The current research investigates the interaction between thought suppression and individuals’ explicit awareness of their thoughts. Participants in three experiments attempted to suppress thoughts of a prior romantic relationship and their success at doing so was measured using a combination of self-catching and experience-sampling. In addition to thoughts that individuals spontaneously noticed, individuals were frequently caught engaging in thoughts of their previous partner at experience-sampling probes. Furthermore, probe-caught thoughts were: associated with stronger decoupling of attention from the environment, more likely (...) to occur under cognitive load, more frequent for individuals with a desire to reconcile, and associated with individual differences in the tendency to suppress thoughts. Together, these data suggest that individuals can lack meta-awareness that they have begun to think about a topic they are attempting to suppress, providing novel insight into the cognitive processes that are involved in attempting to control undesired mental states. (shrink)

Given that as much as half of human thought arises in a stimulus independent fashion, it would seem unlikely that such thoughts would play no functional role in our lives. However, evidence linking the mind-wandering state to performance decrement has led to the notion that mind-wandering primarily represents a form of cognitive failure. Based on previous work showing a prospective bias to mind-wandering, the current study explores the hypothesis that one potential function of spontaneous thought is to plan and anticipate (...) personally relevant future goals, a process referred to as autobiographical planning. The results confirm that the content of mind-wandering is predominantly future-focused, demonstrate that individuals with high working memory capacity are more likely to engage in prospective mind-wandering, and show that prospective mind-wandering frequently involves autobiographical planning. Together this evidence suggests that mind-wandering can enable prospective cognitive operations that are likely to be useful to the individual as they navigate through their daily lives. (shrink)

Sedlakova and Trachsel (2023) discuss the ethical concerns associated with employing what they term conversational artificial intelligence as therapist substitutes. Given their apprehensions, they...

uber das Programm der kommenden Philosophie. ZUr Kritik der Gewalt. SChicksal und Charakter. GEschichtsphilosophische Thesen. THeologisch-politisches Fragment.

The description for this book, The Conquest of Politics: Liberal Philosophy in Democratic Times, will be forthcoming.

AVISLe texte a été retiré du numéro le 30 juin 2013.La direction de la revue.

The discussion about the double inscription of the political is a familiar trope among progressive thinkers, whose discussions have focused primarily on the ontological presuppositions of the political at the expense of a theoretical reflection on politics. This article shifts the emphasis to the latter. It develops an image of thought of our political actuality that moves beyond the commonplace observation that politics exceeds electoral representation. Its underlying assumption is that modernity is characterized by a continual process of political territorialization (...) and re-territorialization whereby the political frontier has experienced a series of displacements along a migratory arc that goes from the sovereign state to liberal party democracies. However, it does not stop there, for as politics colonizes new domains and carves up novel places of enunciation, the cartography we inherited from democratic liberalism experiences a Copernican de-centring that throws us into a scenario best described as an archipelago of political domains. This announces the becoming-other of politics, the post-liberal setting of our political actuality. (shrink)

Enmity, War, Intensity Norberto Bobbio once gave a minimal definition of politics, characterizing it as the activity of aggregating and defending our friends, and dispersing and fighting our enemies.1 We know that the instigator of this definition is Carl Schmitt, although his critics have often misunderstood the reference to enmity. What resonates most is the claim that friend-enemy oppositions constitute the basic code of the political and that such oppositions can lead to the extreme case of war. This might explain (...) why part of the debate on The Concept of the Political has revolved around the status of the enemy…. (shrink)

ABSTRACTSome liberal-cosmopolitan theorists have sought to justify preventive war by proposing new institutions meant to ensure the accurate evaluation of non-imminent threats, and also make any wa...

The paper deals with the status of referents for claims among conflicting claimants when multiplicity is a fact and there is no room for a substantive notion of community. It develops a notion of contingent and 'impure' universal as it arises in the negotiation of equivalence in scenarios of conflict between claimants. My argument is that measures of equivalence cannot conform to the caricature of absolute, all-encompassing referents intent on subjugating difference in the name of sameness; that a reflection about (...) decisions and the validity of claims - i.e. concerning singularity - cannot be reduced to a simple application of the rule; and that decisions are lodged in the undecidable terrain between norms and their redescription, which means that the status of universals is an effect of continual political battles. Key Words: conflict • deliberation • negotiation • particularism • undecidability • universals. (shrink)

Par leurs contributions à ce livre, vingt-trois chercheur.e.s rendent hommage à leur collègue qui souvent fut aussi leur professeure, l’historienne juive Paula Hyman. Comme le rappelle Richard I. Cohen dans son avant-propos, P. Hyman fut une historienne des Juifs de France et les publications qu’elle a consacrées à la vie des Juifs dans la France contemporaine ont constitué un apport considérable à ce champ de recherches. Toutefois le volume dont il est ici question célèbre P. Hyman pour ses...

Terrorisme valt buiten alle democratische kaders en daarom hebben democratische landen er geen adequate antwoorden op. Het enige antwoord op de krachten, die chaos en angst zaaien is een wereldwijde open samenleving, met politieke vrijheid en ruimte voor religies.

This new collection of philosophically rigorous essays critiques the interpretation of divine omniscience known as open theism, focusing primarily on philosophically motivated open theism and positing arguments that reject divine knowledge of future contingents in the face of the dilemma of freedom and foreknowledge. The sixteen new essays in this collection, written by some of the most renowned philosophers on the topic of divine providence, represent a philosophical attempt to seriously consider open theism. They cover a wide variety of issues, (...) including: the ontology of time, systematic metaphysics, perfect being theology, the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation, the problem of evil, and the nature of divine knowledge in general. _Philosophical Essays Against Open Theism _advances the discussion by wrestling against the assertions of open theism, and will be of interest to both proponents and opponents of this controversial issue. (shrink)

Maybe I Should: Case Studies on Ethics for Student Affairs Professionals addresses everyday ethical dilemmas faced by graduate students and new professionals in student affairs/higher education. This edition offers all new cases situated in multiple functional areas with a framework for analyzing these challenging situations.

In an age of apparent disrepair as the climate crisis takes hold and neoliberalism fails to liberate, as the cost of living rises and rights are retracted, the need for a reparative turn is overdue. But what is repair? If repair is contained in moments of total breakdown, then the reparative acts of care that sustain the world are denied. Countering these forces and the urgency prescribed by the crisis of disrepair and in what too often appears as the proprietary (...) epistemology of repair, in this paper I offer an account of ‘repairability’. Structured in relation to the reparative gaze of feminist theory and poetic thinking, repairability assumes a material trace, I contend, through the vernacular archive of Cuban artist-ethnographer Ernesto Oroza. Oroza’s work offers a compelling case study through which to think the possibility of repair as an act of worldly becoming. (shrink)

The recent financial crisis has revealed not only market failure and regulatory failure, but also failure of the narratives that inform the rules of financial law. The term ‘narrative’ is used to mean the deep structures of assumption which inform legal rules, but which are not always fully articulated in them, and which are most fully articulated in the case law. This article identifies three such narratives, namely the arm’s length, fiduciary and consumerist narratives. It finds that they are both (...) inconsistent in practice and inherently limited in their ability to deliver virtuous outcomes, and thereby to command the imaginative assent of the regulated community. A possible new narrative, relating to the netting arrangements on which the derivatives markets rely, and based on the concept of mutuality, is recommended for the future development of financial law. (shrink)

The question of the other appears to be a uniquely human concern. Engagement with the nature of alterity and the quality of the other are philosophical projects that commence with an assumed anthropocentrism. This anthropocentrism will be pursued by way of Hegel's discussion of "disease" in his Philosophy of Nature. Disease is implicitly bound up with race, racial identity and animality, and provides an opening to the question: what if the other were an animal? Any answer to this question should (...) resist a founding anthropocentrism by no longer being limited by the opposition human/non-human. This gives rise to the possibility of engaging philosophically with questions of race and ethnicity. (shrink)

This Paper is an Exploration of Bolzano’s views on causation, which have not been thoroughly examined yet. The paper reconstructs Bolzano’s position, with a focus on his analysis of the concept of causation, on its ontological presuppositions, and on how he relates causation to his theory of grounding.1 A comparison with standard positions from the contemporary debate on causation will prove his views to be quite original. Moreover, they are a valuable addition to the more recent debate on metaphysical grounding,2 (...) in which grounding is sometimes informally described as something like metaphysical causation with the exact connection of the two notions seldom being elaborated. Bolzano’s theory explicitly addresses .. (shrink)

The paper is a detailed reconstruction of Bernard Bolzano’s account of merely possible objects. According to Bolzano, there are some objects which are merely possible. They are neither denizens of space and time nor members of the causal order, but they could have been so. Examples are merely possible persons, mountains etc., objects which are neither actual nor persons or mountains, but which could have been both. Bolzano’s views are contrasted with the theory of Alexius Meinong, and it is shown (...) that they have a modern counterpart in the accounts of merely possible objects that were developed by Bernard Linsky & Ed Zalta, and by Timothy Williamson. (shrink)

This paper argues that Mencius is a eudaimonist, and that his eudaimonism plays an architectonic role in his thought. Mencius maintains that the most satisfying life for a human being is the life of benevolence, rightness, wisdom, and ritual propriety, and that such a life fulfills essential desires and capacities of the human heart. He also repeatedly appeals both to these and to morally neutral desires in his efforts to persuade others to develop and exercise the virtues. Classical Greek eudaimonists (...) similarly regarded the life of virtue as both objectively good and subjectively desirable, and appealed to the desire for eudaimonia or happiness to motivate a commitment to the virtues. Mencius offers a carefully crafted, teleological account of human nature that appears designed in part to support his eudaimonism. In contrast with proposals by other scholars, I argue that Mencius’ notion of happiness, analogous to the Greek eudaimonia, is expressed by the construction jìn xìng 盡性, “fulfilling human nature” or the nearly equivalent jìn xīn 盡心, “fulfilling one’s heart.”. (shrink)

This paper concerns the relationship between epistemology and radically extended cognition. Radically extended cognition (REC) – as advanced by Andy Clark and David Chalmers – is cognition that is partly located outside the biological boundaries of the cognizing subject. Epistemologists have begun to wonder whether REC has any consequences for theories of knowledge. For instance, while Duncan Pritchard suggests that REC might have implications for which virtue epistemology is acceptable, J. Adam Carter wonders whether REC threatens anti-luck epistemology. In this (...) paper, I argue that the possibility of REC has no systematic consequences for theorizing in epistemology. I suggest an alternative relationship between the two: epistemology can play a role in diagnosing cases of REC. Thus, by establishing that entities partially located outside biological boundaries don't play certain epistemic roles, one can establish that they don't play the related cognitive roles either. I conclude the paper by illustrating this last point. (shrink)

Recently, extremist ‘populist’ parties have succeeded in obtaining large enough democratic electoral mandates both to legally make substantive changes to the law and constitution and to legally eliminate avenues to challenge their control over the government. Extremists place committed liberal democrats in an awkward position as they work to legally revolutionize their constitutions and turn them into ‘illiberal democracies’. This article analyses political responses to this problem. It argues that the twin phenomena of legal revolution and illiberal democracy reveal a (...) latent tension between the constitutional commitments to democracy and liberalism, that is, the equal chance to have one’s political goals enacted into law and individual basic rights. Political extremists make the latent tension real when they use the procedures of democratic legal change to abrogate constitutional commitments to liberalism, among other things. Although the two commitments normally coexist side by side, exceptional times raise an existential dilemma for liberal democracies: is it constitutional to democratically amend liberalism out of the constitution? After analysing the moral legitimacy of both the democratic and liberal arguments, this article concludes that liberal constitutionalism is constitutive of genuine democracy. In other words, it is unconstitutional to abrogate basic liberal commitments and it is legitimate to adopt constitutional mechanisms to guarantee liberalism – even if it means constraining democracy to do so. This article then situates ‘constrained democracy’ within the liberal current as a way to conceive of and respond to this pressing problem. It concludes by discussing four constitutional mechanisms – inspired by the German Grundgesetz – to guarantee liberalism: unambiguous lexically prior commitment to liberalism, limits on negative majorities, the eternity clause and party bans. It concludes that constrained democracy is an important constitutional guarantee of liberal democracy and that the four mechanisms, among others, are essential to enact constrained democracy. (shrink)

Benjamin Barber is one of America's preeminent political theorists. He has been a significant voice in the continuing debate about the nature and role of democracy in the contemporary world. A Passion for Democracy collects twenty of his most important writings on American democracy. Together they refine his distinctive position in democratic theory. Barber's conception of "strong democracy" contrasts with traditional concepts of "liberal democracy," especially in its emphasis on citizen participation in central issues of public debate. These essays (...) critique the "thin representation" of liberal democracy and buttress the arguments presented in Barber's twelve books, most recently in his well-received Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism Are Re-shaping the World. In these pieces, Barber argues for participatory democracy without dependence on abstract metaphysical foundations, and he stresses the relationship among democracy and civil society, civic education, and culture. A Passion for Democracy is divided into four sections. In the first, "American Theory: Democracy, Liberalism, and Rights," Barber addresses issues of ongoing relevance to today's debates about the roots of participatory democracy, including individualism vs. community, the importance of consent, and the irrelevance of Marxism. Essays in the second section, "American Practice: Leadership, Citizenship, and Censorship" provide a "strong democracy" critique of American democratic practice. "Education for Democracy: Civic Education, Service, and Citizenship" applies Barber's theories to three related topics and includes his much-discussed essay "America Skips School." The final section, "Democracy and Technology: Endless Frontier or End of Democracy?" provides glimpses into a future that technology alone cannot secure for democracy. In his preface, Barber writes: "In these essays... I have been hard on my country. Like most ardent democrats, I want more for it than it has achieved, despite the fact that it has achieved more than most people have dared to want." This wide-ranging collection displays not only his passion for democracy, but also his unique perspective on issues of abiding importance for the democratic process. (shrink)

Félix Guattari's theoretical and practical interests in cinema culminated in the film project A Love of UIQ. While critics have concentrated on the sci-fi screenplay's elements of minor cinema, its themes of mass media, emerging computer technologies and informatic-communication networks particularly express Guattari's concept of post-media. The screenplay is an aesthetic meditation on the potentialities of post-media, a concept that anticipates the practical and theoretical issues surrounding the age of the Internet. A Love of UIQ voices Guattari's ambivalence towards the (...) liberatory possibilities of network technologies that are at constant risk of capitalist recapture. (shrink)

How should those who value reasonable pluralism navigate ethical and epistemological challenges related to speech and inquiry in higher education? We propose the ethical pursuit of public knowledge as a guiding vision for public colleges and universities with the understanding that other institutions will serve different purposes. The ethical criterion of mutuality calls for engagement across difference and reciprocal recognition of others’ basic equality and liberty. To maintain epistemic legitimacy, knowledge-production processes in these institutions should elevate ideas warranted by public (...) reasons that have withstood rigorous critical scrutiny above those that have not. Some forms of speech—including the expression of extremist views on both the Right and the Left—will prove unreasonable and incompatible with the guiding vision and should therefore be marginalized within these institutions. (shrink)

The contributions made by British intellectuals to modern internationalInternational political thought have been at the centre of several debates in recent decades in disciplines such as international relations.