verbal mental age, for their propensity to imitate the self- or (...) other-orientated aspects of another person’s actions. All participants were attentive to the demonstrator and copied her actions, but the children with autism were significantly less likely to imitate those aspects of her actions that involved movement in relation to her own vis-à-vis the child’s body. There were a number of children with autism who copied the identical geometric orientation of objects acted-upon. These results suggest that children with autism have a diminished propensity to identify with other people, and point to the importance of this mechanism for shaping self-other relations and flexible thinking. (shrink)

In this article a neo-Jamesian approach to the self is developed within a naturalistic, bottom-up, and systemic-relational framework. In this approach, consciousness of the body as one’s own body is a necessary precondition of self-consciousness as psychological self-awareness, and hence of a socially and historically situated narrative self. Thus we take on board the criticism of those accounts of the narrative self that pay little attention to embodiment, or go to the extreme of stating that (...) the narrative self is abstract and hence not embodied. But at the same time, we reject the idea that the embodiment of the narrative self is provided by a pre-reflective self-consciousness. By contrast, we view self-consciousness as a construction all the way down, which develops from automatic and pre-reflective processing of representations of objects (object-consciousness), through awareness and then self-awareness of the body, up to introspective self-awareness and then narrative identity. This form of constructivism is a naturalistic reinterpretation of the Hegelian idea that selfhood is socially constructed and self-experience intersubjectively mediated. However, it enables to move away from that blend of narrativism and epiphenomenism that characterizes some strands of the socio-constructivist approach to the narrative self. The storied Me that the selfing process makes is not “empty chatter”, but rather a causally efficacious layer of personality viewed as a self-unifying system. (shrink)

Throughout philosophical history, there has been a recurring argument to the effect that determinism, naturalism, or both are self-referentially incoherent. By accepting determinism or naturalism, one allegedly acquires a reason to reject determinism or naturalism. _The Epistemological Skyhook_ brings together, for the first time, the principal expressions of this argument, focusing primarily on the last 150 years. This book addresses the versions of this argument as presented by Arthur Lovejoy, A.E. Taylor, Kurt Gödel, C.S. Lewis, Norman (...) Malcolm, Karl Popper, J.R. Lucas, William Hasker, Thomas Nagel, Alvin Plantinga, and others, along with the objections presented by their many detractors. It concludes by presenting a new version of the argument that synthesizes the best aspects of the others while also rendering the argument immune to some of the most significant objections made to it. (shrink)

While friend/enemy are commonly perceived to be mutually constitutive opposites, it is not so evident that hatred is the opposite of love. Hatred is oriented by two ideologies specific to European thought—‘nature’ as an illusory universal, and the ‘ego’, distinct from the ‘I’, as an irreducible expression of identity. The origins of racial hatred in naturalised hierarchical classification at the time of European colonial expansion demonstrates how naturalism and egoism combined to produce an over-valuation of one’s own (...) class='Hi'>self or group as authentic or pure. Drawing on Pascal, Fanon and Derrida, this essay challenges the autonomous, self-loving and naturalised sense of self. It calls for education as a form of action against racial hatred, including hate-speech. It suggests that the dignity or absoluteness of each individual or group should be thought as a ‘sense’ which cannot be reduced to a meaning. This is in contrast to hatred which presupposes closed or solidified meanings. (shrink)

Dieser Artikel stellt Cora Diamonds Begriff des Mitgeschöpfs dar und untersucht dessen Relevanz für tierethische und tierpolitische Diskurse. Die traditionelle Tierethik hat eine rationalistische, naturalistische und reduktionistische Tendenz. Diamonds Moralphilosophie stellt dem einen praxissensitiven Ansatz gegenüber, der Emotionen und die moralische Imagination umfasst, wobei Diamond die Bedeutung des Menschseins betont. Letztere entspringt zwar einem epistemischen Anthropozentrismus, jedoch folgt aus diesem keine Mensch-Tier-Hierarchie: Diamond plädiert dafür, andere Tiere als Mitgeschöpfe, als Gefährten auf sterblichen Pfaden, zu begreifen. Dabei zeigt Diamond an ihrer (...) Interpretation von J.M. Coetzees The Lives of Animals, wie Konzepte von anderen Tieren auf das eigene Selbstverständnis rückwirken. Abschließend erörtert der Artikel den Vorwurf des Quietismus und die Schwierigkeit der politischen Umsetzbarkeit in Diamonds Philosophie. -/- [This article outlines Cora Diamond’s concept of the fellow creature and examines its relevance for animal ethics and animal politics. Diamond’s moral philosophy contrasts the rationalistic, naturalistic, and reductionistic tendency of traditional animal ethics with a practice-oriented approach that encompasses emotions and the moral imagination. Diamond emphasizes the importance of being human, which emanates from an epistemic anthropocentrism, but from which no human-animal hierarchy follows: She pleads for recognizing other animals as fellow creatures, as companions on mortal paths. In her interpretation of J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals, Diamond shows how conceptualizing other animals influences one’s own self-understanding. Finally, the article discusses the reproach of quietism and the difficulty of political feasibility in Diamond’s philosophy.]. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Externalist Psychiatry, Mindshaping, and Embodied InjusticeMichelle Maiese, PhD (bio)Ongaro maintains that although enactivist approaches to psychiatry help to account for the integration of biological, psychological, and social factors, they gloss over an important distinction between patient-centered (bio and psycho) approaches and externalist (social) approaches to mental illness. The central problem is that they lack the means to account for the social causes of illness and do not specify how (...) social determinants can be addressed in the clinic. Since much of an organism’s interaction with the external world is social in kind, the implementation of externalist psychiatry could make the enactivist model truly biopsychosocial and usher in novel forms of treatment.According to Ongaro, this externalist orientation gives rise to an important question about ontology: what are the social causes of psychiatric illness made of, and how can these be conveyed in the clinic to facilitate treatment? A “shared social etiology” would allow for a “rich explanatory framework” that accounts for the social causes of mental disorder. For example, by pointing to spirit affliction as the social cause of mental illness, the Akha transform amorphous pains (which are difficult to capture naturalistically) into meaningful and familiar experiences. Such an approach involves combining a realist understanding of biopsychosocial integration with an anti-realist, social constructivist outlook on social etiology. For them, an illness that is explained as a rupture of a human-spirit relationship is experienced as a ‘problem in living’ that affects the person in an immediate and meaningful way, and can be treated via ritual action.Ongaro then considers social causation in a more familiar context, one where social determinants of mental illness include factors such as employment. Losing one’s job is a significant life event because it signals a change in social status and prompts feelings of uselessness. Ongaro characterizes these feelings of low subjective status as “socially constructed experiences that depend on collectively ingrained ideas about status, value, and self-realization that a person accepts—one could say ‘believes in’—by virtue of living in a particular society.” Because social worlds differ and what counts as social defeat is culturally specific, [End Page 333] social determinants of illness such as unemployment are either negligible or non-applicable in Ahka (non-capitalist) society.To acknowledge the impact of these social constructions, Ongaro maintains, clinical psychiatry should abandon its commitment to naturalism and embrace methodological constructivism instead. Methodological naturalism treats social causes as ‘real’ and holds that the social causes of disorder should be investigated using the scientific method; research focuses on social determinants, social stressors, and social capital. However, despite acknowledging that declining mental health correlates significantly with political and economic factors, Ongaro maintains that methodological naturalism when it comes to social causes will be insufficient to bring about meaningful changes in clinical practice. For one thing, individual psychiatrists lack the political power and economic resources to bring about the sorts of societal changes that are needed to address social determinants of health. Second, social determinants are probabilistic factors rather than definitive causes of mental disorder; psychiatric illnesses often do not have a well-defined cause or a clear-cut social trigger. Third, an explanation that points to ‘lack of social capital’ does “not possess the immediacy, emotional charge, and embodied meaning that could make them therapeutically effective in the same way that Akha explanations for spirit afflictions are.”Philosophically, Ongaro’s embrace of ‘methodological constructivism’ when it comes to social etiology entails a commitment to antirealism about social causation and fictionalism more specifically. Wilkinson (2022) notes that the core tenet of psychiatric fictionalism is that “when we engage in psychiatric discourse... we are not attributing a robust, objective property, but are instead engaging with a useful, perhaps even an indispensable, fiction” (p. 91). For Ongaro, this fiction consists in a meaningful explanatory narrative about the social causes of illness. However, if we take the notion of integration seriously, and characterize this integration naturalistically (as Ongaro does), then questions arise as to how these fictional narratives about social causes can impact people both biologically and psychologically, and thereby have such a powerful impact.I argue that an enactivist approach to treatment will be... (shrink)

BackgroundAttention deficit hyperactivity disorder is clinically diagnosed; however, quantitative analysis to statistically analyze the symptom severity of children with ADHD via the measurement of head movement is still in progress. Studies focusing on the cues that may influence the attention of children with ADHD in classroom settings, where children spend a considerable amount of time, are relatively scarce. Virtual reality allows real-life simulation of classroom environments and thus provides an opportunity to test a range of theories in a naturalistic and (...) controlled manner. The objective of this study was to investigate the correlation between participants’ head movements and their reports of inattention and hyperactivity, and to investigate how their head movements are affected by different social cues of different sensory modalities.MethodsThirty-seven children and adolescents with and without ADHD were recruited for this study. All participants were assessed for diagnoses, clinical symptoms, and self-reported symptoms. A virtual reality-continuous performance test was conducted under four conditions: control, no-cue, visual cue, and visual/audio cue. A quantitativecomparison of the participants’ head movements was conducted in three dimensions using a head-mounted display in a VR classroom environment. Task-irrelevant head movements were analyzed separately, considering the dimension of movement needed to perform the VR-CPT.ResultsThe magnitude of head movement, especially task-irrelevant head movement, significantly correlated with the current standard of clinical assessment in the ADHD group. Regarding the four conditions, head movement showed changes according to the complexity of social cues in both the ADHD and healthy control groups.ConclusionChildren and adolescents with ADHD showed decreasing task-irrelevant movements in the presence of social stimuli toward the intended orientation. As a proof-of-concept study, this study preliminarily identifies the potential of VR as a tool to understand and investigate the classroom behavior of children with ADHD in a controlled, systematic manner. (shrink)

From a certain simplistic and inaccurate, although regrettably popular, perspective philosophy, at least for the past few decades, is available only in two main flavours – analytic and continental. Some self-identified members of both camps are apt to endorse uncharitable caricatures of what the others are up to. Among the many lines of criticism that can be directed against this false dichotomy, I wish to focus on discussion of a broadly naturalistic orientation that rejects many of the commitments both (...) of paradigmatic analytic philosophy and paradigmatic continental philosophy. For the committed naturalist, the enterprise of philosophy is continuous with that of systematic empirical enquiry into the workings of the world . From a naturalistic perspective many of the standard moves of analytic philosophy, such as testing a proposal against ‘intuitions’, are as preposterous as the claims of ‘continental’ and ‘analytic’ philosophers sometimes appear to one another. (shrink)

Concepts We thank all three commentators for extremely constructive, insightful, and gracious commentaries. We cannot address all their valuable points. In this response, we elucidate and relate the concepts of addiction, disease, disability, autonomy, and well-being. We examine some of the implications of these relationships in the context of the helpful responses made by our commentators. We begin with the definitions of the relevant concepts which we employ: ¥? ? ? Addiction (Liberal Concept): An addiction is a strong appetite. ¥? (...) ? ? Appetites: An appetite is a disposition that generates desires that are urgent, oriented toward some rewarding behavior, periodically recurring, often in predictable circumstances, sated temporarily by their fulfillment, and generally provide pleasure. ¥? ? ? Disease (Naturalistic Concept): A disease is some biological or psychological state that results in subfunctioning of the organism in a given set of environmental and social circumstances, C. The reference class is a natural class of organisms of uniform functional design; specifically, an age group of a sex of a species. A normal function is a part or process within members of the reference class and is a statistically typical contribution by it to their individual survival and reproduction (Boorse 1977, 1997). ¥? ? ? Disability (Welfarist Concept): A disability is a relatively stable biological or psychological state that tends to reduce the amount of well-being that this person will enjoy in a given set of environmental and social circumstances (Savulescu and Kahane 2009; Kahane and Savulescu, 2009). ¥? ? ? Autonomy (Rationalist Concept): A person rationally desires or values some state of affairs if and only if he or she desires that state of affairs while (1) being in possession of all relevant. (shrink)